This is hardly the first washable keyboard.
The IBM PS/2 keyboard was made to be machine-washable. There are many washable flex keyboards. They're not even expensive.
Most keyboards that don't contain speakers can be washed and rinsed, provided you use de-ionized or distilled water that won't leave solids behind when it evaporates. After all, PC boards usually go through a dishwasher-like cleaning step after soldering.
That's nice, but it reflects Tesla's work in his "dumb RF" period. Tesla's AC work was great, but his concept of RF was bogus. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. What the Wardencliffe tower was supposed to do was use UV lamps to ionize a path up to the ionosphere so a high voltage could be pushed up to it, like a lightning bolt in reverse. Then, having energized the conductive layer, a receiver in another location far away could pick up the signal, or maybe even power. Tesla wrote this up; there's no mystery about this.
It would have been spectacular to watch, but useless as a communications system. The ionosphere isn't a big conductive plate in the sky. Also, the way to make radio work is to make better receivers, not more powerful transmitters. When Marconi first sent signals across the Atlantic, his transmit RF power was about 10KW. Tesla was planning to use megawatts on the transmit side, but didn't have anything new on the receive side.
The Bitcoin ecosystem has always had trouble converting Bitcoins to something more useful. Most of the ways to get money out of the Bitcoin system involve multiple intermediaries, payment rate limits, delays, and finger-pointing between the intermediaries when the system breaks. Mt. Gox finally, as of June 26, 2012, started offering wire transfers out of their system.
Mt. Gox is in Japan, which allows non-banks to operate money transfer services. This is a new law from 2009, and specifically addresses electronic transfers and "server-based electronic money". In Japan, cell phone companies are in the money transfer business in a big way. Companies which take that route have to maintain a bank balance in a real bank representing all the customer assets they're holding. They cannot engage in "fractional reserve" banking, and they're supposed to be audited.
Under this law, companies which offer "server-based electronic money", like gift cards, must have a bank balance of half the value stored. Bitcoin might be considered to qualify, which would reduce the reserves Mt. Gox must have in banks. Half the value of the Bitcoins Mt. Gox holds should be in a bank in a non-Bitcoin currency.
It's not known if Mt. Gox is in compliance. There are supposed to be audits, but no figures have been published.
Many of the early SF writers and editors were trying to change the world, and said so. Asimov. Heinlein, Clarke, Gernsback, and Campbell were all trying to help invent a better future.
I'm surprised that this and walking are such difficult tasks for robots. I would have thought that reverse engineering the hand would be easy once you've got actuators working. And the human gait has been observed to death and yet we can barely get the robots to walk. It's amazing that these structures we have working examples of cannot be mimiced yet in this day and age. Working consciousness, computer vision, anything that involves some sort of understanding on the part of the machine - I get. But a physical thing like the hand or the human gait? Both seem really well understood.
But I guess they apparently aren't.
Locomotion is reasonably well understood now, but that took a long time. The posting above illustrates one of the major misconceptions. Locomotion is not about gaits. For over a century, starting when Muybridge took the first movie, people did gait studies and obsessed on footfall patterns. That's all wrong.
The first big breakthrough was when Raibert built a self-balancing one-legged hopper. With one leg, there aren't many gait options, and balance dominates the problem. Basic balance on the flat is 1) when in contact with the ground, level the body, and 2) when in the air, position the foot for a landing at the point that will result in zero change in speed. Displace the landing point slightly to accelerate or decelerate.
On the flat, it's all about balance. Once you get off flat surfaces, traction control starts to dominate the problem. I did some work on that. It's like ABS for feet; the robot must keep side forces below the break-loose point.
Once you have basic traction and balance, gait is an emergent behavior. Which foot can most usefully achieve the traction and balance goals? (With more than 4 legs, there are many options.) When something is maneuvering fast or recovering from an upset, there's concept of repetitive "gait". It's more of an asset management problem. Look at some of the Big Dog videos in detail to see this.
