Sure, but how do we power the thing? Battery definitely wouldn't work, and solar power isn't efficient enough yet to power something as small as a hornet. Extended propulsion is almost certainly the biggest obstactle - as you and others have stated, we already have the technology to create a machine the size of a hornet that can carry poison.
Geez, I'm ashamed... and to think most of my engineering friends came to me for help with their papers! Maybe that's why they didn't do so well, and I always thought it was just laziness:)
We've been hearing about this type of thing in science fiction books, then movies, and then in magazines like Popular Science for at least the past 20 years. While I think we probably have the technology to create the hornets, I seriously doubt we have the technology to have them fly very far then deliver some type of lethal force (e.g. poison) to a specific target.
Plus, it's reasonable to assume that $100's of millions would need to be invested in such a "nanohornet" for it to be feasible. Heck, the current world's smallest flying robot is massive compared to a bee, and can only fly a few minutes (yes, this link is from 2003, and the the robot is still considered the smallest working prototype of a flying robot).
In my opinion, the israelis need to invest in far better armor and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. During their conflict with Hezbollah, the UAVs were a huge success. Also, wouldn't highly armored robotic vehicles be better than a hornet? For example, maybe an armored ball (kind of like those hamster balls) that would essentially be indestructable and roll around doing reconaiscence and shooting things. Just a thought.
As a Cornell alumni myself, I am obligated to say "wow, very cool"... although at first I thought this might be the first incarnation of the omnidroid from The Incredibles.
Cornell has had mixed success in building leading edge robots. Some of their more incredible robots are front and center (such as the work they contributed on the Mars Rovers), while others are barely useful (such as their early dominance in minitiarized robotic soccer). One of the school's oddest robots, which might have helped inspire the compensatory robot in this article, was this rather bizarre chair that could reassemble itself if it happened to fall apart. I don't think I'll be buying any of them for the dinner table!
At work, everyone has Blackberry's that sync with Outlook and Exchange, so it enables web access and interfacing with Salesforce and all of our Microsoft solutions. Because we are a relatively small shop with VERY standard systems, we've never really needed or experimented with anything else... although I must say I'm impressed by the slick system you have setup.
Who knows, maybe slashdot can grant you the power of having one wish per day granted... if only;)!
I've never had the good fortune for slashdot to take boring days out of my work life, maybe I'll have to figure out some way to get out of a conference in recognition of my slashdot postings.
I don't see his logic. Americans might demand faster connections and more storage space, but they're not going to get it before the Blu Ray and HD DVD player become mainstream. It's a matter of timing - there's no way the cable and phone companies are going to upgrade everyone from 1.5Mbps (an average connection speed now) to 100Mbps (the minimum required to download a 10-15GB Hi Def movie in under an hour) before the HD players become popular.
No matter how much people might ask for it, there's no way it could possibly happen fast enough. If he was arguing that this next generation of video players will be the last to use physical media, he would have a decent argument, but it will easily take at least 5 years to upgrade our telecommunications infrastructure to the point needed to quickly deliver HD content.
I'd choose awstats. It's fast, very easy to use, looks pretty, and best of all... it's free to use on Windows as well as Linux. Here is their main page on sourceforge, which also includes a nice little demo.
What I find interesting is that this article was submitted multiple times last night with Microsoft's name actually included Microsoft in the title (the Firehose is a pretty cool feature of being a subscriber BTW since you can see all submissions, not just accepted ones). Either the wording wasn't as concise/clear (I don't remember), or there was a little bias exhibitted by the editors.
For home, I never replace a drive unless one goes down. I just have one drive backup to the other (and vice versa) at night, then store my important files at work.
At work, we have everything setup as Raid 1, and only replace drives when they go down, which is rarely. Not sure if this is the best approach, but considering we take offsite incremental backups every 15 minutes it's not really a catastrophic event even if both go down.
Does this remind anyone else of the scene in Brewster's Millions where the guy sells Richard Pryor on a concept to intall a tugboat inside an iceburg and sail it to desert countries in Africa? Maybe nows the time to start looking into this...
