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Comment Lift vs. volume (Score 2, Informative) 281

The lifting power of an airship goes up with it's volume (3 dimensional), while its weight only goes up with surface area (2 dimensional), as a consequence the ship doesn't need to get much bigger to substantialy increase its lifting capability.

So while this thing is just over 6 times longer than the blimp you were in, it's able to lift 160 tons of additional weight.

Comment Pair with photobioreactor for free diesel (Score 1) 418

By itself this device only gives you liquid CO2 which you then have to deal with. But hook this to an algae photobioreactor tower and you can have a self-contained pod that generates use able diesel fuel with only sunlight and air as inputs.

Pairing them will let you eliminate the "compress to a liquid" step as well, which should further lower the energy requirement for CO2 reclamation.

Comment Re:Not necessarily (Score 2, Interesting) 288

The reverse can work too. Ages ago I built a bot that would answer chat attempts with randomly selected "fortune" quotes, stripped of their bylines and biased by the presence of nouns that matched those found in the other party's message. I left it running as my "away" message on the mainframe at a large university (where people would chat randomly to you all the time)

I didn't bother saving "my" side of the conversation , so I'm sure I missed some hilarious exchanges, but just reading the other side's messages shows that girls, in particular, would keep chatting with my bot far beyond the point where guys would realize it was a bot and give up.

My favorite was a girl who kept a running dialog going for nearly a day and a half. She would occasionally express surprise at how fast I could type (no delay in bot response) but otherwise seemed convinced that the bot was really human.

That conversation only ended when the bot apparently chose to say something incredibly offensive to her (I wish I knew what it was). She told the bot to "stop talking to me" several times, apparently never picking up on the fact that it auto-responded every time she tried to get the last word in.

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