LostXOR

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.

“But I saw it on TV!” says the man currently saying untrue things on TV.

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.

Relevant xkcd

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.

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.

They do still have to cater to desktop users, so I imagine accessible websites for those platforms will exist for many years to come.

Space kites are the best kind of kite!

Still, hosting costs were the reason for discussing legal liability. Such a server also increases centralization which isn’t ideal.

That doesn’t solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.

Reminds me of something.

GrapheneOS can be rooted, though they don’t recommend it as it’s bad for security. For an archival device I imagine security isn’t a big concern.

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.

Seems like a reasonable donation prompt; it’s infrequent, unobtrusive, and can be easily dismissed and disabled. Some people are so sensitive to the idea of any sort of soliciting that they forget projects do need money to function.

Now that’s an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.

That’s a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.

However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.

Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you’re just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.