How do you print a fully assembled item like that without the parts sticking together? Does it use some kind of dissolvable substance between the parts that is washed away afterwards?
We might use some system that lets most of the sun's rays pass through but that blocks the infrared from getting back out. You know, like a greenhouse. Maybe we could produce some kind of gas that has these properties?
CD-R/DVD-R has a shelf life of about 5 to 10 years. Beyond that, your data will probably still be readable but it's going to become hit-or-miss. Factory-stamped DVDs do have a much longer shelf life, but that's not really relevant here.
A more accurate headline would have been "Will this nanomaterial be the future of hard drives?". Then I would have been able to apply Betteridge's law and avoid wasting time reading the article.
If they install a physical mailbox where people can post letters which some employee then delivers to the post office, are they allowed to read the mail that people put into it?
is the kid 'patented' and therefore owned by a corporation or other entity?
Don't give them any ideas. O, well, who am I kidding, of course they will have thought of that already. I bet they'll pull a Monsanto on any grandchildren.
Well, they do push up the price of bitcoins so that miners can reap bigger rewards (same amount of bitcoins worth more money). This attracts more miners and makes the network more robust. Right? Who would buy a mining machine if it cost more than what it would yield?
Bitcoins are actually much easier to trace than cash. Every transaction is recorded in the block chain which is public for anyone to see. I bet intelligence agencies absolutely love bitcoin and are actively using it to trace connections between criminals all over the world.
There are ways to anonymise transactions using third party services who receive bitcoins from many different sources and return the money in randomised, seemingly unrelated transactions, but that requires trusting those services. Basically, they do money laundering just like similar laundering services for other currencies. And if you received money from them, you might have some explaining to do when law enforcement one day asks you where you got all those bitcoins. Just like you might have to explain where you got the bundle of banknotes you used to pay for your new house.
So yes, it is possible to launder bitcoins and render them very hard to trace, just like it's possible to launder other currencies, but I wouldn't call bitcoin untraceable by design. If anything, it's more traceable.
based on untested (and obviously flawed) protocols and trust in a completely unregulated private company in another country (or even our own).
The whole point of BitCoin is that you don't have to trust some private company. Sure, the exchanges are companies, and when you wire money to an exchange to buy bitcoins, you need to trust that exchange and may lose money if that exchange happened to be Mt. Gox, but once you take the bitcoins out of the exchange, you are not dependent on any company. The system is run by miners all over the world, and no single miner can control the network. You need at least half the mining power of the entire network to even have a shot at fooling the system.
Of course you can't, at this time, compare the solidity of bicoin to that of the euro or dollar, but I would certainly prefer it over the currency of certain countries in South America or Africa. There too, the value of the currency is determined by how much people are willing to accept it for. If trust in the country is lost, the currency goes down the drain and people have to pay for bread with wheelbarrows full of banknotes. There's really no fundamental difference.
Personally I only invested an amount I can afford to lose, and consider it a very risky investment with a potentially huge reward. Obviously at this stage it would be utterly stupid to put your life's savings into it. If BitCoin fails, it will indeed have been a pyramid scheme duping people into losing money. If it succeeds, it will be obvious that this was no pyramid scheme and people who missed out will kick themselves for not seeing the obvious potential. Hindsight will tell which it will be.
Sadly though, most european airports are exactly the same. I'm a pilot, and I've actually seen them take a bottle of after shave from a captain, not even apologising for their idiocy, as if it was the most normal and logical thing in the world. Never mind the giant crash axe behind the first officer's seat, we must not allow them to bring nail clippers on board! Back when I was flying private jets, they wanted to pass my passengers' cat through the X-ray machine. They might try to hijack their own private plane with a weapon hidden in the plastic cat container! We had to take the cat out, fortunately it didn't run away or they would no doubt have closed the airport. Idiots.
Actually they keep it a secret because that way they can catch more terrorists. If the terrorists would know how many of their colleagues have failed, they would stop trying and therefore wouldn't get caught by the TSA!
Only $35 per user, that's cheap! RIght? And they won't change a thing, no ads, no collection of personal information, nada! At the current subscription rate of 99 cents per year, they'll recover their investment in only... errr.. wait, there must be a mistake here somewhere.
How about a free e-mail solution without ads, without mandatory spam filtering, accessible whichever way you like (pop, imap,...), fully configurable, etc...