I know, I'm completely off topic... but this "news" story didn't really warrant much real discussion... iceburg floats to New Zealand because of benign wind change, more news at 11
I've been wondering for years why we would ever want to step foot again on the moon given the risks and massive costs (other than the obviously political reason of: the chinese are doing it). This article is actually semicoherent, and it's great to see them putting a heavy focus on robotic exploration.
What I'd still rather see though, is human exploration being conducted on an "as needed" basis. For example, let's put robots on the moon that can determine if the moon can be utilized for its supposed natural resources (as NASA contends it has), and if these robots can't mine fuel or other supplies that could be used for a Mars mission, we can send people up there.
Hehe... apparently Steve Ballmer isn't compatible with Zune:
"I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's [an] experience". Does he even know how the Zune works?
There should be a rule against putting the word 'Squirt' in a sentence with Steve Ballmer... ugh, nasty.
This could be really cool on a desktop (probably better than listening to all the beeps and boops spurted out by my Windows desktop right now), but I wonder how "harmonious" it could possibly be if run on a server? This would take techno to a whole new level.
Hmmm.... a few years ago the journal Nature found that 2% of the internet was porn. This would explain why it now takes me twice as long to find what I'm looking for.
I've seen a few of these fake corporate news stories, and usually it's pretty obvious that the story came from a company (particularly for regular viewers, since the local news reporters are typically not involved). As sneaky as this is though, I'd much rather watch corporate ads disguised as news than government propaganda disguised as news, something the current administration has been found to do.
The 4004 tic tac toe hardware from their unofficial site looks wicked... http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jsweinrich/. I never thought I'd be drooling over electronic tic tac toe!
Oh wow, you just made me realize why they put it near Area 51... Google Earth (and other desktop satellite imagery)! I couldn't figure it out before, but your link made me realize that even though Area 51 is a no fly zone, TONS of people will still see it online. Think of all the kooky UFO websites that republish satellite pictures of Area 51. They have a huge audience of folks who are browsing for more info on Area 51. Now all these late night UFOlogists will have the answer to their hunger pains.
If we did this, who would invest the Billions necessary to research and produce these drugs? You or I can likely live very happily without worrying too much about money, but corporations cannot create wealth out of thin air. In areas like software, I agree that most patents should be "free and open". In healthcare, patents are what enables drug companies to make enough money to invest in future drugs. Without protection that patents offer drug manufacturers, it is likely that private investment would dwindle to almost nothing, leaving our government (via higher taxes) to pick up the tab (unless you are suggesting we don't need any future drugs or medical devices... which is an entirely different discussion).
I wonder why someone doesn't make an advertisement in crops after harvest (e.g. like crop circles)? Seems like it would relatively cheap and easy to make something 100-200 acres (100X larger than the KFC ad), and it would certainly get a lot of press. More people might see it as well, since every flight attendant in the country would point it out to travelers as they fly over.
The problem is that the Universities are not the ones manufacturing these life saving medicines and processes, it's the drug companies. Asking Universities to provide access to their discoveries would reduce the value of their discoveries on the open market (since there'd now be multiple companies licensed to sell the product, one of which may not have needed to pay for the right). In such a scenario, what incentive does the research institute have to develop the drugs and medical devices other than government grants?
The Consensus statement suggests that Universities should be "engaging with nontraditional partners, such as public-private partnerships or developing country institutions, creating new opportunities for drug development, and carving out neglected disease research exemptions in any university patents or licenses". So in other words, instead of selling their patents and discoveries to drug companies, they should be giving it away? What incentive would one of these "nontraditional partners" have to sell a $50 drug for $.05 when they could sell it on the black market for $5.00?
Drugs will not solve the long term problems in developing countries, they'll just make them worse. Many of these countries do not have the natural resources to handle their populations. This lack of resources leads to many of the diseases that our drugs are supposed to fix (plus many other problems, such as the constant wars and corruption present in Africa). Sending them cheap drugs puts more strain on existing resources, since more people are able to survive in an area that can't support them. We need to attack the root cause of their problems: corruption, overpopulation, lack of education (particularly sex education), and sanitation. Once these are solved/improved, the need for access to new miracle drugs is greatly reduced.