Robot manipulation has been underestimated for decades, too. McCarthy once thought it was going to be a summer project to program a robot to assemble a Heathkit TV set kit. Big underestimation. That's still beyond the state of the art. (Stanford actually bought the TV set kit, which was finally assembled by some student and put in the CS department lounge.)
Robots manipulate all sort of useful things in controlled environments, but manipulation in uncontrolled environments is still very poor. Willow Robotics has demonstrated towel and sock folding, which is cutting-edge work. The DARPA ARM program, not so much.
Progress is picking up now that enormous compute resources can be devoted to the problem. It will pick up further when a simulator good enough to debug in is developed. DARPA is funding Willow Garage to upgrade Gazebo to do that. I suspect that the physics engine Gazebo uses is not up to the job, but that can be fixed by applying enough money.
Money is important here. We're now at the point where throwing money at robotics produces real progress. That wasn't true 20 years ago, when NASA blew something like $100 million on the Flight Telerobotic Servicer and got zip.
The big problem with ads is that sites keep increasing the number of ads per page or per unit time until the number of users drops off substantially. CBS actually admitted that they cranked up the number of commercials on their on-line shows until the usage started to drop.
There are limits to this, as Myspace found out the hard way. At some point, users revolt and go elsewhere. Facebook seems to be following Myspace in that regard, as "sponsored stories" and larger ads chew up more of the screen. Google started with small blocks of ads on the right of search results, but now there are ads at the right, top, and bottom of search results.
As a counter to that, I did Ad LImiter, which is a reaction to Google and Bing putting too many ads and paid results on search results. You get to select how many ads you want to see per page. The default is 1. You can set it to zero, but one Google ad is often useful. Think of it as moderation, applied to advertisers.
I'd like to see more tools like that. It would induce advertisers to produce better, more relevant ads, if they were competing against other ads for some criterion beneficial to the user. Google selects the ads to show based on an algorithm designed to optimize Google's revenue. This is not necessarily optimal for either user or advertiser.
There's already BitCard, from "Global Standard Bank" They're not a real bank. They used to have pictures of their supposed building and offices in Montreal, which turned out to be a Photoshopped picture of a building on the US west cost, with a fake sign added, and a picture of a bank interior in Florida. They're not registered with Canadian banking authorities.
Except for the battery life problem, this would be OK. Few machines today ever have their hardware upgraded. Even for desktop machines, 80% are never opened after they leave the factory.
Apple uses limited battery life as a way to force users to upgrade. If they're going to make a "sealed unit", they should get rid of the connectors, use inductive charging and radios for everything, and make it watertight.
California in the 1970s had Pacific Southwest Airways, which flew only in California and was very informal. They had flights every hour on most routes. No reservations. I'd park next to the San Jose terminal, about 100 feet from the building, and walk up to the gate, where there was a PSA attendant with a cash register. A flight to LA was about $13. The register receipt was the boarding pass, and the waiting area was behind the cash register. After a while, a 727 would pull up, they'd lower the built-in stairs, and everyone would get on. It was all so simple.
PSA was famous for painting a smile on the front of their aircraft, and for theirstewardesses. They really did wear red boots and miniskirts, those are real PSA stewardesses, not models, and the women who did that job were fiercely proud of their airline.
US oil production not only peaked in 1970, it's about half of what it was then.
Texas (!) is a net oil importer.
World oil production has been more or less flat since 2005, despite a price increase from $20/bbl to $100/bbl.
World natural gas production is up, and US natural gas production is way up. Not clear how long that can continue. Gas wells can be pumped out faster than oil wells, and production drops off rapidly towards the end. Oil wells slow down more gradually, ending up as "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl/day each. The US has about 400,000 of those; it adds up.
It's possible to be raped by someone you previously had consensual sex with.
Yes. It's quite a bit harder to make such a distinction when the alleged occurrence happens the same night, without having even left the bed yet from the former undisputed consensual liaison. I believe that comes close to the colloquial trope "lovemaking session".
Right. The legal concept of "post-coital rape" is quite new. Some countries and a few US states recognize it, but most do not.
No. Facebook and Google are monetized through advertising. Amazon is monetized through retail sales. There's a big difference.
