Slashdot Mirror

Yes, it can.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/quantum-teleportation-breakthrough-could-lead-instantanous-computing

in conjunction with the DARPA-FIND-THE-RED-BALLOONS-PROGRAM, monitors your communication lattice.

Yours In Krasnoyarsk,
K Trout

Who do you think carries it?

DARPA's MULE?

If we go on a mission with a dozen high tech tools, do you think there is any one person who is an expert in all of them? Not a chance. Plus, anything with a screen is a distraction. You can't look at a screen and pull security at the same time. Whoever uses this needs a few more guys to make sure nobody is sneaking up on him.

Transmit it to some base where a guy in a room with AC will analyse the data and video?

Maybe not for now, but it'll happen.

I don't know much about climate myself, but I do know that the atmosphere is several layers of chemically goodness.

If the heat is trapped below the area where most of the ozone resides than the heat wouldn't get to pass through the ozone layer on its way out into space, thus not being able to warm it. When I tried to look up the phenomena in an article I read recently all they said was that it was generally accepted that increased surface temperature results in chillier atmosphere (which is not a helpful explanation) http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/so-now-there%E2%80%99s-ozone-hole-over-arctic-what-does-mean.

*Ahem*
Drone control is already centralized. In Nevada and California. Many of them are fly_by_Sat affairs, and the folks that man the flight control centers can go home at the end of the day and play with their kids. I've seen some news footage of the nice set-ups at "mission control". Biggest issue this brings up is making the whole affair too much like a video game, and killing real people from a nice cozy office thousands of miles from the battle. That, and the fact that these operators aren't getting the benefits that in-the-air combat pilots are getting for flying in a combat zone. Even the Brits are piloting their drones from NV.

Being an RC aircraft guy myself, I hope the utility of having a steady stream of young RC pilots being interested in joining up for miitary service might off-set what this idiot has done in the eyes of the feds when it comes time to evaluate the new rules for RC aircraft.

I think you may have been eluding to a control center being the target of an attack. Not much to worry about there unless the baddies have ICBMs. Some nice info here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4851765

Here is some video of pilots in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZP2AKEqEIU

And an article titled "Point. Click. Kill: Inside The Air Force's Frantic Unmanned Reinvention" :

http://www.popsci.com/drones

Possibly, but the idea didn't originate with Mead; it's been around long enough that they were considering it in the days of Einstein, even if they rejected it at the time. But there's more than
just Mead, myself, and some old fogies taking this line of thinking seriously...

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/fermilab-building-holometer-determine-if-universe-just-hologram

Your two statements have absolutely nothing in common and you have only succeeded in weakening your otherwise valid energy argument. Autism is a problem that now researchers have determined may start very early in the womb mostly like due to environmental issues. If you have spent any time with an autistic kid perhaps you could assess for yourself that Autism is not an illusion or delusion. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-12/mri-scans-diagnose-autism-near-perfect-accuracy-new-study

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-04/hydrocarbons-could-form-deep-earth-no-dead-animal-ingredients-study-says

"Rare earths" aren't that rare. They're just at low concentrations, which makes for an inefficient mining operation. Getting rid of the waste products is a big problem. Molycorp has re-opened a rare earth mine in California, and is expanding capacity.

There are other rare earth mines in the US. There's no shortage of places to mine. It's just that, until recently, it wasn't profitable.

"Looks like the Australians just got scammed for 2 million."

Worse than that, he did this over a year ago. Here's his video from February 2010 which is basically the same as the July 2011 version.

His linkedin goes into a bit more detail: "The Unlimited Detail system consists of a compiler that takes point cloud data and converts it in to a compressed format, the engine is then capable of accessing this data in such a way that it only accesses the pixels needed on screen and ignores the others generating real-time graphics that look like unlimited polygons. it is also the best available way of displaying laser scanned environments, they can be of unlimited size and this will not slow down the system."

Compression? Showing only the information needed on the screen? They already do both of those. Also of interest is he was CEO of "Unlimited Detail" from 1995 until 2010, so apparently this guy has never held a job or graduate college.

Wonder how long the Australian gov't will wait before arresting him for fraud?

"Looks like the Australians just got scammed for 2 million."

Worse than that, he did this over a year ago. Here's his video from February 2010 which is basically the same as the July 2011 version.

His linkedin goes into a bit more detail: "The Unlimited Detail system consists of a compiler that takes point cloud data and converts it in to a compressed format, the engine is then capable of accessing this data in such a way that it only accesses the pixels needed on screen and ignores the others generating real-time graphics that look like unlimited polygons. it is also the best available way of displaying laser scanned environments, they can be of unlimited size and this will not slow down the system."

