At least for metals, I think it's going to be a good while before it's practical in the home. Most 3d metal printing is lost wax casting, which means that you're actually dealing with casting molten metal, and all the hassle that entails to do it right. iMaterialize has one direct printed metal tech - laser sintering of titanium - which yields great results but it's super-expensive and slow. I don't think your CNC milling machine is in any danger of getting kicked off of the workbench any time soon;)
Fuel rods are solid metal of very high strength with a high melting point
I really don't think you understand how ore recovery and smelting of any type works, and particularly not uranium. To produce uranium fuel elements, you dissolve yellowcake in hydrofluoric acid to make uranium hexafluoride ("hex"), which you then centrifuge, and then do any of a number of other reactions to either produce metallic or ceramic fuel elements. The only difference here is that you're already partially enriched, your fuel is easier to dissolve, and you don't have to go through all the steps from ore-in-the-ground to yellowcake. Also your fuel rods contain plutonium, which is much easier to make into fuel than uranium, as you don't have to enrich it.
They make everything that comes into contact with them for long enough radioactive as well
Yes, if you want to get radioactive fuel, you have to have your equipment touch radioactive stuff. Is this supposed to be surprising? Is this supposed to depend on what method you use to get it?
So while there has been quite a lot of proof of concept reprocessing in France and at Harford in the USA (MOX pellets),
Why are you comparing to waste that still has the short-lived actinides present? We're talking about Australia storing the stuff for many generations, wherein the strontium-90 and cesium-137 will be effectively gone and your primary source of radiation is the fissile fuel elements themselves. Which is unavoidable, regardless of source.
You really think people are going to be happy with casks of material sitting loose on the ocean floor? In the high corrosion environment of saltwater?
Also, I'm not sure you understand how subduction works. It's not like some slow-moving conveyor belt down into an endless open chansim. The crust goes down in big jerks. We call those earthquakes.;) And there's no guarantee that something just sitting on the surface will be subducted. It's a lot more likely to just be whallopped around. Even the upper layers of bedrock aren't guaranteed to go down, they can fracture and fold and do all sorts of things.
You're predicting some sort of major revolution when not a single thing has changed for years.
Says a person who's never used 3d printing. Thank you, armchair expert, please lecture me some more about things I've actually used.
Here, send me your address and a 3d model of yourself, I'll print you out (at my expense) a statue of you with your foot in your mouth and mail it to you so you can see the quality 3d printing has gotten to.
Now, if your response is, "Hey, I don't have a 3d model of myself", my response is simply, "Gee, too bad you don't have a tablet that has a built in software/hardware stack for making 3d models"
All of this except the speakers and amp is replaced by a laptop. So there is far less stuff that can break these days.
Funny, I only have to open my eyes to see many thousands of things around me with replaceable parts. Are you posting from a sensory deprivation chamber or something?
Then your silver example is quite entertaining to me, since the process is just making a mold to cast silver like a Luddite!
Amazing, I never knew that Luddites 3d printed molds for silver casting. You learn something new every day on Slashdot!
Hilarious! "LOOK! IT IS STAR TREK!" for making trinkets and baubles!
Have you never actually looked at what most of the stuff people buy on Ebay is?
Professional 3d printing services already have quality in spades. As I wrote elsewhere, I've used iMaterialize, and there was absolutely nothing lacking in quality, it was very professional (pricing on metals could certainly use improvement, mind you, and their wait time definitely does... but there's no shortage on the quality department). Go to google images and punch in the name of some of the big 3d printing services and take a look at what people are making or use some of the manufacturers' galleries where users can show off and/or sell their creations. It's really an imagination-limited endeavour now, not a technology-limited one.
As for home printing.... Remember, in the olden days, it was the same with digital photo printing. Home photo printing sucked and was too expensive, so people just sent their photos off to professional services to get printed. Come to think of, it's still kinda like that....
I don't know what 3d printing you've done, but I've ordered parts that I designed in Blender from iMaterialize and the results were excellent, and I would gladly do so again. My only real complaint about my first attempt was that they had trouble with my rather complicated model (they ultimately had to print it as two pieces and solder them together - but you couldn't really tell) and that their production process is rather backlogged. But I liked them because of how extreme of a variety of printing materials you can choose from. Even each entry there is usually actually several entries - for example, here's the options for silver.
As for 3D scanning, it's called taking two pictures. If that's "THE" enabling technology, you've got problems.
No, the enabling technology is the software stack (and/or whatever accelerating hardware is included). If they're designing a 3d image recognition capability into the tablet, and it works well enough (the caveat I mentioned earlier) and is linked to an appropriate set of tools and services, that's a game changer.
You're so naive.
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, your horse is too high.
You're assuming it's just a visible part that's easy to print that's broken,
I'm not making any assumptions about the task at hand, hence the wording "say, a broken part". You know what an example is, right? People want "things" all the time for all kinds of reasons. Some things they want are mass produced and readily available. Some of the things they want were once mass produced but are no longer readily available. Some were never mass produced. Such is life.
and that people will have the skill, patience, time and tools to do something with it.
No, I'm talking about a software stack that does the work for you, not something that pops open Blender on your tablet and says "Have at it!"
