The LPPFusion company is also looking as a p-B11 reaction (eventually) and actually have reactions running now utilising a dense plasma focus system, which is magnetically confined. They are nowhere near break-even yet, though.

Agreed. Adverts are annoying, but the potential for spoofing other applications is far worse (even if initially difficult to exploit). 100% user-controlled may just about be acceptable - simply make it a property of any video control in the webpage, and it's instantly available on all websites without having to change a thing - but even then I wouldn't bet against it being exploited.

I use Skype desktop version for text chat at work, and I think it breaks many of the most basic rules of UI design. These rules have been known about for decades, and often promoted by Microsoft as the "right way" to write Windows apps.

There are two very simple options that have been requested many times on the Skype forums over the past 2-3 years: change the color scheme, remove the speech bubbles.

Here's all my rants condensed into one page: http://moteprime.org/article.p...

It looks like the new Skype is continuing that trend.

And use of platform default behaviours, and basic configuration options for colors, and a truly compact mode for those of us
w h o
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The user interfaces for different platforms have to be different. Otherwise you end up with Skype 7.x, where we have a UI on the desktop which has been designed for a smartphone.

Low pointing accuracy on smartphones means large targets and huge icons. Short conversations on smartphones means lots of space wasted on speech bubbles. Likely content on smartphones means emojis pop up when you're sharing code snippets, making them unreadable. Restricted input methods on smartphones means ignoring platform conventions like Ctrl+B for bold text.

Conversely, try getting 3DS Max 2017 UI onto a smart watch. Regardless of compatibility, it's simply impossibe.

One of the most common requests on the Skype community forums over the last year and a half is some (any!) basic configuration options for the UI.

There's no way to get a properly compact view, there's no way to set the color of the bubbles, and the support for high-DPI screens is abysmal.

In fact, once I started looking into it, I found a whole batch of UI problems with the new "improved" 7.0 UI, which I shared on the forums and then gathered into a handy blog post:

Skype 7.0 - A new entry for the User Interface Hall of Shame?
http://www.moteprime.org/artic...

The 7.0 UI feedback thread is the longest one on the community forums, and can be found here:
https://community.skype.com/t5...

Something like this was proposed many years ago by Robert L Forward, called Starwisp. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for details.

The probe would be very light but extended, like a cobweb. Tiny processor/sensor nodes would exist where the wires touched. Some nodes and web filaments would undoubtedly be destroyed by dust collisions en route, but would be multiply redundant. On arrival, the probe would be tattered and torn but still functional.

All real drugs have side effects. Therefore the metric used is based on risk vs. reward.

If your reward is zero, then any risk at all - even just the risk of not having your money to spend on proper medicine - is sufficient to tip the balance hard over to the "don't use this" side.

My best pal and matey Mike Marshall, from the Good Thinking Society, was on BBC Breakfast news this morning along with homeopath-in-chief Peter Fisher.

The clip is not available at the BBC but it is on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Since the release of Skype 7.0 (actually the preview version, 6.22), the largest thread on the the Skype community forum has been about one request - can we have our screen space back?

(My take on this at great length at http://moteprime.org/article.p...)

This news gives me some hope that, with appropriate HTML and RPC chops, we will see third-parties allow users some measure of customization of the Skype UI.

Chrome Version 43.0.2357.134 on Linux, just gets me a blank page.

This is the equivalent of ray tracing in graphics - nice effect, but very heavy on the computation.

With graphics, rasterization is faster, and the reason is that it can be characterized as "a bunch of cheats that happen to look good". Can we identify some similar cheats for sound?

Yes, I think so. Here's a paper I wrote 16 years ago outlining one possible, very simple, basis for soundscape generation.

https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~vrml...

Unfortunately, I didn't get to progress with it as VRML faded out pretty quickly after 1998.

...ads that somehow manage to evade both ScriptSafe and AdBlock Plus.

Good calculator - 10 digits, base-N mode, classic Casio design.

This was a present from when I was at University 25 years ago, and it lasted all the way to this year. Now, one of the display segments has failed so I replaced it with a FX85 which I hate.

In private enterprise, I would not be surprised if such a system fell foul of legislation protecting whistleblowers. Should the same whistleblowing protections should apply to government agencies?