The big innovation appears to be very fine control of the liquid hydrogen injectors into the combustion chamber allowing pressurised but gaseous air to be used instead of the liquefied air/oxygen that all previous rocket designs have needed.
From my understanding of the Wikipedia article on the subject, they are using the compressor, a cooler and a special membrane to produce liquid oxygen from the air. This liquid oxygen is then burned in a traditional rocket engine. This would give the vehicle the ability to breathe regular air in the atmosphere, and use LOX while in space. Such a vehicle is, in theory, much lighter than what we have now, due to the lower quantities of LOX required at takeoff.
Let's face it, no major manufacturer is going to decide what technology to use based on storage capacity, it will be based on how restrictive it will be to the end user.
As a former process engineer, I couldn't disagree more. Granted, I work in hardware, not software. A text document is the worst way to communicate to someone without technical knowledge.
Personally, I use as many pictures as possible. A picture can explain something faster and more effectively than any amount of text. Sure, it may take you longer to write, but it will take a lot less time to read. Think about how many people will read this document. How many man hours will you waste reading your document? How does this compare to the amount of time it takes you to add pictures?
I've found that presentation software, like PowerPoint, works best for this. Presentation software usually has all of the tools to manage pictures and add other shapes (arrows, boxes, etc.) to get your point across. Unfortunately, most presentation software isn't printer friendly, so a word processor may be required.
What do labor laws have to do with it? There are still a lot of morons to whom those laws don't apply because they aren't employed because nobody wants to employ them! We dont need as many unskilled jobs as before.
Labor laws have everything to do with it. We will always need unskilled jobs, it's a statistical certainty. There will always be a portion of the population that is simply never be "qualified in something better," because they are simply untrainable and will only be qualified for sweat shop type labor.
The only way I see out of this situation is if all of the other countries in the world begin to develop labor forces with greater skills. At this point our idiots will be just as employable as their idiots and they will all have jobs.
I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about; especially if the building has an air filtration system. Your primary concern is probably going to be ozone, which can stunt plant growth. However, the high levels of CO2 in the air may offset this quite a bit. Carbon monoxide is basically harmless to food. Also keep in mind that motor vehicle exhaust is not nearly as hazardous as it was 30 years ago. Most of it consists of CO2.
In the end, we can use central park as an example of growing plants in a major urban environment. People also live their entire lives breathing the New York City air.
There are too many people, in the USA and abroad, who have zero employable skills.
I disagree. See, 100 years ago, a complete idiot could get a job as a farm hand. Today, we have labor laws and minimum wages. While these laws have increased the standard of living for many Americans, it has eradicated jobs for low skilled individuals. Why should a company hire Lenny for $6.55 per hour + social security in the United States, when they can hire Ling in China for $0.50 per hour?
Unless he's suggesting we return to manual labour. In which case he's solved all our employment problems at the same time and he should be heralded as a genius.
When have we moved away from manual labor? Sure, wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), soybeans, and flax (linseed) can be harvested with a combine, but much of our food is still harvested manually. At the moment there is no automated method to harvest many fruits, nuts, and vegetables. This is the reason why many farms rely on illegal migrant workers and the United States has become reliant on imports from foreign countries.
As a side note, an inventor of a device that can harvest these fruits and vegetables could stand to make a substantial sum of money.
Any concern about the dense air pollution in NYC getting into the food? Doesn't seem like particularly "organic" food when the plants are feeding on car exhaust and cigarette smoke...
I guess you have to be a NASA scientist to know that plants clean the air. (PDF warning)
No, I meant that if every available resource is utilized (recycling, solar energy, wind energy, etc.) the energy created would support a farm about one story tall.
This gigantic thing they are proposing would ship more energy out as food, than it would produce, and have to rely on some external source of energy. In any system, the same amount of energy that goes out, has to come in.
Perhaps this idiot is planning to harness the power of the sun like every other farmer does. Maybe he even has a technology [ecogeek.org] already at his disposal that would make it feasible and cost effective.
How is this informative? There is no way that solar panels or even focusing light is more efficient than simply exposing the plants to the sun naturally. Our current methods of farming are far more efficient. If these skyscraper farms came even close to being as efficient as a regular farm, they would be going up all over the place.
I could go on for hours about how completely unrealistic this bad idea is. These pictures indicate that the architects have little to no idea of how top soil and nutrient cycles work.
Here's one more for ya:
There is no way this thing is self-sustaining.
You see food is energy. Plants convert sunlight into food energy. I don't care if you put solar panels on the roof, and recycle every tiny piece of waste, more energy is going out (as food) than coming in. The only way this thing will work is if a massive external source of energy is used to power it.
The collision of two submarines would actually be unlikely to release vast amounts of radiation, although it could scatter scores of nuclear warheads across the seabed.