Different 3d printing technologies and materials have different resolution capabilities, strengths, etc, but there's nothing at all unreasonable about being given a 3d model of a part and applying some simple filters to clean it up and print it out. Many 3d printing techs can handle details down to the level of fractions of a millimeter, so even fine screw threads are not a problem. And yes, I *have* printed out detail that fine (I made 1" a Orion medallion for my fiance with a detailed leaf trim around the edge, his name embossed in it in small letters maybe 5 millimeters long, hollow tubes allowing light to pass through the medallion it as stars, a neckband clasp, and with the inside hollow so I could fill it with sand from a location important to him, and - concealed within - more writing for him to discover should he ever damage it and see what's inside). Yeah, 3d printers can do some pretty amazing detail work now.
What if it's your pedestal fan in summer and it just stops working for no visible cause?
Wow, I am such an idiot for suggesting that 3d printing could fix every broken device ever invented!
Wait a minute, could you remind me again where I said that, rather than just giving a broken part as an example of something a person may want to print? I can't seem to locate it anymore. But SURELY I must have said it, because otherwise you'd just be attacking a giant straw man, and surely you wouldn't do that.
Setting aside what brand it might bear, how would you employ a portable 3-D scanner?
You mean besides the fact that this would be THE enabling technology to finally make 3d printing a realistic option for average home users?
If it works well enough (for example, would let you stitch together shots from different angles, so you're not just modeling the fronts of objects), think of what that would mean. Take your 3d image of, say, a broken part. Possibly apply a filter or two to it, like "Rust remover" or "Glue pieces together". Click "Share" like with photos on android, and you're given a list of everything that can take a 3d model. One example could be an email to yourself so you can print at home. Or, for most people, an app for companies like iMaterialize, or perhaps a new service owned by Google. Pick your material (metals, plastics, ceramics, rubber, etc) and other print options, possibly pay for a rush order if you need it fast... and you're charged as if buying a song, it's dispatched, printed, and comes right to your house in the mail.
Another "Share" option could be a 3d model gallery (a "3d Flickr" or whatnot), with the default license set to public domain so anyone else can download. Suddenly there's a huge influx of searchable, free 3d models of almost anything you can imagine online. People could also restrict their models or charge for high-res versions of their models. Such a service could have convenient button to send an online model to a 3d printing service. Smart 3d printing services would keep track of how often given models are being downloaded and automatically launch the set up various degrees of mass production for the most commonly printed ones, lowering their prices. Anyone who expects high volume on a part could prepay for mass production setup. Basically, the difference between conventional mass-manufacture and custom user-created manufacture could practically disappear.
The possibilities are endless. Widespread 3d model creation plus easy sharing = widespread 3d printing. It could be a game changer if done right.
I thought it pretty obvious I was just talking about the electric drivetrain. That figure was from old comments from Bob Lutz (long before it was announced that there would be a mechanical linkage on the gasoline engine) when responding to why the price of the Volt spiked so much over the course of development; I could try to find the article again if you'd like. It was pretty stupid of them, IMHO, they could have asked any EV hobbyist how much low-volume EV drivetrains cost and they could have told them; Lutz and the rest of the then Volt management team operated far too long on the concept that the electric powertrain price would be similar to that of a gasoline powertrain. It just doesn't happen without volume. I also smacked my forehead when they released the original Volt concept; it made it clear that they really had no clue what they were doing, letting stylists push a concept that would never realistically work as an EV/PHEV with today's tech (proportions that made no sense and way too high drag). It just led to a lot of people being disappointed when they released the actual prototype (and they bungled that too, with an unintentional leak of a photoshoot that made it look like a total Prius clone)
1) As you noted (but didn't factor into your figures) maintenance difference is hardly just oil changes. In reality, electric drivetrains have a tenth as many moving parts. They don't even have a transmission, for crying out loud, have you priced what it costs to replace a transmission? Just replacing a timing belt can cost a fortune. One can't so readily discount maintenance, it's a huge portion of operating costs.
2) If you drive the car until you totally run it into the ground, the average car will be driven a lot more than 250k miles (we're just going to go with your above erroneous figure - more on that in a second). If you sell it, you're selling a more expensive vehicle. And beyond that, as vehicles age, generally the most important aspect as to how well it holds its value is what it costs to operate it (energy costs + maintenance). Once all the luxury is gone, cars come down to simply how much does it cost to get you from point A to point B.
3) 37 cents per kilowatt hour is an absurd electricity price. The US national average residential rate in 2013 was $0.1226/kwh. 37 cents per kilowatt hour is even over double the *California* average rate. Beyond that, EVs can sometimes get even cheaper power due to off-peak rates.
4) The audi a6 quatro isn't even close to the performance of the Tesla Model S (depending on the details, more on that below).
5) The MSRP on a new TDI quattro (the one that gets nearly 30MPG - the gasoline ones don't) is $57.5k. The base Model S is $59.9k, roughly the same price - *before* incentives. And has a slightly better 0-60. But the performance Model S, which blows the Quattro out of the water with practically supercar-level acceleration plus has a bigger battery pack, is only about $10k more (again, not counting tax incentives/rebates/etc). Beyond all this, I'd argue that the Model S is simply a nicer car, period, all issues of driving/efficiency aside.
Is your boss's Prius's battery covered in gold trim and studded with tiffany diamonds and signed by George Clooney or something? Because brand-new OEM Prius batteries cost $2.5 to 3.5k and you can get refurbished ones for under $1k. Some companies that specialize in refurbished packs charge less than $1k *total* (including labor) to swap out a Prius pack with a refurbished one.
