I don't think this is insurmountable. Each battery gets a tamper-resistant monitor board with NVRAM to record its charge/discharge history. Substandard packs get taken out of circulation and refurbished. Monitor hacking gets dealt with as criminal fraud, just like odometer tampering or miscalibrated gas pumps.
(Of course, those analogies are a bit fragile -- odometer readings are tracked with the full force of automotive title laws, and gas pumps are subject to regular state inspection, neither of which would scale well to a hundred million battery packs being swapped weekly or daily.)
That's interesting, since a co-worker bought her Prius in 2002 and got a surprise battery replacement in 2006. (She hadn't noticed any problems, and isn't the type to ask questions; she took the car in for routine maintenance, they told her they'd replaced the battery and weren't charging her anything for it, she said "Cool!")
I don't know how prevalent this is, but for my N=1, I'm seeing a 100% replacement rate at four years.
Of course, the weasel words "due to wear and tear" let them get away with anything.
There's no evidence that life could ever appear in such environments starting from abiotic conditions, it seems pretty obvious these organisms evolved from more benign habitats.
Like, say, a moon that's crunchy on the outside, but warm on the inside? With lots of organics and water?
I don't think Europa is a perfect haven for biology, but I can easily imagine a race somewhere that has a complete explanation for how they evolved under an ice crust, and that would scoff at the notion of life on the exposed, irradiated, violent surface of a planet...
I forget the order of the screw flags on the content attribute. The first one is IE, of course. But are the next ones Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, Chrome, Safari?
When light hits a surface, some of it bounces off, and some of it gets absorbed. If you dump a whole lot of light onto a surface, it gets hot enough to burn. That's why giant frickin lasers are non-harmless.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network and was not prepared for the advent of HD video and streaming services. The hard fact is that they cannot (and never could) deliver "unlimited" bandwidth.
Oh, of course not -- nobody is saying that they could. So where are the bottlenecks? Are they bottlenecking? Or are they just sore that they're losing 5% of their profits due to increased metered charges from their upstreams?
To be fair, they DID say from the beginning that they reserved the right to pick a name themselves regardless of the poll's outcome.
I suspect that Colbert himself played a big role in this decision. He isn't going to drop out of character to say so, but Colbert-the-pundit is a character, and I imagine Colbert-the-person wasn't entirely comfortable saddling an "important" component of the space program (all ISS contempt aside) with the name of a comedy character. Their final decision still gave his character plenty of mileage -- "the treadmill is the really important part, the 'module' is just a box that the treadmill comes in" -- while preserving a bit of what many would perceive as decorum.
...since without them I couldn't achieve this post.
Radical modifications are certainly different from a good meal or a good night's sleep. That's why school our children, instead of simply feeding them and putting them to bed -- we need to make the radical changes in their mental and emotional structures that allow them to read, to write, to interact successfully with others, and to engage effectively with our society and culture.
If surgical or pharmaceutical enhancements allow us to better control our thought processes, to better perceive and respond to our environment, or to better achieve whatever we individually perceive as "success", please stay the hell out of our way as we take advantage of them.
It's a rendering. Good God, are they going to try to charge if we choose to re-render it in a different font size? Are they missing out on millions in revenue by not charging for iTunes music visualizations, which are clearly "performances" of music in a different modality, and surely at least as deserving of copyright protection?
The comet did not disappear with a pop at 0000 GMT.
It may have been a little brighter last night, but the difference was almost certainly imperceptible. It was still an extremely marginal naked-eye object -- you need really dark skies to see it without binoculars or a telescope.
If you're a comet aficionado, it's kind of nice. With a good scope and well-trained eye, you might glimpse some color, and you might be able to make out the tails. If you're set up for astrophotography (with a tracking mount for your camera), you can get some good photos. But if that's the case, you probably didn't need Slashdot to tell you this was coming.
...my son is the only student named John. With an uncommon last name, it's unlikely he'll ever meet another with exactly the same name.
If your surname is "Smith", yeah, it's a tough life.
Thank God there are Slashdot posters to make vague comments about "forces" and "snapping". Without them, engineers would have to rely on analysis, simulation, and experimentation.
I saw the Sun "go through a layer of clouds" this evening, and its altitude was considerably higher.
Look again at the video, thinking of it as a high-speed sunset. The meteor looked like it was heading more or less straight down, but it was likely heading mostly toward or away from the observer.
This is a CW laser, for which power and energy are equivalent, in the sense that one watt of power for one second delivers one joule (one watt-second) of energy.
Instead of saying "in any meaningful sense", perhaps I should have said "in the way that you're implying". And instead of saying "all the energy", perhaps you should have said "all the power".
When you say "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", it does strongly imply processes like fluorescence, or phosphorescence, or even heating and black-body radiation. Simple reflection is very different -- the period over which radiation is accumulated before being re-emitted is effectively zero.
Absent higher-order interactions, the important thing is reflective efficiency, which determines the amount of energy that isn't "re-emitted". It's that lost energy that heats things up.
I freely confess that I don't know how significant higher-order interactions are for conventional reflective materials at these power levels.
"Alignment beams" are normally low-power (a few milliwatts) visible beams used to indicate the path of an invisible beam. I guess with this one you'd point the alignment beam, move the glowing/smoking spot to your intended target, then hit the big switch.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is insurmountable. Each battery gets a tamper-resistant monitor board with NVRAM to record its charge/discharge history. Substandard packs get taken out of circulation and refurbished. Monitor hacking gets dealt with as criminal fraud, just like odometer tampering or miscalibrated gas pumps.
(Of course, those analogies are a bit fragile -- odometer readings are tracked with the full force of automotive title laws, and gas pumps are subject to regular state inspection, neither of which would scale well to a hundred million battery packs being swapped weekly or daily.)
