There will be a shortage if we try to replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar. I have on my desk a report from Morgan Stanley claiming that it would take 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually to replace coal power.
By when? Next month? Obvious bullshit number is obvious bullshit. Nobody has suggested that replacing coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar is going to happen overnight. Not even quickly. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas represent large capital investments with long amortization schedules. The power companies will only shut one off short of its design lifespan in extremis, and there has been no spike in fuel cost for any of them. Quite the opposite. Gas is dirt cheap now, but most utility companies have set fees agreed with state PUCs when gas was expensive, which have not been revisited, so they're making money hand over fist on gas power generation.
Imagine that I have a dozen nuclear power plants all humming along at about 80% capacity. Now imagine I have one of those once in a century events that knocks out one of those power plants.
Why imagine, when we have actual numbers? Average capacity factor of nuclear power plants in the US for 2015 was 91.9%, the highest it has ever been. If you follow the link, you'll see that at least the top 10 plants are actually operating at capacity factors in excess of 100% in order to achieve that average. Now consider that, with the shutdown of Vermont Yankee, there are only 99 total nuclear plants in the US. Having not just 10 plants, but 10% of the plants running at over 100% capacity, where they are by definition eating into their safety margin, doesn't seem all that safe, and it means that quite a few of those 99 plants are running at much less than 91.9% capacity factor.
Of those 99 plants, the majority of them are of such an age and design that they're incapable of being throttled, so when they're operating, they're operating at 100% or above. That means out of the 365 days in a year, the average nuclear power plant was offline for 30 of those days, and for every year but 2015, it has been worse than that. So there is no margin to "crank up" to accommodate a plant going offline.
In short, nuclear power plants are just as dependent on the existence of the full grid as wind and photovoltaics are.
This schedule should mean that with a dozen plants and an expected lifespan of 50 years I can expect a new plant to come online about every four years.
Design lifespans were universally 30 years and between 1977 and 2013, there were no new plants started. The Obama administration approved construction of 4 new plants. The US will be transitioning from nuclear to solar and wind by default, simply because those plants are not being replaced fast enough. But it won't happen so fast that Morgan Stanley's nonsense number is even remotely relevant.
He doesn't _look_ like a coward and a fraud, he _is_ a narcissistic fraudulent oath-breaking sleazeball cowardly weasel.
I'm curious what oaths you think Julian Assange has broken? He's an Australian citizen who is not a naturalized citizen of any other country, and he has never served in any country's military. He's been in court, so he might have sworn an oath to tell the truth at the time, but that was a short-term thing. He's never been a civil servant of any country's government, either. Those are the only places where he might have sworn any oath, and he hasn't done any of them. So, what oaths?
A rain belt shift that sees the Midwest and the Plains become more and more drought prone is going to have a pretty major effect on a country of over 300 million people.
A rain belt shift that saw the Midwest become more and more drought prone would indeed have a pretty major effect.
Fortunately, it's not happening. Quite the opposite. Average rainfall in Missouri is trending upwards, and is higher now than it has been since at least 1900.
Carmack was working on VR shit that directly went over with him to Oculus on ZeniMax's time and dime.
I strongly doubt it. John Carmack was working on experiments and prototypes. He had an old high speed CRT and a high speed camera, among other things. Yes, he was working with them on ZeniMax's time and dime. With their knowledge and explicit permission. We all knew about it. I'm betting he has it in writing. But having conducted those experiments, he was done with that stuff, hardware and software. He had learned what he needed to know, so he didn't need to drag all that crap with him when he went to Oculus.
Palmer Luckey wasn't a "tech innovator"...he was a rich geek who frequented VR modding message boards, and just like everyone else took a smartphone screen and hooked it to community-made VR software
And stuck some slightly whacky lenses in front of the screen. That's what mostly nobody else was doing. He was (and presumably is) convinced that field of view mattered a lot more than most VR was willing to admit. And since he couldn't curve the screen itself, he found a way to make the light curve instead. Very few people were willing to acknowledge that FOV was important, even within that same community he was frequenting. Plenty of people argued with him, probably including you, complaining that human FOV is actually quite narrow, and all of that. And he said yes, that's why the lenses are the shape they are, and why it's ok for the outer edges to have an effectively lower pixel density. And Slashdot loved him. Plenty of people self-reported pledging to his Kickstarter, and quite a few Slashdot denizens have Rift Dev Kits as a result.
Oculus in general and Palmer Luckey in particular only became persona non grata around here when Facebook offered him stupid money and he accepted. It was stupid money. Of course he said yes. He's not dumb like Yahoo. He was a tech innovator who knew when to say yes.
Yes, they've run a load of static fire tests, and yes, I'm sure they've done a very thorough inspection of the structure, but the stresses of launch are high and you'll only really see how re-usable it is when you actually re-use it.
