Okay, but that is just a single pass from English->Chinese->English, and you admit that it is not always successful and might get rejected. The original proposal was FIVE TIMES, without the crib of being able to compare back to the original source at each step. Surely you will agree based on your experience with a "single pass" of this translation that if they went back and forth five times, never being able to reference back to an earlier version, that things would go off the rails.

I'm seeing a lot of Absurdist (Existentialist? Nihilistic?) braggadocio in this thread. I wonder if all of these people are really this uncaring deep down. For example, would you press the button to end all of humanity in exchange for a mystic vial of infinite happiness potion? Is it really, REALLY all about you? Every one of us alive today is a product of, and influenced (for good and bad) by the legacy of those who came before us. I wonder if people who claim to be totally uninterested in leaving a legacy are either too afraid or too confused to make the personal sacrifices that a satisfactory legacy of your life requires.

Absolutely it does make them less wrong. Are you going to tell me that using phrases such as "to curry favor" and "moot point" are incorrect because a long time ago someone misheard someone else say "to curry Favel" and "mute point"? (see: http://blog.oxforddictionaries...)

Everyone should agree that languages evolve over time. For some reason, however, some people get really indignant when they observe the actual mechanisms by which languages evolve up-close.

Cool, does that mean I can get infinite power out of it as long as I can get the receiver and transmitter arbitrarily close to each other? Sounds like each time I cut the distance in half I get twice the power. Zeno saves the day!

If distance=0 represents a theoretical "full power", then how do you double that distance to get the half (or quarter) power according to the inverse law? If some distance > 0 represents "full power", then getting the TX and RX that close ought to be free of this nasty inverse square business.

Sure, but that loss isn't due to any inverse square law, is it? Like you said, the coils are practically touching. The op was implying that all wireless charging is stupid because loss increases with the square of the distance. I'm saying (with no research and little expertise in the area) that all of the wireless charging I've seen operates in the near field; and while I don't know how much that 40% efficiency number you gave could be improved upon, I doubt that the dominating factor in the loss is distance in this specific case.

I'm pretty sure the fact that most wireless charging systems operate in the near field and rely and near field effects means that the inverse square law doesn't "fully apply". Even if it does in a technical sense, the distance between transmitter and receiver is very small.

That's 3.05e-7 Libraries of Congress for those of us in the civilized world.

There's nothing to be disproved. The submitter is just showing ignorance. I was able to find a commencement address by Arno Penzias where he shows the audience what a staggeringly large amount of time we are talking about when we talk about monkeys (or computers) randomly recreating text of any appreciable size. Tip to the submitter: Don't use phrases like "mathematically impossible" unless you really know what you are talking about. Slashdot readers fall all over themselves in their hurry to assert their superiority in these kinds of cases.

The first half of the book was good. The second half was not good at all. Also, what was up with the whole "nobody in the entire galaxy can make sense of Psychlo math; oh wait, it was just that their number system had a different base this whole time. lol, whoops" thing?

Yeah, but every iteration is better than the previous one. Maybe in a few more cycles, the tech will actually deliver on the promise and it will stick around.

This thread is stale now, but I wanted to let you know that after I posted I went and looked up the legal definition of assault and battery. I now understand the context of your post and no longer think you are weird.

I think it's weird that you think that "touching someone" is assault and battery.

Of course you meant it as an adjective. I'm sure you are extremely "capable of subtle" when you want to be.

subtlety is a noun. subtle is an adjective. You meant to say, "more subtlety than you are apparently capable of." See also: "Your advice on grammar lacks subtlety." versus "Your advice on grammar is not very subtle."

This. The jetpack/flying car whining just needs to stop. Some problems are really hard, and the imagined solutions to some problems make no sense at all. Turns out moving along the surface of the earth is really easy, and (gasp!) we can get to pretty much everywhere we need to by doing so.