Compression? Showing only the information needed on the screen? They already do both of those. Also of interest is he was CEO of "Unlimited Detail" from 1995 until 2010, so apparently this guy has never held a job or graduate college.

Wonder how long the Australian gov't will wait before arresting him for fraud?

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Yes, still it's better than NASA's own plan!

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/nasa-de-orbit-international-space-station-2016

Maybe not since their cars have gotten so much press lately.

But it could likely mean the end of their flying bots aspirations .

If you're looking for tangibles, you can try this:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-07/ten-tech-innovations-nasas-space-shuttle-trickled-down-non-astronauts

But in reality, the entire benefit of the space shuttle program isn't just in "stuff". Lots of the benefits can't be boiled down into metrics, like inspiring children, boosting national pride, etc. I'm not going to claim that with these benefits the shuttles were worth their cost, but you're missing a lot of the point if you only look at the tangibles.

Technically quite correct, but few readers not greatly interested in aircraft will get those differences between a conventional external "prop", turbojets, and turbofans. I'm prior avionics/engines/crew dog (cross-training was fun) but try to keep it simple for layfolk.

These are kinda neat:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/naked-engine-cleaner-flights

Cherry pick much?

I love NASA. But to suggest that one good example, even when it itself is riddled with bad examples somehow means that the rest of the government runs like clockwork is both naive and, frankly, stupid.

There are plenty of other good examples, like the various national labs, which I would actually put above NASA in many ways. Still, ignoring the rest of the government and our almost unimaginable scale of overspending with a history of missing deadlines and budgets is over the top. Even for Slashdot.

According to this article his leg began increasing in muscle mass in a few weeks.

It sounds like he didn't have to regrow bone, it was just muscle. Perhaps if the bone was lost, it would have taken much more time.

Sounds like what 98% of all quadcopter hobbyists encounter daily.

And we are giving 100K+ grants to these colleges to do R&D on stuff that industries experts like Ascending/Aerovironment/Dragam/Microdrone have been doing for ages. On both cheap and expensive scale. With all the super-universities teams working on acrobatic in a close spaced with motion capture systems, why not have some R&D in wind-resistance? Motor fail-over? Wireless comnunications? No one is really doing hardcore research in that topic, aside from the hobby community and that's what everyone is really asking for....

Looks more fun. Story should have said, College students buy a quadcopter, velcro a set of sensors to record to an SD card and fly it in a swarm of bats to get the sensor readings.

Fortunately, there is no "silicon cartel" to restrict the supply of raw materials so people who are expert at manufacturing (such as GE) can predict their costs accurately.

But there is, effectively, a rare earth cartel in China. Sure you can build solar panels without rare earth elements, but they're only about half as efficient as the ones built using rare earth elements.

And here's why. The guy didn't have the contaminated plants "accidentally" spread and take over his field. He quite deliberately selected the GM strain, separated it from the rest of his plants, and used it to replant:
[...]
One can argue about the merits of gene patents in general, but in this particular case it's not anywhere "poor innocent farmer who couldn't do anything about it".

The problem with this theory is that Schmeiser's actions don't fit the motive you're inferring. The wikipedia article seems to have had an editing hack job done on it to make him look bad. The large sections you've quoted are from the Federal Court decision. The Canadian Supreme Court affirmed the ruling on infringement (i.e. he did use Round-up Ready canola seed without a license), but overturned the ~$15,000 award to Monsanto because it found that he did not profit in any way from his canola being Round-up Ready. He treated it and sold it just like regular canola. In particular, this section of wikipedia you've quoted seems slanted:

Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field.

That kinda makes it sound like he sprayed the entire field. If you read the Federal Court decision, it's clear that he didn't spray the entire field, he merely sprayed a single 12-meter wide test-strip adjacent to the ditch to try to figure out what was going on:

[39] In an attempt to determine why the plants had survived the herbicide spraying, Mr. Schmeiser conducted a test in field 2. Using his sprayer, he sprayed, with Roundup herbicide, a section of that field in a strip along the road. He made two passes with his sprayer set to spray 40 feet, the first weaving between and around the power poles, and the second beyond but adjacent to the first pass in the field, and parallel to the power poles. This was said by him to be some three to four acres in all, or "a good three acres". After some days, approximately 60% of the plants earlier sprayed had persisted and continued to grow. Mr. Schmeiser testified that these plants grew in clumps which were thickest near the road and began to thin as one moved farther into the field.

