Viewing profile — bencompanion

I don't see why it's a death knell - as the linked article says, 97% of free users have less than 1000 pictures, and so won't see any difference. Your specific use-case would only …

There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been wo…

Getting from GEO back down to LEO would require pretty serious energy to reduce your altitude. You could possibly get off the elevator early, but you would need to then get up to o…

Some proposals include spacing charges along the cable to break it into small sections and enable it to come down more safely. Of course, this means lining your vulnerable cable wi…

Pretty much all approaches I've read about involve building 'top-down' from orbit, often with the earth end meeting an ocean going platform which would allow for a bit of movement …

The end of this cable would be 36000km up, compared to the ISS's 400km. The first space elevator would primarily be used to shift stuff, rather than people at first - there's no po…

In their FAQ they say they're working on MTB wheels, but that the challenge is the (lack of) lateral stiffness in a bigger wheel, which makes sense. The larger the diameter the spr…

Most things like rigid metals or strong plastics, sure. Things like hair-thin strands of carbon fibre mesh and thin plastic films? Not so much.

I'm building a kids playhouse at the moment and I feel the exact same way. I'm in here working at the computer just enough that I can bail to the backyard for the day and cut timbe…

There's zero chance that it's truly been deleted - it's just not available to users anymore. Facebook wants that data with its associated discussions and interactions just as much …

Is that right? I assumed a railgun's acceleration would be about as high as we can go. Huh! In any case, anything that we accelerate like that is highly durable and rigid - you can…

On your other point - would we have a chance to detect something that small? No, absolutely no way, even considering that there would be a continuous 'stream' of these things sprea…

ʻOumuamua is fascinating, I agree - but the most remarkable thing about it is that it's the first object like it we've seen, followed closely by the fact that it's taken us so long…

Thank you - this article is interesting meat wrapped in lie-pastry. The "will" in the title is just flat wrong. "Might possibly" is a stretch, even. People are sketching out the id…

The poster child for me at the moment is Ghost of Tsushima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSAvzeopPC8 .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar production is one approach to this that is low-tech and doesn't require organism engineering. It's kinda counter intuitive that burning a rich…

Flickr has been seemingly starved of resources since Yahoo purchased it - development definitely slowed down and the performance of the service got noticeably worse. It was looking…

The reason you don't like infinite scroll is the exact reason website owners love it.

One possible hole based on interpretation is that the language refers to the "creation of a film meant for public exhibition". You could argue that uploading to Facebook with some …

It's not slavery. As the sub-contractor, it's your responsibility to contract to provide services under conditions that are safe and sustainable. In the restaurant example, don't o…

Agreed. > the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. That wasn't ever a promise, or rather, it wasn't "the web's" promise to make.…

Absolutely. The potential power is _water mass/sec * head height * g_ - more water volume is just as valuable as more head height. Actually, looking at that calculation, I wonder h…

A well designed waterwheel could be pretty efficient in these cases, too. Waterwheels tend to lose out when hydraulic head (water drop distance) is too big to construct a practical…

I'm not really clear on what position she was applying for, but given that the article is engineering focused, the fact that the whole page is just a massive mosaic of image tiles …