I am no expert on anything related to wireless and broadband services, but something about this report seems a bit over-hyped, or am I missing something?
5G promises higher bandwidth and speed, but it does it also extend range? Does this a allow rancher's or farmer's cow's to communicate over a 50 mile ranch because 4G didn't do it? And if it's just a 50 acre spread with cell towers nearby, how does 5G help? It sounds like the applications, "Bessie phone home" to report that she hooked up to Mr. Milky is a rather low bandwidth need. Your old 2400 baud modem would probably suffice. If the intent is to download live video from a 500 head herd at once, maybe, or if you plan to download video so Bessie can watch the latest Star Wars movies and sour the milk, okay. But otherwise I do not understand how 5G is any better for this than any other telemetry technology of the past 15 years?
Or is this just a slow news day or marketing cow manure? Can someone please enlighten me.
This story made me think of Flight of the Phoenix, a 1965 film starring Jimmy Stewart (there is also a bad remake from 2004). A cargo plane is lost in the Sahara after being downed by a sandstorm. The story is all about how the crew and passengers find a way out. Key to this is that the plane, a Fairchild C-82, has enough undamaged parts that, with the tools they have, they can build a new aircraft sufficient to fly them out. It's a fun movie. The brains behind the rebuild is Dorfmann (played by Hardy Krüger) who works as an aeronautical designer and engineer. Only near the end of the film is it learned that he works for a toy company building motorized flying models rather than big commercial aircraft. Needless to say, that despite the confrontational moments that that reveal brings, the new plane flies, and all are saved, and Dorfmann is a redeemed hero.
For most of motorized aviation history, the distinction between toys and "real planes" was obvious, and it is easy to understand how Dorfmann's ideas would have been derided. But today, the line seems very blurry. In this article, toy airplanes are serving legitimate commercial roles as a means of post and delivery. Larger scale versions of such drone-derived aircraft are starting to show up as personal flying cars, flying boats, military vehicles, law enforcement purposes, research and science, and media and the arts.
The distinction is gone. It used to be that a top of the line IBM 360 took up a giant room with massive electrical and cooling overhead to deliver far less than a smart phone in your pocket can do these days. Back when planes were "big iron", tiny radio controlled models were just toys. Now, they might just revolutionize the whole commercial and military airspace.
Thanks for the thoughtful remark, makes sense. I too am no expert, but your remarks make me wonder if there is a different way to make the defensive AI. Rather than training the defensive AI to recognize each style of forgery, can the defensive AI be better trained than the adversarial one, even on the original dataset or an expanded superset of it, such that it knows that the forgery simply isn't very realistic, that the first AI was simply too amateurish?
Yes, the CEO is responsible. That does not mean that all CEO's are cheats. But, a company that is expected to abide the law and whatever model of decency and good citizenship is expected, it is the CEO who oversees all that the company does to be in compliance. CEO's can err by acts of commission, the evildoers. They can err by acts of omission, failing to keep the company in line even if it was all an honest mistake or oversight. The CEO is responsible for what the company does, just like the captain of ship. If a boat captain runs his ship aground, the Navy doesn't say,"gee, we know you didn't mean to run over the beach and boardwalk, so we'll let bygones be bygones." That is what responsibility is about.
Unless there is some system of carrots and sticks, incentives to keep them on track and doing the right thing, then the evildoer acts of commission have a greater risk of rising.
The CEO is always the ultimate responsible party, and the bigger the breach of decency, public perception, corporate stewardship, the trust of their customers-shareholders-employees, and compliance with the law, then the harder they should fall or be reprimanded.
The maintenance people, the secretaries, the engineers and technicians - they are not the problem. It is odd that you would think so for even a moment. Poorly performing and corrupt CEO's and corrupt boards of directors, those are the problem.
As someone who looks at such things for a living, I find this interesting but not so compelling. For the example of just a single injected nodule, I thought it looked unnatural. But, how it is perceived depends on how it is presented. Suppose they presented the images to real radiologists this way, "You will be looking at films that might be real or might be faked, guess which is which", then I think that most radiologists would know that the single nodule was not natural. But, if presented this way, "Look at these films and see if there is anything abnormal", then many would have fallen for it. But likewise many would have been thinking, "It is probably cancer, because it is a solid nodule, but it looks rather odd."
In comparison, the 472 nodule example was obviously fake. The nodules were all far too similar, too round, too uniform, too dense. I doubt many radiologists would have fallen for that.
If the authors intent was to show that fake imagery can be made that could be used for nefarious deception, then I think we already knew of that concern. I would say that I have seen far more credible and persuasive false CGI than what was seen here. If Pixar for example decided to make fake x-rays, I suspect they could do a much better job of it.
This brings up a question that seems far more interesting to me. If an AI agent can make a fake image that can fool some experts under certain conditions, but the fakery can also be recognized, then can there be a second AI agent that can spot the fakery created by the first AI?
No matter what profession each of us is in, I am certain that we all have stories about "stupid users". They surely do exist. But there is a flip side to this story.
Many "stupid users' are not stupid at their jobs or life in general. They just do not cooperate well with the paradigms of computing and technology they are handed to them by "the industry". The makers of the technology are quite savvy about such things. But, they might forget that not everyone is so, or be dismissive of ordinary smart (or dumb) people who are not as learned about those things as the manufacturers and technical folk are. Those people decrying the IT "stupid user" are likely to be the butt of jokes about how dumbass they are when it comes to accounting their taxes or fixing their car or managing their own diabetes.
If there are too many stupid users, perhaps it is not the users. Perhaps the technologists who make techno products ought to produce better devices and software and computing paradigms that place greater emphasis on user interface, usability, human factors engineering, ergonomics, and just plain wtf common sense. It seems to me that too many IT people are so wrapped up in the technology and their own familiarity with it that they are suffocating from a lack of reality and some sympathy to how their mom or grandma might use the technologies they are making or managing. Turn your propeller head beanies upside down and air out some of the supercilious cobwebs in your IT skulls.
I share your sentiments, but there is a flip side argument. There are only so many hours in a day, so you have to pick and choose your projects and interests. If you are intrigued by radio or interfacing, you might mess around with analog and op amps. If your project involves bandwidth and remote data and IoT, then digital blocks are your bricks and mortar. Even if you had robust experience with electronic basics, your interests might migrate to other areas, or the necessities of a job might lock you in to what ever the project demands.
The complaint can extend to other scenarios. Do you program in C++ or Python, and if so, why not assembler or raw machine language? Are you an analog signal processing dude, and if so, why not make your own op amps from discretes, or use tubes? Are you a down deep digital designer, and if so why use asics when you can use 7400 chips, or better yet, buy a million transistors to make your own logic arrays.
The nice thing about so many options is that there is something for every taste, interest, experience, budget, and time available. Commendable projects can come from any of them. And if they get some young kids hooked on the idea, so much the better, they can grow from there. It used to be that you learned radio first then graduated to digital. Now, it goes the other way - still all good.
Texting and driving is bad. Reducing it should make roadways safer. Legislation and enforcement against it could or should be modeled on DUI / DWI prototypes. Etc. We all know that. Trying to verify that suitable legislation and enforcement has the intended and beneficial effects is also important because it guides and improves public policy and funding to address these issues. So, kudos to those who try to conduct worthwhile research or analyze relevant statistics.
Sadly, this paper doesn't really seem to say anything or fit the profile of worthwhile research. Undoubtedly, they did their diligence in getting public records, culling the data, running some analysis, and popping some kind of p-value. But none of this quite makes sense to explain if texting bans improve safety. See the comment above by Dan East, "Careful with statistics". This expands on the theme.
First, we have too much lately of reporting by CNN and others (e..g. a Wired article about DNA editing, also posted today on Slashdot today). The science reporting in these articles is always awful. It assumes that the readers of such blogs are all retards, idiots, and profoundly uneducated, providing not one shred of meaningful scientific discussion and insight or even adequate reporting of technical facts from the primary source being reported on - you know, mentioning the actual science. Then, go to the primary source, and it is pay-walled with just a short often meaningless abstract. So, intelligent savvy readers see this and get frustrated that they cannot get to see the evidence for themselves. Or, unsophisticated readers read a sloppy 3rd grade level blog and come away un- or mal-informed, erroneously believing unsubstantiated ideas or disbelieving correct but unverified claims. That can be forgiven perhaps in a case such as this because we all know that texting while driving is wrong, so anything that hypes up that sense of universal responsibility is okay, but that still does not make it okay science or responsible journalism. So, any commentary by me or anyone else here is potentially flawed because we are drawing inferences from an unseen article. I for one did not look past the paywall to see the whole thing. But, here is the gist of the article as I can infer:
The article, either by exact logic and statistical proof, or else by fuzzy loose inference (and most of us do not know which), concludes the following: Legislate a texting ban, then this results in fewer emergency room worthy injuries, so anti-texting laws work. First, looking at ER visits after a crash seems like the most odd of all measures. What we really would like to know is, does anti-texting reduce crashes? Secondarily, does it reduce injuries, fatalities, expenses, legal costs, etc. - all worthy secondary endpoints, but first and foremost, the prime predicate is that texting causes crashes, so measure if anti-texting prevents crashes. There is no indication that in their dataset, that they did or did not look at how many crashes or non-ER crashes occurred - maybe they did , but the weak abstract gives nothing to go on. (To be fair to the investigators, they might have had little further information to work with, so they did their best with what they could gather.)