One big difference is that mobile is a win for Amazon. Shopping by mobile works just fine and is popular. Facebook is struggling with the painful fact that nobody really wants to look at their irrelevant ads when catching up on their friends. On small screens, there's no room for that crap. Google has the advantage that when people are looking for products, they're receptive to ads about such products, so mobile doesn't hit them as hard. (AdSense, Google ads on other sites, now 30% of Google's business, may decline because of this.)
All the ad-based companies are competing with each other for a fixed pot of ad revenue. Amazon's competition is the entire retail sector, and, having conquered the book industry, they're now taking on other sectors of retail.
The cell phone system itself doesn't look in the user data header. It's in the text area, and an in-band extension to SMS. Many programmable phones let applications send whatever they want in the user data header.
This is only a problem for phones and SMS gateways dumb enough to believe any ID information in the user data header. Now if Apple displays the source in the user data header in place of the telco-provided source, they're doing it wrong.
Used in a different way, this can be fun. See Necomimi ears. These are cosplay ears which are controlled by a CPU that's reading basic brain activity. They swing up to the "pricked" position when brain activity indicates the wearer has their active attention on something, and slowly droop if the wearer isn't doing much.
These were sold at Fanme 2012. If you call out the wearer's name, or their phone rings, the ears prick up. There are reports that people playing video games have their Necomimi ears prick up when they're doing a level, and the ears relax when they finish.
Worry about bandwidth, not content. Find some way to throttle video streams based on bandwidth. That will discourage watching porno and videos, and keep the upstream link from becoming choked.
Both optical media and magnetic media are essentially immune to solar flares. Hard drive electronics may be damaged, but the data will still be on the platters.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
Magnetic tape is not affected by even intense gamma radiation. NIST totally settled that issue decades ago by lowering a recorded reel of 3/4" computer tape into the gamma ray pool of their nuclear reactor in Gaithersburg, MD, and leaving it there for 45 minutes. It then read back fine. Heat is a big threat to magnetic tape, though.
Sorry, but that example doesn't work because it's a postdoc position, not a permanent job.
The whole "postdoc" thing is mostly a scam. Especially in this case. Someone with a PhD in computer science or aerospace is already more than qualified for a real job. If that "postdoc" position meant entry to the tenure track for a professorship, it might be worthwhile. But it doesn't. It's a staff position for a DARPA competition for which real companies are also competing.
Here's a cool job:
Whole-Body Motion Planning and Locomotion in Rough Terrains. This is to develop control software for the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. University of Texas at Austin (but really on site at NASA Houston)
The ideal candidate should have a PhD in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or related fields. Record of implementation and testing experiments on real robotic systems is required. She/he should be highly familiar with robotics theory, including motion planning, kinematics, dynamics, control, and linear dynamical systems. She/he should be proficient in software development including, algorithms, dynamic simulations, object oriented programming, and realtime Linux applications. High expertise in C++ is required. Proficiency in Python and Matlab is also desired. Experience developing software using GIT revision control or a similar tool is required.
This is just a small test vehicle. It's to answer the question "How do we make a scramjet that actually works"? There have been scramjet projects since the 1950s, but only in the last 10 years has there been much success. The problems are huge.
There's some hope that this might eventually lead to launch vehicles that are air-breathing up to Mach 15 or so, allowing a bigger payload fraction for the vehicle size. At one time, it was hoped this might bring down launch costs, but probably not.
As a weapon system, it's an awfully expensive way to put one non-nuclear bomb on target.
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly the first washable keyboard. The IBM PS/2 keyboard was made to be machine-washable. There are many washable flex keyboards. They're not even expensive.
Most keyboards that don't contain speakers can be washed and rinsed, provided you use de-ionized or distilled water that won't leave solids behind when it evaporates. After all, PC boards usually go through a dishwasher-like cleaning step after soldering.
