please mod up parent. possibly the best explanation I've seen so far.

You made me curious. How are you a christian, yet still someone who uses critical thinking?
Concretely, what is the difference between an agnostic who respects the ten commandments and yourself?
I'm not trolling, just asking because you seem to be genuinly open to debate.

yes. and you could have a pencil like thingie, maybe longer, to point at the volume of fog that should do what you want. and you should make voice commands for the pencil thingie (let's call it a wand for short). or maybe the wand could spit out the utility fog once you say the right words, and it would come back after the job is done.

(I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm just pointing out the obvious conclusion).

You are perfectly right. However, if you are generating too much energy (and you can do that with fusion), and you don't want to over heat the Earth, then you have to get rid of excess heat.

I am seriously talking about overheating the Earth once you can use electricity to generate stuff like natural gas because that is a lot of energy to put in, and you can't turn all electricity into useful fuel. the extra heat might need to be thrown out.

you did make a mistake... for some reason, you assume that society will choose to help the progress of science rather than continue to be "entertained" with sensationalistic journalism.

I should have explained.
the research I'm talking about is this one http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i9/e097403 (slashdot discussion http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/1833224/leds-efficiency-exceeds-100). those people showed that you can have an LED that you feed X energy (as electrical current), and it emits nX energy as light, where n>1. the extra energy comes from decreasing the temperature of the LED.

I was talking about the fact that if we do succeed in making a carbon neutral industry, we might go over the top and simply generate too much heat. whenever you use a steam engine to generate electricity (no matter if the heat comes from nuclear fission or fusion or from burning coal), you end up with some water that is hotter than environmental water, but too cold to use in the steam engine. people usually dump this water in the nearby stream/river, driving away the wildlife.
if we were to create all the fuel being used by cars and planes with electricity, we would probably have a lot of this water. I was pointing out that the other research allows us to solve this hot water issue as well. I'm not sure how efficient it would be to use this light for additional electricity, in the sense that you might simply be taking up too much space.

the link to the abstract is in the summary; here's the link to the full text: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.full

my knowledge of organic chemistry is very bad, so I can't go through the details. what I see is "we have a process that takes in energy and can convert atmospheric CO2 into fuel", which basically means that we no longer need oil for burning (I don't know about plastics). this would be very nice because we could in principle reach an equilibrium between burning fuel and eating up CO2.

couple this with the research from a few weeks ago that allowed "heat extraction" with tiny LEDs, and we may just solve the big problem: nuclear fusion/fission to generate electricity which is then used for a carbon neutral industry/transport, and eliminate extra heat by pointing LEDs at the sky; basically we could have a society that uses a lot of energy, but we don't produce any extra heat or CO2 on average.

I think it would be much simpler to tell GP about the photoelectric effect, where it is clear that the energy of a beam of light comes in a multiple of indivisible units, just like electric charge comes in multiples of indivisible units.
however, I think the GP was just trolling, so I'm not going to bother with the details.

umm... the research you're talking about, while interesting, is not an example of quantum phenomena.
the message of the article discussed here is "matter behaves in the weird quantum way even when you're talking about molecules". i.e. "we made an experiment with real molecules, and they act as predicted by quantum mechanics". it is a verification of theoretical predictions, with the purpose of strengthening our belief that quantum physics is "true". it is conceivable, while unlikely, that they would have obtained different results, thus implying that the passage from the quantum world to the macroscopic world is much more complicated then we currently believe.
the message of the thesis you link to is "with a properly set up classical experiment, we can reproduce quantum physics behavior". even if the molecules of liquid are described by classical physics, once you put a drop on a surface that vibrates very rapidly, you will observe that the drop bounces, and it is being carried by a wave on the surface of the liquid. by design the particle is carried by a wave, but only classical physics is relevant. they do talk about quantum physics because (in a somewhat funny situation) the simplification of the classical physics leads to equations that resemble those in quantum physics. it's just like you can write the same equations to describe sound and radio waves, even though the reasons sound waves exist are completely different from the reasons radio waves exist.

Really? Have a look at the following links please:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16897068
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16759324
http://www.hotnews.ro/zoom.html?desc=Foto:%20Mediafax&imgUrl=http://media.hotnews.ro/media_server1/image-2012-02-10-11476127-41-oameni-izolati-glodeanu-silistea.jpg (yes, that is the roof of a house beneath the snow)

I have no idea where you live, but you don't really know what the winter was like in Europe. And there were sequences of days with temperatures below -20 C in various places (also note the cold record from the Netherlands mentioned in the first article).

In fact, Europe was extremely cold this winter, and there was a lot of snow (as in meters of snow, something that happens once every 50 years). And last year there was an extremely cold winter in North America.
Exactly like science warns, extreme events are more extreme, and predictability is lost.

I think you're right.
however, it's probably easier to make robot fingers then exoskeleton fingers. although I wouldn't bet on it.
furthermore, the doctor is probably interested in working with amputees in the future, so he wants to have experience with that.

you seem to be very young.
a university professor's job is not to teach, but to do research.
by definition, a university professor is supposed to be able to advise master students. as far as I know, a master thesis is supposed to solve a new problem, i.e. "research", even if the method used is not necessarily new. thus the university professor must be able to expand their field.
note that the title of professor is usually given to people who also advise PhD students, and for a PhD thesis it is implied that a variation of a method, or an entirely new method, is worked on (and that is "real research" by most definitions).

yes, a professor will usually teach a few courses for undergraduates, but they are also supposed to keep office hours, and that's where the internet model fails (because the person in the video can't have office hours for a few thousand people). and the grad students you speak of need an advisor as well.

the summary is correct. SABAM clearly states that they want 15 euros per public reading (if the work is "protected"). and the GP knows this, still he acts as if this is perfectly normal. And, in the message by SABAM, they make it pretty obvious that they intend to ask for these +/- 15 euros whenever they can.
just check their webpage, in french or dutch, if you don't believe me (this incident is not mentioned on the english version).

somewhere, in a basement, a lonely teenager is writing in his blog: "just like in 1947, the truth got out, but now the coverup begins".