Next, one has to ask, how does a texting ban reduce ER visits if there is no verification that it even reduces crashes. Even if crashes are reduced, the primary intent of such bans, how does that make the trauma any less severe that a lesser percentage of crashes needs to go to the hospital? Perhaps as some here speculate, texters are moving slower so less energy per impact and less severe trauma (a logical argument to be sure, but I don't buy that they are moving slower). Or, perhaps vehicle-versus-vehicle trauma is unchanged, but vehicle occupants are relatively protected, whereas pedestrians are more at risk, and less texting injuries has a disproportionate benefit to bikers-pedestrians (that is believable).
Here are other possible correlations that invalidate any
Here is a general question, inspired by these article but not specific to it. I would love to hear what Slashdotters think. What is the value of advertising to the ad buyer? Is there any?
I understand why internet advertising exists. It has been the only way to monetize services that do not necessarily have a sponsor, investor, tangible product catalog, or other revenue stream. So, Google and Facebook can give away free services but still make money. For the advertising platform, advertising is the whole game.
But, what about for the advertiser? I know why advertising can be important for a company, like raising awareness of your products, establishing customer rapport, etc. I understand where the promise of internet big data advertising comes in - targeted audiences, so the advertiser theoretically pays less to reach a smaller but more apt group of potential buyers.
But, does it work? Do ad buyers get any meaningful return on their invested ad dollars? I am not suggesting that they do or do not, I just wonder what the reality is. Do they advertise because they feel they must, a "keeping up with the Jones's" cultural expectation of the internet age? Are they persuaded by some internet business consultant, perhaps equally clueless, for no reason other than "you must, you must"? Do some companies get meaningful results from advertising while others do not?
If I, as a private desktop personal user, just bought a $1000 monitor for a new computer rig, I will not be buying another such item for a few years. So why do I immediately get bombarded with ads thinking that I am a hot prospect monitor buyer? It is a wasted targeted ad that some company just wasted their advertising dollar on.
So, that is the question I am curious about. This move by Amazon obviously benefits Amazon. But, does internet advertising actually bring any value to the advertisers, on average? Any thoughts?
An insightful comment, and there is yet another oddity in the rationale behind the loop. The loop as I understand it is for cars, but how would that work? The monorail, whatever shortcomings it may have in its implementation, is made to move people. You can walk on and walk off at will with no other concerns. But what are you going to do with your car after you exit the loop? Why drive it such a short distance? If you are going somewhere near the end of the line, where will you park your car at the other end, and for how much? It sounds like a recipe for parking congestion from hell. Or do you just intend to ride through, bypassing the congested Strip? That's what I-15 is for. Your analogy to a theme park or theme ride is spot on. But those rides work by walking onto the attraction, not riding your own vehicle onto another one. This sounds more like taking your car onto a bay crossing ferry, but where's the bay? It's a tech demonstrator project that most people will probably not see or be much aware of except for the hype they read. It seems like it would be a more functional and practical concept if they ran a high speed underground bypass below central Vegas and the Strip, from Henderson to the North 'burbs, so that locals going to school or business could bypass the downtown congestion.
I don't get it. I can appreciate what the report says, that Tesla did not over extend itself or go too wild with new features and design. But to call it an SUV seems like pure marketing BS. They make a few mods on their base model and call it whatever they want to capture so and so market. They could call it a mini big rig or a suburban war tank, but that don't make it so. Take a look at the thing at https://www.tesla.com/modely. It is a small hatchback coupe that looks like my Honda did in the 1980's. Others in this thread have likened it to a VW beetle. If you got a Hot Wheels or Tonka Toy that looks like a Suburban or 4-Runner, and put a little battery and motor in it, that would be more of an SUV than that thing.
The site says: "Model Y provides maximum versatility—able to carry 7 passengers and their cargo. Each second row seat folds flat independently, creating flexible storage for skis, furniture, luggage and more." Granted, you have to see it in person to know for sure. But to look at the pictures, 7 people would be a huge squeeze. Furniture? A foot stool maybe. Doesn't seem like enough room for much camping gear, a surfboard, or lumberyard or garden store purchases. Sorry you say, surfboards go on the roof, but that curved hatchback ain't got no place to put a roof rack.
Site says: "Model Y is capable in rain, snow, mud and off-road." Off road? Sure, if pulling into your drive is off road. For that wilderness adventure, you can drive on your lawn. Off road usually implies an alternative suspension - maybe they do, maybe they don't - but there is no clearance. Low center of gravity, as they claim, means your butt won't clear a sidewalk curb let alone rock and rubble mountain trails. Want to try a rainy wash?, wear your swim trunks and snorkel.
It's a hatchback, with a few interior seating mods so they can make you think "I bought an SUV"... if you are an urban yuppie... who has never driven through a ranch or a back country road.
And here's the other odd thing. Site says: "And when you’re on the road, it’s easy to plug in along the way—at any public station or with the Tesla charging network. We currently have over 12,000 Superchargers worldwide, with six new locations opening every week." Six new locations a week? Let's do the math. 6x50 weeks = 300 chargers per year. At that rate, 12,000 units means they have invested 40 years in infrastructure build out, but we know that that is not the case. So, they put in a lot quickly in just a few years, and now they are lollygagging their way through. 300 units a year worldwide means that market self sustainability for electric vehicles will never happen. Maybe the ad got the numbers wrong. 600 a week would make sense, not 6.
Anyone else think that this ad is missing a few screws? Any chance the vehicles themselves are missing a few screws?
If you want to track the planet to cm precision and account for every N-body chaotic perturbation, sure, what you said. But dude, it's an ellipse for all practical purposes. That's why we can have a calendar or farmer's almanac. Hell, you don't even need an integral. It's algebra. The position of Mercury or Earth can be plotted parametrically as x(t) and y(t), and then for any t you can solve sqrt (delta x^2 + delta y^2), (and indeed, you can integrate and divide by t to get the average). Next, for any so ambitious, calculate the mean distance from Mercury to YourAnus.
I am not a pilot, but I recognize concerns that effect other life-and-death professions and skills. The wisdom of the comments above is that automated flying is safe and efficient, but it can go wrong, and when it does, somebody with skills needs to be at the helm. But, if automation robs pilots of hands on experience, their knowledge to handle the emergencies is compromised. The focus in pilot training should be to ensure that they get the hands on flying time.
My anesthesiologist colleagues always describe their profession as hours upon hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Automated ventilators, monitors, and iv fluid pumps regulate most of the mundane tasks, making modern anesthesia one of the safest things you can possibly do. But, when something goes wrong, no system of automated controls or AI powered technology can take over for the seasoned anesthesiologist. It's a matter of life and death, not 150 lives at a time as on a 737, but one life at a time, which can add up.
As a surgery resident, I learned the tried and true statistics that hernias are mostly a natural condition, and that post-surgical incisional hernias were infrequent. When they did happen, they were usually for legitimate reasons, and later on, they could be fixed, reliably, by the same experienced surgeons who knew how to avoid them in the first place. Then, circa 1990, surgeons started to use the laparoscope to do abdominal surgery without incisions. Mostly, that has been a huge benefit to the public, reducing hospital lengths of stay, minimizing many conventional surgical complications, and making once difficult operations safe and effective. The downside though is that surgeons have since forgotten how to properly make an abdominal incision, and especially, and more important, how to repair it. Since 1990, there has been an exponential rise in the rate of incisional hernias, the rate of failed hernia repairs and recurrent hernias, and severe morbidity to accompany those bad results. Furthermore, instead of focusing on acquiring the lost skills, surgeons have turned to companies who manufacture a boatload of flawed plastic implants that have made the problems far worse. (Search if you will on terms such as "hernia mesh complications" or "hernia mesh lawsuit".) The problem has reached epidemic numbers, and the death rate from complications of that sort now almost certainly exceed the casualty rate from commercial air accidents. As someone whose career has become ever more focused on fixing those unnecessary messes, it is all too obvious that a new technology that is valuable for ordinary everyday simple affairs robs the professionals and practitioners of vital skills needed for the unusual and extreme problems.