Then wait for it to get a couple of hundred million users and sell it to Google or FaceBook for many times your initial investment. Who will then proceed to add ads, restrict functionality, etc...
OK, what's next then?
O, by then Whatsapp has been merged into FaceBook, so you can roll out a new messenger app without ads that doesn't collect your private information. You know, like Whatsapp before FaceBook bought it and promised not to change it. Then wait for it to get a couple of hundred million users...
So this is how you make big bucks on the internet nowadays:
1. Launch a service that does something people really want without any of the annoyances of other similar services (ads, privacy intrusions,...) and without trying to make much money. Maybe even lose money, who cares. 2. Get lots of users who appreciate the fact that somebody is finally catering to their needs without constantly trying to milk them for information or bombard them with ads. 3. Sell to some big company like FaceBook for billions of dollars, which then proceeds to add the usual annoyances like ads and privacy intrusions after having promised not to do so. 4. Goto 1.
Rude awakening, you say? I bet they're just yelling "Profit!"
As to the conversation, the previous poster claim that there was a motor at each wheel, which is inefficient.
Inefficient? The Mercedes SLS AMG electric has four engines, which simplifies construction quite a bit and offers new possibilities for traction and stability control (torque vectoring) that apparently work quite well.
You get dead reckoning by connecting to some sort of feedback device, namely the wheel sensors or odometer in the vehicle. Android phones don't have a connection to your car's computer; they work entirely off of GPS signals.
In theory, if the accellerometers and gyroscopes were precise enough, they could use those. Airplanes were already using inertial reference systems way before GPS was invented. Initialise the box with a starting position while standing still, and it will keep track of where you are using just gyroscopes and accellerometers. Taking the rotation of the earth into account and all.
Unfortunately, though, accellerometers in even today's newest phones are nowhere near precise enough for that purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you print a fully assembled item like that without the parts sticking together? Does it use some kind of dissolvable substance between the parts that is washed away afterwards?
We might use some system that lets most of the sun's rays pass through but that blocks the infrared from getting back out. You know, like a greenhouse. Maybe we could produce some kind of gas that has these properties?
You mean Australians have terrorists as pets and in zoos?
CD-R/DVD-R has a shelf life of about 5 to 10 years. Beyond that, your data will probably still be readable but it's going to become hit-or-miss. Factory-stamped DVDs do have a much longer shelf life, but that's not really relevant here.
Just have a factory stamp out your backups then.
A more accurate headline would have been "Will this nanomaterial be the future of hard drives?". Then I would have been able to apply Betteridge's law and avoid wasting time reading the article.
If they install a physical mailbox where people can post letters which some employee then delivers to the post office, are they allowed to read the mail that people put into it?
is the kid 'patented' and therefore owned by a corporation or other entity?
Don't give them any ideas. O, well, who am I kidding, of course they will have thought of that already. I bet they'll pull a Monsanto on any grandchildren.
Well, they do push up the price of bitcoins so that miners can reap bigger rewards (same amount of bitcoins worth more money). This attracts more miners and makes the network more robust. Right? Who would buy a mining machine if it cost more than what it would yield?
Bitcoins are actually much easier to trace than cash. Every transaction is recorded in the block chain which is public for anyone to see. I bet intelligence agencies absolutely love bitcoin and are actively using it to trace connections between criminals all over the world.
There are ways to anonymise transactions using third party services who receive bitcoins from many different sources and return the money in randomised, seemingly unrelated transactions, but that requires trusting those services. Basically, they do money laundering just like similar laundering services for other currencies. And if you received money from them, you might have some explaining to do when law enforcement one day asks you where you got all those bitcoins. Just like you might have to explain where you got the bundle of banknotes you used to pay for your new house.
So yes, it is possible to launder bitcoins and render them very hard to trace, just like it's possible to launder other currencies, but I wouldn't call bitcoin untraceable by design. If anything, it's more traceable.
based on untested (and obviously flawed) protocols and trust in a completely unregulated private company in another country (or even our own).
The whole point of BitCoin is that you don't have to trust some private company. Sure, the exchanges are companies, and when you wire money to an exchange to buy bitcoins, you need to trust that exchange and may lose money if that exchange happened to be Mt. Gox, but once you take the bitcoins out of the exchange, you are not dependent on any company. The system is run by miners all over the world, and no single miner can control the network. You need at least half the mining power of the entire network to even have a shot at fooling the system.
