Perhaps future laser weapons won't be like today's lasers and act more like a projectile but at the speed of light, given the recent progress in making light behave like a liquid or a crystal.

Is there a good site for space battles animations? I used to go to spacebattles.com but they haven't added any content in many years.

How can a developer have a frank discussion about the product's limitations when in a public forum? My feeling is you'd end up having to sanitize comments for public consumption or be self-censoring your real, honest opinions.

What about the trolls who will say "hey this has been filed for X years and still nobody fucking fixes it!?? FAIL!!" Who needs that kind of drama in a bug db.

Yes, open source organizations keep their bug DB public but it is a necessity for them and a different dynamic. Also worth mentioning that security bugs are private even for open source.

How can you be first to market when all your new ideas are available to any competitor via the bug DB?

Sure. And at only 100X the cost of all those missions, it would be such a bargain.

Google's page rank algorithm goes a long way to mitigate that by tracking how many links refer to a given site, but of course Google needs to be vigilant of abuse.

Natural-phenomenon news is one of those things that isn't a recent /. change. Random example.

Maintaining a web directory is like keeping nicely pruned and organized browser bookmarks: nobody does it anymore. Keyword search is good enough in both cases.

I was hoping for something motion-activated: Strap one to each wrist and each elbow and get some good old 80's breakdancing going while you play.

It is now under the primary control of Apple, certainly, but it didn't "come out of the Apple compiler group" as you erroneously stated. It came out of the University of Illinois's compiler group. In addition, Lattner was not the only person developing it there.

It is true that LLVM has been Apple-driven since 2005, but it didn't come out of Apple— they picked it up after it was already out there.

That's getting less common since Debian and Ubuntu no longer have bash as /bin/sh. There are still packages that expect that, but they now don't work on Debian, Ubuntu, or the BSDs, which starts to make it more likely the authors will care about fixing them.

Get a Kill-A-Watt meter and test the power consumption of LEDs youself. All the ones I've checked have used just about exactly what it says on the package.

They have heat sinks because the LEDs need to stay very cool to work properly. Incandecent bulbs don't use heat sinks because they need to heat up to thousands of degrees just to get a small fraction of the photons they emit into the visible range. Now which do you think is wasting more energy?

I doubt that any CFL or LED on the market is using a plain 60Hz transformer. They're using switching power supplies, which can be very efficient. That's becuase they crank the frequency up to a range where a small transformer *is* efficient.

You'd still need a switching power supply to match the low voltage to the exact needs and wiring pattern of the particular LEDs. That's why most every PC have a separate power supply on the motherboard just inches away from the main power supply to convert 5VDC to whatever the processor needs.

Not to mention the power loss of low-voltage wires. If you put 100W of LED lights (about 6 bulbs) in a room at the end of a 50-foot run at 5V, you'd be pulling 20 amps. If you used 14AWG wire, at 0.25 ohms for the 100 foot round trip, you'd have a 5V voltage drop just from the resistance of the wire. You would also be violating code, which would require you to install a dedicated 12AWG circuit just to power 100W. That's obviously completely unworkable.

In summary, all of your uninformed "gut feel" opinions on these technical issues are unsurprisingly wrong.

While I was leaving your lawn, I looked up carbon arc lighting and found this cool project: pencil-powered carbon arc light with an Arduino.

Obligatory reference. Makes me laugh every time.

So does Indian Mars look anything like American Mars?

Yes, there is a cost to privacy. Some lives may be lost as a result of increased privacy and due process. I think most people are okay with that.