That sounds like an awesome idea for a sci-fi biological computer.

There's a good article on Wikipedia about RTGs if you want to see what the other isotopes can do. They're all pretty nasty to play with, but when they're headed that far out, they'll do the trick.

There's joking talk on the comments today of the laser missile shield taking this down. Joking aside, as a technical question: assuming they could/did shoot at the missile, I'm curious - is there a signature people would be able to detect a laser with?

There's a lot to be said for the "personalization" trend of places like Google and Facebook, where they shape all of your results according to what their algorithms think is most important to you. Can readers weigh in on how the consolidation of the internet has affected their own use of it?

I've found that rather than randomly browsing the web at large to find any particularly interesting page, my needs are primarily met by Wikipedia, Google's suite of apps, Facebook, Slashdot, and YouTube. Between the five of those, I've got almost all the bases covered, and my habits have *shaped* to not really imagine needing anything outside of those things. Other websites have become the outliers instead of the norm, and so I would say my "diet" has shifted because it's got a more consistent stream of media from these sites, but it's also being tailored to fit what I've become accustomed to. and I can actually mentally perceive my perception of the internet changing to accommodate it. It's erroneous I know, but I occasionally feel like the internet equivalent of a couch potato because the whole of the web is at my fingers, and I don't really browse to any of the other sites without a more specific need to. Things like Stumble are used by a lot of my friends, but most of the main information comes from those big five. I'm curious to hear the thoughts below.

I'm curious, but did you disable the screensaver? That's supposed to keep the screen constantly refreshing to prevent exactly such a ghosting behavior over time.

For someone who has done their homework on them, are RTGs practical in any way for the amounts of power needed for flight? Assuming you've got the admittedly heavy substances, is it particularly bulky to make the generators or could they be scaled into something like this? (And obviously overlooking the fact that if one crashes you've got highly radioactive contaminants being scattered)

It's in the subject line.

I legitimately thought from the headline that it was a startup founded by an 11 year old. Which would have been really awesome.

Anyone in the industry or in the know want to take a stab at where the numbers come from? It seems that 5GB is a common enough number for phone carriers. Is that just a metric that was settled upon, is it arbitrarily set, or are they crunching numbers and coming out with 3GB/5GB as a theoretical "optimal" limit for a network? Feedback welcome from people who know how/why such decisions are made!

Throwing this out there for the community, but I am extremely interested in getting my hands on even some prototypes of gecko tape, at any price. Has anyone heard any developments lately or know who's doing it recently and if they're moving any closer to getting it to market?