+ 3rd amendment = right to print arms... in your home.

That's incomplete. Make it:

+ 3rd amendment = right to print arms... in your home... unobserved by resident government agents (or their spyware equivalent)

The third amendment was not just about the government using your home as a free bed-and-breakfast for their army, but about preventing such government-mandated parasites being positioned where they could continuously spy on your activities at home. "Quartering troops" is an end-run around the "man's home is his castle" doctrine of English Common Law - or the Fourth Amendment protections. It is one of the places the Supreme Court found an implied "right to privacy" in the (amended) Consitiution.

I'm waiting for a case where the Third Amendment is used as an argument against government spyware, which is the electronic equivalent of quartering troops.

Also: See the covers of the Hitchhiker's Guide books for examples of similar features.

Actually it's the mouth and those are the teeth. Mars is just a big orange PacMan.

Is it dead or did it just decide to hibernate until quarters were invented and sent into space? More Research Needed (tm).

My point is that I want to be sure any prior art that might be useful for a challenge to the patent is brought out of obsurity, so the challenger's lawyers don't lose when they could have won had they known about it.

The net comic The Gods of ArrKelann has used a page-turning interface for years.

I'm not sure whether it was from the start of the run or if it got converted somewhere along the way. But it's pretty clearly a page-turning interface.

This is real research. Rigorous, cleanly factorized, unbiased, work shown for others to check.

Real, yes. Open for checking, yes. Rigorous, maybe. Ceanly factorized, not so much. Unbiased, it is to laugh.

Just from the summary I see two classic issues: Selection bias and confusing generational samples with age effects.

Selection bias is cascaded. First, it's sampling only people who joined facebook. Second, it's only sampling the subset who both heard about and chose to download and use the tool and let it watch their activity. I see close to a dozen classes of selection bias here.

Confusing generational samples with aging effects is a classic flaw. Of course when you're first doing a study looking for age effects, about all you CAN do is use generational cohort as a proxy for aging. But people from different generations have a host of differences besides age: Nutrition, nurturing fads, stress from wars and other disasters, disesae exposure, educational variations, and the list goes on.

One of the classic errors that arose from this is the belief among psychologists that intelligence ramps up nearly linearly until early adulthood, knees over, and then slowly drops with age. That lasted until standardized tests had been administered to the same groups over several decades, so the trajectories of the scores from particular individuals and groups could be tracked. It turns out that intelligence does rise and knee-out as described, but the gradual slope with age is UPWARD (even before discounting the higher incidence of specific brain-damaging disease processes with advanced age). The effect had been masked by another: People educated in earlier decades did less well on the things the tests scored.

You can see that this work - or at least those attempting to interpret it - has the same problem:

... and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older â" as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics.

Are today's older people more interested in politics because they've aged and have more understanding of them and/or are more affected by them? Or are they more interested because they grew up during or in the aftermath of WW II, Korea, the Cold War, and the mass movements and political suppression surrounding Vietnam and the clampdown on "recreational" drugs.
Are they less interested in video games because they're older or because video games DIDN'T EXIST YET when they had time to practice enough to become skilled?

Conflating age with cohort membership can lead to problems when you try to use the results of such research to predict how people will change with age. For instance: If video game interest is a symptom of low age you can expect people to "grow out of it" and current users to fade out as they find other interests, but if it's a symptom of cohort membership they may become MORE active as they mature further. If political activity is a symptom of age you can expect the young to become more active as they age, but if it's a symptom of life experience you might see new generations becoming active young (as with the Antiwar movement in the '60s and '70s and the Liberty movement today) and people of all ages suddenly becoming politically active after being "radicalized" by the stress of political events.

Seems to me the two issues are poster children for massive instutionalized policies of attacks on a technology rather than the misuse of it.

Massive to the point of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars wasted and far more damage done that prevented.

Think you've seen massive overreaction to misuse of torrents? Compare it to "The War On Drugs" and you ain't seen nothing yet.

Punish the technology because of how it is used? I thought we grew past that notion already.

