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Comment Re:bent pipe (Score 1) 37

The data rate is likely to be the limiting factor

No, it's going to be the amount of processing power you've got. In the future you could put more up there but that has problems. You could also put more lasers on the satellite and have more bandwidth.

What you can't do is make light go faster. On-satellite analysis could be critical if you wanted to run a fairly simple algorithm on a fairly limited amount of data and detect a fairly obvious feature very quickly, and do something automated with that information right away in orbit, or at least on that side of the planet. Like detecting blooms on thermal imaging. For example.

There is no "oh, natural disasters and stuff" application where it's not more efficient to return the images to the surface. There also aren't any such applications where you wouldn't want to have the images available to view.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good problem to have (Score 1) 128

Yeah, I didn't include the Air because it's kind of dual use. There are enough examples of machines specifically targeted at home users it wasn't necessary to give the trolls more room for pedantry.

I was actually there when Jobs announced the Macbook Air. Apple was very much talking up how great it was for business users and people who travel a lot, and BTW probably a good choice for students too. Not like e.g. the clamshell iMac. It only recently got a real colour choice too, and only barely.

Comment Re:More from the "never happened" department (Score 1) 195

Maybe not the best examples. Genghis Khan did not conquer Persia. He got partway through then got distracted by China, where he died. The Mongol conquest took generations, spread the empire thin, and it broke up to civil war and internal resistance twenty or so years later.

Alexander did conquer Persia, then died about five years later. His empire broke up in civil war immediately.

Comment Re:Why all at once? (Score 1) 48

Lol. There are some pretty good zingers buried in the literature.

I'd add a footnote to my post observing that although mainstream medicine no longer gives patients leaves to munch on, an important "medical" industry called alternative medicine, nutraceuticals, or just "supplements" frequently does. Several studies suggest these are usually shredded mixtures of generic houseplants of questionable origin.

Comment Re:Why all at once? (Score 4, Insightful) 48

We don't make drugs by giving patients some leaves to munch on. The point of the research was to develop a platform for producing any of a wide variety of common psychoactive drugs in a crop plant. They demonstrated its flexibility by producing compounds from three different kingdoms of life. If you were going to do it for real production you could engineer exactly what you wanted into their system. You might well go for more than one compound because you've got to purify them anyway so separating two or more is no big deal, and you get multiple pharmaceuticals with each harvest.

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