Those things are amazing. I would love for the BBC to do a tour and maybe a segment on how they are constructed. Images from inside are surprisingly difficult to find.

Can someone explain this experiment? If I bought coffee with the card and paid the money back, that's just extra hassle. If I paid with the card and didn't pay it back, I'd be wracked with guilt. And as for paying for some other cheapskate's Starbucks coffee, that's just unthinkable.

The promotion button does nothing when the person isn't approved. This is with Chrome. It does work for grey comments.

Those batteries would be in parallel though, so you would only get ~1.5 volts. Maybe three glasses of water and four wires? Or two glasses of water and three wires, with two batteries in one glass, opposite ends immersed.

Promoting comments is still broken, so I am replying to promote.

I think the star rating system could be improved by using the median score rather than the average. By using an average, users who rate 1 or 5 stars are given disproportionate weight in determining what the average is. People who want their opinion to be influential would do well to only rate 1 or 5 stars depending on…

And don't forget these types of missiles can be very maneuverable. When the missile is swerving around unpredictably at Mach 3, hitting it with a lump of metal moving at a third of the speed becomes a lot more difficult.

Maybe. Even though the information is spending part of its life in quantum superposition, I assume that the majority of the time, the data will be digital. I have no idea what a quantum computer would look like; maybe they will be like supercomputers off in a special room completing tasks sent to them over a network,…

As far as I know, that type of parallelization, where you simultaneously march every pixel through a complex pipeline, isn't possible. However, many of the bottlenecks in rendering are exactly the type of problem that quantum computing is good at solving. It's best to think of quantum computing as being really good at…

Quantum computing will be amazing, but it probably won't be powering your Windows machine. It's good at solving problems with many possible solutions. Where traditional computer would have to test possible solutions one at a time until the correct answer is found, a quantum computer could test millions or billions of…

I'd like to congratulate Jesus on particularly well chosen picture.

Jay-Z looks weird without hair.

"Corporations are evil." Check.

The fact that you don't have a good way to store large sums of money isn't inherent to BitCoin, but is an artifact of its infancy. The FDIC itself was only formed in the 1930's and the dollar got along just fine without it.

I think the negative reaction to your type of prediction comes from the fact that BitCoin is used by enthusiasts who are excited by economics and technology. They understand how it works and understand the risks. You don't get any points for predicting an ambitious and complicated experiment is probably going to fail.

Points 2 and 3 are moot because it is easy to exchange BitCoins for dollars. As long as there are easy ways to exchange the currency, it is not critical that everyone use it. It could exist as the currency of the internet and coexist with other 'real' currencies.

Has anyone played Metroid Prime recently? I have wonderful memories of playing it when it came out, but I'm curious how well it has aged. Would I be disappointed if I dug the Gamecube out of the closet to play it again?

Get AdBlock, and when you visit a Gizmodo story, select "Block an ad on this page" from the drop down menu. Then click on the Facebook nonsense and confirm. It will then automatically remove it from pages in the future.

We consume most of what produce and what we do export is smaller than what we import. Pretty simple.

The United States has the largest manufacturing output in the world. We just use machines instead of people, so there are fewer manufacturing jobs. We still know how to make stuff.