Your fantasy of the Gibson factory workers making an armed stand is just that, fantasy.
Who's the moron? Perhaps you've heard about a little incident in Nevada involving a rancher named Cliven Bundy? It isn't fantasy, asshole. It's already happened. This genius decided he would try to create Citizen's Eminent Domain and seize land from the government. So far it's working, because the BLM wasn't wise enough to do what the FBI did to Gibson.
Unless and until all the other vehicles on the road are also autonomous because it's illegal to drive on manual in the city limits, I'm going to hope, nay, insist, that the repair truck be manned and not be alone. A blocked lane is a blocked lane. When large chunks of steel moving at high speeds are involved, I'd rather have a human in the loop to decide now is not a good time to block a whole lane, even if it is 2 in the morning. Especially here, just after a blind curve, in the rain and the dark. Presumably autonomous vehicles can be told wirelessly that they need to avoid that lane, but the merely human drivers probably won't be.
Would this cause some kindof "global cooling"? Apologies for using such a phrase as I know the furore behind global warming, but it does make me wonder what the repercussions would be in the future.
No. The energy doesn't disappear. When it's used in electrical systems, it eventually gets dissipated. As heat. Why do you think your CPU has a big heat sink on it? Even if we power our entire civilization off of solar energy, the heat still gets into the hydrosphere eventually. It just does a little bit of useful work along the way.
Sure, the road might not be able to actually clear its own snow, but the supposed advantage is that the road will be able to provide some of the power for its own clearing.
Just preventing the formation of ice after manual clearing would be a big win, both in lives saved and in money saved not having to run salt trucks over and over.
With (substantial) electrical storage, the road could generate enough power on sunny days to fully clear itself during each snowfall. But that requires Tesla to build several extra gigafactories. It could be a while.
Uh, it's not THAT expensive. Embedded resistive heating in sidewalks and driveways is well within the means of anyone middle class pouring a new one of either. Running such an installation in a typical winter anywhere outside of North Dakota or Alaska costs kilowatt hours per snowfall, sure, but kilowatt hours cost pennies. Powering such a system with plain old coal power costs tens of dollars for a big snow, but not hundreds. It's quite affordable.
you are so funny, where do you live? northern florida? what you say does not hold true in the midwest or northern states.
What he says holds true throughout the Midwest. It does not snow most of the winter. It snows occasionally throughout the winter. Only the norther plains states have to deal with permanent snow-pack in the winter.
But that doesn't help his case all that much. Soaking up and storing power requires some form of energy storage. Presumably batteries, since thermal storage over something as thin and widely distributed as a road is ludicrous. If Tesla builds five gigafactories, rather than just one, then maybe. Otherwise, forget it.
You've got several good points, especially about the impact of falling objects, but your major point is useless. Not even wrong. Steel frames? Foolishness. Yes these panels have to be anchored down somehow, but it's ludicrous to think that the only way to do that is some massively complicated manually installed steel frame.
Existing roads have a roadbed. There's layers and layers of specifically chosen materials piled up to make a functional, usable, long-lasting hard-wearing road. This has been a known prerequisite of good roads since Roman times. That $2 million per lane mile pays for lots more than just the final layer of concrete that you can see. It pays for steel reinforcing frames that end up inside the concrete. It pays for layers and layers of specifically chosen sands and gravels, very carefully distributed and graded at angles just so (by GPS-guided bulldozers and graders, no less). It pays for drainage ditches and culverts and guard rails and lane markings.
Except for the lane markings, I would expect most of those things to continue to be required and to continue to be built in more or less the same way. Changing the wearing surface is unlikely to change most of the roadbed. These tiles still have to perform as part of a roadway that deals with all the things roadways have had to deal with since time immemorial, especially water and freezing temperatures. You correctly concluded that a rigid steel frame around every tile is ridiculous, but you failed to consider alternatives, and especially failed to consider the existence of the roadbed. These tiles aren't magically suspended in mid-air by the power of their own awesomeness. They're laid on top of something, and in order to stand up under the weight of all that traffic, you can bet that they're lying flat on top of the roadbed, with every square millimeter supported from underneath, the same as any other wearing surface.
