Actually it can be cheaper in some cases. Say 1 square yard (hey just using the units in the article) of solar cells costs $100. Then if you can focus 20 times the light on it you're generating slightly less than 20X the power for that $100 bucks plus the cost of the concentrator. If said concentrator costs less than $100 bucks * 19 you win. If it costs more, you don't win. But no cost announced so I'm guessing its stupid expensive or they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

I can't wait for the first showing here at... an un-named lab ;)

BUT WAIT! If you order in the next 4 seconds I'll triple your offer.

I read the article (yes yes I know). But in summary, your hypothesis (temperature fluctations0 was what everyone thought, but the groundbreaking bit was that they did an experiment that provides a LOT of evidence to the contrary.

The sun has a cycle of it's own (about 1 month). They did a much more accurate study and found the decay rate is tightly correlated to the sun's cycle.

Longer version:
The theory now is that it has to do with the neutrino flux. As we move further from the sun the flux goes down by 1/R^2. We saw that fluctuation first. But the neutrino flux also varies with the solar cycle which is independent of the earth's temperature.

This is very very cool experimental physics. Kudo's to them!

The story told to me by Dr. Jackson (of electrodynamics fame):

It's catalyzed fusion because the muon isn't used up, it is released to catalyze again. When they discovered this, people were really excited because the muon *does* live long enough to get past the break-even point even when you consider the energy used to create the muon in the first place. There was all kinds of talk of cold fusion (this was back in the 60s I think). The catch is about a 1% chance that the muon gets ejected in such a way from the fusion such that it can't catalyze the next one. That argument is a bit more subtle, but it is apparently what causes the whole thing to fall apart when talking about a net energy gain. It just takes more energy to produce a muon than ~100 fusing hydrogen atoms will provide.

I'm out west (Aurora), but I'm reasonably happy with AT&T's dsl service. I get 6.0 Mbps for $35/mo and I can substain pretty close to that all the time. About 500-600KB/s average download speed every time I do something that maxes it out. I've only had the service go out once (for 10 minutes) in the last 6 months, so I'm pretty happy with that too.

Nowadays, if you're willing to stay even just a little bit outside of the Yamanote loop line, and if you know where to look (hint: online, especially if you can read a bit of Japanese, in which case Jalan.net is the place to go), you can get small hotel rooms for the same price as capsule hotels in Tokyo.

I should know: I'm sitting in such a room right now. The place where I'm staying has weekly rates which rival the cheapest apartment room rentals -- which usually have the inconvenience of requiring upfront monthly payments, deposits, and often "key money" and "gift money" (unless dealing with special agencies like Sakura House who specialize in housing foreigners, the first month of rent can easily cost you four times the normal rent, and we haven't talked about the utilities yet)

Since this is /. : did I mention that my room has top-notch Internet connectivity? I was downloading stuff from my Montreal-based "home" server at over 50 Mb/s yesterday night! You get an Ethernet jack in the room, and the place is blanketed with free wifi. (Of course you still end up behind a NAT, but I don't think I've ever seen a hotel handing out public IPs...)

The hotel is split in smoking and non-smoking floors, and there's even a women-only floor. There's a coin laundry on the first floor, nice bathing and toilet facilities (cleaner than most 6000-8000 yen/night downtown Shinjuku business hotels I've stayed in), microwave ovens and hot water on each floor... With convenience stores and 100yen shops close by, it makes it really easy to live on a shoestring budget even in this supposedly extremely expensive city.

And this place is far from unique: hell, there's another one just like it right across the street.

Did I mention the best part yet? Unlike most budget hotels... there are virtually no noisy foreigners here!

Which is why I won't tell you where it is ;->

Yes, man-in-the-middle attacks still work. There are a number of other attacks that work also. This wasn't an attempt at explaining every single little detail of cryptography but rather answering the question which was asked- why we care about large primes for crypto purposes.

24 lines? Uh, that is a T1. T1 is available everywhere, although it might get rather expensive in some places.

In general, a T1 seems to be much, much less latency than any DSL I have ever seen. A lot fewer routers in the way. End result is that a 1.5Mb T1 is a lot closer to 3Mb DSL, maybe 6Mb in some situations. Having had a business on DSL a couple of times but mostly on T1 connections this has proven itself several times.

The real question on all of our minds though: "How far will it launch a pumpkin?"

The corp/alliance structure will really help with this I think. From the article, it sounds like as a merc you'll be hired personally. So yes, you might get hired to lead a random bunch of morons who won't do anything you say. OR you get hired along with the rest of your corp/alliance to beat up on the members of another corp.

In the second case, if the grunts you are commanding don't follow orders, kick them out the corp. Put black marks by their names. Tell everyone how much they suck. Refuse to command them again.

The question, I think, comes down to the DUST players. How many serious players will get involved in the corp/alliance structure? How many halo players will just want some laughs screwing everyone over? If there are enough of the former that you can avoid hiring the latter, this will be awesome. If the *only* way to populate your battlefield is to hire the casual players, then I agree, the RTS side of things will degenerate quickly.

But as long as there are some rewards for winning a fight, I imagine the serious players will gravitate towards the serious generals and form groups that are very hard for casual players to beat. All in all a win for user-driven content.

You're right that I did mix feature sets with interoperability. Both are valid points. There are still lots of things you can do with MS Office that you can't in Open Office. I'll be honest and say I use both. I like OO for basic stuff like simple word documents at home. I don't use it at work because the features simply aren't there. Impress and calc are toys compared to MS Office.

The only thing OO has going for it is the price and multi-OS support. It's quickly becoming slow and bloated though.

Eh, on the LHC at full steam, we have collisions at 40MHz. The ATLAS pixel detector, is an 80M pixel chunk (or rather ~28k chunks) of silicon. Admitedly, most of that data never makes it out of the on chip electronics, and it has to be triggered, and the pictures are VERY sparse (a few thousand pixels fireing in an event out of the 80M), but still. We can take those snapshots damn fast.