There's an argument to be made that the return flight is a second stress test. The booster is flying at Mach 10 above the majority of the Earth's atmosphere. Then it intentionally dives back in. Coming back in is very nearly as tough on it as going up was. Other first stage boosters actually break up in the atmosphere when they reenter, it's so tough to do. The Falcon 9 booster not only makes it back into the atmosphere, but flips itself end-for-end twice, which has gotta be a severe lateral jolt, and then soft lands. That's three kicks to the pants (deceleration burn, reentry burn, landing burn), and two kicks to the head (flipping once for deceleration and once for landing). That sounds worse than the trip up and out, which is just one long steady push with some buffeting along the way.
Falcon 9 first stages already survive far rougher treatment than any other rocket ever has. Given how many of them have made it back in one piece, it bodes well for the re-use case.
I didn't read that, but it's the same, held-aloft-by-four-fans design that Moller has been hawking for decades, which means that just like Moller's "Skycar", it's going to fly just slightly better than a grand piano if even one of those engines goes out.
Moller's original design had 12 ducted fans, 3 at each corner, specifically to be able to tolerate the engine-out scenario. They were also supposed to be small enough and light enough to be manually removable by a single mechanic. The quoted weight was 60 pounds. I think I still have that issue of Popular Mechanics in a box in the basement.
What Moller didn't know was that no group of small gasoline engines is responsive enough at the throttle for stable powered-lift flight. If he'd just tried electric motors in the 70s or 80s, the world might be a very different place. It would have had to trail a power cord, and the tilt sensors would have been the size of a shoebox, but it would have worked.
Awesome, hating on Elon for having a private company pay to launch private satellites on a private launch vehicle.
While actually paying the US Air Force pad lease and range fees at Vandenberg. The US government actually came out ahead on that launch.
I really wonder why Slashdot is subjected to so much ham-fisted, pathetically obvious, qualitatively bad propaganda. Why do they care what we think? Why is someone spending actual money trying to change how we think? There's a handful of millionaires lurking. I would be astonished if there's even one billionaire lurking on Slashdot. The vast majority of us control nothing, spend nothing, affect nothing. So why do we have to put up with these crap attempts to convince us to hate a rocket company? Makes no sense.
And the Merlins were designed from the start under the principle of preventing the need for a full teardown. That doesn't mean that they will be cheap to reuse. But it does mean that they have the possibility of it.
Considering they've publicly stated that one of the earlier successfully soft-landed first stages has undergone no less than 10 test firings on the test stand in Texas, with "minimal refurbishing," it seems cost-effective reuse isn't merely a possibility: it's a virtual certainty.
Unfortunately, even if you could get this message out to everyone, the natural human reaction to danger is to move away. From flinching away from pain to running from sudden sounds, it's hard wired in by evolution.
The only way to overcome it is with military style training, getting people used to gunshot sounds and running towards people shooting at them.
That may be true, but there's no evolutionary response to gunfire. It hasn't existed long enough.
Yes, people are accustomed to gunshot sounds. Hollywood gunshot sounds. They are accustomed to gunshot sounds that sound a lot scarier than real gunshots. The pop of a real pistol or the crack of a real rifle are almost unrecognizable to most modern people. The T-800's gunshots in Terminator 2 were famously a combination of a manipulated sound of a.38 pistol being fired, a rifle being fired in a canyon, a cannon firing, and the sped up sound of a cannon firing, all layered together. It sounds nothing like a real gun of any kind, but it was so iconic, and so culturally pervasive, that James Cameron's thumb now rests permanently on the scale of gunshot sound effects.
For decades of film-making, gun battle scenes were shot using blanks. The guns involved fired rounds with the correct amount of real propellant in them, just with no bullet in front of them. The audio of the "fight" was recorded and actually used in the final print. They don't even bother with that anymore. Yes, that was at least partially because of some accidents on set involving injuries (blanks can still hurt, even kill), but a lot of it was because the whole philosophy of filmmaking with respect to guns shifted. Now they just fire smoke squibs, and the sound they make is irrelevant to what is heard in the movie. The sound editor is just going to replace it all anyway.
So people have neither an evolutionary response nor a learned response to real gunfire. Evolution hasn't had time, and what they've learned isn't real.
All those people who fled the terminal building in Fort Lauderdale? Almost none of them saw the shooter shoot someone. Almost none of them heard a shot fired, and the vast majority who heard a shot fired didn't recognize it. They ran because everybody was running, and somebody said "shooter!" It actually happened a second time that day, when no one was firing a weapon anywhere in the airport. News commentators on site by then were baffled. "Why is everyone running again?" one said. All it takes is for the first few people to run. That is the evolutionary response. A panicked crowd could probably trample a shooter to death by accident because of that instinctive reaction, if those first few people would run towards the shooter. Everybody else will too.
That's going to make it a lot harder to cover your camera. The spooks will love it.