The concrete slabs we use today are "secured" only by their own mass and their coefficient of friction with the gravel beneath them. These tiles are considerably less massive, individually, than that slab, but if you start connecting them to each other, you end up with effectively the same sort of slab. If you want to go further, you could add posts that extend down into the gravel beneath, and add the shear strength of those pins to the friction. I seriously doubt that will be necessary though. All you need is to connect tiles to each other. Those connections are going to be much more like the steel reinforcement of concrete roads than like a frame. That is, they'll be deployed by machine and be independent of each other. Tiles would be deployed onto the connections at the same time, and by the same type of mechanism. Any major deployment would be done by machine the same as concrete roads are done today. I would expect the labor to be basically identical, in both numbers and in skill. If anything, the job would be done faster, because it doesn't take two passes by two different machines. Current concrete roads are built by first deploying the steel reinforcement with one machine, then pouring the concrete into the prepared roadbed with another. These tiles could be deployed together with their connections in a single pass.
I expect any initial test deployment to be quite expensive in labor because that tile-laying machine does not yet exist. Further testing will determine whether or not the roadbed supports these tiles as well as they need to be. I expect it will. At which point the tile-laying machine can be designed and built, probably by the same company that designs and builds the machine used to lay the steel reinforcement in concrete roads. No that's not free, but it's not nearly the massive money-sink you seem to believe.
You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
No worse, in other words. Except it is better, because in a major metro area the roads are never actually empty, so they have to close a lane (two guys deploying cones), keep it closed (guy sitting in truck with big flashy arrow sign mounted on the back and huge shock absorber deployed), dump asphalt in the hole (aforementioned guy with shovel), compress asphalt (guy driving one of those mini roller things), and let's face it, it's the highway department, so there's at least 5 other guys standing around not visibly doing much. Let's be generous and assume one of them is an inspector, or something.
These tiles are better. Around here we have quite a bit of nice shiny relatively new concrete highways. But inevitably, they still develop potholes. We get snow and freezing conditions and a small flaw gets magnified by constant traffic and in the end, you get a hole, even in otherwise excellent quality roadwork.
So they patch it. Precisely as I described. Guy with shovel dumps asphalt in it, another guy compresses it, etc. A month later, the patch is gone and the hole is back and growing again. Asphalt patches in concrete have a tendency to shred right out of the hole they're supposed to be filling. So do you do the whole thing all over again? How about we replace the malfunctioned tile, but we'll do it realistically, instead of the optimistic grandparent's way. Lane blocker guys, check. Guys prying the existing tile out of the hole and locking the new tile in place. Two of them, because 110 lbs exceeds OSHA's one-man lift limit, check Nobody to run the mini roller thing, or drive the truck towing the trailer it came on (one of those 5 guys standing around). We saved one laborer! Success!
More to the point, the new tile will still be in place and functioning next month. The asphalt patch isn't. No, the initial repair isn't particularly cheaper than the way it's done now. The benefit would be the longevity of the repair. If it works. They're going to spend a few million dollars and find out.
Hey, if this is really that fast - I wonder if it could make mesh networking a viable alternative to the current (centralized) form of internet access? After all, why should all of those OLPC recipients be the only beneficiaries of mesh network technology?
Yes. And no. At least, there's no technical reason why not. 5 GHz is attenuated by most residential structural materials by only 1 dB more than 2.4 GHz and there are no microwave ovens and very few cordless phones to contend with in that spectrum. Range and throughput for non-line-of-sight is better than for 802.11a and 802.11b. People in fancy houses would probably want a roof-mounted antennae—red brick attenuates 5 GHz 10.1dB more than 2.4 GHz. Of course, if everybody had an antennae in their attic, everybody would benefit. And therein lies the rub.
The throughput is possible, the range is there, the compatibility with suburban realities is there, the mesh-compatible spanning tree algorithms are there, but the public will to buy a product that incorporates mesh networking is very nearly nonexistent. It spells doom for a product that depends on the network effect to have zero network effect.
The problem is connectivity to the rest of the internet.
Suppose we assume that a given neighborhood has nothing but ancient DSL1 available hardwired. Suppose we further assume that the majority of people in the neighborhood want something better. Suppose we get really generous and assume this device that enables mesh networking is affordable to a presumably somewhat lower income neighborhood (because the cable and phone companies only ignore low income neighborhoods). So all these neighbors buy the device and successfully cover the entire region. Congratulations, they can now talk... to each other.