$10k? If that's true, either your boss was pulling your leg or he was scammed, big-time.
I can guarantee you that he's not "exhausting every resource he can muster" because there's really just one figure that matters most, and that's volume.
Most people think EV prices are all about the batteries, but that's just not true. Even the drivetrains are really expensive. *Everything* is really expensive because they're made in small volumes. The Volt's drivetrain, for example, reportedly costs about $6k per vehicle. Why? It's a heck of a lot simpler than a gasoline drivetrain, with a tenth as many moving parts and less raw materials costs. But they're just not mass produced. Here's my favorite line of EV motors, the EMRAX series. They're the size of a desk fan yet have up to 160kW peak power (215hp); they're designed for electric airplanes, and can be inline chained together for even more power. Simple, tiny, no exotic raw materials... but they cost something like $4k each, plus something like $3k for the inverter/controller. Why? Because they're all wired by hand. Even the magnets are hand-wound. With enough volume, you could open a Chinese factory to pump out something like that for maybe $500 dollars a pop. But that's just not the situation today.
The same thing applies to batteries, which is why Tesla's gigafactory is such a big deal. A lot of people seem to think, "But hey, batteries are already mass-produced!". But really, those are the wrong kind of batteries, batteries designed for small electronics, not the type of large EV batteries you can get serious economies of scale on rather than wasting your effort stamping out tens of millions of tiny casings and the like, then wiring ten thousand little cells together and trying to ensure no cell failures. Also the batteries that best suit EVs are cobalt-free, while the potential for price reduction on your typical small electronics li-ion batteries is limited by cobalt prices; the raw materials on most EV batteries are far cheaper, it's always been manufacturing costs that have held them back. Something like the gigafactory has the potential to dramatically slash EV pack prices per kilowatt hour.
Basically, in pretty much aspect, if you want EVs to be cheap, you need to go big. Just like it is for gasoline cars, the key to affordability is scale. If your team responsible for a gasoline car engineers every part from the ground up and produces them in small volumes like some supercar makers do, it'll cost an arm and a leg and your firstborn as well.
To go big, you need a combination of an interested, motivated public and a good sales campaign. Once people start driving EVs, as a general rule, they love them and never want to switch back, but it's hard getting them to start, especially because of "range anxiety" concerns. So things like including with a purchase or lease X number of free 24-hour gasoline car rentals, or installing widespread fast charters, or making available range-extending self-steering genset trailers, or things of that nature is important to making people comfortable enough to take the plunge the first time. And of course subsidies can help a great deal while you're trying to establish the market.
It reminds me of how common it's become for old mines to at some point in time go through a new run of their tailings pile, either for primary material that earlier, less efficient processes didn't recover, or for other minerals that there was no attempt made to recover the first time because either the tech or the demand wasn't there.
I would be a lot more more surprised if nuclear waste was never gone through than if it was. I mean, picture the distant future. It's not like a wind turbine is going to be powering your spaceship. Such timescales may seem long to us, but when you're dealing with waste that's primarily isotopes of uranium and to a lesser extent plutonium and thus has half-lives ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of years, it's always going to be on hand. Only the "short"-lived isotopes will disappear, and generally you want them to go away anyway.
The forecast map I saw for 2070 was similar to the one I linked above, only worse.
Many places do indeed get wetter in a warming earth - in fact, more than not. Actually, the most notable change in precipitation is an increase in the strength of the monsoon cycle as the intertropical convergence zone expands - the dry period becomes drier and the wet period becomes wetter, so such annualized average maps don't show the whole picture. Also, due to the higher precipitable water vapor, the more extreme rain events increase, but due to higher surface temperature, ground dries out faster between precipitation events. So in general, the most universal, pronounced effect can simply be summed up as, "more extreme weather". You can even get more extreme cold at times in the winter at certain temperate latitudes because of the poleward shift and increasing kinks in the winter jet stream (you blend together the temperate and polar climates). And overall winter snow increases in many locations - the length of the winter season almost universally decreases but most areas experience an increase in winter precipitation, so in such areas where the decline in below-freezing days isn't too significant of a part of their season, the total snowfall rises (you mainly see big snowfall declines in areas that don't have too many below freezing days to begin with)
One piece of good news is that the data's still out on what happens with Atlantic hurricanes, and the overall picture might improve. Pretty much everyone's in agreement that when conditions are right they'll form faster, intensify faster, and be able to reach higher peak speeds. But there's also pretty good agreement that good conditions will occur more rarely do to increased wind shear (and possibly, though it's still poorly understood, from a stronger saharan air layer). So it's hard to say what the overall picture will be. It's important to note, of course, that each hurricane basin is different.
Ironically, the "debunking" in that Wiki page is almost as unscientific as the claim itself.
What are you talking about? It's a giant collection of summaries of peer-reviewed papers. What's your problem with peer-reviewed science? Oh right. No magic psychic powers.
Something something multiverse theory something something. I've heard some pretty out-there scientific explanations for stuff we have no way of ever being able to truly verify.
Wow, you heard something with no description and no citation. Wow, I'm totally sold, sign me up for your newsletter!
How, precisely, do you know the nature and theme of every prayer ever uttered?
Do you really honestly think I'm incapable of grasping that different people pray for different things at different times?
