"when a hydroelectric damn collapses..." the nuclear power plants which rely on the man-made lake created by the damn melt down. Take a look at how many nuclear reactors depend on man-made lakes as their ultimate heat sinks.. Here are the actual requirements: http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003739969.pdf Here is a list of reactors: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist1.htm

I worked at a company which, in the mid 80s, made a high resolution broadcast quality character generator for titling. RAM was so expensive even then that it become worthwhile to compress the image using run-length coding into a small amount of video RAM, and repeatedly decompress on the fly for screen refresh. This was implemented with a large number of TTL MSI logic chips, but was still less expensive than full raster RAM (1440x480 x 18 bits I think).

"It's a Type 13 planet, it's in its final stages, it's infected with some kind of alien - we are going to leave...."

I'm not paying the $30 to read the paper, but how do they overcome 1/f noise? You can get arbitrarily high noise disturbances if you wait long enough. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise Though I guess this can be fixed with an error correction protocol involving copies stored at long distances, but you can do that with any media.

They should release it as a firefox plugin to make firefox on PPC linux - firefox on the PS-3 - more useful.