In short, the consortium is barking up the wrong tree. They should be trying to pursuade drug manufacturers to ship more reduced/free products to these third world countries. That would provide the benefits they are looking for, while not reducing the drug's value and risking future research investments. I'm not saying this is a great idea either, but it doesn't nearly the same negative impact as giving away the patent or production methods.
Thanks - based on your suggestion I went through his blog and realized that it is pretty good. I wish the original story would have been more clear, as the links appeared almost entirely off-topic on first glance.
Something's not right with these links... is someone just trying to/. their own blog here or am I being redirected? The first link is completely off topic and goes to a post about SoftMac (a Mac emulator), the second is just an example of how one company has 9000 legacy scripts that require older version of windows (+ 400 16 bit programs). So what? This hardly seems like the a front page of slashdot argument for OS Backwards Compatibility... there's really no argument other than stating the 9000 # and the 3 years it would take to convert them.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only. A company like Apple can afford to ignore backwards compatibility to some extent, as this actually drives greater revenue from their loyal customer base buying new software. Microsoft though, cannot afford to give their corporate users a chance to make a migration decision.
If Microsoft eliminated backwards compatibility, thousands of companies would be in a position where they needed to include the cost of migrating software in the upgrade decision. All of a sudden, Linux would become a viable option for these corporate clients, which Microsoft can't afford. For example, my company currently has over 900 16 bit applications that we haven't touched in ~10 years. Almost all of these run fine under XP and the beta versions of Vista, so upgrading to Vista will be a cheap option. However, if Vista didn't support these 16 bit apps, we'd have to spend years of time and Millions of dollars upgrading... in this case Linux would likely become our new O/S.
For this reason, Linux advocates (and many others) would love to see Microsoft remove backwards compatibility, but from a business standpoint Microsoft just can't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but how do we power the thing? Battery definitely wouldn't work, and solar power isn't efficient enough yet to power something as small as a hornet. Extended propulsion is almost certainly the biggest obstactle - as you and others have stated, we already have the technology to create a machine the size of a hornet that can carry poison.
Geez, I'm ashamed ... and to think most of my engineering friends came to me for help with their papers! Maybe that's why they didn't do so well, and I always thought it was just laziness :)
We've been hearing about this type of thing in science fiction books, then movies, and then in magazines like Popular Science for at least the past 20 years. While I think we probably have the technology to create the hornets, I seriously doubt we have the technology to have them fly very far then deliver some type of lethal force (e.g. poison) to a specific target.
Plus, it's reasonable to assume that $100's of millions would need to be invested in such a "nanohornet" for it to be feasible. Heck, the current world's smallest flying robot is massive compared to a bee, and can only fly a few minutes (yes, this link is from 2003, and the the robot is still considered the smallest working prototype of a flying robot).
In my opinion, the israelis need to invest in far better armor and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. During their conflict with Hezbollah, the UAVs were a huge success. Also, wouldn't highly armored robotic vehicles be better than a hornet? For example, maybe an armored ball (kind of like those hamster balls) that would essentially be indestructable and roll around doing reconaiscence and shooting things. Just a thought.
As a Cornell alumni myself, I am obligated to say "wow, very cool" ... although at first I thought this might be the first incarnation of the omnidroid from The Incredibles.
Cornell has had mixed success in building leading edge robots. Some of their more incredible robots are front and center (such as the work they contributed on the Mars Rovers), while others are barely useful (such as their early dominance in minitiarized robotic soccer). One of the school's oddest robots, which might have helped inspire the compensatory robot in this article, was this rather bizarre chair that could reassemble itself if it happened to fall apart. I don't think I'll be buying any of them for the dinner table!
At work, everyone has Blackberry's that sync with Outlook and Exchange, so it enables web access and interfacing with Salesforce and all of our Microsoft solutions. Because we are a relatively small shop with VERY standard systems, we've never really needed or experimented with anything else ... although I must say I'm impressed by the slick system you have setup.
Who knows, maybe slashdot can grant you the power of having one wish per day granted ... if only ;)!