Of course, in the same logic, saying "Math tells us this might have happened that way" doesn't really make a thing 'scientific' either.
You really have no clue what the scientific method is, do you?
1. I think the universe started this way 2. there are invisible "energies" that I can't prove actually exist 3.... 4. The Big Bang TOTALLY HAPPENED!
Here, let's use this as a demonstration. Slipher discovered that almost every spiral "nebula" was moving away from us, which seemed really weird. Then Hubble performed the first accurate distance measurements which showed that they're really, really far away - not in our own galaxy. It soon became clear that almost everything far away from us was getting further from us. This calls for an explanation. So we get Lemaître's hypothesis - that the universe is expanding. Reversing the time axis shows everything radiating from a single point, down to a single point in spacetime around billion years ago.
A hypothesis is one way of explaining the data. As always, there were numerous. A hypothesis is considered worthless unless it makes specific testable predictions and can be falsifiable based on the data (for example, that's a common criticism of String Theory). For example, the Big Bang hypothesis was criticize on account that it couldn't account for the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements (this was later shown to be due to their formation in supernovæ, but that's a different story). There was a huge debate on all of the relevant points, involving paper after paper going through the peer-review process, each showing evidence for or against the different hypotheses.
There were, of course, predictions made by the hypothesis. Very specific predictions that would be exceedingly unlikely to occur by chance. One of them, for example, was that there would be a 2.725 degree kelvin background of microwave radiation eminating from every portion of the sky. Pretty darn specific, right? Pretty freaking unlikely to be a coincidence, right? Each of the different theories had their own predictions. The thing was, it was the Big Bang hypothesis whose predictions came to fruition. Not once, but again, and again, and again, very specific predictions of what one should observe that hadn't been prior observed. Over time, even proponents of alternative theories were forced to accept that the data fit the Big Bang. At this point, the Big Bang became the operational theory under which cosmology operates. A theory is a hypothesis which has been supported by a great deal of empirical evidence.
Does that mean that the Big Bang absolutely happened? Absolutely not! It just means that it is extremely well supported by the evidence, and no other proposed theory has come close to its predictive power.
Now, please, humor me. Go into the scientific method about your "thinking about things makes radiative energy that causes the stuff you thought about to happen like magic "theory".
1. Menstrual synchronicity is most likely a myth. 2. The tiny electromagnetic radiations from your neural activity diverge to background noise over tiny distances. That's reason EEGs are done with electrodes right on the skin rather than read from across the room. 3. The brain cannot parse electromagnetic radiations from the brain, which is why you can't just connect yourself to an EEG output and know what the other person was thinking. 4. Even if you could directly wire every neuron in another person's brain to yours, it still wouldn't work because no two brains are structured in exactly the same way. The two brains could eventually learn each other, but without any sort of direct-connected training period, they are *not* in any form able to understand each other's signals. 5. Here we're just talking about connecting thoughts from two members of the same thinking species. But to do the sort of things people pray for, you're talking about even inanimate objects taking part.
The short of it... no. Saying "energy" does not equate to a hypothetical mechanism, it does not make it scientific. Here's your "hypothesis":
1. I think of something. 2. There are "energies" in my brain 3.... 4. Magical things that I thought about happen far away from me!
I mean, you're talking underpants-gnomes stuff here.
As for your "it doesn't hurt to try", it's a way for people to feel smug about themselves for "helping" when they're not doing jack squat. Want to help the person? Spend the time you would have spent praying googling solutions, or emailing researchers in the field, or finding medical experts on the locked-in person's condition. The concept that #3 exists without any sort of plausible hypothetical mechanism, simply because you want it to exist, is the most absurd example of wishful thinking imaginable.
Don't expect any miracles with brainwave stuff, though, it's not like in some sci-fi movie. It can be hard to train your brain to control it, and it usually takes a lot of focus to do simple tasks and may sometimes do stuff you don't want. Anything based on EEG sensors is going to be extremely coarse, reading the average output of billions of neurons at a time. But it's a possibility.
The eyegaze device mentioned below sounds like a good possibility.
The subduction rate is negligible. The rate of earthquakes and difficulty of working there are not. Subduction zones are among the worst places you could dispose of waste. If you want to get it deep in a plausible amount of time, pick an easy spot to drill a super-deep borehole into stable crust and dispose of it there.
Anyway, I think Australia would really benefit from this concept. They need to get it approved just once (scale won't influence the rate of NIMBYism, those opposed to the repository would oppose it at any scale), they'll get a HUGE amount of income for little work, and they'll pretty much have nuclear power suppliers held hostage thereafter, as none are going to want to go back to having to try to get local permission to build a repository after their public has been told that it wouldn't happen. And they'll have a tremendous resource for any sort of future isotope or fuel refining that might prove economically viable. I mean, imagine that... picture having all of the world's spent fuel, and then having a technical solution or geopolitical situation that makes it cheaper to get fuel from the waste than to mine new uranium. You're suddenly the near-exclusive nuclear fuel supplier to the entire world. Or supplier of medical isotopes, or isotopes for goods irradiation, or whatever else the future may demand.
I think the emphasis has been misplaced; I think based on the process describe that they're actually measuring the *gravitational* field, which is not readily tampered with. It'd be like navigating based on a topo map, except instead of altitude it'd be using the local gravitational field below the device.
