Logic based on two terminal NDR devices has been around for more than 50 years (tunnel diodes, neon tubes, ...). Its big problem is input-output isolation: cascading elements is tricky. But these guys are using four terminal devices in a three terminal NDR mode, so they don't have that problem.

Well, that depends. The ECL gates that Cray used for their early supercomputers had nearly constant current. Some specialized applications still use ECL. If you're changing state frequently, low static current may not actually save power. So, if this new technology ever becomes practical, you'll see it in fast clocking cores where essentially every gate and flip flop is busy all of the time. The surrounding support circuits will still be silicon.

Except that the enormous loss of life wasn't because they built a nuke on the coast. It was because (like everyone who has a coast), they built *everything* on the coast: homes, schools, factories, offices, railroads, etc. The reactor complex actually turned out to be one of the safest places to be during the tsunami.

Coal exists in narrow seams, too. Massive, destructive strip mining or very dangerous underground mining are required to access it. Coal mining would need to be a million times less unhealthy and destructive than uranium mining to be competitive on safety and environmental impact. It isn't.

Coal and uranium mining are both very dangerous. But the big difference is that while you need tons of uranium to fuel a nuke, you need megatons of coal to fuel a coal plant. The difference in quantity of material and waste dominates the hazard calculation.

Would coal pollution necessitate an evacuation zone? It absolutely would if coal was held to the same standards as nuclear.

Suppose the Fukushima complex had been coal-fired rather than nuclear. For decades, it would have contaminated the air and surrounding land with megatons of toxic emissions, harming the health and shortening the lives of its neighbors. Miners would have died supplying the coal. When the tsunami hit, many workers would have died, since coal plants are much less robust than nuclear. The debris wave from the plant would have killed more. I don't think there can be any doubt that, while not perfectly safe, the use of nuclear technology in this location saved many lives. But coal gets a free ride in the press, which downplays its hazards. Anything nuclear gets the fear treatment.

Apparently, if it had been a general, the drone wouldn't have dared to misbehave!

... make it part of the English lit. curriculum. All of the "classics" were popular literature in their time. Shakespeare was extremely popular in the USA in the 19th century. Now, though, few read the classics for pleasure. I think that's partly because in high school most are taught to hate them.

Much of the trouble is that the carriers load the phones with worthless bloatware, and block the user's ability to remove it. There's then not enough free space to install updates.

"Integration with a backend payment processor provides the municipality with US Dollars that they expect."

In other words, you're actually paying in dollars. You sell a commodity for money and then transfer that money to the municipality. Bitcoins are no different than any other commodity here. In particular, you cannot predict how many bitcoins the bill represents until you sell them.

...when you can pay your taxes with them.

RUNOFF on CTSS (1964) turned the computer into a document preparation tool. From there we got Multics runoff. The UNIX developers justified their early efforts by promising to bring runoff to AT&T without the expense of Multics. And now RUNOFF has many descendents, both in the form of markup languages and document processing applications. These are arguably a more widespread and important use of computers than actual computation.

One famous recent "paradigm shift" is the acceleration of the Hubble expansion, presumed to be caused by "dark energy", and supposedly discovered through high redshift supernovae. But out of the public view, there were other anomalies in cosmology that astrophysicists had noticed years before, such as stars somewhat older than the apparent age of the universe, and the failure of simulations to reproduce the observed patterns of galaxy clustering. I remember several times when colleagues brought up the possibility that these could be resolved by a nonzero "cosmological constant" (a special case of "dark energy"). Finally, the supernova evidence pushed these ideas into our popular articles and textbooks, creating the illusion of a sudden "paradigm shift". I think one reason the supernova results were welcomed rather than disputed was that they confirmed what many of us already suspected privately, based on different lines of evidence.