Impossible, I'd say. Because the problem with video chat that any off-spectrum engineer has been trying to solve since the inception of video chat is, how do you make it look like a face to face conversation? How do you establish eye contact in video chat?
The obvious answer to any skilled practitioner of the art has always been to embed the camera in the display itself. For an oblong display that is most frequently used vertically, embed the camera 1/3rd of the way down from the upper short edge, exactly in the middle of the long edges. Right where people already habitually frame their eyes when video chatting. For a tablet, sometimes used for video chat in landscape mode with groups, embed two cameras: one in the position most suited for vertical orientation, and the corresponding one 1/3rd of the way down from the upper long edge, exactly in the middle of the short edges, so it looks right in either orientation.
That assumes you want a discrete camera. If you want the best possible flexibility, you want two complete grids of elements in the display: pixels and phoxels. Picture elements and photo elements. The pixels are OLEDs. The phoxels are pinhole cameras. Millions of them.
The patent is the usual obvious bullshit, because the eye contact problem has been with us since the days when webcams were a thing. Remember those? Same problem. Same blindingly obvious solution as soon as a display tech amenable to it exists.
So the camera(s) aren't reasonably blockable at all, because they're not where they are today, near an edge. Near an edge, they could be covered, and you just use software that avoids using the pixels near that edge. You've lost some screen real estate, but the device is still reasonably usable with a blocked camera. But if the camera(s) are in the best positions for video chat, you're out of luck. They're far away from the edge, smack in the middle of the part of the display that more or less always has something important on it. Impossible to block and still use the device. Or there's millions of them, and the entire surface of the display is also a camera.
In a Panopticon world, with only discrete cameras, there's a third camera, dead center of the display, that is never accessible or enumerable by userspace software on the device. That one is for the spooks.
IBM is betting big on cloud and other services, having spun off its hardware units like servers and PCs to Lenovo.
Thank you, thank you, IBM. You will finally succeed in killing off this "cloud" thing (a.k.a. somebody else's servers) because you have successfully turned the entire category into a patent minefield. When the Nazgul start sending demand letters these next three years, the whole thing will dry up and blow away. Nobody can stand against the Nazgul.
The reason he was so successful in his mass murder is the rest of the people OBEYED THE LAW! In this case the "gun free zone" in the airport existed only on paper. Blood stained and bullet holed paper.
I thought the laws existed to keep us safe, no?
No, they don't. They exist to improve the chances of safety. They do not create total safety. Neither do guns. Black and white thinking is nearly always wrong. (See what I did there?)
And no, the reason he killed five people was NOT because the rest of the people obeyed the law. It was because the rest of the people were cowards, ignorant, or both, and ran, hid, or otherwise did 100% the wrong thing.
Run from a knife, charge a gun. If everybody within earshot dogpiled on him after they heard the very first shot, they could have cut the number of fatalities to as little as none. Maybe one. Maybe two. Definitely much less than five.
Shit, he was using standard hand gun magazines. He RELOADED TWICE. Stopping him before he used every round did not even require physical bravery. Anybody could have waited until he was reloading, then jumped him, with zero chance of getting shot. And any asshole who has played CounterStrike, or a zombie shooter, or shit, watched the fucking Lone Ranger knows that you can't get shot when somebody is reloading.
So no, the "gun free zone" is not the problem. Having guns everywhere is not the solution. Teaching people what to do is the solution. Bravery is the solution. The false bravery of a concealed carry "hero"? No, we don't need more of that.
Give us real 8 cores with 8 FPU's. none of this cheap ass corner cutting. Intel has lost their way and you have a chance to become a real contender once again.
Your FPU wish is granted (sort of?). Two complete FPUs per core, implemented as two each parallel Fadd and Fmul units, capable of simultaneous scheduling and simultaneous floating point register access, per the detailed diagram here. The loader is 128 bits wide, so it does look like it can suck in, calculate, and shove out two 64 bit floating point instructions simultaneously, indefinitely, no bottleneck, with fancy dedicated instruction scheduling of its own.
As for 8 "real" cores (whatever a "real" core is these days), this makes mention of a "CPU Complex" of 4 cores. The implication being, you might see more than one CPU complex on the same chip. But that diagram should be telling you why Intel has been reluctant to give you 8 "real" cores. With four cores, your L3 cache already has to be 16-way associative to behave reasonably. You want to jam 4 more cores into that diagram. Looks like there's room, top and bottom, right? And double the cache size, to 16 MB. If you want it to behave as efficiently as the 4 core version, you're wanting 64-way associativity. Which is ridiculous, and probably doesn't scale as well as you'd hoped. What it sounds like AMD will be doing is plunking two of those CPU Complexes down side by side, then linking them to each other via the modern version of HyperTransport. The CPUs become ccNUMA within a single chip.