Supercooled superconducting gravimeters can be amazingly sensitive, to the point that one in Finland reportedly detected the increase in local gravity as workmen removed snow from the roof of the building it was housed in;) If one can make use of tiny diode lasers to supercool a tiny group of particles, it could conceivably yield a low power, portable, super-precise, tamper-immune GPS when combined with dead-reckoning and/or other rough positioning mechanisms to help determine how you're moving over the "topographical" gravity map.
Slashdot Mirror
At least for metals, I think it's going to be a good while before it's practical in the home. Most 3d metal printing is lost wax casting, which means that you're actually dealing with casting molten metal, and all the hassle that entails to do it right. iMaterialize has one direct printed metal tech - laser sintering of titanium - which yields great results but it's super-expensive and slow. I don't think your CNC milling machine is in any danger of getting kicked off of the workbench any time soon ;)
I really don't think you understand how ore recovery and smelting of any type works, and particularly not uranium. To produce uranium fuel elements, you dissolve yellowcake in hydrofluoric acid to make uranium hexafluoride ("hex"), which you then centrifuge, and then do any of a number of other reactions to either produce metallic or ceramic fuel elements. The only difference here is that you're already partially enriched, your fuel is easier to dissolve, and you don't have to go through all the steps from ore-in-the-ground to yellowcake. Also your fuel rods contain plutonium, which is much easier to make into fuel than uranium, as you don't have to enrich it.
Yes, if you want to get radioactive fuel, you have to have your equipment touch radioactive stuff. Is this supposed to be surprising? Is this supposed to depend on what method you use to get it?
Why are you comparing to waste that still has the short-lived actinides present? We're talking about Australia storing the stuff for many generations, wherein the strontium-90 and cesium-137 will be effectively gone and your primary source of radiation is the fissile fuel elements themselves. Which is unavoidable, regardless of source.
You really think people are going to be happy with casks of material sitting loose on the ocean floor? In the high corrosion environment of saltwater?
Also, I'm not sure you understand how subduction works. It's not like some slow-moving conveyor belt down into an endless open chansim. The crust goes down in big jerks. We call those earthquakes. ;) And there's no guarantee that something just sitting on the surface will be subducted. It's a lot more likely to just be whallopped around. Even the upper layers of bedrock aren't guaranteed to go down, they can fracture and fold and do all sorts of things.
Says a person who's never used 3d printing. Thank you, armchair expert, please lecture me some more about things I've actually used.
Here, send me your address and a 3d model of yourself, I'll print you out (at my expense) a statue of you with your foot in your mouth and mail it to you so you can see the quality 3d printing has gotten to.
Now, if your response is, "Hey, I don't have a 3d model of myself", my response is simply, "Gee, too bad you don't have a tablet that has a built in software/hardware stack for making 3d models"
Funny, I only have to open my eyes to see many thousands of things around me with replaceable parts. Are you posting from a sensory deprivation chamber or something?
Amazing, I never knew that Luddites 3d printed molds for silver casting. You learn something new every day on Slashdot!
Have you never actually looked at what most of the stuff people buy on Ebay is?
Professional 3d printing services already have quality in spades. As I wrote elsewhere, I've used iMaterialize, and there was absolutely nothing lacking in quality, it was very professional (pricing on metals could certainly use improvement, mind you, and their wait time definitely does... but there's no shortage on the quality department). Go to google images and punch in the name of some of the big 3d printing services and take a look at what people are making or use some of the manufacturers' galleries where users can show off and/or sell their creations. It's really an imagination-limited endeavour now, not a technology-limited one.
As for home printing.... Remember, in the olden days, it was the same with digital photo printing. Home photo printing sucked and was too expensive, so people just sent their photos off to professional services to get printed. Come to think of, it's still kinda like that....
I don't know what 3d printing you've done, but I've ordered parts that I designed in Blender from iMaterialize and the results were excellent, and I would gladly do so again. My only real complaint about my first attempt was that they had trouble with my rather complicated model (they ultimately had to print it as two pieces and solder them together - but you couldn't really tell) and that their production process is rather backlogged. But I liked them because of how extreme of a variety of printing materials you can choose from. Even each entry there is usually actually several entries - for example, here's the options for silver.
No, the enabling technology is the software stack (and/or whatever accelerating hardware is included). If they're designing a 3d image recognition capability into the tablet, and it works well enough (the caveat I mentioned earlier) and is linked to an appropriate set of tools and services, that's a game changer.
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, your horse is too high.
I'm not making any assumptions about the task at hand, hence the wording "say, a broken part". You know what an example is, right? People want "things" all the time for all kinds of reasons. Some things they want are mass produced and readily available. Some of the things they want were once mass produced but are no longer readily available. Some were never mass produced. Such is life.
No, I'm talking about a software stack that does the work for you, not something that pops open Blender on your tablet and says "Have at it!"
Different 3d printing technologies and materials have different resolution capabilities, strengths, etc, but there's nothing at all unreasonable about being given a 3d model of a part and applying some simple filters to clean it up and print it out. Many 3d printing techs can handle details down to the level of fractions of a millimeter, so even fine screw threads are not a problem. And yes, I *have* printed out detail that fine (I made 1" a Orion medallion for my fiance with a detailed leaf trim around the edge, his name embossed in it in small letters maybe 5 millimeters long, hollow tubes allowing light to pass through the medallion it as stars, a neckband clasp, and with the inside hollow so I could fill it with sand from a location important to him, and - concealed within - more writing for him to discover should he ever damage it and see what's inside). Yeah, 3d printers can do some pretty amazing detail work now.