As an added bonus, the sea water acts as a neutron moderator. Having nuclear weapons scattered across the ocean floor is perhaps the best place for them. It's the place they are least likely to do any harm.
The thing that bugs me most about Cannon printers is that they sprinkle their Linux drivers all over the internet. I've never found a Cannon Linux driver on Cannon's US website. I have to either go to their Australian website or their Asian one. Can anyone explain this?
I welcome a fake Cannon website, if it organizes their drivers in a logical manner.
The big company isn't small enough to realize a significant return. The small company isn't big enough to invest. In the end, his ideas are discarded and the customer misses out on yet another feature.
You remind me of an idea I had a while back. I called it the Hair Brained Ideas Department. Basically, if someone in the company has an idea, they email their idea to the Hair Brained Ideas Department where they follow up on it.
Such a concept is only viable to a large company, as a small company would not have enough resources to follow up on these ideas.
Now that I think about it, the closest thing to a working example of this is Ubuntu Brainstorm.
I think it's important to define what you are looking for.
Yeah, where I work, people make innovative suggestions all of the time. It's usually management that thinks the ideas are either too far out, or doesn't want to fund development.
In the United States, call signs are three letters plus a prefix letter denoting east(W) or west(K) of the Mississippi river. The type of broadcast on that frequency is denoted after a dash. Therefore the station you are referencing is called WCBV-TV not WCBVTV
The only real news here is that the work is being submitted to the FDA.
Correction: That should be, "The only real news here is that the work is being published by JAMA." I guess being submitted to the FDA was just wishful thinking on my part.
My question is whether they can bypass the damaged brain ares by moving nerves (it seems to me that TFA suggests yes).
What Dr. Kuiken's technique does is analogous to disconnecting a parallel cable from a broken printer and connecting it to a new one. Doing this won't help if the computer is broken.
To do what you are suggesting requires taking the case of the computer (brain surgery), to do some rewiring.
Slashdot Mirror
The big innovation appears to be very fine control of the liquid hydrogen injectors into the combustion chamber allowing pressurised but gaseous air to be used instead of the liquefied air/oxygen that all previous rocket designs have needed.
From my understanding of the Wikipedia article on the subject, they are using the compressor, a cooler and a special membrane to produce liquid oxygen from the air. This liquid oxygen is then burned in a traditional rocket engine. This would give the vehicle the ability to breathe regular air in the atmosphere, and use LOX while in space. Such a vehicle is, in theory, much lighter than what we have now, due to the lower quantities of LOX required at takeoff.
my Holographic Versatile Disk, we'll talk about this. At the moment, it's all vaporware.
Let's face it, no major manufacturer is going to decide what technology to use based on storage capacity, it will be based on how restrictive it will be to the end user.
Yelp succumbed to greed a long time ago, when they implemented Facebook's Beacon.
HTML is better in every way that I can think of.
Except that your average person* cannot write HTML.
* Average person indicates no one here on Slashdot.
As a former process engineer, I couldn't disagree more. Granted, I work in hardware, not software. A text document is the worst way to communicate to someone without technical knowledge.
Personally, I use as many pictures as possible. A picture can explain something faster and more effectively than any amount of text. Sure, it may take you longer to write, but it will take a lot less time to read. Think about how many people will read this document. How many man hours will you waste reading your document? How does this compare to the amount of time it takes you to add pictures?
I've found that presentation software, like PowerPoint, works best for this. Presentation software usually has all of the tools to manage pictures and add other shapes (arrows, boxes, etc.) to get your point across. Unfortunately, most presentation software isn't printer friendly, so a word processor may be required.
What do labor laws have to do with it? There are still a lot of morons to whom those laws don't apply because they aren't employed because nobody wants to employ them! We dont need as many unskilled jobs as before.
Labor laws have everything to do with it. We will always need unskilled jobs, it's a statistical certainty. There will always be a portion of the population that is simply never be "qualified in something better," because they are simply untrainable and will only be qualified for sweat shop type labor.
The only way I see out of this situation is if all of the other countries in the world begin to develop labor forces with greater skills. At this point our idiots will be just as employable as their idiots and they will all have jobs.
I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about; especially if the building has an air filtration system. Your primary concern is probably going to be ozone, which can stunt plant growth. However, the high levels of CO2 in the air may offset this quite a bit. Carbon monoxide is basically harmless to food. Also keep in mind that motor vehicle exhaust is not nearly as hazardous as it was 30 years ago. Most of it consists of CO2.
In the end, we can use central park as an example of growing plants in a major urban environment. People also live their entire lives breathing the New York City air.
There are too many people, in the USA and abroad, who have zero employable skills.
I disagree. See, 100 years ago, a complete idiot could get a job as a farm hand. Today, we have labor laws and minimum wages. While these laws have increased the standard of living for many Americans, it has eradicated jobs for low skilled individuals. Why should a company hire Lenny for $6.55 per hour + social security in the United States, when they can hire Ling in China for $0.50 per hour?