Somebody, somewhere, has to connect their device to "the other networks," which we call the Internet, and it had better be a very high bandwidth connection because an entire neighborhood is going to funnel through it. 10 Gbit would be ideal. No individual can pay for that, so everybody in the neighborhood has to chip in every month and oh look, you just created an ISP. Or not, because nobody is going to actually take that last step to provide the required organization and get that connection established. Leastwise, not in most places.
Meanwhile the adjacent, probably more affluent neighborhood didn't even look up from their lattés—they already have acceptable hardwired connections and inaction is always easier than action and there's very little incentive for them to enable their own mesh. They already have tens of megabits and 10 gigabits shared out 100 ways is... what they already have, but they'd have to actually do something and once again inaction wins.
Device manufacturers have already followed this line of reasoning from beginning to end and won't even bother to take the first step of manufacturing and affordably pricing a device that can do off-the-shelf mesh networking.
Oh bullshit. They enforced the law. A law, I might add, that was signed into effect by President George W. Bush. A law with 10 Republican co-sponsors. A law which passed with fine bipartisan support in 2008. A law which Tea Partiers must oppose but which Republicans love because it's protectionism for the US logging industry. A law which has been proven empiracally to be working, since illegal logging is down 22% worldwide since the US and other countries enacted it.
Regardless of its pedigree and the fact it actually works, it's law. Laws are ineffective unless enforced. The FBI enforces federal law. The FBI showed up and enforced federal law in Tennessee. What did you expect them to do, send a politely worded letter and ask them to please mail their illegally obtained lumber to the FBI impound yard? When this was Gibson's second offense for the same damn thing? Or maybe you thought the local 55 year old balding slightly overweight county sheriff should show up with his trusty deputy Dudley and enforce the law? Which he can't do even if both he and you wanted him to, because it's federal law, and therefore not his law to enforce (though I'm sure he was invited by the FBI as a courtesy).
The FBI did precisely what it should have done to enforce the law with the least amount of danger to all involved. In a heavily armed portion of the country, they showed up with overwhelming force precisely so they wouldn't have to actually apply any force. If they had showed up with two guys in suits and a forklift, somebody probably would have been hurt. Instead they confiscated the lumber and left, because the law says "shall be confiscated." They did their jobs and did them quite well.
The rule of law is not some magical fairy dust you can just wish into existence. Laws are obeyed when they are enforced. A country is enjoying the rule of law when the laws are being enforced in an egalitarian fashion with a minimum of danger and damage to both the offenders and to innocent bystanders. The FBI successfully minimized the danger as proven by the fact there was no damage at all. As opposed to many many other places in the world where what passes for law enforcement is a heavily armed mob showing up at your warehouse, looking around and saying, "Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it," collecting a wad of cash and leaving, with some minor gratuitous damage and bullying along the way. Or if the owner doesn't pay, burning the place down.
The incident was a measured use of authorized power, carried out professionally and well.
I remember an episode of the A-team where they created a firearm No one got hit by it that time either. Maybe the sights were off.
Haven't you seen Die Hard 2? The A-Team is a false flag operation giving cover to the Bad Guys.
Re:left out the most important steps
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How LEDs Are Made
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Note: I am speaking as a material engineer who spent about 6 years in R&D for the 65W LED bulbs you can now buy at HomeDepot.
Waitaminute waitaminute waitaminute. You can't do that. This is Slashdot. You're violating time-honored tradition.
First you have to tell us what you know without telling us how you know, so some dumbass can demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect. Then you tell us how you know what you know. It's only fair. Gotta keep the post count per article up ya know, or Dice will cry.
Let's go with Tolkein's Shire Calendar instead. Twelve 30 day months and the leftover days are split evenly between summer and winter, with leap days coming after Mid-summer's Day. It has the added bonus of new and strange month and weekday names. What more could you ask for?
Regardless, I use various automotive manual packages, I have several which will only run on 2k or XP.
The compatibility settings don't work? Probably worth a try, since fiddling with compatibility settings can get even old DX5 games to run in Windows 7.
As the water cools, it rises to the surface, causing it to lower the temperature of the surface water...
Cold water does not rise, absent currents that force it to the surface, as in San Francisco. Ordinarily, it sinks under warmer water. Are you claiming that a specific Antarctic current has caused an inversion in the normal arrangement of warm and cold water?
I don't know why that idea even showed up, but that wasn't the only place. Farthest Star and Wall Around a Star, reprinted in an omnibus volume called The Saga of Cuckoo by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson also featured the same idea. Duplicates created by tachyon scan and transmission were sent out of the galaxy and got killed a lot. Meh.