Wow, I am such an idiot for suggesting that 3d printing could fix every broken device ever invented!
Wait a minute, could you remind me again where I said that, rather than just giving a broken part as an example of something a person may want to print? I can't seem to locate it anymore. But SURELY I must have said it, because otherwise you'd just be attacking a giant straw man, and surely you wouldn't do that.
You mean besides the fact that this would be THE enabling technology to finally make 3d printing a realistic option for average home users?
If it works well enough (for example, would let you stitch together shots from different angles, so you're not just modeling the fronts of objects), think of what that would mean. Take your 3d image of, say, a broken part. Possibly apply a filter or two to it, like "Rust remover" or "Glue pieces together". Click "Share" like with photos on android, and you're given a list of everything that can take a 3d model. One example could be an email to yourself so you can print at home. Or, for most people, an app for companies like iMaterialize, or perhaps a new service owned by Google. Pick your material (metals, plastics, ceramics, rubber, etc) and other print options, possibly pay for a rush order if you need it fast... and you're charged as if buying a song, it's dispatched, printed, and comes right to your house in the mail.
Another "Share" option could be a 3d model gallery (a "3d Flickr" or whatnot), with the default license set to public domain so anyone else can download. Suddenly there's a huge influx of searchable, free 3d models of almost anything you can imagine online. People could also restrict their models or charge for high-res versions of their models. Such a service could have convenient button to send an online model to a 3d printing service. Smart 3d printing services would keep track of how often given models are being downloaded and automatically launch the set up various degrees of mass production for the most commonly printed ones, lowering their prices. Anyone who expects high volume on a part could prepay for mass production setup. Basically, the difference between conventional mass-manufacture and custom user-created manufacture could practically disappear.
The possibilities are endless. Widespread 3d model creation plus easy sharing = widespread 3d printing. It could be a game changer if done right.
I thought it pretty obvious I was just talking about the electric drivetrain. That figure was from old comments from Bob Lutz (long before it was announced that there would be a mechanical linkage on the gasoline engine) when responding to why the price of the Volt spiked so much over the course of development; I could try to find the article again if you'd like. It was pretty stupid of them, IMHO, they could have asked any EV hobbyist how much low-volume EV drivetrains cost and they could have told them; Lutz and the rest of the then Volt management team operated far too long on the concept that the electric powertrain price would be similar to that of a gasoline powertrain. It just doesn't happen without volume. I also smacked my forehead when they released the original Volt concept; it made it clear that they really had no clue what they were doing, letting stylists push a concept that would never realistically work as an EV/PHEV with today's tech (proportions that made no sense and way too high drag). It just led to a lot of people being disappointed when they released the actual prototype (and they bungled that too, with an unintentional leak of a photoshoot that made it look like a total Prius clone)
Where you erred:
1) As you noted (but didn't factor into your figures) maintenance difference is hardly just oil changes. In reality, electric drivetrains have a tenth as many moving parts. They don't even have a transmission, for crying out loud, have you priced what it costs to replace a transmission? Just replacing a timing belt can cost a fortune. One can't so readily discount maintenance, it's a huge portion of operating costs.
2) If you drive the car until you totally run it into the ground, the average car will be driven a lot more than 250k miles (we're just going to go with your above erroneous figure - more on that in a second). If you sell it, you're selling a more expensive vehicle. And beyond that, as vehicles age, generally the most important aspect as to how well it holds its value is what it costs to operate it (energy costs + maintenance). Once all the luxury is gone, cars come down to simply how much does it cost to get you from point A to point B.
3) 37 cents per kilowatt hour is an absurd electricity price. The US national average residential rate in 2013 was $0.1226/kwh. 37 cents per kilowatt hour is even over double the *California* average rate. Beyond that, EVs can sometimes get even cheaper power due to off-peak rates.
4) The audi a6 quatro isn't even close to the performance of the Tesla Model S (depending on the details, more on that below).
5) The MSRP on a new TDI quattro (the one that gets nearly 30MPG - the gasoline ones don't) is $57.5k. The base Model S is $59.9k, roughly the same price - *before* incentives. And has a slightly better 0-60. But the performance Model S, which blows the Quattro out of the water with practically supercar-level acceleration plus has a bigger battery pack, is only about $10k more (again, not counting tax incentives/rebates/etc). Beyond all this, I'd argue that the Model S is simply a nicer car, period, all issues of driving/efficiency aside.
Is your boss's Prius's battery covered in gold trim and studded with tiffany diamonds and signed by George Clooney or something? Because brand-new OEM Prius batteries cost $2.5 to 3.5k and you can get refurbished ones for under $1k. Some companies that specialize in refurbished packs charge less than $1k *total* (including labor) to swap out a Prius pack with a refurbished one.
$10k? If that's true, either your boss was pulling your leg or he was scammed, big-time.
I can guarantee you that he's not "exhausting every resource he can muster" because there's really just one figure that matters most, and that's volume.
