The link to the Independent appears broken and all I can find is a story in the Daily Mail which seems to be a bit of a rag: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2485533/Technical-fault-left-RAF-pilots-unable-flying-100-million-aircraft.html#comments

Can anyone tell when the "blinding" incident actually happened? Daily Mail appears to imply the BAE helmet program was de-funded as a result but there's no way the government could move that fast.

To play devil's advocate, is there some aspect of "Immigration Law" that would pertain to a US Citizen crossing the border with information deemed sensitive to national security?

But when police shoot people on American soil, they have to claim self-defense since they are not executioners. Armed drones ARE executioners and thus should not be used on American soil. Or am I missing something? Why in the world would we ever want to do this or not be willing to give a simple "no" answer to the question of whether we will?

If you want to turn 40 watts of heat into blue light, I'm figuring that's something like 5000 lumens you're creating according to the luminosity function. That's a conference room projector worth of light. Then you have to figure the laser power required to get that much heat out, which according to the article's 2 percent efficiency estimate would be...a lot. I don't know how "cooling efficiency" is defined. Ideally you'd move the emission to infrared, but that would be disastrous for your night vision goggles.

You make a good point, since there aren't many reports of long haul truckers causing accidents due to CB use. I would just speculate the key differences are: 1) Truckers are professional drivers with lots of driving experience 2) Truckers log mostly highway miles and spend less time making complicated maneuvers 3) The guy on the other end of the call is also driving 4) Truckers probably don't have to drive as defensively as normal cars since they're hard to fit in someone else's blind spot

Shoppers could opt out by discreetly stowing their cell phones in the little Santa's North Pole Train as it chugs around the food court all day...

If you read their patent # 7227674 it suggests they don't compute the hologram fringes, which is the computationally intensive part. Instead they let the optics do the work and record real, photographic holograms for every frame of video. So it's kind of a step backward in computational complexity compared to other holographic video systems that try to do thousands of FFTs and display the resulting fringe patterns on a super hi-res electronic display.

I think a practical goal would be to find ways for the US government to shift its military-industrial-complex spending away from weapons and war machines and encourage those companies to develop and sell peacetime technologies that will allow them to keep their technological edge. For example, instead of making fighter planes Lockheed could make rockets and space shuttles. Kind of the opposite of car companies being re-purposed to build tanks in WW2.

I just think that the military industrial complex has too much lobbying power to let itself get cut off from government funding. Some might also argue that we need to maintain the capacity to build weapons in case we ever need them in the future. I think it would be great if we could fund companies that take the sharpest minds and put them to work solving challenging problems for the benefit of mankind. And if war does break out we can take the minds off those problems and put them back to work figuring out the highest-tech way to blow people up.

From your linked source, in Bush's last 12 months in office the unemployment rate went from 5.00 to 7.4%. In Obama's first 12 months in office it went from 7.7 to 9.7%. Arguably this shows Obama inheriting a shrinking economy from Bush, but by no means accelerating the decline. I don't know what the "adding jobs" language means but I would argue Obama's term has seen better results (or less-bad results) than Bush's, which began in a boom and ended in a recession.

Use it to charge 30 Palm Pre's simultaneously. Or vice versa, buy 30 touchstone chargers and use them to cook a nice meal for that special lady in your life.

I'm interested to see how Valve's trademarking of "Dota" ends up impacting Blizzard's SC2 DotA mod. Hopefully Valve's trademark will only cover the spelling with the lower-case 'a'; I would hate to see it causing the mod community to be locked out of using the proper name for it.

Fucking laws, how do they WORK?

The cosmic microwave background is everywhere, at all frequencies. Any signal you send has to be stronger than this. But wait, if you use spread spectrum signals, you can actually receive a signal with a power spectral density that's lower than this noise floor! So there could be alien signals lurking below the CMB, but we have no chance of finding them without guessing their code. And as the codes get more complex and more efficient, they become more impossible to guess.

(This is not my field, but) I think a good way to state it is that if you are sending a data stream that has any order or predictability to it, you are not using your communication resources most efficiently. Surely the aliens wouldn't have truly optimal efficiency, but as they get smarter they will make it harder and harder for us to find them. (Ha. Maybe the efficiency is a happy side-effect.)