Scuba tanks are not made of simple steel, they are an especially tough alloy that can handle the pressure cycles well. That factors into the cost.

WDTV in one of its various incarnations is $50 to $120 and it can play virtually any format from your media server and can stream video from the internet. The most recent, more expensive version can stream netflix. A media server can relay formats that are otherwise unsupported.

If you want to integrate over the air TV get a SiliconDust HDHomeRun.

If you want to integrate and DVR cable, get a Moxi or Tivo.

This is huge. 2.4 kernels are so old that a lot of desirable software doesn't work properly. A modern kernel allows for much easier porting, IE optware.

I can't agree more. WDTV Live with b-rad's firmware is excellent. It can't really transcode other than transcoding to a particular output resolution but it is cheap and amazingly powerful. At ~$60-80 bucks it is worth a flier. Under the hood the WDTV Live is a 500mhz, 512meg linux computer. It's not fast at it but you can have the WDTV host an attached usb HD on NFS and SMB which isn't bad at 6 watts. The Sigma chipset is a decoding, transcoding beast. If the SDK for the 8655 ever gets into the wild it will be even better. The WDTV binaries are lousy and the after market firmware can only work around that so much. B-rad and the other coders have done an amazing job.

Hawking is talking about self sustaining life without any support from the Earth. We are so far away from that it isn't even funny.

If we could seed a self-sustaining human colony on Mars, we could probably maintain life on Earth. A nuclear powered habitat underground or underwater, "City of Ember" style, would be easier than Mars or the Moon if for no other reason than we don't have to lift any mass out of our 11.2 m/s, atmosphere leaden, gravity well.

Some things we would need to figure out first:

1. A vastly more efficient heavy launch system. Quicklaunch is immediately promising in that regard. The squishy humans can take a chemical rocket, but the heavy stuff gets shot out of a cannon. A space elevator implies emerging mastery of nanotechnology, which would also have a high risk of mass human extinction (bio-terrorism, gray-goo, deadly nanopolution). Solid rocket boosters will never get us there with enough of our luggage.

2. A space station at L1. Shielding is tricky without the protection of the Earth's magnetic field but it is truly space, not like LEO. Hydroponics, asteroid capture for materials, solar and/or nuclear power, a linear motor launch system. It's feasible and asteroid capture could be immensely useful/profitable. Life support gases would be hard to maintain, even if capturing asteroids, but a heavy launch system would allow for a very large initial stock and multiple ultra-low loss gas barriers around the living quarters.

3. A moon base. It would be largely underground to avoid gamma rays and meteorites. Same setup as L1 but mining the moon rather than asteroids. Gravity is a blessing and a curse. The moon doesn't have the mineral content of certain asteroids and the mass is stuck at the bottom of a gravity well. Supposedly there is water, which is fantastic and worth a base all by itself. With no atmosphere and a big mass to push against, the moon makes a great site for a huge linear accelerator. It might be easier to orbit valuable asteroids around the moon rather than slowing them to a stop at L1 anyhow.

4. Finally Mars!!! By now we would have to have mastered building large structures in space. You'd need chip fabs in space, food and medical issues totally solved. A post-nuclear / nanotech apocalypse Earth should be looking rather hospitable around now...

In the past people thought a lot about the afterlife and how their terrestrial behavior would effect it. Even though lifespans were shorter, I think the concept of an afterlife made them think longer term than we do now. Can you imagine the pyramids being built in the present day?

China needs us to buy the exports that their billion+ underclass help manufacture. That keeps those workers busy and distracted from the fact that they are being exploited by the privileged classes and deprived of any say in their government. Stop the exporting and it is a short road to civil unrest.

China needs us to buy their products in US dollars so that the government can stand in between every export transaction and the local Yuan based economy and thereby control everything. They also get to wield that pile of dollars as a political tool in furtherance of their goals.

A non-exporting China with a freely exchangeable currency? That's a nightmare for the CCP. They would lose some of their favorite tools!