That's nice, but it reflects Tesla's work in his "dumb RF" period. Tesla's AC work was great, but his concept of RF was bogus. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. What the Wardencliffe tower was supposed to do was use UV lamps to ionize a path up to the ionosphere so a high voltage could be pushed up to it, like a lightning bolt in reverse. Then, having energized the conductive layer, a receiver in another location far away could pick up the signal, or maybe even power. Tesla wrote this up; there's no mystery about this.
It would have been spectacular to watch, but useless as a communications system. The ionosphere isn't a big conductive plate in the sky. Also, the way to make radio work is to make better receivers, not more powerful transmitters. When Marconi first sent signals across the Atlantic, his transmit RF power was about 10KW. Tesla was planning to use megawatts on the transmit side, but didn't have anything new on the receive side.
The Bitcoin ecosystem has always had trouble converting Bitcoins to something more useful. Most of the ways to get money out of the Bitcoin system involve multiple intermediaries, payment rate limits, delays, and finger-pointing between the intermediaries when the system breaks. Mt. Gox finally, as of June 26, 2012, started offering wire transfers out of their system.
Mt. Gox is in Japan, which allows non-banks to operate money transfer services. This is a new law from 2009, and specifically addresses electronic transfers and "server-based electronic money". In Japan, cell phone companies are in the money transfer business in a big way. Companies which take that route have to maintain a bank balance in a real bank representing all the customer assets they're holding. They cannot engage in "fractional reserve" banking, and they're supposed to be audited.
Under this law, companies which offer "server-based electronic money", like gift cards, must have a bank balance of half the value stored. Bitcoin might be considered to qualify, which would reduce the reserves Mt. Gox must have in banks. Half the value of the Bitcoins Mt. Gox holds should be in a bank in a non-Bitcoin currency.
It's not known if Mt. Gox is in compliance. There are supposed to be audits, but no figures have been published.
Many of the early SF writers and editors were trying to change the world, and said so. Asimov. Heinlein, Clarke, Gernsback, and Campbell were all trying to help invent a better future.
Stephenson mostly cranks out dystopias.
(Sorry, "no concept of repetitive gait.")
I'm surprised that this and walking are such difficult tasks for robots. I would have thought that reverse engineering the hand would be easy once you've got actuators working. And the human gait has been observed to death and yet we can barely get the robots to walk. It's amazing that these structures we have working examples of cannot be mimiced yet in this day and age. Working consciousness, computer vision, anything that involves some sort of understanding on the part of the machine - I get. But a physical thing like the hand or the human gait? Both seem really well understood.
But I guess they apparently aren't.
Locomotion is reasonably well understood now, but that took a long time. The posting above illustrates one of the major misconceptions. Locomotion is not about gaits. For over a century, starting when Muybridge took the first movie, people did gait studies and obsessed on footfall patterns. That's all wrong.
The first big breakthrough was when Raibert built a self-balancing one-legged hopper. With one leg, there aren't many gait options, and balance dominates the problem. Basic balance on the flat is 1) when in contact with the ground, level the body, and 2) when in the air, position the foot for a landing at the point that will result in zero change in speed. Displace the landing point slightly to accelerate or decelerate.
On the flat, it's all about balance. Once you get off flat surfaces, traction control starts to dominate the problem. I did some work on that. It's like ABS for feet; the robot must keep side forces below the break-loose point.
Once you have basic traction and balance, gait is an emergent behavior. Which foot can most usefully achieve the traction and balance goals? (With more than 4 legs, there are many options.) When something is maneuvering fast or recovering from an upset, there's concept of repetitive "gait". It's more of an asset management problem. Look at some of the Big Dog videos in detail to see this.
Robot manipulation has been underestimated for decades, too. McCarthy once thought it was going to be a summer project to program a robot to assemble a Heathkit TV set kit. Big underestimation. That's still beyond the state of the art. (Stanford actually bought the TV set kit, which was finally assembled by some student and put in the CS department lounge.)
Robots manipulate all sort of useful things in controlled environments, but manipulation in uncontrolled environments is still very poor. Willow Robotics has demonstrated towel and sock folding, which is cutting-edge work. The DARPA ARM program, not so much.