At that point, I'm not quite sure what you expected him to do. Destroy the entire field because he detected Round-up ready canola in it? It sounds more like he figured the contamination wasn't substantial, so just treated the field like any regular field.

Anyhow, the reasoning in the Supreme Court ruling justifying infringement (that he "ought to have known" the canola contained Monsanto's patented Round-up Ready gene) was invalidated a few years ago, with the discovery of weeds which have developed a natural resistance to Round-up. You can no longer make the assumption that if a plant survives Round-up, then it must have Monsanto's patented gene in it. The only way to know for sure is to perform a DNA test on it. It remains to be seen whether farmers will be required to conduct such tests in order to avoid infringing Monsanto's patent (at the risk of destroying a naturally-occuring Round-up resistant plant if they can't pay). Or if they'll be allowed to assume the resistance is natural until Monsanto tests their field and tells them otherwise.

That story was confirmation for you? Some guy posting on slashdot?
Here is documented proof that it has been that way for a long time.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space

The background story is that New York time wrote an editorial in 1920 lambasting a Professor named Robert Goddard for writing an scientific paper where he had the nerve to suggest that humans could someday use one of the liquid fueled rockets he was working on to send a machine to the moon. Well at least he didn't suggest that a person could go. I mean that would have been just insane. Robert Goddard had what little support he had dry up and was publicly humiliated so he worked in secret out in New Mexico. One does wonder what he might have done if the Times had supported is bold idea?
Did the Time bother to write a retraction when V2s where falling on London? No.
Did they write a retraction before Robert Goddard's death? No.
Did they even bother to write a retraction when Sputnik was launched? No.
They waited until man walked on the Moon.
Reporters are indoctrinated that they are the protectors of our freedom and that it is there job to explain things to us. Too bad they are not taught to just gather and report facts so that we can figure out what they mean for ourselves.

This dream has been around for a long time. Time to start building them.

.

I was hoping for this:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlantic-maglev

'Neutrally buoyant vacuum tunnel submerged 150 to 300 feet beneath the Atlantic's surface and anchored to the seafloor, through which zips a magnetically levitated train at up to 4,000 mph.'

At '$88 billion - $175 billion' it might be a little outside even Branson's budget, but London to New York in an hour is something of an improvement on Virgin's current service.

There's also a US team. "Team North American Eagle"... <sigh> ...using a converted supersonic Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.

Noble seems to get the most press.

And the space plane is controlled by a Chinese iClone

Check out SARTRE.

I think I understand how an oxy-acetylene torch works, but I don't think I could duplicate its function with legos...

Well, you can duplicate its function with bacon. That also counts.

The Chinese may have stolen stealth technology from the downed F117, re-purposed Russian designs (which lag even the 1950s stuff of the SR71), but they are running down the wrong path. Forget Z-day, the Terminator scenario is looming...

It's the "logical next step" in all the "break this sticker with a screw hidden underneath and void your warranty" crap.

And of course, it's got 90% of the consumer population so fucking scared that they won't break that sticker even when they need to repair a device that's 5 years old and 4 years, 9 months out of the stupidly short 90-day warranty.

It's the same kind of brainwashing crap you get with expiration dates on bottled water (also found on non-expiring foods/spices such as honey and salt) and stupidly short expiration dates on medicines.

Pop Sci still runs a great "void your warranty" column. I recommend reading it on a regular basis and learning to say "fuck it, void the warranty, I'm going to improve/repair my own fucking property" whenever possible!

Combine that with the robot that learned to shoot a bow and arrow and the robots that learned to lie to each other and we're either living in very interesting or very scary times... or both.

I dug this up on PopSci - http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-03/koreas-online-electric-vehicle-gathers-power-road-wirelessly

Implementing this via the bus system, to prove the tech, then rolling into other building projects.
Step 1. Induction Road beds
Step 2. City bus systems runs on electro buses
Step 3. modify Hybrid cars to run on induction Step 4. Interstate highways are rebuilt to with the technology - reducing oil reliance, and pollution. Smug may become a problem tho.

It's a safe assumption.

Actually, it's probably a safe assumption that this is just a way to extract $1.3 billion of funding out of the EU in order to pay for a bunch of supercomputers and interdisciplinary research. It's apparently part of something called FuturICT, a submission to the EU's Flagships initiative, which is to say that it is meant to be ambitious - here a codeword for 'infinitely improbable'. FET Flagships are long term initiatives on a budget of around 100 M€ Euros per year.