Most people think EV prices are all about the batteries, but that's just not true. Even the drivetrains are really expensive. *Everything* is really expensive because they're made in small volumes. The Volt's drivetrain, for example, reportedly costs about $6k per vehicle. Why? It's a heck of a lot simpler than a gasoline drivetrain, with a tenth as many moving parts and less raw materials costs. But they're just not mass produced. Here's my favorite line of EV motors, the EMRAX series. They're the size of a desk fan yet have up to 160kW peak power (215hp); they're designed for electric airplanes, and can be inline chained together for even more power. Simple, tiny, no exotic raw materials... but they cost something like $4k each, plus something like $3k for the inverter/controller. Why? Because they're all wired by hand. Even the magnets are hand-wound. With enough volume, you could open a Chinese factory to pump out something like that for maybe $500 dollars a pop. But that's just not the situation today.
The same thing applies to batteries, which is why Tesla's gigafactory is such a big deal. A lot of people seem to think, "But hey, batteries are already mass-produced!". But really, those are the wrong kind of batteries, batteries designed for small electronics, not the type of large EV batteries you can get serious economies of scale on rather than wasting your effort stamping out tens of millions of tiny casings and the like, then wiring ten thousand little cells together and trying to ensure no cell failures. Also the batteries that best suit EVs are cobalt-free, while the potential for price reduction on your typical small electronics li-ion batteries is limited by cobalt prices; the raw materials on most EV batteries are far cheaper, it's always been manufacturing costs that have held them back. Something like the gigafactory has the potential to dramatically slash EV pack prices per kilowatt hour.
Basically, in pretty much aspect, if you want EVs to be cheap, you need to go big. Just like it is for gasoline cars, the key to affordability is scale. If your team responsible for a gasoline car engineers every part from the ground up and produces them in small volumes like some supercar makers do, it'll cost an arm and a leg and your firstborn as well.
To go big, you need a combination of an interested, motivated public and a good sales campaign. Once people start driving EVs, as a general rule, they love them and never want to switch back, but it's hard getting them to start, especially because of "range anxiety" concerns. So things like including with a purchase or lease X number of free 24-hour gasoline car rentals, or installing widespread fast charters, or making available range-extending self-steering genset trailers, or things of that nature is important to making people comfortable enough to take the plunge the first time. And of course subsidies can help a great deal while you're trying to establish the market.
For some reason, my post lost the "14" in "14 billion years". :P
It reminds me of how common it's become for old mines to at some point in time go through a new run of their tailings pile, either for primary material that earlier, less efficient processes didn't recover, or for other minerals that there was no attempt made to recover the first time because either the tech or the demand wasn't there.
I would be a lot more more surprised if nuclear waste was never gone through than if it was. I mean, picture the distant future. It's not like a wind turbine is going to be powering your spaceship. Such timescales may seem long to us, but when you're dealing with waste that's primarily isotopes of uranium and to a lesser extent plutonium and thus has half-lives ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of years, it's always going to be on hand. Only the "short"-lived isotopes will disappear, and generally you want them to go away anyway.
The forecast map I saw for 2070 was similar to the one I linked above, only worse.
Many places do indeed get wetter in a warming earth - in fact, more than not. Actually, the most notable change in precipitation is an increase in the strength of the monsoon cycle as the intertropical convergence zone expands - the dry period becomes drier and the wet period becomes wetter, so such annualized average maps don't show the whole picture. Also, due to the higher precipitable water vapor, the more extreme rain events increase, but due to higher surface temperature, ground dries out faster between precipitation events. So in general, the most universal, pronounced effect can simply be summed up as, "more extreme weather". You can even get more extreme cold at times in the winter at certain temperate latitudes because of the poleward shift and increasing kinks in the winter jet stream (you blend together the temperate and polar climates). And overall winter snow increases in many locations - the length of the winter season almost universally decreases but most areas experience an increase in winter precipitation, so in such areas where the decline in below-freezing days isn't too significant of a part of their season, the total snowfall rises (you mainly see big snowfall declines in areas that don't have too many below freezing days to begin with)
One piece of good news is that the data's still out on what happens with Atlantic hurricanes, and the overall picture might improve. Pretty much everyone's in agreement that when conditions are right they'll form faster, intensify faster, and be able to reach higher peak speeds. But there's also pretty good agreement that good conditions will occur more rarely do to increased wind shear (and possibly, though it's still poorly understood, from a stronger saharan air layer). So it's hard to say what the overall picture will be. It's important to note, of course, that each hurricane basin is different.
What? How is that not an accurate description of prayer?
What are you talking about? It's a giant collection of summaries of peer-reviewed papers. What's your problem with peer-reviewed science? Oh right. No magic psychic powers.
Wow, you heard something with no description and no citation. Wow, I'm totally sold, sign me up for your newsletter!
Do you really honestly think I'm incapable of grasping that different people pray for different things at different times?
You really have no clue what the scientific method is, do you?
Here, let's use this as a demonstration. Slipher discovered that almost every spiral "nebula" was moving away from us, which seemed really weird. Then Hubble performed the first accurate distance measurements which showed that they're really, really far away - not in our own galaxy. It soon became clear that almost everything far away from us was getting further from us. This calls for an explanation. So we get Lemaître's hypothesis - that the universe is expanding. Reversing the time axis shows everything radiating from a single point, down to a single point in spacetime around billion years ago.
