Yeah. Too bad, though, since dropping gravity bombs from planes had its heyday during 1935 to 1955.

Nobody's tried doing that for a long long time.

What you do is stand off 20 miles and shoot a missile at the ship.

So an anti-plane laser is not all that useful. And what if it's a cloudy day?

> The Lisa was never sold!

Ah, I think what the writer was trying to say was that the disks were the old Apple ][ / Lisa dual-sided 5 1/4 inch drives, which were the original drives intended for the Mac.
They actually did a small production run of those, for internal use, so there were Lisas and Macs with 5 1/4 inch drives, and a lot of development software was on those style of floppies.

>I remember thinking how expensive and lacking in features 'MacPaint' was.

Er, um, MacPaint was "free". It was bundled with every Mac, for at least three years.

And wasn't the color on the ZX limited to like seven colors, in 24x80 character-sized blocks?

Oh wow, I still remember the first time I saw MacPaint-- there was nothing like it. Bill Atkinson did a superb job, shoehorning all those features so they could run in 128K of RAM.

He just barely made it-- I remember trying to find how much memory my desk accessory could use while MacPaint was running, and when you did a "print preview", the available RAM went down to like 1800 bytes! Yikes!

You are very confused about scaling.

If you make this machine ten times bigger in each of the three linear dimensions, you get:

  (1) A machine that weighs 1,000 times as much.

(2) Heavy equipment cost is very close to proportional to weight, so it also costs 1,000 times as much.

(3) The 2-D components, the pipe cross-sections, the centrifuge inner and outer radii, are going to be 10 times too small, at only 100 times larger. So it's only going to pump and filter at 1/10th the rate you'd expect.

(4) The tank that is holding 1,000 times as much water has sides that are only 10 times thicker, so the tank is going to rupture.

So you have a machine that's only 1/10th as efficient, by dollar or volume.

There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.

Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....

        1,830 years

to process that amount of water.

And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.

The "Protocol on Laser Weapons" has nothing to do with this issue.

The weapon under discussion is not a laser. The wavelength it emits is at least a thousand times longer. It comes out of a waveguide, not out of a optical lens.

It's been known for over fifty years that microwaves, at just a few milliwatts per square centimeter, cause cataracts. That's why there are rather tight limits on microwave exposure around radar and telecom equipment.

Spraying microwaves around and possibly inducing mass blindness is not going to look good in the history books.

The "common toy" is not a radiometer. It's a heat engine. The bulb is only partially evacuated and the hotter, black side of the vanes heats up the gas molecules, which then bounce off it with increased vigor, compared to the white side. So the vanes spin with the white side going forward.

A true radiometer would be bouncing photons off the white side, and spinning with the black side leading.

The heat-engine version has many times the efficiency of the photon one.

Er, if you actually try to go read TFA, it seems they analyze the text by semi-numerological means.
Like noticing that one particular argument is about 1/12th the length of the chapter, from that somehow drawing some far-fetched conclusion.
Sounds like a particularly bizarre form of BS to me.

Way back around 1972, I worked on a CDC time-share system. They charged 4 cents per CPU second, 1 cent per PRU (640 characters) transferred to/from disk, and 0.2 cents per kiloword-second of memory used.

Except after 5PM, when the rates went down 50%.

Luckily I worked for the computer center, so the long assembly times ( 5 minutes ) were charged against a funny-money account. Still it was humbling that one missing comma and I'd wasted about 20 minutes of real time and $12, when $12 was real money.

Are you sure you haven't reinvented the wheel?

Mapmakers and Mathematicians have been working in this area for like, centuries.

  If you're talking straight-line, great-circle routes, that was reduced to simple formulas a very long time ago.

    If you're talking about contour-following, or minimum-energy paths, or road-following, that was worked out before we were born.

If you're talking about efficient algorithms for searching geo databases, that's been well plumbed too.

If you're talking about an efficient algorithm or implementation on a particular platform, that's not so much science, as a blurb in Dr Dobbs.

What a ridiculous story.

Nobody is going to invest the needed billions of dollars in a country with no real government, no laws, no protection for private property, and every expectation of being taken over by the Taliban as soon as the US army leaves.

It would take billions in up-front investment, as Afghanistan does not have any of the needed things: water, power, roads, engineers, chemical plants, railroads, ports, diging machines, huge trucks, smelters, coal, oil, and gas. Billions, and at least ten years to build the infrastructure before a pound of ore comes out of there.

And minerals only get extracted if the cost is less there than from the developed sources. That's unlikely, due to the needed up-front investment. And one of the alleged largest supplies, Lithium, is already being mined very, very cheaply in South America, where there are huge easily-accessed deposits.

Ridiculous.

Someone needs to inform whomver wrote this story:

* Mining-company geologists have been scouring the globe for centuries, looking for mineral deposits that are economically recoverable.

* Minerals do not know about arbitrary political boundaries, making it highly unlikely that this "treasure-trove", if it exists, is wholly contained in Afghanistan.

* Minerals are heavy and hard to extract, which makes it paramount that there be things that Afghanistan has none of, such as rail lines, roads, ports, docks, electricity, coal, fresh water, chemicals, a stable government, a stable economy, and much more. Lacking just one of those items can make mining an impractical venture.

* No bank is going to loan the hundreds of millions to billions needed to even begin to extract these minerals. Banks do not loan money into war zones with no history of a stable government or protection of private property, and when the only source of quasi-stability, the US military, is on a countdown to leave the country.

Funny, but I was just reading an old radio magazine, circa 1938, where they were using 5 to 6 volts to the heater of a rectifier tube that usually needed 25. That's 1/4 the voltage, about 1/16th the power, and the rectifier worked BETTER at detecting radio signals than at full voltage. Some complex thing about the diode work functions one might suspect.

Engineers have explored most corners of the performance envelope, nothing all that new under the sun.