A while back I saw a short on TV, sad but true. A man and woman, professionals in business suits and brief cases, enter a huge high rise office building and start riding the long tall escalator from the lobby to the third floor. Half way up, there is a power outage. The escalator stops. They look around bewildered, and call out for "Help, is there anyone who can help us?" They knew not how to walk up or down the escalator, idiots of the technology era. Technology is wonderful. But when the lights go out or the software balks or nature doesn't cooperate, people need to have foundational skills. We as a society have made a mistake putting so much focus on teaching new exciting chi chi technologies, and forgetting the reasons for learning the ABC's, the 3-R's, and other essential skills. For a surgeon, sewing up an incision so it does not fall apart is a fundamental skill. People suffer when surgeons fail to do so. I am not a pilot, but I can appreciate that stick and rudder skills are of the same essential importance. Our educational systems need to be corrected to supply those essential skills.
While your comments are sound, "where the software fail happened" may not be correct apropos of your premise about technically robust coding practices. The problem could just be bad design and logic. The software could be perfect in that there are no errant procedure calls, no faulty branch logic, no page faults, no divide by zeros, no stack overwrites, etc. But, imagine we lived in a community where, by law, vehicles are only permitted to make right turns (to make a left, make three rights). So, to sell vehicles in Rightville, an electric vehicle manufacturer assiduously writes perfect software to make only right turns. But, to avoid hitting a pedestrian, a driver is forced to make a left, and the software, not understanding, does stupid things. All the while, nobody in software engineering remembered that possibility, or the execs said "screw it, can never happen, too expensive to code". But, agreed, " it'll be interesting to see where the software fail happened".
On the serious side, the current system requires us to remember three names or prefixes for each triad (each 10^3). For example: one-million or one-millionth, versus one mega-meter versus one micro-meter. Million-mega-micro-. one-thousand or one-thousandth, versus one kilo-liter or one milli-liter. Thousand-kilo-milli-. For Europeans and others speaking Latin or Romance languages, the cardinal number names may be closer to the multiplier-divider prefixes, but it is still a cumbersome system.
For the higher order new numbers, why not make them with a uniform naming convention. For instance, the common root name, then tillo- and tetto-. Examples: 10^27 = one octillion trees, one octillo-meter, one octetto-meter. 10^30 = one nonillion beans, one nonillo-newton, one nonetto-joule. 10^39 = one dodecillion electrons, one dodecillo-farad, one dodecetto-ohm.
Instead of having unique initials as abbreviations, such MB, mm, cm, km, Gb, etc., try this, using "D" for "decade": My new computer has 4 of 10^27 byte chips = 4-D27B of memory. The distance to so and so galaxy is one nonillion meters away, or D30m away. Or, something like that.
It just seems too cumbersome to remember too many contrived names and disparate prefixes for ever bigger numbers that no one can really comprehend or has the time to recall in the middle of a sentence that is meant to be fluent.
Premise 1. Before the computer-robot-techno age, retrieving overdue books back to the free public lending library was a big deal, still is, to make sure all can enjoy the item. From that perspective, this is indeed a neat achievement, for the reasons stated, because people get lazy about the returns, so this makes it simple, in a hassle-free non-retaliatory way. But, the very technologies that make this possible have also changed the nature of libraries and public consumption of media, so there are novel better ways to use BookBot.
Premise 2. I love books. I have a huge library at home. I love libraries. I also love my desktop computer and ability to read large tracts of writing and other content from remote sources, on demand, and find things that otherwise would be unknown or inaccessible, with the supreme convenience of not having to drive to the library which isn't open anyway at 2 AM. What I have come to realize is that some books are better because they are books, codices that you can hold in your hand and flip the pages. But some books are valuable for their content only, and reading on a screen is more practical, and having a pdf or other digital version without wasting real space with a physical volume or magazine is preferable.
Here is how the book bot could work better. Sure, use it to collect overdue books, that is a worthy purpose. Even better, use it to deliver books to people who cannot get out of the house, a digital age bookmobile.
And third, allow users to place a book of their own on deposit with the library. When the book gets there, the library will scan it for you (because you might not have the time or resources to do so at home), and then send you the digital file in whatever format you prefer. With the user's permission or preference, (1) the user could leave the real book with the library, a donation to the public holdings, because it is no longer needed at home because you now have the digital format, and (2) make the digital version publicly accessible.
We have huge online libraries such as archives.org, HathiTrust, university libraries, Library of Congress, and many others. But, they are either pay-walled, or restricted to tuition paying registrants, or they are free but simply do not have what you are looking for, or it could be years before they get around to digitizing the thing you want. Allowing BookBot to pick up a book you no longer need or would prefer the e-book would make life easier for the user and contribute to the public, all in a friendly neighborly way. Modern digital technologies have forced libraries to rapidly reassess their purpose and retool for new ways of doing things. BookBot could serve its original purpose of solving the age old problem of book returns, or its role can be expanded for new tasks, born of the digital age, that extend the reach of the library and the knowledge therein.
When I was a kid, we had three major TV networks in the U.S. with well respected news services, radio, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Technical geeky stuff was in professional or industry journals that you could read at the library if you were so inclined. Now, we have personal and network technologies that allow anyone to be their own self appointed news outlet. For a moment, discount the fraud and fake news, hostile state actors and propaganda, and any other self serving self interest group that abuses the internet for stupid or evil purposes. Instead, just think about those channels or outlets that aspire to be honest outlets for legitimate even if trivial news. There are so many that the capacity exceeds supply. Radio, TV, print news, and internet blogs cannot permit "dead air", so you go to press with whatever nonsense you can muster up on a slow news day.
The consequence is that non-technical non-professional general interest sites for public consumption are "reporting" on anything they can get their hands on, with what seems to be juvenile "uncooked" editorial oversight. Stories like this one would never have made it to public reporting in the past. The chemistry that the authors did is wonderful (follow the second link in the post), and it adds to a body of knowledge, but so what? For anyone interested in an "efficient" catalysis of CO2 -> C + O2, they know where to look up this kind of research. But the reason it got reported on (the first link) is solely because CO2 and the environment are hot topics, not because of the inherent value or game changing nature of that research.
As evidenced by the posts so far, everyone here on Slashdot immediately recognized that this would be untenable for large scale CO2 sequestration - it uses too much energy, spending two bucks to make one so to speak. This chemistry could be useful for instance in some sort of closed circuit biological respiratory gas system, such as on space stations or on the moon where abundant sunlight could power the process on more modest scales. However, the public media reporting implies that here is a potential solution to global warming and greenhouse gas effects. It is foolish reporting. It provides scant (none) of technical information for people who know enough to ask. It does not use it as a jump off point for insightful discussions about realistic versus pie-in-the-sky versus miss-the-mark technologies. It just gives public notice of a paper they found in a technical journal, the reporting written at a 3rd grade level with a comprehension level below that. It is a sorry excuse for legitimate reporting, it assumes that the readership is dumb, it betrays that the reporters and editors (if we dare call them that) are even dumber, and that writing infantile gibberish is a form of prostitution to make money by selling ads no matter how bad the report or the product advertised.
The researchers' paper is good, and they do not make arrogant or preposterous claims, focusing mainly on the chemistry and potential use of the generated carbon to be used as capacitors. To me, it seems to serve no purpose or bring any value to society for The Independent to write about this in a context other than what the researchers intended. Reporting on STEM subjects ought to respect the material, the spirit of knowledge and academia, the intellect of the scientists, and especially the intellect of the public that wants to read about it, rather than turning out drivel of no more scholarly or literary value than a kindergarten Valentine's card.
" Cook said that Apple is "rolling the dice" on some future products that will "blow you away " Thank goodness they are just rolling the dice, and not betting the farm, because the following are all too ho-hum. Yawn.
" eventual goal is to be able reduce the price of the 2018 Retina MacBook Air " That would be nice. Hardly revolutionary. The only minds to be blown are those who cannot believe that Apple would make a budget minded model, and I think their heads are safe for now.
" in reference to the Apple Watch and the AirPods, there's a long, great roadmap of fantastic products on the horizon " They have already risen over the horizon. In the past, Apple moved the industry and society when they founded new concepts, not spinning what's already in the barn.
" while Cook did not go into more detail " There's your sign.
