put the woofers a half wavelength apart

Resonance tricks work great with RF, where you're using a rather narrow frequency range (often less than +/- 2%), but they really don't work with AF where you're trying to faithfully reproduce a multi-octave range of frequencies. In fact, since you're trying to reproduce them all equally, resonance is something you specifically try to avoid.

When a company uses HTTPS proxies, it's just making it so all of the client browsers trust every HTTPS website.

Since the proxy is trusted by your browser, it doesn't complain.

You two are actually in agreement. An HTTPS proxy robs the end user of the choice as to whether to trust the certificate the remote web server presents. That decision instead has to be made automatically by the HTTPS proxy. It could be set to trust everything, it could be set to refuse to proxy any certificate it doesn't trust, but it's out of the end users' hands.

This really only needs a very very tiny adjustment even for very large telescopes. I'll use Hubbell as an example - it is 57600mm focal length and f/24. If its pixel density is the same as a typical 35mm sensor (it will likely not be anything near this), then you'll have sharp focus anywhere between 1400 miles and infinity (the hyperfocal distance is 2800 miles - http://www.outsight.com/hyperfocal.php). Hubble is fixed focus and routinely takes pictures of earth to calibrate its instruments (although it cannot track the earth's surface and has a minimum exposure time of 1/10s, so all you get are streaks - http://www.badastronomy.com/mad/2000/hubbleearth.html).

It also means that there's more data tracks on the same platter, requiring proportionally more revolutions to read or write the whole thing. I doubt rotational speed will increase any further than the 15krpm we have now, unless platter sizes shrink much further (and SSDs have already taken over that part of the market).

Internal combustion engines tend to become a lot less efficient at high elevation where the air is less dense.

Not necessarily. Lower air density reduces maximum available power, but the air is also much colder up there, and heat engines become more efficient as you increase the hot side vs. cold side temperatures, so it becomes a matter of whether this increased efficiency can make up for the friction losses of pumping a larger volume of lower pressure air around.

the wingspans going to be about the same probably with the same or at least very similar airfoil...

Doubtful. The B-52 uses the NACA 63A219.3 and 65A209.5 airfoils (root and tip, respectively). While the 6-series airfoils are designed to extend laminar flow towards the rear of the wing, they have been improved upon by the 7- and 8- series. The 8- series are known as "supercritical" airfoils, which specifically improve performance (and therefore efficiency) at high subsonic speeds.

If you decouple the power source (as opposed to power storage) from the wheels, you don't need torque/rpm flexibility and can switch to an efficient constant RPM engine.

Besides the turbines you linked to (which I'm not convinced scale down efficiently) there's the Stirling Cycle engine. It is more efficient than an Otto cycle engine and has fewer moving parts but like any external combustion engine, it cannot produce power until it is warmed up, and it also can't quickly change power levels.

I can also recommend Wings & Things. I usually make the "Blackboard Bomber" design from there.

A bigger sensor makes a *dramatic* difference - rent a full-size camera sometime and you'll see it for yourself.

A 50mm f/1.8 lens delivers within-an-order-of-magnitude sensitivity on a 3-year-old DSLR as it does on a 1/4" webcam sensor. The difference is that the 1/4" webcam sensor delivers a much smaller 540mm-equivalent field of view, while the APS-C DSLR sensor delivers a much wider 80mm-equivalent field of view. Try it. I have.

Sensor size doesn't have much to do with field of view unless you assume a fixed distance from the back of the lens.

Which I was ("for a given focal length").

A given lens with a given aperture will concentrate as much light on any given square millimeter of a large sensor as it will on a small sensor. The only exception to this is that the sensor must be small enough to be positioned within the light circle of the lens (for example if you match a DSLR-sized sensor to a webcam lens, you will get severe vignetting). A sensor with a higher pixel density may have more wasted space in-between pixels (and thus may absorb less light per square millimeter of surface area), but this has nothing to do with sensor size per se.

Of course, as a photographer I have to question using a tiny sensor [high signal noise/ low sensor speed] and a rather small objective lens [reduced light input] to take photographs from rifle distance. There's a reason why pro photographers carry big lenses.

Just to add to this - physical resolution (not in the number-of-pixels sense but in the optical resolving-power sense) for a given light wavelength and a given focal length is limited by aperture size. A tiny sensor combined with a large lens aperture and focal length will give you a very limited field of view, but it will still be just as sharp as if you had a much larger sensor covering more of that field of view.

Ahh. I read "box" as "the entirety of the tracking device".

Box to GPS: "Where Am I?"
GPS to Box:(X.Y.)

FYI, GPS does not work this way at all. Signals are unidirectional - they are *only* sent from the satellites to the receivers. The data stream sent is primarily a very, very accurate timestamp as well as ephemeris data (indicating the orbit of the satellite). Based on that information, distance to each satellite is calculated by the receiver via speed of light delays and triangulation (this is why 3 satellites are required for position, and 4 are required for altitude as well). This is the reason that GPS beacons have to communicate their position by some other means (usually to a network of land-based receivers) - the satellites only know their own position information, not the position of any receiver.

IMHO concentrated solar power is absolutely the way forward for the Southwest and other desert regions of the US that have 250-300 sunny days per year. There's plenty of land available, no scary chemicals are needed anywhere in the process, and the power output will naturally match the air conditioning power demand.

However, it won't work so well in more moderate climates - you can't concentrate sunlight on cloudy days at all, and a few straight cloudy days are all it will take to use up all of that latent heat in a molten salt tower. It might still be worth installing but you'll have to have standby capacity (perhaps in the form of natural gas generators) to match it and that unfortunately drives up the price.

Also, apparently a number of these plants are being built to use fresh water to help reject turbine waste heat, and that's unsustainable in the sort of desert environments where these plants make sense.

Take the lens off the front and bolt the sensor to a used SLR camera lens. With the 10x or 15x crop factor, that old 50mm SLR lens will turn into a 500-750mm equivalent, and if you use a prime lens, it'll have even better low-light performance than the original wide angle lens. If you put it on a telescope, you can easily get into 5000mm+ territory, although it'll be very difficult to use without an expensive tripod and tracking system.