Slashdot Mirror
NextFest
anzha writes "This Saturday and Sunday between 9 and 6 pm at the Fort Mason Center's Festival Pavilion in San Francisco, NextFest will be taking place. Organized by Wired and sponsored by HP, The SF Chronicle, General Electric, General Motors, and many others, this is an expo on 'almost there' technologies. Ranging from [in]famous Moller aircar to a 'transparent cloak' from the Tachi Lab at Tokyo University to antibacterial powders from Canada to many, many others. Read more here."
Moller website.
Links are good, people!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Each day. Around the world. The future is born.
While NextFest seems to showcase some cool stuff, it does not seem to highlight the innovative underpinnings to these gadgets, which are often created/discovered by individuals, independent groups and academics. The science behind the gadgetry (i.e. The Robotics Institute) is often more interesting, IMHO.
While I know that's not the purpose of NextFest, it's just interesting to me to think that "the future is born" of smart individuals collaborating (obvious example == F/OSS), not necessarily from "leading visionary companies".
Oh, also, Isn't retro-reflective redundant? Doesn't reflection pretty much imply sending light back in the direction it came?
No. Classic reflection (the sort normal mirrors do) involves light heading off in a direction other than the one it was originally going in -- "angle of incidence equals angle of reflection". Retroreflection involves things like corner mirrors and sends light back in a direction exactly opposite the one it was originally headed in.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Took a quick swing by Fort Mason (the location) and saw some vendor trucks, but also saw the floor space being curtained off -- not a good sign for attendance, either by exhibitors or by teh curious. Of course, this is sponsored by Wired, the magazine for people who think they're cool because they read Wired.
Not bitter, just tired of it.
I've seen video on a show of it doing a tethered flight... it's real. How much more than a tethered flight is yet to be seen.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
Flash sucks because it isn't standards compliant.
/.ers dislike it for other reasons. I mean, Slashdot does have a good 170 HTML errors. Even Microsoft beats that (although only by 4).
Websites that use flash navigation and provide no text alternative are totally unusable by my blind friend. Text -> Speech converters can't touch them.
Then again, you're probably right that most
It's true that he has been taking money from investors for decades, but he's been pouring his own money into it as well. He made about $20 million from real estate investment and millions more from his invention of the SuperTrapp muffler. He invested that in his company. So while it's true that he has been taking money from others, he hasn't been getting rich from it, as the word "scam" implies.
Dr. Moller is a credible aerospace engineer. He is the started the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at UC Davis. And he has invented a new type of engine for the SkyCar.
As someone else pointed out, there have been tethered tests that have shown that the thing can at least hover.
Don't get me wrong. I think that Moller's claims are continually over-optimistic, even to the point that he got in trouble with the SEC for misleading investors. He's been over-promising and under-delivering for decades. But he has made slow, painful progress, and I've seen every indication that he really does believe in what he's doing.
To call it a scam is completely unfair.
It's called a Wankel engine and is conventiently ignored by the majority of engineers because they remember the engine sealing problems with the early NSU Ro80 in the late 60's that almost bankrupted them.
Talk to most people about the Wankel engine and the chances are they've never heard of it. Many engineers laugh when you mention it, because they remember 1967 and haven't heard of all the developments since then. My old (1983) Mazda RX7 did 127000+ miles before the engine wore out.
The spiffy model on the showroom floor is nothing more than a stage prop. It doesn't fly, it never did, and it probably never will.
Unless the man is a bare-faced lier, you can find out all sorts of things about it at moller.com.
Need I remind you that VTOL aeroplanes have been built before (albeit with jet engines).
Stick Men