" rumors have suggested that AirPods coming in the near future will be available in new colors (black) and support and the ability to be wirelessly charged " Thank goodness, lack of black is the only thing that has kept me from buying into the Apple ecosystem. And don't all you cynics be discounting the wireless charger - less chance of scratching that beautiful new finish. Now, if they gave you a jar of Turtle Wax with the phone, that would indeed be revolutionary.
" more ambitious products are also rumored, including a pair of augmented reality smart glasses and perhaps even a full self-driving vehicle " AR and VR are certainly hot topics, but that is because everyone else is already making geek goggles (e.g. MS), or already gave it up (Google). Self driving cars - now there's an idea - why didn't anyone think of that before?
" on the topic of services, goal to double its $25 billion revenue by 2020 " Thank goodness, I was starting to think that this was a fabricated story, fake news, but there it is, the real Apple.
" two new products in the services category, including a new streaming TV service with original shows and a new Apple News service with subscription for a monthly fee " Perhaps they should ask Amazon, Google, Netflix, Hulu, MS, and the others for some brotherly advice.
" Cook also said that Apple is pushing for regulation against tech companies like Facebook and Google that build data profiles of their users. Apple has long been an advocate for customer privacy " Okay, good for them. We pay our respects.
Innovation can be hard, and for every million products made, only one comes along that changes everything. Apple and Jobs used to do that. Now, the Cook in the kitchen is just making re-hash. Why is this even news? (Trick question see above, 2 times $25 billion).
Applause. Very well said. Your last few sentences are the kinds of sensible watchwords that should govern all thoughtful and respectable speculative communications on new and poorly resolved phenomena.
On the technical side, an outgassing comet-like body is just one of two possibilities, one model based on dissolution, the other on accretion.
The dissolution model is the "outgassing comet". It starts as a solid or semisolid construct of a certain fixed diameter, and slowly gives up internal substance. Not every dissolution or depletion will result in a fractal structure, but for the right material and circumstances, it can happen. Compare to a fractal river basin. Solid earth is downcut and flowed away by water erosion, leaving a highly fractal branched pattern that renders the surface very porous or textured. In a solid structure, if the outgassing creates flows and erosions of similar nature, then the internal structure gets progressively more porous and lighter, ultimately resembling either fractal mountain-river systems, or something like a Sierpinski gasket or the solid Koch structure shown in one of the links given in the Slashdot post. Acceleration of the object could be by gravitational means or photonic pressure, but either way, for a given force, it will increase inverse to the square root of the diminishing mass (F = m a^2).
The accretion model says that the object is built from the gravitational or chemical assembly of small elements into a large structure. Under the conditions of a nebula cloud or a protoplanetary disk, we are used to thinking of spherical accretion under gravity of heavy elements and minerals. But, under the right conditions, with few and light weight and low pressure particles, the physics of DLA, diffusion limited aggregation, could potentially occur, giving rise to dendritic structures. DLA fractals are seen in the dendrites of minerals, feathery frost on a window, certain electrical discharges, and others. If the dendrite could, in theory, be light enough and structurally strong enough to resist gravitational collapse, it could get quite large. Its gross diameter would enlarge faster than it weight according to its fractal dimension. In that case, gravitational acceleration would still affect it (it does have mass), but it would present ever more surface area to the source of photonic pressure, a bigger sail capturing more force (photonic stress times area). So, acceleration increases proportional to sqrt of force/mass, which should be the fractal dimension.
Now, imagine that the structure is outgassing, and that the escaped volatiles cool at the surface from either the cold ambient temperature or refrigeration effects of outward radial expansion, and in so doing, they freeze and accumulate on the surface. DLA would apply. Now, the structure is mass invariant, but the interior becomes a porous gasket while the exterior becomes an ever larger dendrite. Sail force increases for the same mass. Without doing the math, the force and acceleration will be all the greater than just simple accretion in which mass is also rising, and depending on the dendritic structure and fractal dimension, probably greater than simple outgassing from a spherical solid which is losing mass without an increase in sail area. Recall that one of the intriguing things about Oumauamua was the high velocity. Big sail, low mass, and bright light from some radiating source - that could do it.
We are all so used to thinking about celestial objects as being solid spheres, perhaps this is a call to let us know we should also be looking for porous and dendritic structures out there.
You are right, and you are wrong. Plenty of libraries are completely up to date on current journals. The problem is that they are often university libraries (or corporate, or private institutions, etc.). Most public civic lending libraries are not apt to have a diversity of technical and science journals. So, you can go to the public library and get frustrated by not having the journals, or you can go to the publishers' websites and be frustrated by their paywalls, or you can try to get the journal from the university and be frustrated by "you are not an enrolled student". I can understand that restriction, "we are a private institution", for private universities. It always seemed to me though that public colleges and universities funded by the taxpayers should make their libraries open to all their citizens. If you live and pay taxes in Pennsylvania or Arizona, you should get a library card for Penn State or ASU. That to me is the biggest frustration, to have that resource around the corner, that I paid for via taxes and my kid's tuition, and not have access.
So far, the posts in response to this article are all sarcastic and cynical, mocking the claim of "reaching the moon" when they are just hitching a ride on SpaceX, not to mention riding the coattails of big nation states that have spent billions over half a century to develop the foundational technologies and do it all in grander style. But think about the historical significance of this. It may be small potatoes in a sense, but it is indeed the first time that a non-governmental low budget endeavor gets there (if it succeeds). The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You cannot do something the 2nd and 3rd time without doing it the first time. Making inexpensive or commercially feasible trips to the moon with some regularity will depend on projects of this magnitude and expense, and at some point, somebody does it first, and this is it.
True, they are not running the whole show themselves. The launch comes from a an established carrier. But therein is another wondrous thing. A government rocket is not lifting them, a private enterprise is. And don't forget that with complex technologies, businesses are highly interconnected and dependent on each other - no one company can do it all themselves - even NASA needed thousands of subcontractors to get Apollo there and back. Furthermore, all they are doing with SpaceX is getting off the ground, and nowadays, that's easy. Not so easy is dropping out of orbit and landing, without overshooting or crashing, and the Israeli craft will do that on its own. And, a small potatoes budget forces you to be clever, and how they are going to get from low orbit to the moon on minimum weight and fuel is itself inspiring, lessons to be learned for all the moon trekkers who hope to follow.
If nothing else, this kind of event can inspire other pioneers and entrepreneurs that it can be done. Something hasn't been done until the moment it is done, and whoever did it, they were the first. Their pride is understandable. You would be too if you were the first, and we would equally applaud and be inspired by you. This opens the gates, and more will follow. Who knows, next could be the Jamaican bob-rocket team. (And instead of Tang, rum and mauby.)
It's like PC's and smart phones. Winning new products have huge growth as the market ramps up, then slows to steady state sales and revenues as the market saturates. PC's appeared circa 1980. They took a decade to gain traction at home and businesses. Now, they have redefined life, and everybody needs one, but since everybody already has one, the sales rate drops off to the steady state turnover of replacing or upgrading older equipment. Thus, since about 2010, the industry decries the demise of the PC and their off-peak down-profits. They blame the smart phone and tablet,but the reality is that these devices are products for a different niche, enjoying their rapid uptake as PC's are topping out. Now, we are seeing reports of smart phones sales topping. None of this means that making PC's or smart phones is dead or unprofitable, just not at prior levels. In tech, so many people have gotten use to fast windfall fortunes on product risings, that they forget there is also good money to be made, even if not as much, on steady income commodity and utility products.
The same is true as you said for SUV's, and it will happen for electric vehicles. For the drug in question, the initial profits represent the righteous cure of a big backlog of pending cases. Those people are now cured, and future revenues and profits are based on a more limited stream of new cases. While sales might shrink, overhead also shrinks, as the R&D, factory tooling, and initial marketing have already been paid for.
A truly righteous non-greedy company should be proud of what it does, and continue to do so for the same righteous reasons. They should take the windfall profits of the first wave, take out their dividends, then reinvest in new cures for something else, using their proven ability to make a chemical and get it studied, approved, and marketed. If they do well, then by 20 years or so, they should have 4 or 5 great drugs serving stable steady state markets, and 5 times more humble profits still equals huge investor payout.
Slashdot Mirror
I am no expert on anything related to wireless and broadband services, but something about this report seems a bit over-hyped, or am I missing something?
