How is it "only" 1% efficient? I can't find the exact reference at the moment but I think I heard that photosynthesis is ~99% efficient (Take that with a grain of salt since that is relying on my memory).

Apparently it appears some complicated quantum effects take place in the photosynthesis process. Some info is presented on (possible) quantum behaviour in biology by Prof Jim Al-Khalili in in this Royal Institution Lecture

By L2 commando, do you mean the type 2 Mekennes plug (image: https://images.duckduckgo.com/...) ?

To make things even more complicated, there are quite a number of 3-pin (240V, 13amp) public charging posts as well.

I thought North America already was low voltage. 8P

230~240VAC FTW!

That gate is still open.

True you won't lose the patent, but there is a time limit on suing an infringer, isn't there?

Anyway, given that textbooks often discuss MIPS, good to see something being offered to Academia.

IANAL and I didn't check the details, but if MS are trying to use the International Trade Commission path, then that body can only block the import of products into the US which are determined to be infringing their patents, hence they target the manufactures/importers.

That's true in part, but, IIRC, the Polish break relied on the original insecure operating practice that the Germans soon removed. The operator had to choose a "random" 3 letter session key. Using the day's settings, they'd transmit that key twice in a row (presumably because they were worried that errors might creep in), before adjusting the machine rotors to the session key and encrypting the message. Transmitting the key twice was a major security flaw, which the Polish attack relied on.

IIRC, the German army soon realised their error, and stopped the repetition of the key. This made breaking enigma much harder, which is where Welch(?) and Turing come in.

I think you'll find the GP was quoting The Beatles' "Taxman". At the time, the group were in a 95% tax bracket, the 5% being what they were left with!!

Yes. Using a trained bird of prey can give other birds an unsubtle hint to stay away.

You're thinking of standard lead-acid car batteries for ICEs.

Charging stations operate at "slightly" higher voltages: See Charge point basics for details on European ones.

EG, of the faster AC ones, ~40kW, for example, use 3-phase power at around (_IIRC_) 450V.

They probably started as nothing more than an inflated animal bladder, but I do recall seeing one of these http://comeheretome.files.word...

Indeed. As explained by Barry Crocker and the Doug Anthony Allstars. ;-)

Given that road damage is apparently proportional to the 4th power of axle weight (too lazy to put in link to wikipedia), it seems unlikely anyone would be brave enough to push that legislation... but it'd make railways more attractive.

Followed the link but couldn't see where it showed actual power consumption of the hardware decoder they used (their own I guess?) but given that an ARM CPU might consume around 500mW whereas an H.264 hardware decoder doing HD uses 10mW, either the screen is using a huge amount of power or their hardware leaves a bit to be desired.

"Massaging"?? Having just read that news report, it seems they just needed to include other inventive features of the design in the patent, which probably just means the claims had to be 'narrowed' to include that feature.

I don't see any issue with that. There is nothing wrong with patenting an improvement to an existing invention as long as it's non-trivial.