Of course they showed up, because this is _awesome_. I would have shown up no matter what my job was to check out the cool stuff he was doing.

Better yet, use a hash of your 'secret' password combined with the name of the site. that way if one site gets compromised or you get phished, they can't use that to figure out your password to other sites yet you only have a single password to remember to let you recover all your site specific ones.

If the system controlling the mirrors fails, then you are just going to get a very sunny tower. to concentrate solar energy requires extremely fine control of the mirrors to focus them on just the right spot. A failure mode that results in a perfect focus somewhere else seems unlikely.

In any case, it is somewhat irrelevant due to the different albedo's of the materials used, the target will be pitch black, the rest of the tower will be white, black pavement gets much hotter to the touch than white sidewalk during the day, the same thing happens here, paint the tower white and even the fully concentrated rays won't be enough to cause damage.

Heat capacity is proportional to the volume of the liquid while radiative heat loss is proportional to the surface area. volume grows to the third power while surface area grows to the second as you add more liquid (assuming a non pathological design) so a smaller facility is signifigantly less useful than a simple scaling of the power output of a larger one might imply.

Yes. that is exactly the reason for inflation, you wanting to get rid of the cash right away. The government doesn't want _anyone_ holding on to fiat money. Cash's only purpose is to facilitate trade, cash that is hoarded does not facilitate trade. Invest your money in something (i-bonds, or gold under your floorboards) if you want it to maintain its value.

It is quite trivial actually, the lithium isn't consumed, deposits develop and the (cheap) electrolytes degrade, it is a simple (relatively) chemical/mechanical process to clean the lithium and rebuild the cell. Not something you do in place, but every 5 years or so you get your battery exchanged. Less work than replacing your tires or shocks. And since you arn't buying any more expensive lithium, it probably won't be that much. Lithium is certainly a fully recyclable resource. And it is a whole lot cheaper than the Palladium that is the best bet for hydrogen storage at the moment.

Failure to show up is a vote of *confidence* in the system. The US voter turnouts are so low because for the most part, US citizens are happy, or at least, not unhappy enough to give up an afternoon to change it. The places where they have 99% voter turnout are the ones in civil turmoil or just not good places to live, people want to change it.

I think all laws should not just have a sunset provision, but a testable intended effect when possible. For instance, a law requiring seatbelts would have an intended effect of "reduce fatalities due to car accidents." then when the sunset comes up, reasonably good evidence that the law is having the original intended effect must be presented.

I don't think this is unfair against law abiding citizens, it is simply unfair to people unwilling to do the slight amount of research and mild effort required to find the answer to their question. Like one phone call to the court, or a google search. I think you will find that people unwilling to do that are at a disadvantage in many areas of life, legal or otherwise.

You always could have opted out via disabling cookies, but now they even have a plugin if cookie management isn't your thing.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/greater-choice-and-transparency-for.html

Some of the comments on that blog post that think privacy is a horrible thing are kind of scary.

Actually, CISC uses less memory in general, but has traditionally been slower. CISC CPUs came out when memory was extremely expensive relative to CPU speed. cheaper memory is what made RISC (with its larger footprint but faster speed) possible. Nowadays, it really doesn't matter much, CISC is probably better nowadays that memory bandwidth is the big bottleneck. However, our CISC designs are not exactly modern, if you were to do a modern CISC design you would probably end up with something more akin to ARM's thumb instruction set.

All in all, x86 didn't end up too horribly off, its plethora of addressing modes actually makes smaller code on 64 bit systems because integer arithmetic can be 32 bits by default as you rarely need to directly operate on 64 bit values in arbitrarry ways as the addressing modes can perform most pointer arithmetic that is needed. Matching the 32 bit 'int' and 64 bit pointer on x86-64. Not that there arn't issues with x86, but being CISC in and of itself isn't one of them.

There is a much better way to change it. Bring the economic situation in india up to par with the united states so wage and quality of life improvements there make outsourcing less attractive. A difficult problem, but probably more tractable than changing the way every american chooses how to shop and it would leave the world in a much better state overall.

Plus, What company in their right mind would give up being able to use the marketing campain "Brought to you by the people that _friggen cured AIDS_". The idea that pharmaceutical companies are holding back cures for things is patently ridiculous.

If anything, they are optimizing their games to get people to sign up and pay the monthly fee, but load their servers at little as possible by playing few hours. that maximizes their reward. If they make content that could potentially take 11 hours a day every day, it is because there is demand for that, some people want that out of their monthly fee, I am sure the companies would rather have people pay the fee and never log in but tell their friends how great it is.

In truth, it does always bother me how easy it seems to 'blow up' planets in fiction. If you think about it, the amount of energy required to blow up a planet would be equivalant to launching every bit of the earth into space, think about the amount of energy involved in just getting the tiny space shuttle into space, then think about doing that for mount everest, then think about doing that for mount everest about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. That is how hard it is to blow up a planet (very roughly)

http://qntm.org/destroy has some more good information on destroying the earth.