5G promises higher bandwidth and speed, but it does it also extend range? Does this a allow rancher's or farmer's cow's to communicate over a 50 mile ranch because 4G didn't do it? And if it's just a 50 acre spread with cell towers nearby, how does 5G help? It sounds like the applications, "Bessie phone home" to report that she hooked up to Mr. Milky is a rather low bandwidth need. Your old 2400 baud modem would probably suffice. If the intent is to download live video from a 500 head herd at once, maybe, or if you plan to download video so Bessie can watch the latest Star Wars movies and sour the milk, okay. But otherwise I do not understand how 5G is any better for this than any other telemetry technology of the past 15 years?
Or is this just a slow news day or marketing cow manure?
Can someone please enlighten me.
This story made me think of Flight of the Phoenix, a 1965 film starring Jimmy Stewart (there is also a bad remake from 2004). A cargo plane is lost in the Sahara after being downed by a sandstorm. The story is all about how the crew and passengers find a way out. Key to this is that the plane, a Fairchild C-82, has enough undamaged parts that, with the tools they have, they can build a new aircraft sufficient to fly them out. It's a fun movie. The brains behind the rebuild is Dorfmann (played by Hardy Krüger) who works as an aeronautical designer and engineer. Only near the end of the film is it learned that he works for a toy company building motorized flying models rather than big commercial aircraft. Needless to say, that despite the confrontational moments that that reveal brings, the new plane flies, and all are saved, and Dorfmann is a redeemed hero.
For most of motorized aviation history, the distinction between toys and "real planes" was obvious, and it is easy to understand how Dorfmann's ideas would have been derided. But today, the line seems very blurry. In this article, toy airplanes are serving legitimate commercial roles as a means of post and delivery. Larger scale versions of such drone-derived aircraft are starting to show up as personal flying cars, flying boats, military vehicles, law enforcement purposes, research and science, and media and the arts.
The distinction is gone. It used to be that a top of the line IBM 360 took up a giant room with massive electrical and cooling overhead to deliver far less than a smart phone in your pocket can do these days. Back when planes were "big iron", tiny radio controlled models were just toys. Now, they might just revolutionize the whole commercial and military airspace.
Three cheers to Dorfmann.
Thanks for the thoughtful remark, makes sense. I too am no expert, but your remarks make me wonder if there is a different way to make the defensive AI. Rather than training the defensive AI to recognize each style of forgery, can the defensive AI be better trained than the adversarial one, even on the original dataset or an expanded superset of it, such that it knows that the forgery simply isn't very realistic, that the first AI was simply too amateurish?
Yes, the CEO is responsible.
That does not mean that all CEO's are cheats.
But, a company that is expected to abide the law and whatever model of decency and good citizenship is expected, it is the CEO who oversees all that the company does to be in compliance.
CEO's can err by acts of commission, the evildoers.
They can err by acts of omission, failing to keep the company in line even if it was all an honest mistake or oversight.
The CEO is responsible for what the company does, just like the captain of ship.
If a boat captain runs his ship aground, the Navy doesn't say,"gee, we know you didn't mean to run over the beach and boardwalk, so we'll let bygones be bygones." That is what responsibility is about.
Unless there is some system of carrots and sticks, incentives to keep them on track and doing the right thing, then the evildoer acts of commission have a greater risk of rising.
The CEO is always the ultimate responsible party, and the bigger the breach of decency, public perception, corporate stewardship, the trust of their customers-shareholders-employees, and compliance with the law, then the harder they should fall or be reprimanded.
The maintenance people, the secretaries, the engineers and technicians - they are not the problem. It is odd that you would think so for even a moment.
Poorly performing and corrupt CEO's and corrupt boards of directors, those are the problem.
Look at the demo video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... .
As someone who looks at such things for a living, I find this interesting but not so compelling. For the example of just a single injected nodule, I thought it looked unnatural. But, how it is perceived depends on how it is presented. Suppose they presented the images to real radiologists this way, "You will be looking at films that might be real or might be faked, guess which is which", then I think that most radiologists would know that the single nodule was not natural. But, if presented this way, "Look at these films and see if there is anything abnormal", then many would have fallen for it. But likewise many would have been thinking, "It is probably cancer, because it is a solid nodule, but it looks rather odd."
In comparison, the 472 nodule example was obviously fake. The nodules were all far too similar, too round, too uniform, too dense. I doubt many radiologists would have fallen for that.
If the authors intent was to show that fake imagery can be made that could be used for nefarious deception, then I think we already knew of that concern. I would say that I have seen far more credible and persuasive false CGI than what was seen here. If Pixar for example decided to make fake x-rays, I suspect they could do a much better job of it.
This brings up a question that seems far more interesting to me. If an AI agent can make a fake image that can fool some experts under certain conditions, but the fakery can also be recognized, then can there be a second AI agent that can spot the fakery created by the first AI?
What do you think?
No matter what profession each of us is in, I am certain that we all have stories about "stupid users". They surely do exist. But there is a flip side to this story.
Many "stupid users' are not stupid at their jobs or life in general. They just do not cooperate well with the paradigms of computing and technology they are handed to them by "the industry". The makers of the technology are quite savvy about such things. But, they might forget that not everyone is so, or be dismissive of ordinary smart (or dumb) people who are not as learned about those things as the manufacturers and technical folk are. Those people decrying the IT "stupid user" are likely to be the butt of jokes about how dumbass they are when it comes to accounting their taxes or fixing their car or managing their own diabetes.
If there are too many stupid users, perhaps it is not the users. Perhaps the technologists who make techno products ought to produce better devices and software and computing paradigms that place greater emphasis on user interface, usability, human factors engineering, ergonomics, and just plain wtf common sense. It seems to me that too many IT people are so wrapped up in the technology and their own familiarity with it that they are suffocating from a lack of reality and some sympathy to how their mom or grandma might use the technologies they are making or managing. Turn your propeller head beanies upside down and air out some of the supercilious cobwebs in your IT skulls.
I share your sentiments, but there is a flip side argument. There are only so many hours in a day, so you have to pick and choose your projects and interests. If you are intrigued by radio or interfacing, you might mess around with analog and op amps. If your project involves bandwidth and remote data and IoT, then digital blocks are your bricks and mortar. Even if you had robust experience with electronic basics, your interests might migrate to other areas, or the necessities of a job might lock you in to what ever the project demands.
The complaint can extend to other scenarios. Do you program in C++ or Python, and if so, why not assembler or raw machine language? Are you an analog signal processing dude, and if so, why not make your own op amps from discretes, or use tubes? Are you a down deep digital designer, and if so why use asics when you can use 7400 chips, or better yet, buy a million transistors to make your own logic arrays.
The nice thing about so many options is that there is something for every taste, interest, experience, budget, and time available. Commendable projects can come from any of them. And if they get some young kids hooked on the idea, so much the better, they can grow from there. It used to be that you learned radio first then graduated to digital. Now, it goes the other way - still all good.
And, if a photon falls in the Superposition Woods, does it make a sound?
Texting and driving is bad. Reducing it should make roadways safer. Legislation and enforcement against it could or should be modeled on DUI / DWI prototypes. Etc. We all know that. Trying to verify that suitable legislation and enforcement has the intended and beneficial effects is also important because it guides and improves public policy and funding to address these issues. So, kudos to those who try to conduct worthwhile research or analyze relevant statistics.
Sadly, this paper doesn't really seem to say anything or fit the profile of worthwhile research. Undoubtedly, they did their diligence in getting public records, culling the data, running some analysis, and popping some kind of p-value. But none of this quite makes sense to explain if texting bans improve safety. See the comment above by Dan East, "Careful with statistics". This expands on the theme.
First, we have too much lately of reporting by CNN and others (e..g. a Wired article about DNA editing, also posted today on Slashdot today). The science reporting in these articles is always awful. It assumes that the readers of such blogs are all retards, idiots, and profoundly uneducated, providing not one shred of meaningful scientific discussion and insight or even adequate reporting of technical facts from the primary source being reported on - you know, mentioning the actual science. Then, go to the primary source, and it is pay-walled with just a short often meaningless abstract. So, intelligent savvy readers see this and get frustrated that they cannot get to see the evidence for themselves. Or, unsophisticated readers read a sloppy 3rd grade level blog and come away un- or mal-informed, erroneously believing unsubstantiated ideas or disbelieving correct but unverified claims. That can be forgiven perhaps in a case such as this because we all know that texting while driving is wrong, so anything that hypes up that sense of universal responsibility is okay, but that still does not make it okay science or responsible journalism. So, any commentary by me or anyone else here is potentially flawed because we are drawing inferences from an unseen article. I for one did not look past the paywall to see the whole thing. But, here is the gist of the article as I can infer:
The article, either by exact logic and statistical proof, or else by fuzzy loose inference (and most of us do not know which), concludes the following: Legislate a texting ban, then this results in fewer emergency room worthy injuries, so anti-texting laws work. First, looking at ER visits after a crash seems like the most odd of all measures. What we really would like to know is, does anti-texting reduce crashes? Secondarily, does it reduce injuries, fatalities, expenses, legal costs, etc. - all worthy secondary endpoints, but first and foremost, the prime predicate is that texting causes crashes, so measure if anti-texting prevents crashes. There is no indication that in their dataset, that they did or did not look at how many crashes or non-ER crashes occurred - maybe they did , but the weak abstract gives nothing to go on. (To be fair to the investigators, they might have had little further information to work with, so they did their best with what they could gather.)