Progress is picking up now that enormous compute resources can be devoted to the problem. It will pick up further when a simulator good enough to debug in is developed. DARPA is funding Willow Garage to upgrade Gazebo to do that. I suspect that the physics engine Gazebo uses is not up to the job, but that can be fixed by applying enough money.
Money is important here. We're now at the point where throwing money at robotics produces real progress. That wasn't true 20 years ago, when NASA blew something like $100 million on the Flight Telerobotic Servicer and got zip.
The big problem with ads is that sites keep increasing the number of ads per page or per unit time until the number of users drops off substantially. CBS actually admitted that they cranked up the number of commercials on their on-line shows until the usage started to drop.
There are limits to this, as Myspace found out the hard way. At some point, users revolt and go elsewhere. Facebook seems to be following Myspace in that regard, as "sponsored stories" and larger ads chew up more of the screen. Google started with small blocks of ads on the right of search results, but now there are ads at the right, top, and bottom of search results.
As a counter to that, I did Ad LImiter, which is a reaction to Google and Bing putting too many ads and paid results on search results. You get to select how many ads you want to see per page. The default is 1. You can set it to zero, but one Google ad is often useful. Think of it as moderation, applied to advertisers.
I'd like to see more tools like that. It would induce advertisers to produce better, more relevant ads, if they were competing against other ads for some criterion beneficial to the user. Google selects the ads to show based on an algorithm designed to optimize Google's revenue. This is not necessarily optimal for either user or advertiser.
There's already BitCard, from "Global Standard Bank" They're not a real bank. They used to have pictures of their supposed building and offices in Montreal, which turned out to be a Photoshopped picture of a building on the US west cost, with a fake sign added, and a picture of a bank interior in Florida. They're not registered with Canadian banking authorities.
Here's the discussion on Bitcoin forums about them.
As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.
Except for the battery life problem, this would be OK. Few machines today ever have their hardware upgraded. Even for desktop machines, 80% are never opened after they leave the factory.
Apple uses limited battery life as a way to force users to upgrade. If they're going to make a "sealed unit", they should get rid of the connectors, use inductive charging and radios for everything, and make it watertight.
California in the 1970s had Pacific Southwest Airways, which flew only in California and was very informal. They had flights every hour on most routes. No reservations. I'd park next to the San Jose terminal, about 100 feet from the building, and walk up to the gate, where there was a PSA attendant with a cash register. A flight to LA was about $13. The register receipt was the boarding pass, and the waiting area was behind the cash register. After a while, a 727 would pull up, they'd lower the built-in stairs, and everyone would get on. It was all so simple.
PSA was famous for painting a smile on the front of their aircraft, and for their stewardesses. They really did wear red boots and miniskirts, those are real PSA stewardesses, not models, and the women who did that job were fiercely proud of their airline.
US oil production not only peaked in 1970, it's about half of what it was then. Texas (!) is a net oil importer. World oil production has been more or less flat since 2005, despite a price increase from $20/bbl to $100/bbl.
World natural gas production is up, and US natural gas production is way up. Not clear how long that can continue. Gas wells can be pumped out faster than oil wells, and production drops off rapidly towards the end. Oil wells slow down more gradually, ending up as "stripper wells", producing less than 10 bbl/day each. The US has about 400,000 of those; it adds up.
It's possible to be raped by someone you previously had consensual sex with.
Yes. It's quite a bit harder to make such a distinction when the alleged occurrence happens the same night, without having even left the bed yet from the former undisputed consensual liaison. I believe that comes close to the colloquial trope "lovemaking session".
Right. The legal concept of "post-coital rape" is quite new. Some countries and a few US states recognize it, but most do not.
Everything is monetized through advertising
No. Facebook and Google are monetized through advertising. Amazon is monetized through retail sales. There's a big difference.
One big difference is that mobile is a win for Amazon. Shopping by mobile works just fine and is popular. Facebook is struggling with the painful fact that nobody really wants to look at their irrelevant ads when catching up on their friends. On small screens, there's no room for that crap. Google has the advantage that when people are looking for products, they're receptive to ads about such products, so mobile doesn't hit them as hard. (AdSense, Google ads on other sites, now 30% of Google's business, may decline because of this.)
