...why can't I buy all these wonder batteries?

In the last five years I must have read about at least fifty breakthroughs in battery technology, but nothing of it has reached the consumer (me) yet.

I believe that this is because researchers seem to exaggerate their research results for obvious reasons and seem to underestimate what it takes to make a successful product.

Regarding battery technology I completely stopped to believe anything that comes out of the research community.

Unless I can buy it, it does not exist.

p.

The unit kilowatt is fine, but the number is ridiculously low. Cars breaks are typically designed to have a breaking power of four times the engine power, so we are talking about 500-1000 kW of breaking power in typical cars.

Modern high speed trains have a breaking power in the order of 10 - 20 MW using their engines for regenerative dynamic braking. The german ICE3 has about 16,4 MW dynamic breaking power, which is only slightly higher than the 16 MW propulsion power. It also has additional eddy current brakes, but they there breaking power is just 1600 kW, about 10% of the the dynamic breaking power. There are even additional disc brakes, but they are only used in emergency situatuions.

The largest burner on my gas stove has 5 kW power, but I don't think I can make a pan to glow in seconds, if at all.

Watching the video I would assume that they are talking about 4.6 MW oder 4600 kW of breaking power this disk can handle.

I do not see why the burden of proof that massive dissemination of poison is harmful should be with the public.

IMO those who manufacture and sell this stuff have to prove that it does not destroy our ecosystem.

I know, the stuff has been at some point been certified, but I think that every company that manufactures a product has an obligation to monitor if it is harmful even after it appears on the market. You simply can not determine the long term impact of wide use on the environment with a handful of studies,

p.

More precisely:

If the game state is maintained and processed on "their" computer, it is a service. Otherwise I would regard it as a "good" that is executed on my computer.

p.

The "Cubic Mile of Oil"-numbers do show the opposite of what you are suggesting.

Replacing one CMU with nuclear is the second most expensive alternative, only solar panels are more expensive. Building 2200 nuclear power plant is not only totally out of question, it would also deplete world uranium reserves within a decade.

On the other Hand, building 1.6 Mio. wind turbines is the cheapest viable alternative. Germany alone already has about 22.000 of them, and they are profitable.

Safe nuclear power is not commercially viable. The only reason why it looks cheap is because today's commercial reactors are unsafe by design and the risk costs are carried by the society.

With the cheap nuclear reactors that are still being build today we will have a major nuclear disaster every 20-30 years, and the economic damage to the affected country is huge.

Depending on the outcome, Fukushima probably will cost Japan more than has ever been saved by using nuclear power at all. Expect Japan to pay billions every year just to maintain the Fukushima ruin, and this might go on for hundreds of years.

Just one Fukushima or Chernobyl type disaster in Germany would cost more than the transition to renewable sources.

Of course a society can make the decision to take the gamble, but Germany has been hit hard from Chernobyl Fallout - in some areas in Bavaria deer still can not be consumed because the meat is too radioactive, and it will take about 200 years until the situation will be normal.

The U.S. may not have such big problem when a few thousand square miles get polluted with radioactive fallout - the country is big.

For a small country like Germany, one nuclear disaster might cause more damage than World War II.

My guess is that within the next 30 years we will see another major nuclear disaster somewhere in the world, most probably in the U.S. or in France.

I also expect that most planned nuclear reactors never will get built because even before Fukushima they were too expensive, and after Fukushima no sane Investor will sink money into it.

Like about 80% of the german population I regard the decision to end nuclear power in Germany as a good one - not because I am afraid, but because it is an economically sound decision.

p.

Reading this article, I was thinking this security guy is exaggerating and playing down at the same time.

First of all, in the U.S. many companies use so much crap when it comes to IT that it makes me sick, so everything is possible. However, I think it is much more probable many systems will blow up on a large scale without any malice involved, but just due to incompetence and negligence.

At the same time this guy admits the U.S. is actively preparing and maybe even conducting cyber-warfare against other countries. I don't know how to comment on that. If all countries would stick to cyberwarfare instead of dropping bombs, this would not be *that* bad.

The talk about stolen intellectual property and trade secrets is mostly bullshit. Any business that requires a great deal of secrets to be kept is not sustainable anyway. The future belongs to companies who need very few secrets, if any at all, and are quite open about most aspects of their business. Secrets tend to get out sooner or later anyway.

For mission critical software the quality standards should not be very high, but insanely high. And when the life of people is on the line, software alone should never be able wreak havoc. Unfortunately there are too many people out there who don't have a clue and are just happy when things work. The only get wiser when after the shit hits fan a couple of times, but then they overreact. Professionals should have more courage and never let hazardous systems become operational.

However, I don't see a chance that most of those responsible for the bottom line would voluntarily invest in security and safety unless they are forced to do so, either by law, or by shitstorm.

p.

I read an interview with these guys some times ago.

- They basically sell very small bars, like 1 gram pieces, which are sold which high markup everywhere

- they don't target investors with these machines, but people who want to bring a gift home

- they want to raise interest for buying gold this way

p.

I agree with you that the Browser Issue is a secondary one.

But no one would deny that Microsoft has a de-facto Monopoly on desktop operating systems and office applications.

Bill Gates did not become the richest person in the world because Microsoft did a good job on innovating, but they successfully succeeded the IBM Mainframe monopoly in the PC market on the back of IBM.