I'm afraid you're doomed to disappointment with Intel and AMD both. Without sandwich stacked circuits, building an L3 cache for 8 cores is just infeasible. You can fit all the transistors you need, but hooking them all together in a useful arrangement requires an absurd number of paths.
Another related question: If things went so wrong with 3D TVs, what guarantee is there that the new 3D VR/AR trend won't collapse along similar lines as well? - I fully expect this to happen. People complained loudly about 3D glasses and now you expect them to wear a HMD? Really?
I didn't expect this to happen. VR is qualitatively different from all other viewing experiences. Moving your head changes what you see. Nothing else does that. And we're finally at the stage where rendered image quality and framerates are high enough and latency is low enough that it can really fool your brain, far better than a flat "3D" TV.
What may still kill VR is price. When Oculus was targeting the $200-$300 range, it sounded fantastic. The price of another display. Then it landed commercially. At $600. Vive costs even more. When your choice is between an unknown and an 85" TV, or a 55" OLED TV, it's really hard to go with the unknown.
I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use?
It seems unlikely. Panasonic agreed to create the 2170 form factor specifically for Tesla. Tesla likes have large numbers of smaller, cylindrical cells because they can build packs out of them that give them finer control and better cooling than the large monolithic cells you seem to be referring to (very imprecisely). They're just a little bit bigger in both dimensions than an 18650 in order to improve the power density of the packs, while not losing the aforementioned advantages.
Because it's a custom Tesla-specific cell form factor, it's very likely a Tesla-exclusive contract as well. Panasonic is making these in a Tesla factory for Tesla, and nobody else. So when you start seeing advertising for Panasonic 2170 cells on Alibaba, don't try to buy them. They'll be fake. You're unlikely to see any real new 2170 bare cells on the open market. What you may see are used ones coming from someone buying a wrecked Tesla and tearing apart the battery pack. What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced it—it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.
Yet another nail in the coffin for autonomous vehicles. Should we really keep going?
Autonomous vehicles can do it better, with hidden microphones throughout the cabin, plus one visible one with a little sign that says "All conversations are recorded." Since autonomous vehicles are already stuffed full of expensive sensors, adding a few more won't affect the price of the vehicle to any great extent. Taxis today are much much cheaper vehicles, so adding the microphones would be a big burden.
Yeah but who built that network? Not the Chinese...
Doesn't matter, does it? The Chinese may even know that they're not very good at building new, which is why they entertain deals like this one. Doesn't matter, because they're the world champions at maintaining what's built. China's entire society revolves around stasis and stability, especially now that they no longer transfer power between dynasties the hard way. Regardless of who built it for them, they participated in its construction, and now that the network exists, they can maintain it for a thousand years.
...how to identify dangers, how to respond to traffic cops, how to navigate complex parking structures.
When did Slashdot accrete such a large contingent of morons? These are engineering problems. Solvable engineering problems. First, "how to identify danger". Uuh, don't hit things? That's half the job of making a self-driving car in the first place, and radar, lidar, and what have-you are being used for precisely that purpose. Is it simple? No. Does it require a sapient AI? Not even close.
How to navigate a complex parking structure? Really? You're asking this while using a computer network to post? You do realize that only one vehicle has to navigate the structure successfully, and then they all can, right? And it can be taught how to do it by a human?
And finally traffic cops. Oh, the lovely traffic cops. You know the very first thing they'll demand is a "Do As I Say" button. And they will get it. When the vehicle obeys all posted speed limits, it gets harder to keep the drug money seizures flowing, but the old busted taillight gag still works a treat. Can't get that sweet speeder money anymore, so civil forfeitures will have to go up. Them's the breaks. City Hall has to get paid, and they sure as shit can't implement a tax on everybody. Only a "tax" on Bad People.
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
There are other gotchas though such as what if stray pieces of conductive material get in the way? If the vehicle is going to actually charge at a reasonable rate then some stray piece of metal can be a real problem in terms of picking up energy and heating. You could carefully monitor the power on both sides but it's hard to say if the difference is going to heat something. Another is broadcasting all kinds of errant emissions. When you broadcast that much power even little screwups like not parking in the exact right spot or minor damage to the bottom of the car could create tons of unwanted noise at all kinds of frequencies.
You included the key word in your own text. Broadcasting is specifically what they are not doing. Everybody agrees that a purely radiant broadcast is a terrible way to move power wirelessly. That's why WiTricity intends to use resonant antennas, as described here. That prevents both heating of stray objects, because essentially no stray metal objects will be the right size to resonate, and prevents broadcast noise, because very nearly all the power is confined to the near field.
Slashdot Mirror
There will be a shortage if we try to replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar. I have on my desk a report from Morgan Stanley claiming that it would take 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually to replace coal power.