What's with this "sheer horror of death" thing, anyway? The originals never even met their duplicates, so why would they even be concerned about their deaths, let alone driven insane. Makes no sense. The duplicates met each other at times, but still—it's not a realistic reaction. It's like having a twin brother die. Sad, sure, but enough to unhinge an even halfway normal person? Bah. Stupid literary device.
...and they have no-compete clauses with each other
No they don't. That would be an illegal cartel, and they know it. No, they have "gentleman's agreements" with each other not to compete. Which amounts to the same thing, but the only proof is the indirect evidence that they never actually compete, and so it's not particularly actionable in court.
And don't look now, but Ma Bell is very nearly completely reconstituted. The only piece missing is Pac Bell. Of course the FCC and FTC will remain determinedly oblivious to that fact.
Caramack is open and honest, and very intelligent to boot. He will have given Zenimax's lawyers less than zero to work with. And this means Facebook will be extremely unlikely to want to settle (and Zenimax wants too large a pay-off anyway, to cover their iD loses).
The one doesn't necessarily follow from the other.
I'm quite certain Mr. Carmack is open, honest, and very intelligent, and he's been around the corporate block enough times to wear the naivete off of even as stunning an intellect as his (plus he's married and you can bet his wife is paying attention to business even if he isn't*). All of that may be true, but Facebook may still settle.
So far Facebook has shown precious little interest in court fights. I expect Facebook will offer a considerably lower sum than they're asking. If they go so far as insultingly low, then there will be a fight, but if they don't, Zenimax will probably accept and that will be the end of it. Unless Zenimax's greed just overpowers them and they start demanding royalties forever after, in which case there probably will be a fight. But if the bogus IP claim is just a bargaining position, I could easily see this whole thing settling out of court in a matter of months. If they really are looking to get the purchase price of iD out of the deal, you're probably right, it will go to court.
Now if Zenimax were so foolish as to be suing NewEgg, I would say bust out the popcorn, light a little candle at the shrine to PJ, and sit back and watch the fireworks. But if Facebook has a lawyer like Lee Cheng, he's never been let off the leash.
--- * For evidence, I submit the fate of Armadillo Aerospace, and Mr. Carmack's public statements concerning it.
Unfortunately, Luckey has put in writing to Zenimax that Zenimax owns the IP used in OR, and that the tech can't be shared or used with third parties without Zenimax's involvement.
You've posted that twice now and I'm calling bullshit. Palmer Luckey created the Oculus Rift completely independently of John Carmack and Zenimax both. He started showing it around, Mr. Carmack got interested and started demoing it, still without working on it himself. It was only after Mr. Luckey managed a successful Kickstarter for the Rift that anybody really gave any credence to the idea in the first place. Mr. Carmack started addressing the software gap by volunteering to make the upcoming Doom 3 re-release compatible. That's when he actually started working on the project and his contract with Zenimax became an issue. Until that point, Zenimax owned nothing.
I don't believe for an instant that Mr. Luckey would sign away all his hardware design work on the Oculus Rift. It was his sole design, based on his own personal years of experience with older, inferior virtual reality displays, none of which Zenimax had anything at all to do with. I consider it far more likely that the other claim posted on Slashdot is true, that Zenimax signed a "we don't give a damn" agreement for John Carmack's time. They thought they were looking at a failed Kickstarter in the making, and paid no attention to Valve's interest, nor gave any credence to the whole idea. VR had failed before; VR would fail again. They went so far as to deny Mr. Carmack permission to follow through on his offer of Doom 3 support. That is not the action of a company with skin in the game. If they owned any Rift IP, they would not be actively working against it.
No, this is just sour grapes on the part of Zenimax.
(And thank you Aesop for providing the genesis of a marvelously concise phrase to describe that particular human behavior.)
That's what I hoping for too. We definitely need to get Carmack's word and get all the facts.
You can bet Mr. Carmack's lawyer has already told him not to say one mumbling word in public about either suit. We won't be getting his word for years to come, unless Facebook seriously unloads with both barrels. Odds are they'll pay Zenimax something with a gag order and we'll never hear any of the facts. And Zenimax is perfectly aware of the odds. So far as can be told publicly, Facebook isn't like NewEgg. They don't fight much. So the typical corporate shakedown tactic will succeed and that'll be the end of it.
