not sure what with the atmosphere and everything, but maybe an orbiter could use a camera or laser to record messages that a rover displays. no need for the rover itself to transmit anything back.
get a kino like screen going just to make bruce sterling happy
loved that book. You may be interested in Steven Wolfram’s little bio piece on Ada Lovelace, where he gets into some interesting “what if” speculation, had Ada lived longer than 36 years
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Stephen Wolfram Writings
That looks awesome. Bookmarked for later. Thanks. 
If allowing someone to “pay the bills” means it makes trying to navigate their mess till things are unreasonable and unreadable because of 700 cookies- you’re just gullible.
Get Brave browser- do yourself a favor.
I’d love to donate to BB ala patreon model to help with that, since I block the hell out of all of it (because the site became physically impossible for me to load, I had no alternative, it was actually that bad for me), but they don’t offer that option.
Instead they are going down the shittiest path, rapidly turning into a hypocritical skymall crapmart sellout, hawking a lot of shit they directly railed against for years.
I love the place, but I’m really sad to see the way they’re headed.
If they do end up using the good old fashioned silicon carbide electronics, that might not be out of the question…
Shouldn’t they be sending Venus balloons or Venus dirigibles or something?
They could just float at whatever altitude was convenient to get the ambient temperature they wanted
Well, it’s their business model… there have been a couple times the adware experience got too disagreeable and I’d just not stop by until and unless it got fixed. (EDIT: I should make it clear it was the site BB linked to that caused the problem for me. I thought it was linking to a BBC article, not the Skynews page) With other sites, I may take a different approach, but I’ve been coming here since the '90s so I feel an obligation to accept the implied contract. I use another computer for less frivolous things and am a little more protective with it 
It is interesting to see where this goes.
The original design was for something wholly mechanical. This echoed back to the 1950s, and possibly 1960s when it was felt that tiny electromechanical devices would be smaller and more efficient computer components. The work of Ovshinnikov and others on histogram equalisation in the sixties used a mechanical scanner and 6-bit mechanical tabulator, so mechanical image processing is not unknown.
The second design with silicon carbide circuits for the communications seems more sensible if you are going to send images anywhere. The other alternative was to use a mechanically moved semaphore that reflected radio from an orbiter. However, this uses power as it is generated because they don’t have batteries that work at the same temperatures as far as I know.
This may in turn may loose out to conventional circuits in a dewar with mechanical refrigeration. This would let us use more energy efficient circuits, with some sort of memory backup if the winds drop and the power goes out. They could have a conventional camera in there.
It’s a fun problem, though.
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