A hypothesis is one way of explaining the data. As always, there were numerous. A hypothesis is considered worthless unless it makes specific testable predictions and can be falsifiable based on the data (for example, that's a common criticism of String Theory). For example, the Big Bang hypothesis was criticize on account that it couldn't account for the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements (this was later shown to be due to their formation in supernovæ, but that's a different story). There was a huge debate on all of the relevant points, involving paper after paper going through the peer-review process, each showing evidence for or against the different hypotheses.
There were, of course, predictions made by the hypothesis. Very specific predictions that would be exceedingly unlikely to occur by chance. One of them, for example, was that there would be a 2.725 degree kelvin background of microwave radiation eminating from every portion of the sky. Pretty darn specific, right? Pretty freaking unlikely to be a coincidence, right? Each of the different theories had their own predictions. The thing was, it was the Big Bang hypothesis whose predictions came to fruition. Not once, but again, and again, and again, very specific predictions of what one should observe that hadn't been prior observed. Over time, even proponents of alternative theories were forced to accept that the data fit the Big Bang. At this point, the Big Bang became the operational theory under which cosmology operates. A theory is a hypothesis which has been supported by a great deal of empirical evidence.
Does that mean that the Big Bang absolutely happened? Absolutely not! It just means that it is extremely well supported by the evidence, and no other proposed theory has come close to its predictive power.
Now, please, humor me. Go into the scientific method about your "thinking about things makes radiative energy that causes the stuff you thought about to happen like magic "theory".
Existentialism, actually.
1. Menstrual synchronicity is most likely a myth.
2. The tiny electromagnetic radiations from your neural activity diverge to background noise over tiny distances. That's reason EEGs are done with electrodes right on the skin rather than read from across the room.
3. The brain cannot parse electromagnetic radiations from the brain, which is why you can't just connect yourself to an EEG output and know what the other person was thinking.
4. Even if you could directly wire every neuron in another person's brain to yours, it still wouldn't work because no two brains are structured in exactly the same way. The two brains could eventually learn each other, but without any sort of direct-connected training period, they are *not* in any form able to understand each other's signals.
5. Here we're just talking about connecting thoughts from two members of the same thinking species. But to do the sort of things people pray for, you're talking about even inanimate objects taking part.
The short of it... no. Saying "energy" does not equate to a hypothetical mechanism, it does not make it scientific. Here's your "hypothesis":
1. I think of something. ...
2. There are "energies" in my brain
3.
4. Magical things that I thought about happen far away from me!
I mean, you're talking underpants-gnomes stuff here.
As for your "it doesn't hurt to try", it's a way for people to feel smug about themselves for "helping" when they're not doing jack squat. Want to help the person? Spend the time you would have spent praying googling solutions, or emailing researchers in the field, or finding medical experts on the locked-in person's condition. The concept that #3 exists without any sort of plausible hypothetical mechanism, simply because you want it to exist, is the most absurd example of wishful thinking imaginable.
How dare those heathens not believe in your imaginary friend!
There's the EPOC controller...
http://emotiv.com/epoc/feature...
Don't expect any miracles with brainwave stuff, though, it's not like in some sci-fi movie. It can be hard to train your brain to control it, and it usually takes a lot of focus to do simple tasks and may sometimes do stuff you don't want. Anything based on EEG sensors is going to be extremely coarse, reading the average output of billions of neurons at a time. But it's a possibility.
The eyegaze device mentioned below sounds like a good possibility.
I'll be asking my imaginary friend to use magic on her, too!
The subduction rate is negligible. The rate of earthquakes and difficulty of working there are not. Subduction zones are among the worst places you could dispose of waste. If you want to get it deep in a plausible amount of time, pick an easy spot to drill a super-deep borehole into stable crust and dispose of it there.
I think your periodic table has termites.
True. But it is still a fact that Australia is predicted to get drier in the interior. And a hotter, too. It's already undergone a statistically significant measurable shift in its climate.
Anyway, I think Australia would really benefit from this concept. They need to get it approved just once (scale won't influence the rate of NIMBYism, those opposed to the repository would oppose it at any scale), they'll get a HUGE amount of income for little work, and they'll pretty much have nuclear power suppliers held hostage thereafter, as none are going to want to go back to having to try to get local permission to build a repository after their public has been told that it wouldn't happen. And they'll have a tremendous resource for any sort of future isotope or fuel refining that might prove economically viable. I mean, imagine that... picture having all of the world's spent fuel, and then having a technical solution or geopolitical situation that makes it cheaper to get fuel from the waste than to mine new uranium. You're suddenly the near-exclusive nuclear fuel supplier to the entire world. Or supplier of medical isotopes, or isotopes for goods irradiation, or whatever else the future may demand.
I think the emphasis has been misplaced; I think based on the process describe that they're actually measuring the *gravitational* field, which is not readily tampered with. It'd be like navigating based on a topo map, except instead of altitude it'd be using the local gravitational field below the device.
Supercooled superconducting gravimeters can be amazingly sensitive, to the point that one in Finland reportedly detected the increase in local gravity as workmen removed snow from the roof of the building it was housed in ;) If one can make use of tiny diode lasers to supercool a tiny group of particles, it could conceivably yield a low power, portable, super-precise, tamper-immune GPS when combined with dead-reckoning and/or other rough positioning mechanisms to help determine how you're moving over the "topographical" gravity map.
At least that's my take.