Really? The moon orbits the earth. Is it eclipsed by the earth 50% of the time? Of course not. You're only thinking about satellites in -low- earth orbit, which are shaded by the earth basically during half of each orbit. Put the satellites in very high orbits (geosynchronous itself is pretty high), and they are exposed to sunlight far more than 50% of the time. Heck, put a satellite in a polar orbit and for much of the year it can be exposed to the sun -throughout- its orbit.

That still means at any given time 1/2 the panels aren't doing anything useful. It also means on every lunar day the panels go through massive temperature transitions from incredibly hot to incredibly cold.

Instead, you could place a ring of panels in high orbit around the earth and have -all- of them working nearly all the time. I guess there might be a tradeoff due to the need for microwave transmitters on every generating satellite (since wiring together sets of panels many kilometers apart in earth orbit is probably not feasible).

while studying someone else's code. All the programmers were muttering and cursing under their breath, about what an idiot the programmer was and how much better they could have written the same thing.

Some of us care about that $10 a month. In fact, I didn't get basic cable bundled with my internet until it actually -dropped- the cost of my internet (net cost of basic cable was actually -negative-).

But what happened next? Comcast decided to switch basic cable from analog to digital to save bandwidth. (Ok, no problem so far - that's actually a good idea). But what did they give basic cable subscribers then? A tiny box which converted the digital signal to 4x3 Standard Definition NTSC television (the old Channel 3 connection). In other words, crap. I could hook up an antenna to my TV and pull broadcast TV in 1080p HD, but the cable company puts me back in the 90's. You bet your ass I cared about that $10 a month. If adding basic cable to my internet connection cost me even one cent I wouldn't have been happy.

I don't think I've burned out a CFL in the past 8 years, and they weren't that expensive to begin with. So, anecdotally, YES they can be cheaper.

Sorry, posting to remove erroneous moderation. Me and my clumsy fingers. Consider yourself getting +1 Funny.

That was really the weakest point of that story and really completely unnecessary. Considering that Doctor Who established that a Weeping Angel is a -stone statue- that can't move at all if anybody is looking at it, it makes no sense at all. First, the Statue of Liberty is not stone, and second, is there actually any point in time where -nobody- at all is looking at it?

That's quite a generality. I've been to my daughter's high school and the teachers there don't appear to be lazy in the least, AND they seem to be leveraging technology in sensible ways. For example, the way my daughter can log in to a school web site and see every day's lessons and homework assignments.

"We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”

I took a look at TFA and followed up by reading the description of LibGeoDecomp:

Gee, that seems like an extremely limited problem space, and doesn't measure up at all to the title of this Slashdot submission. It might really be a useful tool, but when I clicked to this article I expected to read about something much more general purpose, in terms of 'bringing Legacy Fortran to Supercomputers'.

By the way, regarding the use of the word 'codes': I don't think English is the first language of this developer. Cut some slack.

Well I guess Elon Musk hasn't gotten the memo yet, that there's no way he can do heavy lift, because he certainly seems hell-bent on trying. Now do I know whether or not designs like the Falcon 9 Heavy or Falcon X Heavy can ever get off the drawing board? No I don't. But I'd love to see Musk try, instead of bowing to 'prevailing wisdom' that only the government can do this.

... But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

So much for that bright idea.

Well patch.com is trying. I can't say they're yet but at least you get some local news out of their sites.

In my area I think retailers realize there are too many consumers who don't get a newspaper, so a bundle of advertising is bulk-mailed every Thursday for free. It provides flyers for most of the area supermarkets, a few hardware and department store flyers, and occasionally some coupons. And a lot of it is still printed on newsprint. We also get the advertising envelope bundles like Valpak and the like.

By the way, I don't think newspapers are even a particularly cheap source of paper, considering how thin many local newspapers have become. You can get a better deal buying a ream of paper at an office supply store, but I admit it won't burn as well or protect your packages like crumpled newsprint.

This is the first thing I ran into as a newcomer to Node. Not just packages but programming techniques. You're trying to learn how to do something trivial for the first time, so you hit Google and then drop into Stack Overflow and find plenty of questions and answers about your very problem. Then you try to use the solution and it falls apart. That's when you look back through the comments and you discover, "Oh yeah, I wrote that answer / released that package for Node 0.4.x: it really doesn't work anymore, sorry."

This isn't really an indictment of node, because I see this now wherever I look into the Web world (coming from the C/C++ world). So much immaturity (in the literal sense). Everything: HTML, CSS, Standards, Real-world browser support for said standards, VMs, best practices for JavaScript, tools like Dojo, Node, etc. all in flux. Documents that describe the "deprecated" old way, the new "approved" way, and the "better" way that doesn't work yet but will when the next revision is coming out (date TBD). A little more stability would go a long way.