Of course you can't, at this time, compare the solidity of bicoin to that of the euro or dollar, but I would certainly prefer it over the currency of certain countries in South America or Africa. There too, the value of the currency is determined by how much people are willing to accept it for. If trust in the country is lost, the currency goes down the drain and people have to pay for bread with wheelbarrows full of banknotes. There's really no fundamental difference.
Personally I only invested an amount I can afford to lose, and consider it a very risky investment with a potentially huge reward. Obviously at this stage it would be utterly stupid to put your life's savings into it. If BitCoin fails, it will indeed have been a pyramid scheme duping people into losing money. If it succeeds, it will be obvious that this was no pyramid scheme and people who missed out will kick themselves for not seeing the obvious potential. Hindsight will tell which it will be.
The alleged goal, yes. Their actual goal? Who knows what that is or if they even have one.
Sadly though, most european airports are exactly the same. I'm a pilot, and I've actually seen them take a bottle of after shave from a captain, not even apologising for their idiocy, as if it was the most normal and logical thing in the world. Never mind the giant crash axe behind the first officer's seat, we must not allow them to bring nail clippers on board! Back when I was flying private jets, they wanted to pass my passengers' cat through the X-ray machine. They might try to hijack their own private plane with a weapon hidden in the plastic cat container! We had to take the cat out, fortunately it didn't run away or they would no doubt have closed the airport. Idiots.
Actually they keep it a secret because that way they can catch more terrorists. If the terrorists would know how many of their colleagues have failed, they would stop trying and therefore wouldn't get caught by the TSA!
I wish everyone would just go back to the original name "alumium" and end this tomayto/tomahto rubbish once and for all.
I've always wondered why they conficate nail files at the security checkpoint. Thanks for clearing that up!
Yeah, it's quite difficult, with the accent and all.
Only $35 per user, that's cheap! RIght? And they won't change a thing, no ads, no collection of personal information, nada! At the current subscription rate of 99 cents per year, they'll recover their investment in only... errr.. wait, there must be a mistake here somewhere.
How about a free e-mail solution without ads, without mandatory spam filtering, accessible whichever way you like (pop, imap,...), fully configurable, etc...
Then wait for it to get a couple of hundred million users and sell it to Google or FaceBook for many times your initial investment. Who will then proceed to add ads, restrict functionality, etc...
OK, what's next then?
O, by then Whatsapp has been merged into FaceBook, so you can roll out a new messenger app without ads that doesn't collect your private information. You know, like Whatsapp before FaceBook bought it and promised not to change it. Then wait for it to get a couple of hundred million users...
So this is how you make big bucks on the internet nowadays:
1. Launch a service that does something people really want without any of the annoyances of other similar services (ads, privacy intrusions,...) and without trying to make much money. Maybe even lose money, who cares.
2. Get lots of users who appreciate the fact that somebody is finally catering to their needs without constantly trying to milk them for information or bombard them with ads.
3. Sell to some big company like FaceBook for billions of dollars, which then proceeds to add the usual annoyances like ads and privacy intrusions after having promised not to do so.
4. Goto 1.
Rude awakening, you say? I bet they're just yelling "Profit!"
Nasa found cops on Mars. Still no sign of intelligent life, though.
As to the conversation, the previous poster claim that there was a motor at each wheel, which is inefficient.
Inefficient? The Mercedes SLS AMG electric has four engines, which simplifies construction quite a bit and offers new possibilities for traction and stability control (torque vectoring) that apparently work quite well.
Well, somebody made a game called "Twittles" many years ago, and they were forced to change the name. The new name they picked was... Candy Crisis.
I'm actually posting this to see IF they managed to support unicode in comments. If they didn't, that would be beyond unbelievable.
So let's see how this preview turned out...
What? The symbols all disappeared?!?!?!?!?!
OK, I'm joining the beta complainers now.
Grow up and discuss the news instead of bitching about people complaining about the beta.
You get dead reckoning by connecting to some sort of feedback device, namely the wheel sensors or odometer in the vehicle. Android phones don't have a connection to your car's computer; they work entirely off of GPS signals.
In theory, if the accellerometers and gyroscopes were precise enough, they could use those. Airplanes were already using inertial reference systems way before GPS was invented. Initialise the box with a starting position while standing still, and it will keep track of where you are using just gyroscopes and accellerometers. Taking the rotation of the earth into account and all.
Unfortunately, though, accellerometers in even today's newest phones are nowhere near precise enough for that purpose.