You can get a copy of the proposal from here. It's a bunch of hand-wavy maybes. Most of the proposal is taken up with the interesting observation that knowing stuff about stuff is a prerequisite to revolutionising education, understanding and fixing the world economy, identifying financial crises before they happen, identifying innovations before they catch on, solving transport problems, creating a whole new scientific paradigm ('science 2.0'), fixing energy consumption and making us all safer. However, they have letters of support from George Soros and various other luminaries, so presumably the EU will assume (or already assumed) that they know what they are talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqliklVgNWE little video of my bullied bantam enjoying an evening by the fire.

Of course we are animals but you are really the one making a distinction between the human animal and the rest of the animal kingdom. Many animals eat other animals and will even eat animals of their own species.

Of course we generally don't eat our own species but it happens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571 and the people eaten were the friends and relatives of the people doing the eating the alternative was to die. I wonder if you were in the same circumstances would you remain vegan?

This is an interesting story
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/five-reasons-henrietta-lacks-most-important-woman-medical-history
She has been farmed to an amazing extent. Would it be better to stop.

Your slavery comments are interesting but slavery goes back thousands of years and is not colour based Africans and Arabs were selling slaves long before western Europeans came to Africa.

Slavery has never really gone away it is just presented differently.

"Would you agree it would always be unethical to kill another human we didnt know to take his or her organ/s? I think most would."

What if that person was on death row for some horrible crimes could we take his organs then? A mass murderer giving life to others seems almost karmic.

Death isn't a terrible thing once it's happened it's over done. The only problem with death is when and how.
we don't want to be in drawn out pain and most of us don't want it now.

Since I had a heart attack there is a 50% chance of dying in the next 6 to 8 years, I don't aim for that to occur and year 1 is the worst thats 25% the stats are scary 30 out of 100 die when they have a first heart attack of the 70 left 17-18 will die within the year. Death gets very real when your trying to drag yourself to an A&E department when you have a coronary artery 97% blocked. that was the 2nd time i got close. Fear is the worst thing about dying but it does finish once you are dead and so does the pain and suffering. Let me just say it took some adjustment for me to get used to the idea of having a reduced life expectancy.

To take molly for example if I didn't choose to bring her inside feed her keep her warm, then she would probably be dead already or suffering. She doesn't seem to be in pain so her quality of life seems reasonable and compared to the average chicken she has got it made.

But if she was suffering it would be best if i killed her rather than her be in pain.

I don't think I know what I would do in a violent situation, I know, because sometimes somebody has to do something and I know I have done what needed to be done on several occasions.

I'm not going to stop eating meat but that doesn't mean I don't care about the well being of animals, any animals including the human animal.
I guess you see a happy pig and think about its death and how it will be killed, me I see a happy pig and the pig is happy enough and death tends to be a short lived surprise. Most animals live in the now they don't think about tomorrow or yesterday.

From Popular Science you can read:
" 'Within these galaxies, a good chunk of the mass that had been ascribed to dark matter is probably stars,' said Pieter van Dokkum, the lead researcher on the project."

So I bet "a good chunk of the mass" is a bit more than "a minor change".
But we will probably soon get an exact new ratio after the smart guys have made new calculations, other than any of the above.

1. Clippy: Misunderstood animated pedagogical agent or spawn of Satan? - Invokes Sun Tzu

2. Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. Impressive 65 Page PDF available from this abstract page.

3. People Who Hate Clippy, the Stupid Paper Clip from Microsoft Word (Wartburg Chapter). Emergency outreach

4. Meme:Clippy. Fanpic uploads @ end.

5. On Youtube.

6. How I Made Clippy Lovable. Stanford again. What is it with these guys? You know their mascot is a tree?

7. DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS. I think my nose just started bleeding.

8. Et tu DARPA?.

9. Senor Pedaso Molesto de Matal NPR transcript.

10. Back At'chya. Remember before they became inertia?

11. Hark the Herald.. Wait, DIE DIE DIE. Just sayin'.

12. Reflection.

Happy Clippymas! Hope the leaks result in a zillion times the cogitation invested in Clippy..

The regular air force does this now. You can join and be behind a desk and joystick piloting a UAV in a few years.

This is "mainstream" now.

http://www.popsci.com/drones

Thats because it is one. http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-11/hybrid-car-created-completely-3d-printing Real picture of a 1/6 scale model according to the article, and they have an actual video of the prototype driving around without a body shell. The body appears to flip up with a seam around the driver area over the front wheel wells. Hinges on the front of the body? Or maybe hinges mid-body but that means you can't open it in your garage and some parking garages without scraping ceiling/garage door.

