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Comment Re: Big bada boom (Score 1) 71

Well, a baseball bat *is* a deadly weapon, if used as a weapon.

OTOH, when arguing about whether it's a bomb the definitions of the terms are less clear. And when arguing about whether it's an explosion, high energy chemists/engineers will have a different definition than folks who don't deal with the details.

To me, it's an explosion. If some professional wants to say "No, it's a deflagration." I'm not going to say he's wrong, but I'm not wrong either. We're just speaking different dialects of English.

Comment Re:Lithium isn't rare, and it is important (Score 1) 51

That's not clear. The problems are real, but some of them already have solutions, and perhaps the others will eventually have solutions also. Also all of the alternatives have their own problems.

The folks working on sodium based batteries have made tremendous progress recently, but there's no proof that analogous advances aren't possible for lithium. At any particular time, you weigh your options, and decide based on the choices available, but that doesn't tell you what the choices will be next week. For that matter, lab results often don't scale commercially. So take this article with a few grains of salt.

Comment Re:Lithium isn't rare, and it is important (Score 1) 51

Actually lithium should make more powerful and lighter batteries. That's been known for nearly a century. The details come when it turns to practical design.

I forget the details, but I seem to recall that lithium should be half again as powerful per unit weight as sodium. (That might be an underestimate.) But this doesn't include things like flammability, growth of metallic extrusions, etc. Dealing with the details can easily be enough to change that balance.

Comment Re: No, based on the summary (Score 3, Interesting) 140

It sounds to me like the input to the algorithm is truly random, but not unbiased, and the algorithm perfectly unbiases output from the particular source they are using. The rest of the article goes into the type of flaw they're addressing, and talks about very slightly unfair dice, which you could correct, but you'd need to know exactly how unfair they are, and you're always going to be very slightly wrong and end up correcting not quite perfectly. The obvious quantum RNG is to generate polarized light and measure it perpendicular to the polarization, but you'd still need to get it perfectly perpendicular. It sounds like they've built something that doesn't rely on precise alignment to give a known distribution, which they can then use to unbias the output perfectly.

Comment Re:This should not be acceptble... (Score 2) 124

Is that a serious question? Even in the late '70s when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the kids were dealing with the technology the parents didn't understand. While that is starting to be inverted (GenX and Millennials seemed to be peak tech-able), many parents still rely on the kids for that sort of thing.

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