Neo-airships are the sort of idea/innovation/invention that are constantly appearing in Popular Science et al., always just around the corner, for decades on end.

This article conspicuously and strongly implies that airships save fuel. Then it fails to mention any specifics about how much fuel they save. Why is that?

It's a funny, creative idea, and I admire it as a gizmo and a feat of hacking.

But how big of a jerk do you have to be to deliberately tamper with random strangers' vacation photos?

The results are a little underwhelming, too. Maybe that's why there isn't a gallery of images on the site. The video posted by Liquide is really more informative than the web page is.

I'd start with a small PDF file first. Figure out the process you need to follow, then bring in the giant, slow-to-process files.

I saw IJATKOTCS (what a mouthful!) over the weekend and I noticed this, but I thought it was a glitch in the theater's sound system.

What this will accomplish that the similarly intrusive CAP system will not?

Coffee With Sinistar

I'm trying to understand what the film's producer was trying to accomplish by preventing certain persons from viewing his movie.

Those prohibited from the premiere will be perfectly able to see it later, after all. They aren't any more likely to come around to the film's point-of-view later.

Here are some possibilities:

1) The producer imagined that the audience of Myers' blog will be more likely to pay to see his movie if, instead of reading Myers' review, they read this ridiculous story.

2) The producer was deliberately trying to create an incident, thus earning some free publicity.

3) The film isn't a final edit, and the producer knows or imagines that there is something about this print of the movie that exposes him to legal action from Myers, something that will be removed from the final edit.

4) The producer is insane.

yuubi: I could see a CEO who recognizes that he has little left to lose taking great pleasure in making rudeness harder to get away with.

I think this sort of outburst, far from making it harder to "get away with" being rude to the defendants, would only serve to justify being rude to the defendants.

Jeff: I can see why he would talk that way. There's nothing like a deposition conducted by a real jerk wad of an attorney.

Follow the links to here and there are some more pretty choice quotes:

...you're a piece of shit and a piece of garbage and I'm the only person in your life that is fucking up your world and I enjoy it.

Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining what the opposing counsel could possibly have said or done to make such a retort comprehensible, let alone justified. Judge Robreno presumably observed the conduct of lawyers on both sides of this little imbroglio when he reviewed the video, but he only took issue with one of them.

Would these be those "Ballentine quarts with the puzzle on the cap" that I've heard about?

Re: "You are simply using the stored magnetic charge, that will eventually run out, just like a battery."

A magnetic field is, in this sense at least, more like a spring than like a battery. Energy may be stored to and released from springs and magnetic fields. The objects that embody springs and magnetic fields may deteriorate in time -- as so many objects do -- but not because of the depletion of some intrinsic store of energy in them.

Re: "If you could make them more efficient, cumulatively, it could make a big difference."

Except that 1) modern small electric motors are generally designed to be considerably more efficient than they were just a few years ago and 2) the best ones are awfully efficient by now.

There just isn't that much headroom left. Going from 5% efficiency to 10% efficiency is a huge improvement; going from 90% efficiency to 95% efficiency is extremely minor. Bigger savings are likely to lie elsewhere, at that point.

I agree that a magician -- or even a reformed perpetual motion machine builder -- would be a better choice to evaluate these things.

Sadly, the Galvanick Lucipher was fictional.

I suppose the (strong) resemblance to elements from the Star Wars and Half-Life fantasy worlds is because the artists and designers of Star Wars and Half-Life looked to the real world for inspiration. Half-Life 2 in particular is modeled on former Soviet-bloc eastern Europe settings.

The real question, not addressed in the pull quotes in the posting is this: "What is it in his official background that causes him to be considered a person of interest, and what has he done to mitigate/eliminate that since his previous visit?"

I'd have a couple of other real questions, like "How can John Q. Public tell if he's a 'person of interest,' how can he (or the BBC, for that matter) tell what made him a person of interest, and how can he mitigate that at all?"

Ianm has an excellent point. The Administration has been tripping over its own shoes for years.

I'm afraid that simple incompetence is no longer a convincing explanation for the continued bungling of the War On Some Terrorists.

One alternate explanation is that the Administration just doesn't care. It is not focused on combating terrorism effectively; it is focused on using terrorism as a political tool, a bogeyman to scare the masses. There is a political motivation to appear to take the issue seriously, but there's little motivation to actually do the job well. If more ordinary citizens get blown up, that's just more fodder for the bogeyman stories.

That theory has the virtue of simplicity and explaining pretty much everything. It has the drawback that to many people, it sounds like an incredible conspiracy theory. I don't think it is, though. It's just a group of cutthroat politicians acting on political concerns alone.

Here's a direct link to the Flickr gallery, Entoptic Phenomena.

Creepy. Edward Gorey-esque. Cool.

Yeah, these darn kids today, with their weird abbreviations, acronyms -- all that impenetrable insider jargon. That's alien, all right. Not like the military at all.