If we had you'd be able to buy any weapon or drug you want without government interference or oversight.

The NRA could go back to its original functions of training and research, and the FDA and DEA to could be replaced by Underwriters' Laboratories and Consumers' Reports.

As you can see we have a long way to go.

.do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law.

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy isn't created or destroyed. It has nothing to do with charging rates. With respect to charging it just tells you that the stored energy added plus the losses (mostly heat) add up to the energy you supplied. (Second law says you have to lose SOMETHING to make the charging happen - though it doesn't say how much.)

The key here is battery resistance. The heat produced is proportional to the SQUARE of the current. If you charged a battery with the same resistance a thousand times as fast, you'd generate a MILLION times the heat.

Charge is determined by current times time. Maximum charging rate is determined by the highest charging current you can drive while creating heat no faster than it can be dissipated with the battery almost at the maximum temperature it can stand. Resistance tells you how much heat you generate at a given current. Cut the resistance by a factor of a million and you can multiply your charging rate by a factor of a thousand and get the same heat generation.

The micro-geometry of the plates in this case (along with most of the recent ultra-fast-charge battery designs) results in drastically lowered resistance.

A pre-emptive strike of MREs and candy bars should distract the entire populace of NK thoroughly and destabilize the regime.

Unfortunately, South Korea has been bombarding the North with propaganda leaflets for decades. To mitigate this, the North Korean propaganda machine has claimed these are germ warfare weapons. Many of their people literally believe that even touching something dropped by the US or North Korea will cause their hands to rot off.

Remember the Squeaky Axis of Evil gets the Grease.

Or greased.

Or Greece

(Of course, with the current state of their economy, what Squeaky Axis of Evil would want them?)

You tell me another field [than medicine] that comes even close [to having as much trouble actually doing good science].

Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved.

They also have funding bias by interested parties.

For instance: The Federal Reserve Bank has spent enormous amounts of money supporting economics jourals and departments, as have governments.

Is it any wonder that Keynsianism - with its abysmal record of failed predictinos and its support of government and bank looting of the population by inflationary printing and pumping - is mainstream, while the Chicago and Austrian Schools are considered "crackpot"?

And what's non-"fake" about legacy print journals? Especially if they're publishing something outside their field of expertise.

(One recent example: The New England Journal of Medicine publishing criminological studies on guns, most now thoroughly debunked by researchers in the actual field, publishing in the field's own, well-respected, journals.)

I wonder how much of this is the existing journals (and paridigm-embedded academic cliques) trying to maintain their business model and hold on the field in the face of competition, much of it higher quality and timeliness, from online journals.

They have exactly the same problem as the mainstream news and entertainment media versus the Internet-based alternatives. This looks like they're taking one of the same approaches: Discredit the competition as a class, rather than those individual publications that rate the discredtation.

(Print journals have plenty of non-mainstream competition - both from "valid" alternative viewpoints and crackpots. All that's different about internet journals are the lower costs, barriers to entry, and publication delays.)

Only until it runs out of fuel.

Tens of kilowatts is eights of horsepower. That's a drop in the bucket compared to just the ship's lights.

I wonder if it has enough fuel that, if it weren't cruising around, it could run its generators and fire the laser continuously for several times the duration of WW II.

And then there's the prospect of being refueled.

If you want to get picky about "unlimited fuel" you can claim that a device that will run until the heat death of the universe isn't "unlimited".

... future directions .. for [US Navy] ship technology. ... they want the ship to have a huge amount of electrical generation capacity onboard, then multiple redundant busses to route the power all over.

Note that it's the Navy that's funding the polywell fusion generator research. If that works out, you're talking a nuclear fusion power plant that would fit in even very small ships, taking far less room than existing engine systems, producing hundreds of megawatts output per unit, with efficiencies of 60% or greater nuclear-reaction-energy-to-electricity, from minute amounts of hydrogen and boron fuel, with negligible, easily-shielded, radiation from low-level side-chain reactions.

This would be ideal for such a ship.