It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.

Yes. I understand that they have built these arrays of so-called microantennas. I believe that they are props, fakes, shiny objects to distract from what is really happening.

Those antennae are tiny, too small to pick up the relatively long wavelengths of current transmissions. The are packed together so tightly that they would be shielding one another from the signals. Running analog signals from those antennae to tens of thousands of separate tuners? Come on, really?

Thad

Does anybody really think that there is actually one antenna per customer? And that that antenna is hooked up to a particular DVR? And that that antenna and DVR are connected to just one customer?

I just can't and don't believe it. The 'antenna array' is surely a prop, and the DVR has to be a rack of shared servers.

I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)

These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.

There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware cameras, though.

Thad

Curiously, in my youth in the 60's, we referred to Luna-9 as a "hard landing", and the first "soft landing" was Surveyor 1 three months later. Now, it's clear that the Luna 9 lander really was a soft landing (similar to the landings of the Mars Pathfinder and Spirit/Opportunity rovers) and we were just ragging on the Soviets.

Sending a neutrino beam through the earth will be faster than taking the great-circle route across the surface of the earth.

Of course, one would have to send a ridiculously large number of neutrinos to be sure to have them detected, but that's just an engineering problem.

I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.

With fiber optics...I don't think it's very easy. Especially with the new doped fibers that do their own recharging.

It used to be that there had to be transceivers every so often along the fiber, to turn the optical signals back into electronic signals, then generate new laser pulses. The new cables basically build lasers into the fiber, allow it to refresh the signal without going through that process.

Among the many problems with hyperloop is elevation changes. If you're going even 1000 miles per hour, the minimum turning radius to stay less than half a g is 25 miles. There are 4000 ft mountains between LA and SF, and either you have to build a 80 mile long tunnel through them (pretty expensive) or build a viaduct that is 2000 ft high and 100 miles long. Going around the mountains might make more sense, but you're going to end up way out to sea.

The difference between a rocket engine and an explosive shell is almost nil. People have been using explosive shells in cannons with similar g forces for 100 years.

If the mountain is a 2km away the reflection from the mirror is going to be very broad indeed. The sun is a half-degree across, and half-degree times 2km means that the edges of the mirror beam will be about 20 meters wide, nice soft edges and not the harsh ellipse shown. The ends of the ellipse will have edges more like 100 meters wide.

There are thousands of visual effects artists who are, or soon will be, out of work -- who would be happy to model anything for you. Schools today are training thousands more every year.

I think the biggest problem is that people don't want something unique -- they wants something everybody else has.

Think about it -- say you could print your own phone; and it would be unique; custom fit to your hand (say), and really the best possible phone for you. How many would want that, vs. the phone that everybody else has?

Back when it was thought that neutrinos were massless, it was impossible to believe that there were huge masses of neutrinos surrounding galaxies, as they would have to travel at the speed of light. But now that we know that neutrinos have mass, maybe they could travel a lot more slowly, slow enough to be captured by a galaxy.

Think about it; there are a huge amount of neutrinos created every microsecond in every star in every galaxy, and they hardly interact with anything. They've been accumulating since the big bang.

What happened to the early photons? Those created as the universe first became transparent initially were very high energy indeed, but as the universe has expanded they've lost energy, to the point that they correspond to a temperature of just 3 degrees kelvin. What happens to neutrinos of a similar vintage?

Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.

I was working at SGI at the time, late 1991. The cheapest way to buy expansion memory was to buy Indigo's and throw out the rest of the computer. SGI was just feeling the first tickles of the commoditization of computer hardware, and was looking for ways to make their components unique (and keep them expensive.)