By when? Next month? Obvious bullshit number is obvious bullshit. Nobody has suggested that replacing coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar is going to happen overnight. Not even quickly. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas represent large capital investments with long amortization schedules. The power companies will only shut one off short of its design lifespan in extremis, and there has been no spike in fuel cost for any of them. Quite the opposite. Gas is dirt cheap now, but most utility companies have set fees agreed with state PUCs when gas was expensive, which have not been revisited, so they're making money hand over fist on gas power generation.
Imagine that I have a dozen nuclear power plants all humming along at about 80% capacity. Now imagine I have one of those once in a century events that knocks out one of those power plants.
Why imagine, when we have actual numbers? Average capacity factor of nuclear power plants in the US for 2015 was 91.9%, the highest it has ever been. If you follow the link, you'll see that at least the top 10 plants are actually operating at capacity factors in excess of 100% in order to achieve that average. Now consider that, with the shutdown of Vermont Yankee, there are only 99 total nuclear plants in the US. Having not just 10 plants, but 10% of the plants running at over 100% capacity, where they are by definition eating into their safety margin, doesn't seem all that safe, and it means that quite a few of those 99 plants are running at much less than 91.9% capacity factor.
Of those 99 plants, the majority of them are of such an age and design that they're incapable of being throttled, so when they're operating, they're operating at 100% or above. That means out of the 365 days in a year, the average nuclear power plant was offline for 30 of those days, and for every year but 2015, it has been worse than that. So there is no margin to "crank up" to accommodate a plant going offline.
In short, nuclear power plants are just as dependent on the existence of the full grid as wind and photovoltaics are.
This schedule should mean that with a dozen plants and an expected lifespan of 50 years I can expect a new plant to come online about every four years.
Design lifespans were universally 30 years and between 1977 and 2013, there were no new plants started. The Obama administration approved construction of 4 new plants. The US will be transitioning from nuclear to solar and wind by default, simply because those plants are not being replaced fast enough. But it won't happen so fast that Morgan Stanley's nonsense number is even remotely relevant.
He doesn't _look_ like a coward and a fraud, he _is_ a narcissistic fraudulent oath-breaking sleazeball cowardly weasel.
I'm curious what oaths you think Julian Assange has broken? He's an Australian citizen who is not a naturalized citizen of any other country, and he has never served in any country's military. He's been in court, so he might have sworn an oath to tell the truth at the time, but that was a short-term thing. He's never been a civil servant of any country's government, either. Those are the only places where he might have sworn any oath, and he hasn't done any of them. So, what oaths?
A rain belt shift that sees the Midwest and the Plains become more and more drought prone is going to have a pretty major effect on a country of over 300 million people.
A rain belt shift that saw the Midwest become more and more drought prone would indeed have a pretty major effect.
Fortunately, it's not happening. Quite the opposite. Average rainfall in Missouri is trending upwards, and is higher now than it has been since at least 1900.
Carmack was working on VR shit that directly went over with him to Oculus on ZeniMax's time and dime.
I strongly doubt it. John Carmack was working on experiments and prototypes. He had an old high speed CRT and a high speed camera, among other things. Yes, he was working with them on ZeniMax's time and dime. With their knowledge and explicit permission. We all knew about it. I'm betting he has it in writing. But having conducted those experiments, he was done with that stuff, hardware and software. He had learned what he needed to know, so he didn't need to drag all that crap with him when he went to Oculus.
Palmer Luckey wasn't a "tech innovator"...he was a rich geek who frequented VR modding message boards, and just like everyone else took a smartphone screen and hooked it to community-made VR software
And stuck some slightly whacky lenses in front of the screen. That's what mostly nobody else was doing. He was (and presumably is) convinced that field of view mattered a lot more than most VR was willing to admit. And since he couldn't curve the screen itself, he found a way to make the light curve instead. Very few people were willing to acknowledge that FOV was important, even within that same community he was frequenting. Plenty of people argued with him, probably including you, complaining that human FOV is actually quite narrow, and all of that. And he said yes, that's why the lenses are the shape they are, and why it's ok for the outer edges to have an effectively lower pixel density. And Slashdot loved him. Plenty of people self-reported pledging to his Kickstarter, and quite a few Slashdot denizens have Rift Dev Kits as a result.
Oculus in general and Palmer Luckey in particular only became persona non grata around here when Facebook offered him stupid money and he accepted. It was stupid money. Of course he said yes. He's not dumb like Yahoo. He was a tech innovator who knew when to say yes.
Yes, they've run a load of static fire tests, and yes, I'm sure they've done a very thorough inspection of the structure, but the stresses of launch are high and you'll only really see how re-usable it is when you actually re-use it.
There's an argument to be made that the return flight is a second stress test. The booster is flying at Mach 10 above the majority of the Earth's atmosphere. Then it intentionally dives back in. Coming back in is very nearly as tough on it as going up was. Other first stage boosters actually break up in the atmosphere when they reenter, it's so tough to do. The Falcon 9 booster not only makes it back into the atmosphere, but flips itself end-for-end twice, which has gotta be a severe lateral jolt, and then soft lands. That's three kicks to the pants (deceleration burn, reentry burn, landing burn), and two kicks to the head (flipping once for deceleration and once for landing). That sounds worse than the trip up and out, which is just one long steady push with some buffeting along the way.
