In 1972 or 1973, my family vacationed for a week in the summer on Chincoteague Island off the coast of Maryland. NASA launched sub-orbital rockets that did this exact same thing -- created colored clouds in the night sky.

Why do it again, 45 years later?

SevenEves would have been better if it was half as long. Stephenson is a great writer, though, and I understand if he can't help himself on that!

I agree than Anathem was incredibly good. A long book that you should really read twice to get everything.

I work for Dolby Laboratories, and am deeply involved with high-dynamic-range content creation and hardware.

We created the SMPTE 2084 standard HDR EOTF (electro-optical transfer function.) It turns out that human perception is such that by choosing the luminance for code values to be just barely indistinguishable from the adjacent ones, you can get 0 to 10,000 nits (10x as bright as this Panasonic display) with only 12 bits. SMPTE 2084 is what all HDR TVs are using today.

When I was shooting Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift in Tokyo, in winter of 2005, I saw a rig a lot like this. I was walking down a street, and saw a van with four cameras, four LIDARs, and two GPS sensors on the top. I asked a man working on it what it was, and he said "Oh! Are you engineer?" and I confessed that I was just a movie-maker. But, nevertheless, they showed me everything in the van, and said that the point was developing 3D models of all the streets in Tokyo. At the time, it wasn't for self-driving cars though -- they wanted to build 3D in-car maps for navigation. The team of engineers was from a university in Tokyo; although I don't recall which one.

While in the past, I agree that people were correct to hold the government accountable for this kind of surveillance, it isn't the biggest issue today. Huge amounts of information are gathered by companies about everybody on the 'net, and shared between them without any limitations. You don't want the government to see your email? Ok, fine -- but Google's incredibly powerful AI team doesn't just see your email -- it *understands* your email. Google can, and does, use that knowledge in any number of ways; and ways that will get more diverse (and perverse?) in the future.

In the not too distant future, I believe that companies like Google and Facebook will become more politically powerful than 99% of the governments in the world. Facebook was going to launch a satellite today to allow everybody in Africa to use Facebook; although somehow the rocket that was going to launch that satellite blew up. My belief is that Facebook wants to get information about everybody on the planet, and will do whatever it takes to do that.

Governments? Come on, that's not the threat.

My believe is that they intend to fly hundreds of these. If you have 100 tethers from 0 to 60,000 ft or so, I believe that you would have many aircraft accidents. Recall that the British used tethered balloons to protect themselves from German air raids. There is no way that you could see those tethers while flying, until you were very close to them -- then it would be too late to avoid.

There are a dozen or so tethered balloons around the border of the US now, so far there have been no incidents that I know of -- but the border is a place where pilots are very observant. Also, the balloons are only at about 10,000 ft or so, so most planes are far higher.

While the parent is Anonymous coward, please rate him up, as that is correct.

Facebook is either going to fly a few thousand WiFi drones or thousands of WiFi satellites to cover the entire planet. Why would they be doing that?

While I think that Pirate Bay guys suck hard (I spent my life creating content that they pirated), I don't think in this particular case he's wrong.

Fuel cell cars all have significant-size traditional batteries as well, because during acceleration or climbing of hills you need more power than a practical fuel cell can provide.

OTEC has been "coming" forever, I went to a presentation that reads astonishingly like that Wikipedia article 40 years ago when I started college. The mechanisms were the same, the idea of using the energy to generate chemicals rather than send electricity through long cables was the same (back then they were suggested ammonia rather than hydrogen, but that's in the Wikipedia article too.)

Curious that the efficiency could be up to 6% -- now, granted, we're not using that temperature difference at all now, but still -- 6%? Solar panels can be up to 30% or more now.

If we were going to use OTEC for hydrogen to power, say, 10% of the cars in the world -- wouldn't we need tens of thousands of plants, each costing millions of dollars?

I was flying along the coast, just south of San Francisco, when a small dot caught my eye. Flying is typically 99% boring and 1% terrifying -- this was the 1% that day -- I thought it was another plane headed right for me.

About a second later, it was clear that it was a small balloon, and I flew right past it. Just for fun, I entered a 360 degree turn to see it again -- the fun part was that as I came around it was still caught in the vortex from my wing, and was spinning madly! I was surprised, as it probably took well over a minute to make the turn; I didn't realize that even 1,500 lb Cessnas would generate vortices with that much endurance. I treated big jets with a lot more respect after that.

Actually, the last 6 months were the hottest of those six months on record. And not by a little bit -- recent 'record heat' has been tenths of a degree hotter, now it's like a whole degree hotter. Not just hotter than average, the hottest ever. April will certainly be the next one. Sorry Charcharodon -- you're just wrong.

This seems to me to be an article promoting the new (probably very expensive!) BART train cars I have to say that they look pretty good. The first ones are due toward the end of this year.

It's so easy to justify consuming almost anything, because there are thousands of web pages that say "that is good for you!" Coffee, chocolate, fruit juice, whatever. Some of these are, of course, created by the companies that sell these foods and drinks -- but I think most of it comes from the fact that everybody eats -- and while almost any other subject will only address a fraction of people, foods and drinks are obviously part of everybody's life. So, there's talk about food every day in the newspaper, on the news cable channels...and now on Slashdot.

One of the most essential parts of the 'immersive' experience of VR is 3D. Many VR cameras, like the Nokia OZO, do good 3D -- the cameras are spaced reasonably close to the distance between eyes, and the cameras are wide enough angle that you can calculate good 3D info from the multiple views. It's odd that Samsung is putting out just a 360-degree camera, not one that captures depth, when their display will clearly show 3D.