Unless he's suggesting we return to manual labour. In which case he's solved all our employment problems at the same time and he should be heralded as a genius.
When have we moved away from manual labor? Sure, wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), soybeans, and flax (linseed) can be harvested with a combine, but much of our food is still harvested manually. At the moment there is no automated method to harvest many fruits, nuts, and vegetables. This is the reason why many farms rely on illegal migrant workers and the United States has become reliant on imports from foreign countries.
As a side note, an inventor of a device that can harvest these fruits and vegetables could stand to make a substantial sum of money.
Any concern about the dense air pollution in NYC getting into the food? Doesn't seem like particularly "organic" food when the plants are feeding on car exhaust and cigarette smoke...
I guess you have to be a NASA scientist to know that plants clean the air. (PDF warning)
You mean less energy is coming out than going in.
No, I meant that if every available resource is utilized (recycling, solar energy, wind energy, etc.) the energy created would support a farm about one story tall.
This gigantic thing they are proposing would ship more energy out as food, than it would produce, and have to rely on some external source of energy. In any system, the same amount of energy that goes out, has to come in.
Perhaps this idiot is planning to harness the power of the sun like every other farmer does. Maybe he even has a technology [ecogeek.org] already at his disposal that would make it feasible and cost effective.
How is this informative? There is no way that solar panels or even focusing light is more efficient than simply exposing the plants to the sun naturally. Our current methods of farming are far more efficient. If these skyscraper farms came even close to being as efficient as a regular farm, they would be going up all over the place.
I could go on for hours about how completely unrealistic this bad idea is. These pictures indicate that the architects have little to no idea of how top soil and nutrient cycles work.
Here's one more for ya:
There is no way this thing is self-sustaining.
You see food is energy. Plants convert sunlight into food energy. I don't care if you put solar panels on the roof, and recycle every tiny piece of waste, more energy is going out (as food) than coming in. The only way this thing will work is if a massive external source of energy is used to power it.
The collision of two submarines would actually be unlikely to release vast amounts of radiation, although it could scatter scores of nuclear warheads across the seabed.
As an added bonus, the sea water acts as a neutron moderator. Having nuclear weapons scattered across the ocean floor is perhaps the best place for them. It's the place they are least likely to do any harm.
It sounds to me like Soulskill has invented a way to re-create Robot Wars in a more real and more fun way.
I was thinking of getting two launchers and recreating Scorched Earth. To each his own.
The thing that bugs me most about Cannon printers is that they sprinkle their Linux drivers all over the internet. I've never found a Cannon Linux driver on Cannon's US website. I have to either go to their Australian website or their Asian one. Can anyone explain this?
I welcome a fake Cannon website, if it organizes their drivers in a logical manner.
The big company isn't small enough to realize a significant return. The small company isn't big enough to invest. In the end, his ideas are discarded and the customer misses out on yet another feature.
You remind me of an idea I had a while back. I called it the Hair Brained Ideas Department. Basically, if someone in the company has an idea, they email their idea to the Hair Brained Ideas Department where they follow up on it.
Such a concept is only viable to a large company, as a small company would not have enough resources to follow up on these ideas.
Now that I think about it, the closest thing to a working example of this is Ubuntu Brainstorm.
I think it's important to define what you are looking for.
Yeah, where I work, people make innovative suggestions all of the time. It's usually management that thinks the ideas are either too far out, or doesn't want to fund development.
There's no need to "Ask Slashdot" about this. A simple trip to the CDC's website provides everything one needs to know.
so now they have nuclear laptops. WOW and mine still runs solar power.
From the sound of things, they have a whole Beowulf cluster of them!
So who was the bright spark that thought up the idea of representing "east" with a "W"? Now what can we use for "west" - dammit "W" is taken!!
The International Telecommunication Union.
In the United States, call signs are three letters plus a prefix letter denoting east(W) or west(K) of the Mississippi river. The type of broadcast on that frequency is denoted after a dash. Therefore the station you are referencing is called WCBV-TV not WCBVTV
Since they are abandoning the platform, is it for sale? Are they going to open source it? I would not like to see it die.
It will probably end up like the other operating system Palm pulled the plug on.
The only real news here is that the work is being submitted to the FDA.
Correction: That should be, "The only real news here is that the work is being published by JAMA." I guess being submitted to the FDA was just wishful thinking on my part.
My question is whether they can bypass the damaged brain ares by moving nerves (it seems to me that TFA suggests yes).
What Dr. Kuiken's technique does is analogous to disconnecting a parallel cable from a broken printer and connecting it to a new one. Doing this won't help if the computer is broken.
To do what you are suggesting requires taking the case of the computer (brain surgery), to do some rewiring.