Would the components necessarily have military style dates on them? I would expect a device like this to use as many commodity parts as possible to keep costs low. Is it possible that some parts would have markings on them intended for the US civilian market?
I'm not familiar with military equipment so I don't know what lengths they go to in removing civilian markings from equipment.
I can walk into my local Comcast office and pay my monthly bill by cash or check. Comcast does in theory need to know what your address is to activate service*, so even if you use a fake name, you can still be found.
*I do know that you can actually move a modem around on the Comcast network: I moved within the same city recently, the modem I was using at the old address worked fine at the new address, with no changes to the account. I did eventually change my account so the bill came to the correct place, so I don't know if this was a temporary or indefinite situation, but it kept working like this for a month and a half before I made the address change. In theory this means that you can find a neighbor without internet through Comcast, and make a fake account at their address. Decline the installation service and hook up the modem yourself and you should have completely anonymous internet**.
**you have to live with Comcast internet and pricing, but in some areas you have to do this anyway.
If we consider communism a religion, presumably we are modifying the definition of religion to include all strongly held dogmas or belief systems.
In this context, we could legitimately equate atheism to a form of religion, since atheists tend to have very strong beliefs about the nature of the universe.
FWIW: I think that the above argument is silly. As the parent post points out, we have a perfectly good language, which clearly defines religion. What the GP should recognize is: in the absence of religious fanaticism, other forms of zealotry such as political fanaticism may take over (ie. soviet communism). This of course leads to the same types of negative social consequences, as the religious type. By its very nature, atheism makes no dictates about how a person should act, and consequently avoids creating fanaticism in the detrimental sense that we are thinking of here. (Atheists can however be fanatically boring if you wind them up)
Re:What has this to do with sony yanking linux?
on
PS3 Hacked via USB Dongle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The way I understood the current situation is the following:
Image for a second a piece of paper, there are two overlapping circles on it. One represents the people who want to run Linux on the PS3 and are trying to hax0r it. This circle is about the size of a quarter.
The other circle is for the people who want to pirate games and cheat AND HAVE THE TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION TO FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES. The diameter of this circle is roughly the same as the Linux camp.
Basically, you have a very small group of people, who's only motivation for hacking the platform is Sony's removal of the boot other OS function. This group of people then gives away the plans for their hack, and thus enables all the people from your 50m circle who can't hack a PS3 on their own.
Claiming that the Linux crowd is irrelevant here, ignores the fact that one motivated person can release an exploit which will work for everyone, and I think the Linux crowd has a much higher ratio of people who might find those exploits than the crowd of wall-hack/aimbot enthusiasts.
Your 'high school math' analysis however fails to address the fact that these solar installations are not distributed evenly across the earths surface. If we consider only the local area around the solar installation, rather than the entire earth, we would expect a much greater impact on the local energy absorption. Further we know that seemingly small changes can have notable impacts on the local climate, for instance slashdot recently discussed how air traffic may significantly modify local weather patterns . For an honest assessment of the impact I would agree with the gp, the input of actual climatologists is important.
For those of you who are wondering if they missed some huge drop in netbook pricing like I was:
That $49 is the price as subsidized by a 2 year contract with Verizon wireless. The cheapest non subsidized netbook on that list is the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 for $149.
At least on some laptops it is worthwhile to disable the SD card slot. I know that in the case of some EEEPC's the SD card is on the same integrated USB as the webcam, and shutting that whole thing off actually nets a fair drop in power consumption.
Hawking's condition is a neurodegenerative disease and it seems likely that the condition that prevents him from using his own vocal cords would prevent him from using this device, since the device apparently registers peripheral nervous system signals. That sucks since it looks like it would otherwise be perfect for people in his condition.
1) Rail does not have direct delivery to storefront. You can ship goods by rail for some long distance savings but that won't really help the issue here that much, which is traffic and congestion around urban centers. 2) The subject at hand does not seem to have much to do with shipping goods or road maintenance, rather the issue seems to be congestion around urban centers. Like it or not urban planning in most US cities basically assumes that the individual will be able to transport themselves to the storefront/workplace using a personal vehicle and the highway system. Without that capacity the local economy is pretty much hosed. However you want to fund it a functioning road system is in everybody's best interest so paying for it out of taxes does make sense.
I'd love to see a public transit system (the real solution I think) that worked in my home city, but the urban sprawl is so bad that even an efficient rail/bus system would still take me 3-4 times as long for my commute, and the cost of penetration into all the neighborhoods would make it cost prohibitive to establish
I had a graduate professor (in bioengineering/nanotechnology) who claimed that the light absorptive complexes in plant cells (chloroplasts) were on the order of 95% efficient(I've forgotten the exact number) in certain wavelengths. (not green since that all gets reflected for you to see the nice green color of the leaf)
Unfortunately comparing the efficiency of plants to this wire thing isn't that simple. Chloroplasts have lots of internal complexes(Thylakoid disks) full of organized protein structures that convert light to electricity as one hugely efficient electron transfer system. To compare a plant leaf to this wire we'd need to know how the wire performs in densities similar to the thylakoid disk density in a plant leaf. We'd also need to know things like whether these wires get more or less efficient with packing, what the peak achievable packing density is, and what kind of alignment restrictions we have regarding the incoming photons.