Falcon 9 first stages already survive far rougher treatment than any other rocket ever has. Given how many of them have made it back in one piece, it bodes well for the re-use case.
I didn't read that, but it's the same, held-aloft-by-four-fans design that Moller has been hawking for decades, which means that just like Moller's "Skycar", it's going to fly just slightly better than a grand piano if even one of those engines goes out.
Moller's original design had 12 ducted fans, 3 at each corner, specifically to be able to tolerate the engine-out scenario. They were also supposed to be small enough and light enough to be manually removable by a single mechanic. The quoted weight was 60 pounds. I think I still have that issue of Popular Mechanics in a box in the basement.
What Moller didn't know was that no group of small gasoline engines is responsive enough at the throttle for stable powered-lift flight. If he'd just tried electric motors in the 70s or 80s, the world might be a very different place. It would have had to trail a power cord, and the tilt sensors would have been the size of a shoebox, but it would have worked.
Awesome, hating on Elon for having a private company pay to launch private satellites on a private launch vehicle.
While actually paying the US Air Force pad lease and range fees at Vandenberg. The US government actually came out ahead on that launch.
I really wonder why Slashdot is subjected to so much ham-fisted, pathetically obvious, qualitatively bad propaganda. Why do they care what we think? Why is someone spending actual money trying to change how we think? There's a handful of millionaires lurking. I would be astonished if there's even one billionaire lurking on Slashdot. The vast majority of us control nothing, spend nothing, affect nothing. So why do we have to put up with these crap attempts to convince us to hate a rocket company? Makes no sense.
And the Merlins were designed from the start under the principle of preventing the need for a full teardown. That doesn't mean that they will be cheap to reuse. But it does mean that they have the possibility of it.
Considering they've publicly stated that one of the earlier successfully soft-landed first stages has undergone no less than 10 test firings on the test stand in Texas, with "minimal refurbishing," it seems cost-effective reuse isn't merely a possibility: it's a virtual certainty.
If they faked it on the moon how come the flag is waving?
Springs! Duh! It's all done with springs. And smoke. And mirrors.
Can't wait to see how much more free money the govt. gives them.
So now building an object 23 stories tall that can fly into orbit is free? Good to know.
Or maybe you're just an asshole.
Unfortunately, even if you could get this message out to everyone, the natural human reaction to danger is to move away. From flinching away from pain to running from sudden sounds, it's hard wired in by evolution.
The only way to overcome it is with military style training, getting people used to gunshot sounds and running towards people shooting at them.
That may be true, but there's no evolutionary response to gunfire. It hasn't existed long enough.
Yes, people are accustomed to gunshot sounds. Hollywood gunshot sounds. They are accustomed to gunshot sounds that sound a lot scarier than real gunshots. The pop of a real pistol or the crack of a real rifle are almost unrecognizable to most modern people. The T-800's gunshots in Terminator 2 were famously a combination of a manipulated sound of a .38 pistol being fired, a rifle being fired in a canyon, a cannon firing, and the sped up sound of a cannon firing, all layered together. It sounds nothing like a real gun of any kind, but it was so iconic, and so culturally pervasive, that James Cameron's thumb now rests permanently on the scale of gunshot sound effects.
For decades of film-making, gun battle scenes were shot using blanks. The guns involved fired rounds with the correct amount of real propellant in them, just with no bullet in front of them. The audio of the "fight" was recorded and actually used in the final print. They don't even bother with that anymore. Yes, that was at least partially because of some accidents on set involving injuries (blanks can still hurt, even kill), but a lot of it was because the whole philosophy of filmmaking with respect to guns shifted. Now they just fire smoke squibs, and the sound they make is irrelevant to what is heard in the movie. The sound editor is just going to replace it all anyway.
So people have neither an evolutionary response nor a learned response to real gunfire. Evolution hasn't had time, and what they've learned isn't real.
All those people who fled the terminal building in Fort Lauderdale? Almost none of them saw the shooter shoot someone. Almost none of them heard a shot fired, and the vast majority who heard a shot fired didn't recognize it. They ran because everybody was running, and somebody said "shooter!" It actually happened a second time that day, when no one was firing a weapon anywhere in the airport. News commentators on site by then were baffled. "Why is everyone running again?" one said. All it takes is for the first few people to run. That is the evolutionary response. A panicked crowd could probably trample a shooter to death by accident because of that instinctive reaction, if those first few people would run towards the shooter. Everybody else will too.
That's going to make it a lot harder to cover your camera. The spooks will love it.
Impossible, I'd say. Because the problem with video chat that any off-spectrum engineer has been trying to solve since the inception of video chat is, how do you make it look like a face to face conversation? How do you establish eye contact in video chat?
