Water cooling is lame, liquid nitrogen cooling is the way to go!

Do you have a source for that? I am unaware of any modern hard drives that support reading individual bits; the minimum unit of data that can be read is generally one sector, or 512 bytes. If the sector fails to be read, the drive will usually attempt to read it several times before giving up and reporting a read error to the PC.

Data recovery companies can remove the platters from a damaged drive and put them in a working drive, as long as the platters are in good condition, preventing further damage. (If the platters themselves are damaged, you’re screwed either way).

If your data is really important, you should send it to a reputable data recovery service. Using the drive any more (even with a tool like SpinRite) risks further damage.

The kinetic energy of an object is equal to the energy that was required to accelerate it.

They work out to the same total amount of energy.

About 132 kcal, if your calorie to chicken heat transfer is 100% efficient.

There’s an annual Minecraft event where they announce what’s coming in the next update (among other stuff). In the past, players could vote during the event to choose which of three mobs (animals/creatures) would be added to the game. Now they’ve announced they’re no longer doing that.

80,000 tons of CO2 is better than 80,000 tons in the ocean, I guess.

Well, given a sphere of air stretching out to Neptune would only be around 6.5x its Schwarzschild radius in diameter, I imagine it would very quickly collapse into a black hole. There definitely won’t be enough time to fly airships around or hear the sound from the Sun before the planets are shredded by the air (which is moving at roughly Mach 80 in the case of Earth), even if they didn’t fall into the new black hole.

If every one of those users uploads one 10MB file, that would be two petabytes of data. At S3’s IA prices that’s $25k/month. And people are uploading far, far more data than that.

If anyone wants to actually run this, here ya go:

          #include              <stdio.h>
      short i=0;long          b[]={1712,6400
    ,3668,14961,00116,      13172,10368,41600,
  12764,9443,112,12544,15092,11219,116,8576,8832
,12764,9461,99,10823,17,15092,11219,99,6103,14915,
69,1721,10190,12771,10065,16462,13172,10368,11776,
14545,10460,10063,99,12544,14434,16401,16000,8654,
12764,13680,10848,9204,113,10441,14306,9344,12404,
  32869,42996,12288,141129,12672,11234,87,10086,
    12655,99,22487,14434,79,10083,12750,10368,
      10086,14929,79,10868,14464,12357};long
        n=9147811012615426336;long main(){
          if(i<0230)printf("%c",(char)((
            0100&b[i++>>1]>>(i--&0x1)*
              007)+((n>>(b[i>>001]>>
                7*(0b1&01-i++)))&1
                  *main(111))));
                    return 69-
                      0b0110
                        ;}

Bonus points if you can deobfuscate it!

The 9km mirror I’m referencing is for a sunlight level of illumination; the moonlight mirror needs only be 14m in diameter (or 500m for geostationary orbit).

Some calculations:

In a 1000km orbit, you’ll need a mirror about 9km across to appear 0.5° in diameter from the ground (the same size as the Sun), and therefore light up an area with the same illumination as the Sun.

Note that you can’t make due with a smaller mirror focused to a tighter area, as the brightest thing the mirror can reflect is the Sun, and so it must appear at least as large as the Sun in the sky to illuminate any point on the ground by the same amount.

With the much dimmer goal of moonlight illumination levels, the mirror shrinks to 9km / sqrt(400,000) = 14.2m in diameter, which is actually rather reasonable. However it would only illuminate an area 0.5° wide from the mirror’s point of view, or around 9km. And because the mirror is orbiting at 7.4km/s, you’d only get a second or two of illumination.

TLDR: Moonlight mirror 14m across, could light up a 9km diameter area for a little over a second.

Edit: In the case of a permanent mirror in geostationary orbit, a 500m mirror could provide moonlight illumination to an area around 300km in diameter.

Hahahahah-

Wait… They’re serious?

Does anyone really think this could actually work? A LEO satellite would have to be massive (>1 km) to reflect a significant amount of sunlight, and you’ll need to put it waaay higher to avoid atmospheric drag. Not to mention the problem of the satellite only being above a given location for a few minutes a couple times a day.

Well, so far. But going by historical data things are looking pretty good!

After reading the first few paragraphs, I can understand why that site was deprecated by Wikipedia as a source. It’s a very opinionated article.

Everyone knows functional programming is the only real programming.

Made me think of Ernest, the developer of kbin. He had some medical problems going on and hasn’t been seen in quite some time. Hopefully he’s doing alright.

Reminds me of something.

I’m tired of people ascribing any sort of intelligence to AI. It’s not thinking, it’s not seeing you as a threat, it’s just predicting a probable response based on its training data.