Next, one has to ask, how does a texting ban reduce ER visits if there is no verification that it even reduces crashes. Even if crashes are reduced, the primary intent of such bans, how does that make the trauma any less severe that a lesser percentage of crashes needs to go to the hospital? Perhaps as some here speculate, texters are moving slower so less energy per impact and less severe trauma (a logical argument to be sure, but I don't buy that they are moving slower). Or, perhaps vehicle-versus-vehicle trauma is unchanged, but vehicle occupants are relatively protected, whereas pedestrians are more at risk, and less texting injuries has a disproportionate benefit to bikers-pedestrians (that is believable).
Here are other possible correlations that invalidate any
Here is a general question, inspired by these article but not specific to it. I would love to hear what Slashdotters think.
What is the value of advertising to the ad buyer? Is there any?
I understand why internet advertising exists. It has been the only way to monetize services that do not necessarily have a sponsor, investor, tangible product catalog, or other revenue stream. So, Google and Facebook can give away free services but still make money. For the advertising platform, advertising is the whole game.
But, what about for the advertiser? I know why advertising can be important for a company, like raising awareness of your products, establishing customer rapport, etc. I understand where the promise of internet big data advertising comes in - targeted audiences, so the advertiser theoretically pays less to reach a smaller but more apt group of potential buyers.
But, does it work? Do ad buyers get any meaningful return on their invested ad dollars? I am not suggesting that they do or do not, I just wonder what the reality is. Do they advertise because they feel they must, a "keeping up with the Jones's" cultural expectation of the internet age? Are they persuaded by some internet business consultant, perhaps equally clueless, for no reason other than "you must, you must"? Do some companies get meaningful results from advertising while others do not?
If I, as a private desktop personal user, just bought a $1000 monitor for a new computer rig, I will not be buying another such item for a few years. So why do I immediately get bombarded with ads thinking that I am a hot prospect monitor buyer? It is a wasted targeted ad that some company just wasted their advertising dollar on.
So, that is the question I am curious about. This move by Amazon obviously benefits Amazon. But, does internet advertising actually bring any value to the advertisers, on average?
Any thoughts?
An insightful comment, and there is yet another oddity in the rationale behind the loop. The loop as I understand it is for cars, but how would that work? The monorail, whatever shortcomings it may have in its implementation, is made to move people. You can walk on and walk off at will with no other concerns. But what are you going to do with your car after you exit the loop? Why drive it such a short distance? If you are going somewhere near the end of the line, where will you park your car at the other end, and for how much? It sounds like a recipe for parking congestion from hell. Or do you just intend to ride through, bypassing the congested Strip? That's what I-15 is for. Your analogy to a theme park or theme ride is spot on. But those rides work by walking onto the attraction, not riding your own vehicle onto another one. This sounds more like taking your car onto a bay crossing ferry, but where's the bay? It's a tech demonstrator project that most people will probably not see or be much aware of except for the hype they read. It seems like it would be a more functional and practical concept if they ran a high speed underground bypass below central Vegas and the Strip, from Henderson to the North 'burbs, so that locals going to school or business could bypass the downtown congestion.
I don't get it. I can appreciate what the report says, that Tesla did not over extend itself or go too wild with new features and design. But to call it an SUV seems like pure marketing BS. They make a few mods on their base model and call it whatever they want to capture so and so market. They could call it a mini big rig or a suburban war tank, but that don't make it so. Take a look at the thing at https://www.tesla.com/modely. It is a small hatchback coupe that looks like my Honda did in the 1980's. Others in this thread have likened it to a VW beetle. If you got a Hot Wheels or Tonka Toy that looks like a Suburban or 4-Runner, and put a little battery and motor in it, that would be more of an SUV than that thing.
The site says:
"Model Y provides maximum versatility—able to carry 7 passengers and their cargo. Each second row seat folds flat independently, creating flexible storage for skis, furniture, luggage and more."
Granted, you have to see it in person to know for sure. But to look at the pictures, 7 people would be a huge squeeze. Furniture? A foot stool maybe. Doesn't seem like enough room for much camping gear, a surfboard, or lumberyard or garden store purchases. Sorry you say, surfboards go on the roof, but that curved hatchback ain't got no place to put a roof rack.
Site says:
"Model Y is capable in rain, snow, mud and off-road."
Off road? Sure, if pulling into your drive is off road. For that wilderness adventure, you can drive on your lawn.
Off road usually implies an alternative suspension - maybe they do, maybe they don't - but there is no clearance. Low center of gravity, as they claim, means your butt won't clear a sidewalk curb let alone rock and rubble mountain trails. Want to try a rainy wash?, wear your swim trunks and snorkel.
It's a hatchback, with a few interior seating mods so they can make you think "I bought an SUV" ... if you are an urban yuppie ... who has never driven through a ranch or a back country road.
And here's the other odd thing.
Site says:
"And when you’re on the road, it’s easy to plug in along the way—at any public station or with the Tesla charging network. We currently have over 12,000 Superchargers worldwide, with six new locations opening every week."
Six new locations a week?
Let's do the math.
6x50 weeks = 300 chargers per year.
At that rate, 12,000 units means they have invested 40 years in infrastructure build out, but we know that that is not the case. So, they put in a lot quickly in just a few years, and now they are lollygagging their way through. 300 units a year worldwide means that market self sustainability for electric vehicles will never happen. Maybe the ad got the numbers wrong. 600 a week would make sense, not 6.
Anyone else think that this ad is missing a few screws?
Any chance the vehicles themselves are missing a few screws?
If you want to track the planet to cm precision and account for every N-body chaotic perturbation, sure, what you said. But dude, it's an ellipse for all practical purposes. That's why we can have a calendar or farmer's almanac. Hell, you don't even need an integral. It's algebra. The position of Mercury or Earth can be plotted parametrically as x(t) and y(t), and then for any t you can solve sqrt (delta x^2 + delta y^2), (and indeed, you can integrate and divide by t to get the average). Next, for any so ambitious, calculate the mean distance from Mercury to YourAnus.
I am not a pilot, but I recognize concerns that effect other life-and-death professions and skills. The wisdom of the comments above is that automated flying is safe and efficient, but it can go wrong, and when it does, somebody with skills needs to be at the helm. But, if automation robs pilots of hands on experience, their knowledge to handle the emergencies is compromised. The focus in pilot training should be to ensure that they get the hands on flying time.
My anesthesiologist colleagues always describe their profession as hours upon hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Automated ventilators, monitors, and iv fluid pumps regulate most of the mundane tasks, making modern anesthesia one of the safest things you can possibly do. But, when something goes wrong, no system of automated controls or AI powered technology can take over for the seasoned anesthesiologist. It's a matter of life and death, not 150 lives at a time as on a 737, but one life at a time, which can add up.
As a surgery resident, I learned the tried and true statistics that hernias are mostly a natural condition, and that post-surgical incisional hernias were infrequent. When they did happen, they were usually for legitimate reasons, and later on, they could be fixed, reliably, by the same experienced surgeons who knew how to avoid them in the first place. Then, circa 1990, surgeons started to use the laparoscope to do abdominal surgery without incisions. Mostly, that has been a huge benefit to the public, reducing hospital lengths of stay, minimizing many conventional surgical complications, and making once difficult operations safe and effective. The downside though is that surgeons have since forgotten how to properly make an abdominal incision, and especially, and more important, how to repair it. Since 1990, there has been an exponential rise in the rate of incisional hernias, the rate of failed hernia repairs and recurrent hernias, and severe morbidity to accompany those bad results. Furthermore, instead of focusing on acquiring the lost skills, surgeons have turned to companies who manufacture a boatload of flawed plastic implants that have made the problems far worse. (Search if you will on terms such as "hernia mesh complications" or "hernia mesh lawsuit".) The problem has reached epidemic numbers, and the death rate from complications of that sort now almost certainly exceed the casualty rate from commercial air accidents. As someone whose career has become ever more focused on fixing those unnecessary messes, it is all too obvious that a new technology that is valuable for ordinary everyday simple affairs robs the professionals and practitioners of vital skills needed for the unusual and extreme problems.