The obvious answer to any skilled practitioner of the art has always been to embed the camera in the display itself. For an oblong display that is most frequently used vertically, embed the camera 1/3rd of the way down from the upper short edge, exactly in the middle of the long edges. Right where people already habitually frame their eyes when video chatting. For a tablet, sometimes used for video chat in landscape mode with groups, embed two cameras: one in the position most suited for vertical orientation, and the corresponding one 1/3rd of the way down from the upper long edge, exactly in the middle of the short edges, so it looks right in either orientation.
That assumes you want a discrete camera. If you want the best possible flexibility, you want two complete grids of elements in the display: pixels and phoxels. Picture elements and photo elements. The pixels are OLEDs. The phoxels are pinhole cameras. Millions of them.
The patent is the usual obvious bullshit, because the eye contact problem has been with us since the days when webcams were a thing. Remember those? Same problem. Same blindingly obvious solution as soon as a display tech amenable to it exists.
So the camera(s) aren't reasonably blockable at all, because they're not where they are today, near an edge. Near an edge, they could be covered, and you just use software that avoids using the pixels near that edge. You've lost some screen real estate, but the device is still reasonably usable with a blocked camera. But if the camera(s) are in the best positions for video chat, you're out of luck. They're far away from the edge, smack in the middle of the part of the display that more or less always has something important on it. Impossible to block and still use the device. Or there's millions of them, and the entire surface of the display is also a camera.
In a Panopticon world, with only discrete cameras, there's a third camera, dead center of the display, that is never accessible or enumerable by userspace software on the device. That one is for the spooks.
IBM is betting big on cloud and other services, having spun off its hardware units like servers and PCs to Lenovo.
Thank you, thank you, IBM. You will finally succeed in killing off this "cloud" thing (a.k.a. somebody else's servers) because you have successfully turned the entire category into a patent minefield. When the Nazgul start sending demand letters these next three years, the whole thing will dry up and blow away. Nobody can stand against the Nazgul.
The reason he was so successful in his mass murder is the rest of the people OBEYED THE LAW! In this case the "gun free zone" in the airport existed only on paper. Blood stained and bullet holed paper.
I thought the laws existed to keep us safe, no?
No, they don't. They exist to improve the chances of safety. They do not create total safety. Neither do guns. Black and white thinking is nearly always wrong. (See what I did there?)
And no, the reason he killed five people was NOT because the rest of the people obeyed the law. It was because the rest of the people were cowards, ignorant, or both, and ran, hid, or otherwise did 100% the wrong thing.
Run from a knife, charge a gun. If everybody within earshot dogpiled on him after they heard the very first shot, they could have cut the number of fatalities to as little as none. Maybe one. Maybe two. Definitely much less than five.
Shit, he was using standard hand gun magazines. He RELOADED TWICE. Stopping him before he used every round did not even require physical bravery. Anybody could have waited until he was reloading, then jumped him, with zero chance of getting shot. And any asshole who has played CounterStrike, or a zombie shooter, or shit, watched the fucking Lone Ranger knows that you can't get shot when somebody is reloading.
So no, the "gun free zone" is not the problem. Having guns everywhere is not the solution. Teaching people what to do is the solution. Bravery is the solution. The false bravery of a concealed carry "hero"? No, we don't need more of that.
Give us real 8 cores with 8 FPU's. none of this cheap ass corner cutting. Intel has lost their way and you have a chance to become a real contender once again.
Your FPU wish is granted (sort of?). Two complete FPUs per core, implemented as two each parallel Fadd and Fmul units, capable of simultaneous scheduling and simultaneous floating point register access, per the detailed diagram here. The loader is 128 bits wide, so it does look like it can suck in, calculate, and shove out two 64 bit floating point instructions simultaneously, indefinitely, no bottleneck, with fancy dedicated instruction scheduling of its own.
As for 8 "real" cores (whatever a "real" core is these days), this makes mention of a "CPU Complex" of 4 cores. The implication being, you might see more than one CPU complex on the same chip. But that diagram should be telling you why Intel has been reluctant to give you 8 "real" cores. With four cores, your L3 cache already has to be 16-way associative to behave reasonably. You want to jam 4 more cores into that diagram. Looks like there's room, top and bottom, right? And double the cache size, to 16 MB. If you want it to behave as efficiently as the 4 core version, you're wanting 64-way associativity. Which is ridiculous, and probably doesn't scale as well as you'd hoped. What it sounds like AMD will be doing is plunking two of those CPU Complexes down side by side, then linking them to each other via the modern version of HyperTransport. The CPUs become ccNUMA within a single chip.
I'm afraid you're doomed to disappointment with Intel and AMD both. Without sandwich stacked circuits, building an L3 cache for 8 cores is just infeasible. You can fit all the transistors you need, but hooking them all together in a useful arrangement requires an absurd number of paths.