... in countries that are excessively dry and not to far from the the equator.
You do realize northern Australia is 1379.21 KM from the equator, right? And the the entirety of the Sun Race course is farther than that? Nor does the desert have anything to do with insolation. It gets as much sun as it gets. Nobody drives race cars in the rain, solar or not. A certain amount of drama was added to both of the last two races because it was so cloudy.
Anyway, they changed the rules in 2005, because the speed limit had become a problem. Basically anybody could build a "car" that would make the trip, at the speed limit. Since then, they've gotten away from the original vehicles that were more bicycle than car.
No. Dealing with nuclear materials isn't "difficult".
Dealing with nuclear materials isn't difficult, but you and everybody else in the thread are glossing over the realities at Hanford. It's not just radioactive waste. It's enormous quantities of toxic chemical waste as well, and when you get right down to it, nobody actually knows what's inside a good many of the tanks of sludge they're dealing with. All we know is it's radioactive, chemically toxic, and corrosive to the tank it's sitting in. Records weren't kept of what was dumped where and when. It was appallingly bad management, for decades, and it accumulated a problem far worse than any trivial holding pond at a nuclear reactor site somewhere in the Midwest.
Hanford actually is a difficult and dangerous problem, all foot-dragging and finger-pointing aside. That is indeed part of the problem. 90% of the bureaucrats involved have no clue even where to begin, and they're so ignorant they don't know who to ask or how to find out.
The "problem" will end when the sludge finishes eating through the tanks it's in and it all leaks into the ground, contaminating the region's water supply for centuries. There will be a massive relocation program, a HUGE amount of blame-gaming, none of which will actually stick to anybody, and it then it will all go away. The bureaucrats involved have already proven their one skill: having a chair when the music stops.
Let's make a deal, global warming (or climate change, or whatever the buzzword of the week) deniers: You can keep your SUVs, your ACs turned to 60 degrees and all your other toys. And once the waters rise you drown like good old idiots and don't try to climb up on my mountains.
I don't own an SUV and I have yet to turn my AC on this year and I live 650 miles away from the nearest ocean and I still think this article is utter bullshit. Failed forest management policies cause wildfires. End of story. Any signal from the climate is completely overwhelmed by the policies of clowns who think the "natural" way is by definition better.
Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation's final law Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
How come every time a nation / state / city is overspending, people always immediately turn to how to raise more tax revenues?
Overspending? Oklahoma ran out of fat to cut decades ago, and had very little to begin with. Then they ran out of muscle. Now they're busy cutting out bone. There are certain things a government in the developed world must do. If the government stops doing those things, the region ceases to be part of the developed world. Oklahoma is not overspending. Oklahoma is underspending, and underspending very badly. Roads don't just appear by magic you know. There are no pothole gnomes who magically fill holes in the road in the middle of the night for free. Leaving a bowl of milk and a ragged textbook on your front porch does not get you a new textbook the next morning.
Government is the only reliable way humans manage to achieve these things, and only a funded government manages to do them. An unfunded 'government' like what Somalia has is a sham and everybody except you knows it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your fantasy of the Gibson factory workers making an armed stand is just that, fantasy.
Who's the moron? Perhaps you've heard about a little incident in Nevada involving a rancher named Cliven Bundy? It isn't fantasy, asshole. It's already happened. This genius decided he would try to create Citizen's Eminent Domain and seize land from the government. So far it's working, because the BLM wasn't wise enough to do what the FBI did to Gibson.
Unless and until all the other vehicles on the road are also autonomous because it's illegal to drive on manual in the city limits, I'm going to hope, nay, insist, that the repair truck be manned and not be alone. A blocked lane is a blocked lane. When large chunks of steel moving at high speeds are involved, I'd rather have a human in the loop to decide now is not a good time to block a whole lane, even if it is 2 in the morning. Especially here, just after a blind curve, in the rain and the dark. Presumably autonomous vehicles can be told wirelessly that they need to avoid that lane, but the merely human drivers probably won't be.
Would this cause some kindof "global cooling"? Apologies for using such a phrase as I know the furore behind global warming, but it does make me wonder what the repercussions would be in the future.
No. The energy doesn't disappear. When it's used in electrical systems, it eventually gets dissipated. As heat. Why do you think your CPU has a big heat sink on it? Even if we power our entire civilization off of solar energy, the heat still gets into the hydrosphere eventually. It just does a little bit of useful work along the way.