It is a lot of water but you can reclaim the water that is driven off the desiccant if water is in short supply. The stock system doesn't do it but that hot, humid exhaust air can be cooled to ambient and much of the water will condense out. In fact this type of cooling system harvests water in humid environments.

Evaporating water creates as much cooling BTU (negative btus) or coolth as the BTUs it would take to boil a like amount of water. It works out to about 6 liters per hour per ton of AC. A ton of AC is 12k BTU per hour and a BTU is ~ kilojoule.

Yep, draw your GUI on a large resolution 200 DPI virtual screen AKA buffer and let a GPU scale it back down to the physical display's native resolution.

Before Blu-Ray and HD-DVD there were not that many sources of HD content and people with HTPCs would upscale, filter and down res DVDs to try to clean up the picture. It wasn't 1080P blu-ray but it was better than the original, normally rendered picture to many people's eyes.

It would still have scaling artifacts but it wouldn't / shouldn't look too bad. Alternatively use SVG for everything... that's the best solution.

MTA subway ridership averages 7 million daily and there is currently only one subway that services the East side of uptown Manhattan, a huge commuter corridor and home to about 500k people. The new subway line would probably support 500k rides per day or more times 365 days a year times $2 a ride divided by a real interest rate of 4% is about $9B. Still too low, right? But MTA fares are subsidized 50% by car taxes and tolls. There's your $18B.

Should it cost $18B? of course not but hey... this is New York. Nothing costs what it should.

I am not an expert on how GPS works but real world RF noise and encrypted frequency hopping military comms both look like noise. They are not sparse and no "filling in the blanks" will change that especially with the one buried in the other. Even the sequence of frequency hopping is intended to be pseudo random.

The "key" for following the frequency hopping and picking out the signal is itself a pseudo random key. Then the comm itself commonly has encryption.

This technique is about filling in data that is in some ways redundant and therefore compressible. The algorithm tries to figure out the lowest "entropy" uncompressed "plaintext" that would have sub samples consistent witht eh observed signal. Encrypted data and noise is devoid of redundancy and is incompressible by definition. No filtering or gap filling or anything is going to change that. It's not the black box from "Sneakers".

My voice is my passport, verify.

This technique is not about detection but about "filling in the blanks" for signals that are highly ordered but for which you have limited samples.

Encrypted military communications are not "sparse" as they have very high entropy. Said another way... it is too random for any "filling in the blanks" - so this technique doesn't work well for them - spread spectrum or otherwise. There is a big difference between reconstructing f(t)=t^2 + 4t + 7 from two samples (always perfect) and rand(t) which never works. Encrypted signals look as much like rand(t) as possible of course. In fact the set of signals you seem to think will be easily detected is in fact the precise sort that it cannot easily untangle. It would convert encrypted jibberish into mangled, encrypted jibberish.

QuickLaunch is one of the most interesting concepts for cheap LEO launches I have ever seen. It could make LEO incredibly cheap for hardened payloads (everything but people). Traditional chemical rockets or Virgin Galactic style two stage vehicles can transport the squishy and relatively light weight humans.

http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/quicklaunch

With one of these firing five times a day, it is really feasable to put a space tug in place for boosting orbits and repairing satellites, establish a fuel depot in LEO and even work on massive projects like a skyhook - the LEO hyper velocity kind that we actually have the cable to make.

See the wiki entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOFC

The "inks" are probably catalysts that make the cell work better or at a lower temperature. My guess is that the inks help crack the hydrocarbon fuel.

Solid oxide fuel cells are a bit like the low temperature hydrogen PEM cells. Two chemical reagents on opposite sides of a membrane really want to come together. That potential is harvested by a conductors. High temperature fuel cells, like SOFCs, can use hydrocarbon fuels because they can crack the carbon chain on the membrane surface and use the resulting hydrogen (and elemental carbon) to react with oxygen.

Me too. I love spending on new gadgets too and if electricity cost savings helps justify the purchase, so be it.