Comment Rotherham? (Score 0) 120
Comment Plex is what? (Score 1) 89
Comment Maybe the ultim killer app will be legal/political (Score 1) 112
Ever since I started writing code in 1980, I've continually wondered if we'll ever reach a plateau where consumer-affordable tech is so good the average person won't need it to advance anymore. Eventually computing and networking will be fast enough, and storage will be huge enough, that we can all essentially have full copies of the Internet on our phones (or whatever), and intelligent, locally-running agents that can tell us anything we want to know, conversationally in realtime, including results that require analysis. At that point what would a faster or bigger computer do for you? Hardware and software will definitely get there, but getting permission to have and manipulate the content will be an even bigger barrier. I don't see a scenario like this happening as long as economics is still a force in the world. Food and electricity will probably be free before information will.
Comment "bright as a full moon" (Score 3, Insightful) 80
You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.
(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.
(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.
Comment Re: Brought in from visitors (Score 0) 159
^â^
Comment Re: TL;DR (Score 1) 144
Have you tried 8-tracks