I've never had the good fortune for slashdot to take boring days out of my work life, maybe I'll have to figure out some way to get out of a conference in recognition of my slashdot postings.
25 miles is the max distance, it looked like you could set the sensitivity down to 1/4 mile.
I don't see his logic. Americans might demand faster connections and more storage space, but they're not going to get it before the Blu Ray and HD DVD player become mainstream. It's a matter of timing - there's no way the cable and phone companies are going to upgrade everyone from 1.5Mbps (an average connection speed now) to 100Mbps (the minimum required to download a 10-15GB Hi Def movie in under an hour) before the HD players become popular.
No matter how much people might ask for it, there's no way it could possibly happen fast enough. If he was arguing that this next generation of video players will be the last to use physical media, he would have a decent argument, but it will easily take at least 5 years to upgrade our telecommunications infrastructure to the point needed to quickly deliver HD content.
I'd choose awstats. It's fast, very easy to use, looks pretty, and best of all ... it's free to use on Windows as well as Linux. Here is their main page on sourceforge, which also includes a nice little demo.
What I find interesting is that this article was submitted multiple times last night with Microsoft's name actually included Microsoft in the title (the Firehose is a pretty cool feature of being a subscriber BTW since you can see all submissions, not just accepted ones). Either the wording wasn't as concise/clear (I don't remember), or there was a little bias exhibitted by the editors.
For home, I never replace a drive unless one goes down. I just have one drive backup to the other (and vice versa) at night, then store my important files at work.
At work, we have everything setup as Raid 1, and only replace drives when they go down, which is rarely. Not sure if this is the best approach, but considering we take offsite incremental backups every 15 minutes it's not really a catastrophic event even if both go down.
Does this remind anyone else of the scene in Brewster's Millions where the guy sells Richard Pryor on a concept to intall a tugboat inside an iceburg and sail it to desert countries in Africa? Maybe nows the time to start looking into this ...
... but this "news" story didn't really warrant much real discussion ... iceburg floats to New Zealand because of benign wind change, more news at 11
I know, I'm completely off topic
I've been wondering for years why we would ever want to step foot again on the moon given the risks and massive costs (other than the obviously political reason of: the chinese are doing it). This article is actually semicoherent, and it's great to see them putting a heavy focus on robotic exploration.
What I'd still rather see though, is human exploration being conducted on an "as needed" basis. For example, let's put robots on the moon that can determine if the moon can be utilized for its supposed natural resources (as NASA contends it has), and if these robots can't mine fuel or other supplies that could be used for a Mars mission, we can send people up there.
Hehe ... apparently Steve Ballmer isn't compatible with Zune:
"I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's [an] experience". Does he even know how the Zune works?
There should be a rule against putting the word 'Squirt' in a sentence with Steve Ballmer ... ugh, nasty.
This could be really cool on a desktop (probably better than listening to all the beeps and boops spurted out by my Windows desktop right now), but I wonder how "harmonious" it could possibly be if run on a server? This would take techno to a whole new level.
Hmmm .... a few years ago the journal Nature found that 2% of the internet was porn. This would explain why it now takes me twice as long to find what I'm looking for.
I've seen a few of these fake corporate news stories, and usually it's pretty obvious that the story came from a company (particularly for regular viewers, since the local news reporters are typically not involved). As sneaky as this is though, I'd much rather watch corporate ads disguised as news than government propaganda disguised as news, something the current administration has been found to do.
Either way, it's pretty sneaky and low.
The 4004 tic tac toe hardware from their unofficial site looks wicked ... http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jsweinrich/. I never thought I'd be drooling over electronic tic tac toe!
Oh wow, you just made me realize why they put it near Area 51 ... Google Earth (and other desktop satellite imagery)! I couldn't figure it out before, but your link made me realize that even though Area 51 is a no fly zone, TONS of people will still see it online. Think of all the kooky UFO websites that republish satellite pictures of Area 51. They have a huge audience of folks who are browsing for more info on Area 51. Now all these late night UFOlogists will have the answer to their hunger pains.