Don't worry, we're getting closer and closer.

I was expecting to read some radical plan for getting to the Gliese 581 star system with some kind of Orion nuclear pulse starship built from a moonbase. Instead I read about interplanetary travel and even airships. Interstellar travel is exactly what we should be planning. We've already mostly explored our own system with robotic probes. Time to move on. I picture large scale uranium mining on the moon similar to the mining operations in the film Moon, and a huge spaceship manufacturing base. Something like that is what we really need to get the the next phase of space exploration. In addition to building solar system sized interferometer telescope arrays to see which systems are worth visiting. Although Gliese 581 is an obvious choice. Nasa should be focusing on a permanent lunar settlement as its next immediate goal.

This maybe what you were thinking of.
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-06/bat-hook-designed-military-engineer-lets-you-charge-your-phone-overhead-power-lines

"It's just you"</polite_sarcasm>

The 'little guy inventor' ignored by the establishment and 'ahead of his time' is perhaps the strongest cliche in popular-science writing.

Particularly in Popular Science. Here -- enjoy the archives. I grew up with a molding pile of these extending back to the 30s. I doubt you can find any issue without this trope, and likely more than 3 times in each.

While I can understand where it comes from and why it's popular (every engineer has a PHB), the trouble is it encourages glossing over real problems and gives crackpots far too much traction.

The problem being glossed over here, pointed out below, is we cannot build a defensibly accurate Analytical Engine. This problem was thoroughly examined by no less than Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine.

I heartily recommend reading his book. Also there's two or three similar hour-long lectures online to whet your appetite. I recommend the one given to Google engineers. Doron's just great. It's a real missed opportunity that BBC didn't have him do a TV series on the history and the project.

For reference, what you are referring to is duct tape (used to seal heating and cooling ducts)

Duct tape (as we usually understand the term) is not used for sealing HVAC ducts, at least not by knowledgeable persons.

Duck Tape is a name brand of duct tape that came long after people who didn't know what it actually was kept calling it duck tape.

The name "duck tape" came first, referring to "cotton duck" fabric, though whether that name was applied to the stuff we now called "duct tape" when "duct tape" first came out, is still open to debate.

Gaff (or gaffer's) tape is better than duct tape for many applications. For sticking stuff together, my three tape recommendations are gaff tape, 3M's relatively new transparent duct tape (more durable than the grey stuff), and the new style of blue masking tape, surprisingly strong without damaging a surface. Add transparent "scotch" tape for the occasional bit of book repair or gift wrapping, and electrical tape, and your taping needs are pretty much covered.

Here is the the link.

Hmm, I was about to speculate the opposite - the new robotic stuff is probably too perfect, lacking the flaws that we think of as craftsmanship or authenticity. Like how women don't want man-made diamonds even though the only difference is they're flawless. And just like audiophiles who stick to LPs and vacuum tubes despite all evidence of their inferiority because, hey, what kind of enthusiast am I if I use the same equipment as everybody else?

A staff photographer at Popular Science is building a green home. http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/green-dream

Lockheed Martin recently put out a press release about their magnetic communications system (MCS), which works at distances of up to half a mile through solid rock:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/lockheed-develops-magnetic-communication-mine-safety

Although the MCS probably uses large coils and low wavelengths on both sides to achieve that impressive distance, typical RFID cards have small coils. To make up for this, very strong digitally controlled magnetic fields could be used to couple to a coil from far away. For example, see this implementation of a static 0.7 tesla magnet:

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25527/page1/

A strong enough, highly directional magnetic field and a sensitive enough detector could couple all the way to the theoretical maximum distance permitted by the RFID card's frequency. Like the MCS, that distance is one third the wavelength of 125 KHz (1.5 miles), or half a mile.

Your numbers are way off. If the entire unpopulated area of the Sahara were covered in photoelectric (at current efficiency levels), it would produce somewhere in the 600-800 terawatt range. The entire planet uses about 13.5 terawatts. Even with transmission losses on high voltage DC lines, you could still power the whole planet using only 1% of the uninhabited area of the Sahara. The picture at the bottom of this article illustrates it nicely, with squares indicating how much would need to be covered in panels to power specific regions.

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-06/bat-hook-designed-military-engineer-lets-you-charge-your-phone-overhead-power-lines

a bat hook?

Even if it never rains down or enters the atmosphere, it's just as much of a problem just orbiting depending who you ask Debris Cloud