A projector that can cover a full sized movie screen is a lot different than a projector that we typically use to present power point slides at our weekly staff meeting, and the fact that it's 4096x2160 has little to do with that. Much more light, much bigger power supply, much more cooling, much bigger lenses, etc., all equal much more money. Can you retrofit an existing film projector? Not really, unless you can come up with some way of creating a digital film frame that can sit in the film gate of an existing projector that has the necessary resolution, can be color calibrated, and can withstand the heat of the projector lamp focused on that square inch or so that covers the film gate. If you can invent that, I'll invest in your company. Otherwise, yeah, you pretty much have to scrap the entire film projector.

If a better OS came along since the start of the Voyager program, which I'm sure is true, I highly doubt that the Voyager crafts would get their disks wiped and a new OS installed, so to speak, while on their way to the edge of the solar system.

My high school was fortunate enough to have a great math teacher that taught college level calculus. Her classroom still had a giant slide rule mounted above the blackboard (this gives you an idea of how long ago it was), but she also realized, even back then, how important computers would come to be. In the back of the classroom there sat an ASR-33 Teletype, complete with paper tape punch and reader. It connection to some mainframe at, I believe, Penn State through a 110 baud connection. I spent untold hours after school in that classroom learning Basic. The programs had to be typed in my hand; if you wanted to save it for later you dumped it out to the paper tape punch.

I was 11. I remember that the nation's focus was on the space program, and this was quite a while before I really became aware of politics. The news was always about that next big step toward a moon landing. It was a weekend, and my father, the TV hater that he was, was sitting along with us in front of the black & white TV watching the landing. This was the only time I ever saw him actually being amazed by something that he saw on TV. We all knew that the whole world was watching this, and that everything would be different from now on. To this day I still have that dog-eared copy of the local newspaper from the next day.

They're not going to even start collecting data for another 12 years, yet they're basing their hardware estimates on what's available today. Compare today's GPUs with those made 12 years ago. I'm guessing they'll be able to crunch their data in 2024 by just using a video game console.

What's left of Rocketdyne still exists, and there's an actual F1 engine in front of their offices on Canoga Avenue, just north of Victory. https://maps.google.com/?ll=34.190997,-118.597948&spn=0.00041,0.000603&t=h&z=21

The areas in which most farming is done, i.e. out in the sticks, also have the least amount of gray water due to the low population density. The only way this idea would work was if infrastructure was built to not only partially treat the sewage and runoff from the cities, but then transport it possibly hundreds of miles to where it's most needed for agriculture.

I second the recommendation for the Mt Wilson Observatory. It's a nice mountain drive, and the observatory grounds are open to the public on weekends (if not the entire week, check their web site). They have a nice little museum with lots of interesting stuff from the golden age of astronomy, you can take look at the 100 inch telescope, complete with the chair that Edwin Hubble spent many a night sitting in while peering at the universe, plus they have unique structures like their solar telescopes.

Up until about 6 months ago, I was paying ~$50 per month for cable internet and about $80 per month for DirectTV. I had been a DirectTV subscriber for 10 to 12 years (before that cable TV), and during that time our family watched a lot of TV. About two years ago I noticed that everyone was watching less and less TV, and spending more time on YouTube, etc. At some point, when I asked everyone, it turned out that nobody had watched any actual TV for at least 4 months. I dropped direct TV the next day. Mind you I have two sons, 17 and 20, who spends hours a day watching netflix, playing video games, chatting online, etc. The only thing the TV gets used for now is as a display device for the XBox.

Some of us have to actually use computers to, you know, make a living. We don't want or need yet more fluffy widgets to keep us from getting our work done. For every improved driver in Windows 7, there were at least two annoyances that were added to the mix. Transparent overlays?... useless. God-awful search tool that doesn't even recognize a tilde (~) character?...even worse than useless. Completely arbitrary user interface when trying to copy files (probably depending on which serf wrote that piece of code), absolutely infuriating. Hey, Microsoft, how about you try making your OS better, rather than just putting more lipstick on the pig that is Vista.

Why the hostility? These stories appear here, and elsewhere on the Internet, pretty regularly... "Drive X miles after only charging your car for Y minutes", etc. Without knowing the energy efficiency, the cost of the batteries, their expected lifetime, etc., these claims are completely worthless. They're written the way they are for a reason, to make those that aren't EE's (i.e. the general public) believe that this really is a magic bullet, and to hopefully invest in a probably-bogus company that will never actually produce anything.

So it's only nerds that spend the time to understand how anything actually works, while you Real Americans can't bothered with such unnecessary details. No wonder our country is going down the shit hole, too many people think just like you.