Sure, the road might not be able to actually clear its own snow, but the supposed advantage is that the road will be able to provide some of the power for its own clearing.
Just preventing the formation of ice after manual clearing would be a big win, both in lives saved and in money saved not having to run salt trucks over and over.
With (substantial) electrical storage, the road could generate enough power on sunny days to fully clear itself during each snowfall. But that requires Tesla to build several extra gigafactories. It could be a while.
a billionaire's ruinously expensive driveway
I think you've found the real use case.
Uh, it's not THAT expensive. Embedded resistive heating in sidewalks and driveways is well within the means of anyone middle class pouring a new one of either. Running such an installation in a typical winter anywhere outside of North Dakota or Alaska costs kilowatt hours per snowfall, sure, but kilowatt hours cost pennies. Powering such a system with plain old coal power costs tens of dollars for a big snow, but not hundreds. It's quite affordable.
you are so funny, where do you live? northern florida? what you say does not hold true in the midwest or northern states.
What he says holds true throughout the Midwest. It does not snow most of the winter. It snows occasionally throughout the winter. Only the norther plains states have to deal with permanent snow-pack in the winter.
But that doesn't help his case all that much. Soaking up and storing power requires some form of energy storage. Presumably batteries, since thermal storage over something as thin and widely distributed as a road is ludicrous. If Tesla builds five gigafactories, rather than just one, then maybe. Otherwise, forget it.
You've got several good points, especially about the impact of falling objects, but your major point is useless. Not even wrong. Steel frames? Foolishness. Yes these panels have to be anchored down somehow, but it's ludicrous to think that the only way to do that is some massively complicated manually installed steel frame.
Existing roads have a roadbed. There's layers and layers of specifically chosen materials piled up to make a functional, usable, long-lasting hard-wearing road. This has been a known prerequisite of good roads since Roman times. That $2 million per lane mile pays for lots more than just the final layer of concrete that you can see. It pays for steel reinforcing frames that end up inside the concrete. It pays for layers and layers of specifically chosen sands and gravels, very carefully distributed and graded at angles just so (by GPS-guided bulldozers and graders, no less). It pays for drainage ditches and culverts and guard rails and lane markings.
Except for the lane markings, I would expect most of those things to continue to be required and to continue to be built in more or less the same way. Changing the wearing surface is unlikely to change most of the roadbed. These tiles still have to perform as part of a roadway that deals with all the things roadways have had to deal with since time immemorial, especially water and freezing temperatures. You correctly concluded that a rigid steel frame around every tile is ridiculous, but you failed to consider alternatives, and especially failed to consider the existence of the roadbed. These tiles aren't magically suspended in mid-air by the power of their own awesomeness. They're laid on top of something, and in order to stand up under the weight of all that traffic, you can bet that they're lying flat on top of the roadbed, with every square millimeter supported from underneath, the same as any other wearing surface.
The concrete slabs we use today are "secured" only by their own mass and their coefficient of friction with the gravel beneath them. These tiles are considerably less massive, individually, than that slab, but if you start connecting them to each other, you end up with effectively the same sort of slab. If you want to go further, you could add posts that extend down into the gravel beneath, and add the shear strength of those pins to the friction. I seriously doubt that will be necessary though. All you need is to connect tiles to each other. Those connections are going to be much more like the steel reinforcement of concrete roads than like a frame. That is, they'll be deployed by machine and be independent of each other. Tiles would be deployed onto the connections at the same time, and by the same type of mechanism. Any major deployment would be done by machine the same as concrete roads are done today. I would expect the labor to be basically identical, in both numbers and in skill. If anything, the job would be done faster, because it doesn't take two passes by two different machines. Current concrete roads are built by first deploying the steel reinforcement with one machine, then pouring the concrete into the prepared roadbed with another. These tiles could be deployed together with their connections in a single pass.
I expect any initial test deployment to be quite expensive in labor because that tile-laying machine does not yet exist. Further testing will determine whether or not the roadbed supports these tiles as well as they need to be. I expect it will. At which point the tile-laying machine can be designed and built, probably by the same company that designs and builds the machine used to lay the steel reinforcement in concrete roads. No that's not free, but it's not nearly the massive money-sink you seem to believe.