I wish I had mod points, as this is a FANTASTIC idea.
If we did this, who would invest the Billions necessary to research and produce these drugs? You or I can likely live very happily without worrying too much about money, but corporations cannot create wealth out of thin air. In areas like software, I agree that most patents should be "free and open". In healthcare, patents are what enables drug companies to make enough money to invest in future drugs. Without protection that patents offer drug manufacturers, it is likely that private investment would dwindle to almost nothing, leaving our government (via higher taxes) to pick up the tab (unless you are suggesting we don't need any future drugs or medical devices ... which is an entirely different discussion).
I wonder why someone doesn't make an advertisement in crops after harvest (e.g. like crop circles)? Seems like it would relatively cheap and easy to make something 100-200 acres (100X larger than the KFC ad), and it would certainly get a lot of press. More people might see it as well, since every flight attendant in the country would point it out to travelers as they fly over.
The problem is that the Universities are not the ones manufacturing these life saving medicines and processes, it's the drug companies. Asking Universities to provide access to their discoveries would reduce the value of their discoveries on the open market (since there'd now be multiple companies licensed to sell the product, one of which may not have needed to pay for the right). In such a scenario, what incentive does the research institute have to develop the drugs and medical devices other than government grants?
The Consensus statement suggests that Universities should be "engaging with nontraditional partners, such as public-private partnerships or developing country institutions, creating new opportunities for drug development, and carving out neglected disease research exemptions in any university patents or licenses". So in other words, instead of selling their patents and discoveries to drug companies, they should be giving it away? What incentive would one of these "nontraditional partners" have to sell a $50 drug for $.05 when they could sell it on the black market for $5.00?
Drugs will not solve the long term problems in developing countries, they'll just make them worse. Many of these countries do not have the natural resources to handle their populations. This lack of resources leads to many of the diseases that our drugs are supposed to fix (plus many other problems, such as the constant wars and corruption present in Africa). Sending them cheap drugs puts more strain on existing resources, since more people are able to survive in an area that can't support them. We need to attack the root cause of their problems: corruption, overpopulation, lack of education (particularly sex education), and sanitation. Once these are solved/improved, the need for access to new miracle drugs is greatly reduced.
In short, the consortium is barking up the wrong tree. They should be trying to pursuade drug manufacturers to ship more reduced/free products to these third world countries. That would provide the benefits they are looking for, while not reducing the drug's value and risking future research investments. I'm not saying this is a great idea either, but it doesn't nearly the same negative impact as giving away the patent or production methods.
Thanks - based on your suggestion I went through his blog and realized that it is pretty good. I wish the original story would have been more clear, as the links appeared almost entirely off-topic on first glance.
Something's not right with these links ... is someone just trying to /. their own blog here or am I being redirected? The first link is completely off topic and goes to a post about SoftMac (a Mac emulator), the second is just an example of how one company has 9000 legacy scripts that require older version of windows (+ 400 16 bit programs). So what? This hardly seems like the a front page of slashdot argument for OS Backwards Compatibility ... there's really no argument other than stating the 9000 # and the 3 years it would take to convert them.
... in this case Linux would likely become our new O/S.
Pure and simple, Microsoft has protected their market share by remaining backwards compatible, and will continue to do so for that reason only. A company like Apple can afford to ignore backwards compatibility to some extent, as this actually drives greater revenue from their loyal customer base buying new software. Microsoft though, cannot afford to give their corporate users a chance to make a migration decision.
If Microsoft eliminated backwards compatibility, thousands of companies would be in a position where they needed to include the cost of migrating software in the upgrade decision. All of a sudden, Linux would become a viable option for these corporate clients, which Microsoft can't afford. For example, my company currently has over 900 16 bit applications that we haven't touched in ~10 years. Almost all of these run fine under XP and the beta versions of Vista, so upgrading to Vista will be a cheap option. However, if Vista didn't support these 16 bit apps, we'd have to spend years of time and Millions of dollars upgrading
For this reason, Linux advocates (and many others) would love to see Microsoft remove backwards compatibility, but from a business standpoint Microsoft just can't do it.