Simply put: the 0.2nW quoted here is probably not a useful number when considering systems aggregating the production of many of these things.
Disclaimer: although I had relevant class work my degrees focus in biomechanics not biochemistry or nanotechnology.
We've got a long way to go for bone replacements
on
Building Artificial Bone
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Unfortunately I think a proper bone replacement is still a long ways off. In addition to figuring out an ideal material, we still have to figure out how to make the tendons and ligaments attach normally to the fake bone.
We also don't have a good idea of how to get rapid cellular invasion of very large bone grafts. Living bone is actually full of cells that tear down and rebuild the hard bits. This keeps our bones from wearing out the way a piece of metal will, due to wear and cracks in the microstructure. Unfortunately the cells in bone don't move that fast (0.23mm/day or so in perfect lab conditions with no bone in the way), and if you replace a whole load bearing bone at once you can have problems with the cells refusing to migrate into the center of the new bone material. This is, in part, why they'll try to use as much of the load bearing bone that's still there when they go to fuse a joint, instead of just cutting everything out and packing in a hydroxyapatite implant.
The last barrier to a real bone replacement is getting the replacement bone in the right shape. It's actually pretty difficult to build something up to be the same shape as a bone before you take the bone out of a person. And that's assuming that you have a "good" bone as a reference. (In your case they'd need to make sure the new bone wasn't full of holes, and quite probably adjust the shape to promote a more normal joint posture)
I work in a biomechanics lab, for the orthopedics at a major hospital (we mostly work with spine biomechanics) and believe me the surgeons would like nothing better than to be able to just pop out a bad bone and replace it. I just think we're a lot further from making that happen than papers like this make it sound. When somebody does figure it out I'm betting it happens for long bones like radius, ulna, humerus, tibia etc first, since perfect geometry isn't a big issue and the tendon/ligament insertions are pretty spaced out.
I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that a better solution to your ankle problem probably isn't going to develop out of this any time in the next decade or two. Which is too bad because all the work I've done with ankles tells me that the solutions we have could use a lot of improving.
Slashdot Mirror
Would the components necessarily have military style dates on them? I would expect a device like this to use as many commodity parts as possible to keep costs low. Is it possible that some parts would have markings on them intended for the US civilian market?
I'm not familiar with military equipment so I don't know what lengths they go to in removing civilian markings from equipment.
Hmm, slashdot appears to be eating my carriage returns
I can walk into my local Comcast office and pay my monthly bill by cash or check. Comcast does in theory need to know what your address is to activate service*, so even if you use a fake name, you can still be found. *I do know that you can actually move a modem around on the Comcast network: I moved within the same city recently, the modem I was using at the old address worked fine at the new address, with no changes to the account. I did eventually change my account so the bill came to the correct place, so I don't know if this was a temporary or indefinite situation, but it kept working like this for a month and a half before I made the address change. In theory this means that you can find a neighbor without internet through Comcast, and make a fake account at their address. Decline the installation service and hook up the modem yourself and you should have completely anonymous internet**. **you have to live with Comcast internet and pricing, but in some areas you have to do this anyway.
To be fair, the point of the GP post was this:
If we consider communism a religion, presumably we are modifying the definition of religion to include all strongly held dogmas or belief systems.
In this context, we could legitimately equate atheism to a form of religion, since atheists tend to have very strong beliefs about the nature of the universe.
FWIW: I think that the above argument is silly. As the parent post points out, we have a perfectly good language, which clearly defines religion. What the GP should recognize is: in the absence of religious fanaticism, other forms of zealotry such as political fanaticism may take over (ie. soviet communism). This of course leads to the same types of negative social consequences, as the religious type. By its very nature, atheism makes no dictates about how a person should act, and consequently avoids creating fanaticism in the detrimental sense that we are thinking of here. (Atheists can however be fanatically boring if you wind them up)
The way I understood the current situation is the following:
Image for a second a piece of paper, there are two overlapping circles on it. One represents the people who want to run Linux on the PS3 and are trying to hax0r it. This circle is about the size of a quarter.
The other circle is for the people who want to pirate games and cheat AND HAVE THE TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION TO FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES. The diameter of this circle is roughly the same as the Linux camp.
Basically, you have a very small group of people, who's only motivation for hacking the platform is Sony's removal of the boot other OS function. This group of people then gives away the plans for their hack, and thus enables all the people from your 50m circle who can't hack a PS3 on their own.