A while back I saw a short on TV, sad but true. A man and woman, professionals in business suits and brief cases, enter a huge high rise office building and start riding the long tall escalator from the lobby to the third floor. Half way up, there is a power outage. The escalator stops. They look around bewildered, and call out for "Help, is there anyone who can help us?" They knew not how to walk up or down the escalator, idiots of the technology era. Technology is wonderful. But when the lights go out or the software balks or nature doesn't cooperate, people need to have foundational skills. We as a society have made a mistake putting so much focus on teaching new exciting chi chi technologies, and forgetting the reasons for learning the ABC's, the 3-R's, and other essential skills. For a surgeon, sewing up an incision so it does not fall apart is a fundamental skill. People suffer when surgeons fail to do so. I am not a pilot, but I can appreciate that stick and rudder skills are of the same essential importance. Our educational systems need to be corrected to supply those essential skills.
While your comments are sound, "where the software fail happened" may not be correct apropos of your premise about technically robust coding practices. The problem could just be bad design and logic. The software could be perfect in that there are no errant procedure calls, no faulty branch logic, no page faults, no divide by zeros, no stack overwrites, etc. But, imagine we lived in a community where, by law, vehicles are only permitted to make right turns (to make a left, make three rights). So, to sell vehicles in Rightville, an electric vehicle manufacturer assiduously writes perfect software to make only right turns. But, to avoid hitting a pedestrian, a driver is forced to make a left, and the software, not understanding, does stupid things. All the while, nobody in software engineering remembered that possibility, or the execs said "screw it, can never happen, too expensive to code". But, agreed, " it'll be interesting to see where the software fail happened".
The names must apply to all forms of measures and metrics.
But, if the Bureau of Geeks and Nerds has its say, the names will be:
whata-byte
abigga-byte
onthisa-byte
myassa-byte
heybitchdont-byte
On the serious side, the current system requires us to remember three names or prefixes for each triad (each 10^3).
For example:
one-million or one-millionth, versus one mega-meter versus one micro-meter. Million-mega-micro-.
one-thousand or one-thousandth, versus one kilo-liter or one milli-liter. Thousand-kilo-milli-.
For Europeans and others speaking Latin or Romance languages, the cardinal number names may be closer to the multiplier-divider prefixes, but it is still a cumbersome system.
For the higher order new numbers, why not make them with a uniform naming convention.
For instance, the common root name, then tillo- and tetto-.
Examples:
10^27 = one octillion trees, one octillo-meter, one octetto-meter.
10^30 = one nonillion beans, one nonillo-newton, one nonetto-joule.
10^39 = one dodecillion electrons, one dodecillo-farad, one dodecetto-ohm.
Instead of having unique initials as abbreviations, such MB, mm, cm, km, Gb, etc., try this, using "D" for "decade":
My new computer has 4 of 10^27 byte chips = 4-D27B of memory.
The distance to so and so galaxy is one nonillion meters away, or D30m away.
Or, something like that.
It just seems too cumbersome to remember too many contrived names and disparate prefixes for ever bigger numbers that no one can really comprehend or has the time to recall in the middle of a sentence that is meant to be fluent.
Premise 1. Before the computer-robot-techno age, retrieving overdue books back to the free public lending library was a big deal, still is, to make sure all can enjoy the item. From that perspective, this is indeed a neat achievement, for the reasons stated, because people get lazy about the returns, so this makes it simple, in a hassle-free non-retaliatory way. But, the very technologies that make this possible have also changed the nature of libraries and public consumption of media, so there are novel better ways to use BookBot.
Premise 2. I love books. I have a huge library at home. I love libraries. I also love my desktop computer and ability to read large tracts of writing and other content from remote sources, on demand, and find things that otherwise would be unknown or inaccessible, with the supreme convenience of not having to drive to the library which isn't open anyway at 2 AM. What I have come to realize is that some books are better because they are books, codices that you can hold in your hand and flip the pages. But some books are valuable for their content only, and reading on a screen is more practical, and having a pdf or other digital version without wasting real space with a physical volume or magazine is preferable.
Here is how the book bot could work better. Sure, use it to collect overdue books, that is a worthy purpose. Even better, use it to deliver books to people who cannot get out of the house, a digital age bookmobile.
And third, allow users to place a book of their own on deposit with the library. When the book gets there, the library will scan it for you (because you might not have the time or resources to do so at home), and then send you the digital file in whatever format you prefer. With the user's permission or preference, (1) the user could leave the real book with the library, a donation to the public holdings, because it is no longer needed at home because you now have the digital format, and (2) make the digital version publicly accessible.
We have huge online libraries such as archives.org, HathiTrust, university libraries, Library of Congress, and many others. But, they are either pay-walled, or restricted to tuition paying registrants, or they are free but simply do not have what you are looking for, or it could be years before they get around to digitizing the thing you want. Allowing BookBot to pick up a book you no longer need or would prefer the e-book would make life easier for the user and contribute to the public, all in a friendly neighborly way. Modern digital technologies have forced libraries to rapidly reassess their purpose and retool for new ways of doing things. BookBot could serve its original purpose of solving the age old problem of book returns, or its role can be expanded for new tasks, born of the digital age, that extend the reach of the library and the knowledge therein.
When I was a kid, we had three major TV networks in the U.S. with well respected news services, radio, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Technical geeky stuff was in professional or industry journals that you could read at the library if you were so inclined. Now, we have personal and network technologies that allow anyone to be their own self appointed news outlet. For a moment, discount the fraud and fake news, hostile state actors and propaganda, and any other self serving self interest group that abuses the internet for stupid or evil purposes. Instead, just think about those channels or outlets that aspire to be honest outlets for legitimate even if trivial news. There are so many that the capacity exceeds supply. Radio, TV, print news, and internet blogs cannot permit "dead air", so you go to press with whatever nonsense you can muster up on a slow news day.
The consequence is that non-technical non-professional general interest sites for public consumption are "reporting" on anything they can get their hands on, with what seems to be juvenile "uncooked" editorial oversight. Stories like this one would never have made it to public reporting in the past. The chemistry that the authors did is wonderful (follow the second link in the post), and it adds to a body of knowledge, but so what? For anyone interested in an "efficient" catalysis of CO2 -> C + O2, they know where to look up this kind of research. But the reason it got reported on (the first link) is solely because CO2 and the environment are hot topics, not because of the inherent value or game changing nature of that research.
As evidenced by the posts so far, everyone here on Slashdot immediately recognized that this would be untenable for large scale CO2 sequestration - it uses too much energy, spending two bucks to make one so to speak. This chemistry could be useful for instance in some sort of closed circuit biological respiratory gas system, such as on space stations or on the moon where abundant sunlight could power the process on more modest scales. However, the public media reporting implies that here is a potential solution to global warming and greenhouse gas effects. It is foolish reporting. It provides scant (none) of technical information for people who know enough to ask. It does not use it as a jump off point for insightful discussions about realistic versus pie-in-the-sky versus miss-the-mark technologies. It just gives public notice of a paper they found in a technical journal, the reporting written at a 3rd grade level with a comprehension level below that. It is a sorry excuse for legitimate reporting, it assumes that the readership is dumb, it betrays that the reporters and editors (if we dare call them that) are even dumber, and that writing infantile gibberish is a form of prostitution to make money by selling ads no matter how bad the report or the product advertised.
The researchers' paper is good, and they do not make arrogant or preposterous claims, focusing mainly on the chemistry and potential use of the generated carbon to be used as capacitors. To me, it seems to serve no purpose or bring any value to society for The Independent to write about this in a context other than what the researchers intended. Reporting on STEM subjects ought to respect the material, the spirit of knowledge and academia, the intellect of the scientists, and especially the intellect of the public that wants to read about it, rather than turning out drivel of no more scholarly or literary value than a kindergarten Valentine's card.
I read the article.
I can't wait for the future.
" Cook said that Apple is "rolling the dice" on some future products that will "blow you away "
Thank goodness they are just rolling the dice, and not betting the farm, because the following are all too ho-hum. Yawn.
" eventual goal is to be able reduce the price of the 2018 Retina MacBook Air "
That would be nice. Hardly revolutionary. The only minds to be blown are those who cannot believe that Apple would make a budget minded model, and I think their heads are safe for now.
" in reference to the Apple Watch and the AirPods, there's a long, great roadmap of fantastic products on the horizon "
They have already risen over the horizon. In the past, Apple moved the industry and society when they founded new concepts, not spinning what's already in the barn.
