And yes, I realize 1500 planets a second is a stupid low number considering a realistic beam width. Point is, anything you do will have to be over days aimed at a single planet...assuming you're trying to talk to us right now.

>Planets are very poor reflectors. Not comparable.

Not comparable!??? From wikipedia:
"The average overall albedo of Earth, its planetary albedo, is 30 to 35%, because of the covering by clouds, but varies widely locally across the surface, depending on the geological and environmental features."

Just because one square inch of mirror reflects better than one square inch of planet surface does not mean the mirror will be more visible. Your positionable mirrors will still need to cover a surface area that's a pretty large fraction of a planet.

BUT unfortunately that's not how Kepler detects planets. Assuming the detectors can detect an increase in brightness as well as a decrease...you're going to need an array that's close to 100% reflective and exactly the size of a planet.

>What you do is point at a target, let fly, then point at the next target, let fly, etc

From wikipedia:
"While only about a dozen planets have been confirmed in the habitable zone, the Kepler spacecraft has identified a further 54 candidates and current estimates indicate that there are "at least 500 million" such planets in the Milky Way."

Either the transmitter or receiver will need to have a wide lobe...otherwise the probability of intercept is stupid low. If you could position your absolutely massive mirrors array at a rate of 1500 planets/second, you would, on your receiving planet, see a signal once every three days for 1/1500 of a second. Kepler can see something like 15 degrees, and requires DAYS of averaging to get something statistically useful. Seeing a 1/1500 second signal even with, literally, planet sized light blockers or reflectors isn't anywhere close to our grasp yet.

Not saying that some aliens aren't doing this....but I don't think we're ready to see it yet.

And, if you're talking about planet sized mirror arrays being feasible, why not planet sized light blockers arrays that can be modulated? Way easier to construct. Is there a benefit in making the average brightness of a sun look brighter rather than darker?

Beings that we're just now able to see *entire planets* orbiting distance suns, I doubt a relatively small array of mirrors, encircling a sun (you would want omnidirectional) would be even close to visible. If they were intentionally going for ease and being highly omnidirectional, I think RF would be the way to go.

>song downloaded in the Mastered for iTunes format with a CD version of the same song, and said there were no differences.

Why. Sounds like its been achieved.

You've obviously never played angry birds or plants vs zombies.

I think the pretty and usefulness will be in the proper aliased text presentation. The desktop monitor I'm looking at has only a few useful font sizes for the capital letter "I", ether one pixel wide, two pixels wide, or three pixels wide...anything between is blurry. I would absolutely love to see a true type font that didn't look blurry and didn't require some barely tolerable sub-pixel tricks.

I think he's basically asking for jslint, where you can catch errors many levels deep in your code at compile time, rather than waiting for the code to crash when it, eventually, gets run (in unit test or whatever).

I don't understand this. How does the code look that much different? Besides some syntax differences, they're all almost *exactly* the same. Some languages force you to format your declarations and types differently, but a for loop is a for loop, an object is an object with procedures, variables, scope, and all of whatever features the language supports, doesn't support, or pretends to support. Unless it's something like Haskell or a language that encourages unreadable lambda functions, they all look basically the same to me. Sure, javascript has interesting ways of declaring functions and building objects, but you could still translate it, basically on the fly and at a glance, to any other common language.

When I write code, in whatever language, it not that drastically different. It's all as clean and straightforward as possible for the task. If you look at it, you'll say "yeah, that's ", but only from syntax and slight formatting.

Maybe programming since I was 10 just means I don't see the code anymore.

Stupidly assuming you're talking American "football", 119.99993120364 yards, or 0.00247666896 inches from the line.

Your helicopter uses modulated IR. The transmitter probably runs at 40kHz (like a tv remote) with an appropriate filter on the receiver side.

Not sure why this was modded down. Sadly, it is fairly true. The visual basic for applications is basically vb6 with full access to the windows api and any COM objects.

You probably should have appended a "but shouldn't" to the end.