Claiming that the Linux crowd is irrelevant here, ignores the fact that one motivated person can release an exploit which will work for everyone, and I think the Linux crowd has a much higher ratio of people who might find those exploits than the crowd of wall-hack/aimbot enthusiasts.
Cheers
Your 'high school math' analysis however fails to address the fact that these solar installations are not distributed evenly across the earths surface. If we consider only the local area around the solar installation, rather than the entire earth, we would expect a much greater impact on the local energy absorption. Further we know that seemingly small changes can have notable impacts on the local climate, for instance slashdot recently discussed how air traffic may significantly modify local weather patterns . For an honest assessment of the impact I would agree with the gp, the input of actual climatologists is important.
For those of you who are wondering if they missed some huge drop in netbook pricing like I was: That $49 is the price as subsidized by a 2 year contract with Verizon wireless. The cheapest non subsidized netbook on that list is the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 for $149.
At least on some laptops it is worthwhile to disable the SD card slot. I know that in the case of some EEEPC's the SD card is on the same integrated USB as the webcam, and shutting that whole thing off actually nets a fair drop in power consumption.
I think your father should absolutely have to justify any pieces of cooper that he has lying around his truck!!
Hawking's condition is a neurodegenerative disease and it seems likely that the condition that prevents him from using his own vocal cords would prevent him from using this device, since the device apparently registers peripheral nervous system signals. That sucks since it looks like it would otherwise be perfect for people in his condition.
1) Rail does not have direct delivery to storefront. You can ship goods by rail for some long distance savings but that won't really help the issue here that much, which is traffic and congestion around urban centers.
2) The subject at hand does not seem to have much to do with shipping goods or road maintenance, rather the issue seems to be congestion around urban centers. Like it or not urban planning in most US cities basically assumes that the individual will be able to transport themselves to the storefront/workplace using a personal vehicle and the highway system. Without that capacity the local economy is pretty much hosed. However you want to fund it a functioning road system is in everybody's best interest so paying for it out of taxes does make sense.
I'd love to see a public transit system (the real solution I think) that worked in my home city, but the urban sprawl is so bad that even an efficient rail/bus system would still take me 3-4 times as long for my commute, and the cost of penetration into all the neighborhoods would make it cost prohibitive to establish
I had a graduate professor (in bioengineering/nanotechnology) who claimed that the light absorptive complexes in plant cells (chloroplasts) were on the order of 95% efficient(I've forgotten the exact number) in certain wavelengths. (not green since that all gets reflected for you to see the nice green color of the leaf)
Unfortunately comparing the efficiency of plants to this wire thing isn't that simple. Chloroplasts have lots of internal complexes(Thylakoid disks) full of organized protein structures that convert light to electricity as one hugely efficient electron transfer system. To compare a plant leaf to this wire we'd need to know how the wire performs in densities similar to the thylakoid disk density in a plant leaf. We'd also need to know things like whether these wires get more or less efficient with packing, what the peak achievable packing density is, and what kind of alignment restrictions we have regarding the incoming photons.
Simply put: the 0.2nW quoted here is probably not a useful number when considering systems aggregating the production of many of these things.
Disclaimer: although I had relevant class work my degrees focus in biomechanics not biochemistry or nanotechnology.
Unfortunately I think a proper bone replacement is still a long ways off. In addition to figuring out an ideal material, we still have to figure out how to make the tendons and ligaments attach normally to the fake bone.
We also don't have a good idea of how to get rapid cellular invasion of very large bone grafts. Living bone is actually full of cells that tear down and rebuild the hard bits. This keeps our bones from wearing out the way a piece of metal will, due to wear and cracks in the microstructure. Unfortunately the cells in bone don't move that fast (0.23mm/day or so in perfect lab conditions with no bone in the way), and if you replace a whole load bearing bone at once you can have problems with the cells refusing to migrate into the center of the new bone material. This is, in part, why they'll try to use as much of the load bearing bone that's still there when they go to fuse a joint, instead of just cutting everything out and packing in a hydroxyapatite implant.
The last barrier to a real bone replacement is getting the replacement bone in the right shape. It's actually pretty difficult to build something up to be the same shape as a bone before you take the bone out of a person. And that's assuming that you have a "good" bone as a reference. (In your case they'd need to make sure the new bone wasn't full of holes, and quite probably adjust the shape to promote a more normal joint posture)
I work in a biomechanics lab, for the orthopedics at a major hospital (we mostly work with spine biomechanics) and believe me the surgeons would like nothing better than to be able to just pop out a bad bone and replace it. I just think we're a lot further from making that happen than papers like this make it sound. When somebody does figure it out I'm betting it happens for long bones like radius, ulna, humerus, tibia etc first, since perfect geometry isn't a big issue and the tendon/ligament insertions are pretty spaced out.
I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that a better solution to your ankle problem probably isn't going to develop out of this any time in the next decade or two. Which is too bad because all the work I've done with ankles tells me that the solutions we have could use a lot of improving.