* Posts by John_NY

3 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2009

Amazing 'pulse of darkness' ray tech birthed in US gov labs

John_NY
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those perfectionists ought to be pleased

Good stuff for the folks at NIST, who are interested in very accurate and well-characterized pulses, among other fastidiously accurate and impossibly well-characterized phenomena.

More doubt tossed onto iPad numbers

John_NY
Coffee/keyboard

"a light flow of iPads"

coffee, keyboard

This is why I read El Reg.

DARPA seeks orbital wheely-bin plan

John_NY
Go

Finding a bolt somewhere in Rhode Island

The tricky part is finding a way to catch or change the direction of something the size of a bolt, zipping by at one earth circumference every 2 hours, while searching an area of 11 kilo-wales (54 kilo-Rhode Islands) while orbiting on a platform also zipping at one earth circumference per 2 hours (so you can't just wait 2 hours for the object to reappear).

Since anything capable of whacking a bolt out of orbit into the atmosphere could also hunt satellites, there might need to be a new amendment to the Outer Space treaty to circumvent the prohibition on space weapons.

Regarding the mechanism that is fast enough: I recommend relativistic particle beams, or 'nuke nobbling laser' technology.