Another related question: If things went so wrong with 3D TVs, what guarantee is there that the new 3D VR/AR trend won't collapse along similar lines as well?
- I fully expect this to happen. People complained loudly about 3D glasses and now you expect them to wear a HMD? Really?
I didn't expect this to happen. VR is qualitatively different from all other viewing experiences. Moving your head changes what you see. Nothing else does that. And we're finally at the stage where rendered image quality and framerates are high enough and latency is low enough that it can really fool your brain, far better than a flat "3D" TV.
What may still kill VR is price. When Oculus was targeting the $200-$300 range, it sounded fantastic. The price of another display. Then it landed commercially. At $600. Vive costs even more. When your choice is between an unknown and an 85" TV, or a 55" OLED TV, it's really hard to go with the unknown.
Strange vapor-ware[sic]. Did you even read the article? The CPU exists, the motherboards exists, the coolers exists.
Well one of them does, at least...
I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use?
It seems unlikely. Panasonic agreed to create the 2170 form factor specifically for Tesla. Tesla likes have large numbers of smaller, cylindrical cells because they can build packs out of them that give them finer control and better cooling than the large monolithic cells you seem to be referring to (very imprecisely). They're just a little bit bigger in both dimensions than an 18650 in order to improve the power density of the packs, while not losing the aforementioned advantages.
Because it's a custom Tesla-specific cell form factor, it's very likely a Tesla-exclusive contract as well. Panasonic is making these in a Tesla factory for Tesla, and nobody else. So when you start seeing advertising for Panasonic 2170 cells on Alibaba, don't try to buy them. They'll be fake. You're unlikely to see any real new 2170 bare cells on the open market. What you may see are used ones coming from someone buying a wrecked Tesla and tearing apart the battery pack. What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced it—it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.
"The practice of labelling the infringement of exclusive rights in creative works as "piracy" predates statutory copyright law."
Just because it's an old lie doesn't make it any less of a lie.
Yet another nail in the coffin for autonomous vehicles. Should we really keep going?
Autonomous vehicles can do it better, with hidden microphones throughout the cabin, plus one visible one with a little sign that says "All conversations are recorded." Since autonomous vehicles are already stuffed full of expensive sensors, adding a few more won't affect the price of the vehicle to any great extent. Taxis today are much much cheaper vehicles, so adding the microphones would be a big burden.
Yeah but who built that network? Not the Chinese...
Doesn't matter, does it? The Chinese may even know that they're not very good at building new, which is why they entertain deals like this one. Doesn't matter, because they're the world champions at maintaining what's built. China's entire society revolves around stasis and stability, especially now that they no longer transfer power between dynasties the hard way. Regardless of who built it for them, they participated in its construction, and now that the network exists, they can maintain it for a thousand years.
...how to identify dangers, how to respond to traffic cops, how to navigate complex parking structures.
When did Slashdot accrete such a large contingent of morons? These are engineering problems. Solvable engineering problems. First, "how to identify danger". Uuh, don't hit things? That's half the job of making a self-driving car in the first place, and radar, lidar, and what have-you are being used for precisely that purpose. Is it simple? No. Does it require a sapient AI? Not even close.
How to navigate a complex parking structure? Really? You're asking this while using a computer network to post? You do realize that only one vehicle has to navigate the structure successfully, and then they all can, right? And it can be taught how to do it by a human?
And finally traffic cops. Oh, the lovely traffic cops. You know the very first thing they'll demand is a "Do As I Say" button. And they will get it. When the vehicle obeys all posted speed limits, it gets harder to keep the drug money seizures flowing, but the old busted taillight gag still works a treat. Can't get that sweet speeder money anymore, so civil forfeitures will have to go up. Them's the breaks. City Hall has to get paid, and they sure as shit can't implement a tax on everybody. Only a "tax" on Bad People.
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
Nah. He's just getting $$ for everything you happen to disagree with. That's what makes this site great. Everyone's on the take.
Then where's my damn check? I can be disagreeable all day long!
There are other gotchas though such as what if stray pieces of conductive material get in the way? If the vehicle is going to actually charge at a reasonable rate then some stray piece of metal can be a real problem in terms of picking up energy and heating. You could carefully monitor the power on both sides but it's hard to say if the difference is going to heat something. Another is broadcasting all kinds of errant emissions. When you broadcast that much power even little screwups like not parking in the exact right spot or minor damage to the bottom of the car could create tons of unwanted noise at all kinds of frequencies.
You included the key word in your own text. Broadcasting is specifically what they are not doing. Everybody agrees that a purely radiant broadcast is a terrible way to move power wirelessly. That's why WiTricity intends to use resonant antennas, as described here. That prevents both heating of stray objects, because essentially no stray metal objects will be the right size to resonate, and prevents broadcast noise, because very nearly all the power is confined to the near field.