All the ad-based companies are competing with each other for a fixed pot of ad revenue. Amazon's competition is the entire retail sector, and, having conquered the book industry, they're now taking on other sectors of retail.
This is known as the "first wall" problem in fusion reactors. It's good to hear there's been progress.
It's discouraging to hear how slow progress is on ITER.
Mod parent up. That appears to be exactly what happened.
Expect employee lawsuits over this.
The cell phone system itself doesn't look in the user data header. It's in the text area, and an in-band extension to SMS. Many programmable phones let applications send whatever they want in the user data header.
This is only a problem for phones and SMS gateways dumb enough to believe any ID information in the user data header. Now if Apple displays the source in the user data header in place of the telco-provided source, they're doing it wrong.
Used in a different way, this can be fun. See Necomimi ears. These are cosplay ears which are controlled by a CPU that's reading basic brain activity. They swing up to the "pricked" position when brain activity indicates the wearer has their active attention on something, and slowly droop if the wearer isn't doing much.
These were sold at Fanme 2012. If you call out the wearer's name, or their phone rings, the ears prick up. There are reports that people playing video games have their Necomimi ears prick up when they're doing a level, and the ears relax when they finish.
I R on Sun, first manned mission to the Sun.
Worry about bandwidth, not content. Find some way to throttle video streams based on bandwidth. That will discourage watching porno and videos, and keep the upstream link from becoming choked.
Both optical media and magnetic media are essentially immune to solar flares. Hard drive electronics may be damaged, but the data will still be on the platters.
Magnetic tape is hard to erase; it takes a big magnet within inches of the tape. Degaussing most modern tape cartridges takes a field strength above 1000 gauss. The earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss. It varies during solar flares and other events, but the numbers are all below 1 gauss. MRI scanners are in the 500 gauss range, and at those field strengths, metal objects become projectiles.
Magnetic tape is not affected by even intense gamma radiation. NIST totally settled that issue decades ago by lowering a recorded reel of 3/4" computer tape into the gamma ray pool of their nuclear reactor in Gaithersburg, MD, and leaving it there for 45 minutes. It then read back fine. Heat is a big threat to magnetic tape, though.
Apple itself has a prior art problem. Look at the Apple Newton, designed in 1987, alongside an iPhone. That was more than 20 years ago, so any patents have expired.
Sorry, but that example doesn't work because it's a postdoc position, not a permanent job.
The whole "postdoc" thing is mostly a scam. Especially in this case. Someone with a PhD in computer science or aerospace is already more than qualified for a real job. If that "postdoc" position meant entry to the tenure track for a professorship, it might be worthwhile. But it doesn't. It's a staff position for a DARPA competition for which real companies are also competing.
Here's a cool job: Whole-Body Motion Planning and Locomotion in Rough Terrains. This is to develop control software for the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. University of Texas at Austin (but really on site at NASA Houston)
The ideal candidate should have a PhD in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or related fields. Record of implementation and testing experiments on real robotic systems is required. She/he should be highly familiar with robotics theory, including motion planning, kinematics, dynamics, control, and linear dynamical systems. She/he should be proficient in software development including, algorithms, dynamic simulations, object oriented programming, and realtime Linux applications. High expertise in C++ is required. Proficiency in Python and Matlab is also desired. Experience developing software using GIT revision control or a similar tool is required.
Pays $55K.
I thought the QR code thing in advertising was over. I saw more QR codes two years ago than now.
This is just a small test vehicle. It's to answer the question "How do we make a scramjet that actually works"? There have been scramjet projects since the 1950s, but only in the last 10 years has there been much success. The problems are huge.
There's some hope that this might eventually lead to launch vehicles that are air-breathing up to Mach 15 or so, allowing a bigger payload fraction for the vehicle size. At one time, it was hoped this might bring down launch costs, but probably not.
As a weapon system, it's an awfully expensive way to put one non-nuclear bomb on target.