That's interesting, since a co-worker bought her Prius in 2002 and got a surprise battery replacement in 2006. (She hadn't noticed any problems, and isn't the type to ask questions; she took the car in for routine maintenance, they told her they'd replaced the battery and weren't charging her anything for it, she said "Cool!")
I don't know how prevalent this is, but for my N=1, I'm seeing a 100% replacement rate at four years.
Of course, the weasel words "due to wear and tear" let them get away with anything.
There's no evidence that life could ever appear in such environments starting from abiotic conditions, it seems pretty obvious these organisms evolved from more benign habitats.
Like, say, a moon that's crunchy on the outside, but warm on the inside? With lots of organics and water?
I don't think Europa is a perfect haven for biology, but I can easily imagine a race somewhere that has a complete explanation for how they evolved under an ice crust, and that would scoff at the notion of life on the exposed, irradiated, violent surface of a planet...
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="black 0111, default">
I forget the order of the screw flags on the content attribute. The first one is IE, of course. But are the next ones Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, Chrome, Safari?
When light hits a surface, some of it bounces off, and some of it gets absorbed. If you dump a whole lot of light onto a surface, it gets hot enough to burn. That's why giant frickin lasers are non-harmless.
...as the site designer is dim.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network and was not prepared for the advent of HD video and streaming services. The hard fact is that they cannot (and never could) deliver "unlimited" bandwidth.
Oh, of course not -- nobody is saying that they could. So where are the bottlenecks? Are they bottlenecking? Or are they just sore that they're losing 5% of their profits due to increased metered charges from their upstreams?
Superhuman hive-mind? Or menace?
To be fair, they DID say from the beginning that they reserved the right to pick a name themselves regardless of the poll's outcome.
I suspect that Colbert himself played a big role in this decision. He isn't going to drop out of character to say so, but Colbert-the-pundit is a character, and I imagine Colbert-the-person wasn't entirely comfortable saddling an "important" component of the space program (all ISS contempt aside) with the name of a comedy character. Their final decision still gave his character plenty of mileage -- "the treadmill is the really important part, the 'module' is just a box that the treadmill comes in" -- while preserving a bit of what many would perceive as decorum.
I'm guessing the border of international SPACE is probably somewhere above the altitude where there's enough air to support a blimp.
...known as "Notes clients".
...since without them I couldn't achieve this post.
Radical modifications are certainly different from a good meal or a good night's sleep. That's why school our children, instead of simply feeding them and putting them to bed -- we need to make the radical changes in their mental and emotional structures that allow them to read, to write, to interact successfully with others, and to engage effectively with our society and culture.
If surgical or pharmaceutical enhancements allow us to better control our thought processes, to better perceive and respond to our environment, or to better achieve whatever we individually perceive as "success", please stay the hell out of our way as we take advantage of them.
It's a rendering. Good God, are they going to try to charge if we choose to re-render it in a different font size? Are they missing out on millions in revenue by not charging for iTunes music visualizations, which are clearly "performances" of music in a different modality, and surely at least as deserving of copyright protection?
The comet did not disappear with a pop at 0000 GMT.
It may have been a little brighter last night, but the difference was almost certainly imperceptible. It was still an extremely marginal naked-eye object -- you need really dark skies to see it without binoculars or a telescope.
If you're a comet aficionado, it's kind of nice. With a good scope and well-trained eye, you might glimpse some color, and you might be able to make out the tails. If you're set up for astrophotography (with a tracking mount for your camera), you can get some good photos. But if that's the case, you probably didn't need Slashdot to tell you this was coming.
Heck, put a photocell on the front and a bulb on top, and it could BE a nightlight. The "photocell" could actually be a webcam.
Who pays for AP? Newspapers. Who prints most of the AP? Newspapers. Who provides most of the content for AP? Newspapers.
That you think that you not viewing the AP for free online is going to hurt them one tiny little bit, shows how little you know about them.
And you think the print-newspaper ecosystem will remain large enough to support the AP because...?
...my son is the only student named John. With an uncommon last name, it's unlikely he'll ever meet another with exactly the same name. If your surname is "Smith", yeah, it's a tough life.
...measure the building's shadow, and use the like-triangles rule.
If there's going to be temporal logic, I'm going to need more coffee.
Thank God there are Slashdot posters to make vague comments about "forces" and "snapping". Without them, engineers would have to rely on analysis, simulation, and experimentation.
I saw the Sun "go through a layer of clouds" this evening, and its altitude was considerably higher.
Look again at the video, thinking of it as a high-speed sunset. The meteor looked like it was heading more or less straight down, but it was likely heading mostly toward or away from the observer.
I have significant doubt the images are very important. The result may be important, but the images fail.
It's been a long time since I've seen a more underwhelming set of visualizations.
This is a CW laser, for which power and energy are equivalent, in the sense that one watt of power for one second delivers one joule (one watt-second) of energy.
Instead of saying "in any meaningful sense", perhaps I should have said "in the way that you're implying". And instead of saying "all the energy", perhaps you should have said "all the power".
When you say "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", it does strongly imply processes like fluorescence, or phosphorescence, or even heating and black-body radiation. Simple reflection is very different -- the period over which radiation is accumulated before being re-emitted is effectively zero.
Absent higher-order interactions, the important thing is reflective efficiency, which determines the amount of energy that isn't "re-emitted". It's that lost energy that heats things up.
I freely confess that I don't know how significant higher-order interactions are for conventional reflective materials at these power levels.
Low Power Setting Provides nominally 100 watt alignment beam
Article is here.
"Alignment beams" are normally low-power (a few milliwatts) visible beams used to indicate the path of an invisible beam. I guess with this one you'd point the alignment beam, move the glowing/smoking spot to your intended target, then hit the big switch.