The only great thing Microsoft did was to royally kick IBMs testicles when they felt they could do so safely.

Then they operated for decades with an paranoid underdog mentality, and because they knew that their technology and their people were at best second-rate, they thought that every new small competitor might do to them what they had done to IBM, so they used every dirty trick in the book to eliminate upcomers.

And at the same time they enjoyed their monopoly and charged way too much for their software.

Software has a wonderful economy of scale, and with software you can create wonderful lock-in effects, and also abuse the patent and copyright system to keep competitors away.

By the number of windows licenses, a copy of windows should not cost more than a single digit amount of dollars, and Office as well.

Microsoft should have been forced to open its books and all the indecent profits should have been taxed away. Price controls should have been enforced based on the actual costs of developing and marketing the stuff, divided by the number of copies sold.

What happened here is a classical example of how laissez-faire capitalism hurts the economy, stiffles innovation and makes a few obscenely rich.

Now, before calling me a communist:

I regard Communism and Capitalism as equally inhumane because they both deny and suppress half of what makes us survive and prosper. Every sane human being has not only the desire to maximize his own profit, but also to give away, to share and to sacrifice for the prosperity of the society he lives in.

A society or culture that focuses on one side is simply doomed.

p.

Yeah, sure, those terrorists capable of turning an iPhone into a cruise missile will be stopped in their tracks by this measure. The would never dare to smuggle in an iPhone *with* GPS, and would never get the idea to buy a $20 GPS module for this purpose.

No, your scenario is complete nonsense. There are much simpler and cheaper solutions when you want an programmable embedded GPS system.

However, what you can do with an "off the shelve" iPhone is to it use as tactical computer to coordinate the movement of you strike teams in real time. And with the iTerrorize-Plugin from the AppStore every iPhone-owner can sign up for a suicide mission on behalf of any organization. He just needs to bring his own weapons and explosives.

Seriously, a society that fails to provide a meaningful life in dignity for too many talented people will eventually get in serious trouble. You want the talented people to work for the establishment, not against it.

Restricting and regulating the use of some technology does make sense, but isolating your society from progressive and wide-spread technology used by the rest of the world will weaken your economy and make your country an easy prey for your neighbors in the long run. I don't believe that restricting the use of GPS in today's world can have any positive effect.

p.

You are right, this claim might be a bit far fetched, but the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" gives you the following rights:

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. [...]

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; [...]

Article 23
      3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration [...]

Article 27
      2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 29
      1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
      2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

There is of course no right that says "All humans have the right to put Easter Eggs in their products", but taking all these above rights together, when you create something extraordinary, you are entitled to "protection of the moral interests", and matters like human dignity, freedom of expression and development of personality under circumstances may imply this right, unless of course you do no harm and respect the rights of others.

I don't believe you will be very successful in a U.S. court with this argumentation. Arguing with human rights in court generally does not work well in most countries of the world.

But the fact that there are so many easter eggs around and I never heard about anyone getting in trouble because of it indicates that most people, be it customers, superiors or colleagues do appreciate or tolerate it.

p.

but if you are proud of what you have achieved, go ahead, it is a human right. I did it a couple of times when it seemed appropriate, and it was never a problem. If you are in a position where you are responsible for creating the system, it is just your decision.

If you need a rational argument for doing it: It might make the team more proud of the product, more productive for future releases, projects or products. A company is about people, and it is a people issue.

And when even weapon designers can put easter eggs into missiles, I can't imagine anything to be too serious to pull it off; a product just may be too boring or suck too much to deserve an easter egg.

An easter egg is just a sign that the people who made the product did care about it, and are proud of it. An easter egg is like a medal or decoration for the product.

p.

This guy, Lutz Heilman, would be right now the least liked politician in whole Germany, if someone would care. Even his own party does not like him because he did not properly disclose that he worked for the Staatsicherheit, the secret police in Communist Germany. His political career is fucked since 2005, when the German news magazine "Der Spiegel" disclosed it, and now he probably has nothing to loose. The facts in the wikipedia are based on solid sources, so I don't think the court will decide in his favour. And not that it really matters in this case, but he is also avowed gay and a lawyer.

p.

It is all more smoke than fire, only forwarding from www.wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org is affected, you can still access wikipedia under de.wikipedia.org from Germany. So actually not much is blocked, and when you go to www.wikipedia.de, you are even given the URL that still works.

And it is only a preliminary injunction, which probably will be lifted soon. It has happened already, but this futile symbolic act will probably just last a few days. In Germany, the courts do generally favor the right of every person to defend himself against defamatory speech, and are often quick with such injunctions to limit the damage the press can do to individuals.

It is a conflict between different human rights, the right to free speech, and the right of any human individual to live in dignity.

Actually the the Article 1 of the German constitution is one of the most beautiful and touching sentences I have ever seen in any piece of legislation:

"Human dignity is inviolable."

Free speech is important, but human dignity comes first.

Although the whole thing is stupid, I can not say the court did act on behalf of the powerful to suppress free speech, on the opposite, it did what it could to protect the rights of an politician who is not in high esteem with any of the established parties. The guy is from a small left wing party, the successor of the communist party of east germany. They get around 5% of the votes in whole Germany, and up to 20% in some parts of the former east.

Hope this makes a few thing more clear.

p.