" while Cook did not go into more detail "
There's your sign.
" rumors have suggested that AirPods coming in the near future will be available in new colors (black) and support and the ability to be wirelessly charged "
Thank goodness, lack of black is the only thing that has kept me from buying into the Apple ecosystem. And don't all you cynics be discounting the wireless charger - less chance of scratching that beautiful new finish. Now, if they gave you a jar of Turtle Wax with the phone, that would indeed be revolutionary.
" more ambitious products are also rumored, including a pair of augmented reality smart glasses and perhaps even a full self-driving vehicle "
AR and VR are certainly hot topics, but that is because everyone else is already making geek goggles (e.g. MS), or already gave it up (Google). Self driving cars - now there's an idea - why didn't anyone think of that before?
" on the topic of services, goal to double its $25 billion revenue by 2020 "
Thank goodness, I was starting to think that this was a fabricated story, fake news, but there it is, the real Apple.
" two new products in the services category, including a new streaming TV service with original shows and a new Apple News service with subscription for a monthly fee "
Perhaps they should ask Amazon, Google, Netflix, Hulu, MS, and the others for some brotherly advice.
" Cook also said that Apple is pushing for regulation against tech companies like Facebook and Google that build data profiles of their users. Apple has long been an advocate for customer privacy "
Okay, good for them. We pay our respects.
Innovation can be hard, and for every million products made, only one comes along that changes everything. Apple and Jobs used to do that. Now, the Cook in the kitchen is just making re-hash. Why is this even news? (Trick question see above, 2 times $25 billion).
Applause. Very well said. Your last few sentences are the kinds of sensible watchwords that should govern all thoughtful and respectable speculative communications on new and poorly resolved phenomena.
On the technical side, an outgassing comet-like body is just one of two possibilities, one model based on dissolution, the other on accretion.
The dissolution model is the "outgassing comet". It starts as a solid or semisolid construct of a certain fixed diameter, and slowly gives up internal substance. Not every dissolution or depletion will result in a fractal structure, but for the right material and circumstances, it can happen. Compare to a fractal river basin. Solid earth is downcut and flowed away by water erosion, leaving a highly fractal branched pattern that renders the surface very porous or textured. In a solid structure, if the outgassing creates flows and erosions of similar nature, then the internal structure gets progressively more porous and lighter, ultimately resembling either fractal mountain-river systems, or something like a Sierpinski gasket or the solid Koch structure shown in one of the links given in the Slashdot post. Acceleration of the object could be by gravitational means or photonic pressure, but either way, for a given force, it will increase inverse to the square root of the diminishing mass (F = m a^2).
The accretion model says that the object is built from the gravitational or chemical assembly of small elements into a large structure. Under the conditions of a nebula cloud or a protoplanetary disk, we are used to thinking of spherical accretion under gravity of heavy elements and minerals. But, under the right conditions, with few and light weight and low pressure particles, the physics of DLA, diffusion limited aggregation, could potentially occur, giving rise to dendritic structures. DLA fractals are seen in the dendrites of minerals, feathery frost on a window, certain electrical discharges, and others. If the dendrite could, in theory, be light enough and structurally strong enough to resist gravitational collapse, it could get quite large. Its gross diameter would enlarge faster than it weight according to its fractal dimension. In that case, gravitational acceleration would still affect it (it does have mass), but it would present ever more surface area to the source of photonic pressure, a bigger sail capturing more force (photonic stress times area). So, acceleration increases proportional to sqrt of force/mass, which should be the fractal dimension.
Now, imagine that the structure is outgassing, and that the escaped volatiles cool at the surface from either the cold ambient temperature or refrigeration effects of outward radial expansion, and in so doing, they freeze and accumulate on the surface. DLA would apply. Now, the structure is mass invariant, but the interior becomes a porous gasket while the exterior becomes an ever larger dendrite. Sail force increases for the same mass. Without doing the math, the force and acceleration will be all the greater than just simple accretion in which mass is also rising, and depending on the dendritic structure and fractal dimension, probably greater than simple outgassing from a spherical solid which is losing mass without an increase in sail area. Recall that one of the intriguing things about Oumauamua was the high velocity. Big sail, low mass, and bright light from some radiating source - that could do it.
We are all so used to thinking about celestial objects as being solid spheres, perhaps this is a call to let us know we should also be looking for porous and dendritic structures out there.
You are right, and you are wrong. Plenty of libraries are completely up to date on current journals. The problem is that they are often university libraries (or corporate, or private institutions, etc.). Most public civic lending libraries are not apt to have a diversity of technical and science journals. So, you can go to the public library and get frustrated by not having the journals, or you can go to the publishers' websites and be frustrated by their paywalls, or you can try to get the journal from the university and be frustrated by "you are not an enrolled student". I can understand that restriction, "we are a private institution", for private universities. It always seemed to me though that public colleges and universities funded by the taxpayers should make their libraries open to all their citizens. If you live and pay taxes in Pennsylvania or Arizona, you should get a library card for Penn State or ASU. That to me is the biggest frustration, to have that resource around the corner, that I paid for via taxes and my kid's tuition, and not have access.
So far, the posts in response to this article are all sarcastic and cynical, mocking the claim of "reaching the moon" when they are just hitching a ride on SpaceX, not to mention riding the coattails of big nation states that have spent billions over half a century to develop the foundational technologies and do it all in grander style. But think about the historical significance of this. It may be small potatoes in a sense, but it is indeed the first time that a non-governmental low budget endeavor gets there (if it succeeds). The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You cannot do something the 2nd and 3rd time without doing it the first time. Making inexpensive or commercially feasible trips to the moon with some regularity will depend on projects of this magnitude and expense, and at some point, somebody does it first, and this is it.
True, they are not running the whole show themselves. The launch comes from a an established carrier. But therein is another wondrous thing. A government rocket is not lifting them, a private enterprise is. And don't forget that with complex technologies, businesses are highly interconnected and dependent on each other - no one company can do it all themselves - even NASA needed thousands of subcontractors to get Apollo there and back. Furthermore, all they are doing with SpaceX is getting off the ground, and nowadays, that's easy. Not so easy is dropping out of orbit and landing, without overshooting or crashing, and the Israeli craft will do that on its own. And, a small potatoes budget forces you to be clever, and how they are going to get from low orbit to the moon on minimum weight and fuel is itself inspiring, lessons to be learned for all the moon trekkers who hope to follow.
If nothing else, this kind of event can inspire other pioneers and entrepreneurs that it can be done. Something hasn't been done until the moment it is done, and whoever did it, they were the first. Their pride is understandable. You would be too if you were the first, and we would equally applaud and be inspired by you. This opens the gates, and more will follow. Who knows, next could be the Jamaican bob-rocket team. (And instead of Tang, rum and mauby.)
Sadly, of course, you are correct.
We can only hope that at some point a worthy company will be run by somebody with morals and a conscience. It is not entirely inconceivable.
I was going to write that, but you beat me to it.
You said it much better than I would have.
But -
perhaps they are all referring to amber and fossils, in which case "entomology" was correct - insects set in stone.
Correct.
It's like PC's and smart phones. Winning new products have huge growth as the market ramps up, then slows to steady state sales and revenues as the market saturates. PC's appeared circa 1980. They took a decade to gain traction at home and businesses. Now, they have redefined life, and everybody needs one, but since everybody already has one, the sales rate drops off to the steady state turnover of replacing or upgrading older equipment. Thus, since about 2010, the industry decries the demise of the PC and their off-peak down-profits. They blame the smart phone and tablet,but the reality is that these devices are products for a different niche, enjoying their rapid uptake as PC's are topping out. Now, we are seeing reports of smart phones sales topping. None of this means that making PC's or smart phones is dead or unprofitable, just not at prior levels. In tech, so many people have gotten use to fast windfall fortunes on product risings, that they forget there is also good money to be made, even if not as much, on steady income commodity and utility products.
The same is true as you said for SUV's, and it will happen for electric vehicles. For the drug in question, the initial profits represent the righteous cure of a big backlog of pending cases. Those people are now cured, and future revenues and profits are based on a more limited stream of new cases. While sales might shrink, overhead also shrinks, as the R&D, factory tooling, and initial marketing have already been paid for.
A truly righteous non-greedy company should be proud of what it does, and continue to do so for the same righteous reasons. They should take the windfall profits of the first wave, take out their dividends, then reinvest in new cures for something else, using their proven ability to make a chemical and get it studied, approved, and marketed. If they do well, then by 20 years or so, they should have 4 or 5 great drugs serving stable steady state markets, and 5 times more humble profits still equals huge investor payout.