You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
No worse, in other words. Except it is better, because in a major metro area the roads are never actually empty, so they have to close a lane (two guys deploying cones), keep it closed (guy sitting in truck with big flashy arrow sign mounted on the back and huge shock absorber deployed), dump asphalt in the hole (aforementioned guy with shovel), compress asphalt (guy driving one of those mini roller things), and let's face it, it's the highway department, so there's at least 5 other guys standing around not visibly doing much. Let's be generous and assume one of them is an inspector, or something.
These tiles are better. Around here we have quite a bit of nice shiny relatively new concrete highways. But inevitably, they still develop potholes. We get snow and freezing conditions and a small flaw gets magnified by constant traffic and in the end, you get a hole, even in otherwise excellent quality roadwork.
So they patch it. Precisely as I described. Guy with shovel dumps asphalt in it, another guy compresses it, etc. A month later, the patch is gone and the hole is back and growing again. Asphalt patches in concrete have a tendency to shred right out of the hole they're supposed to be filling. So do you do the whole thing all over again? How about we replace the malfunctioned tile, but we'll do it realistically, instead of the optimistic grandparent's way. Lane blocker guys, check. Guys prying the existing tile out of the hole and locking the new tile in place. Two of them, because 110 lbs exceeds OSHA's one-man lift limit, check Nobody to run the mini roller thing, or drive the truck towing the trailer it came on (one of those 5 guys standing around). We saved one laborer! Success!
More to the point, the new tile will still be in place and functioning next month. The asphalt patch isn't. No, the initial repair isn't particularly cheaper than the way it's done now. The benefit would be the longevity of the repair. If it works. They're going to spend a few million dollars and find out.
Hey, if this is really that fast - I wonder if it could make mesh networking a viable alternative to the current (centralized) form of internet access? After all, why should all of those OLPC recipients be the only beneficiaries of mesh network technology?
Yes. And no. At least, there's no technical reason why not. 5 GHz is attenuated by most residential structural materials by only 1 dB more than 2.4 GHz and there are no microwave ovens and very few cordless phones to contend with in that spectrum. Range and throughput for non-line-of-sight is better than for 802.11a and 802.11b. People in fancy houses would probably want a roof-mounted antennae—red brick attenuates 5 GHz 10.1dB more than 2.4 GHz. Of course, if everybody had an antennae in their attic, everybody would benefit. And therein lies the rub.
The throughput is possible, the range is there, the compatibility with suburban realities is there, the mesh-compatible spanning tree algorithms are there, but the public will to buy a product that incorporates mesh networking is very nearly nonexistent. It spells doom for a product that depends on the network effect to have zero network effect.
The problem is connectivity to the rest of the internet.
Suppose we assume that a given neighborhood has nothing but ancient DSL1 available hardwired. Suppose we further assume that the majority of people in the neighborhood want something better. Suppose we get really generous and assume this device that enables mesh networking is affordable to a presumably somewhat lower income neighborhood (because the cable and phone companies only ignore low income neighborhoods). So all these neighbors buy the device and successfully cover the entire region. Congratulations, they can now talk... to each other.
Somebody, somewhere, has to connect their device to "the other networks," which we call the Internet, and it had better be a very high bandwidth connection because an entire neighborhood is going to funnel through it. 10 Gbit would be ideal. No individual can pay for that, so everybody in the neighborhood has to chip in every month and oh look, you just created an ISP. Or not, because nobody is going to actually take that last step to provide the required organization and get that connection established. Leastwise, not in most places.
Meanwhile the adjacent, probably more affluent neighborhood didn't even look up from their lattés—they already have acceptable hardwired connections and inaction is always easier than action and there's very little incentive for them to enable their own mesh. They already have tens of megabits and 10 gigabits shared out 100 ways is... what they already have, but they'd have to actually do something and once again inaction wins.
Device manufacturers have already followed this line of reasoning from beginning to end and won't even bother to take the first step of manufacturing and affordably pricing a device that can do off-the-shelf mesh networking.
This is why we can't have nice things.
...the entire thing was a vast abuse of power...
Oh bullshit. They enforced the law. A law, I might add, that was signed into effect by President George W. Bush. A law with 10 Republican co-sponsors. A law which passed with fine bipartisan support in 2008. A law which Tea Partiers must oppose but which Republicans love because it's protectionism for the US logging industry. A law which has been proven empiracally to be working, since illegal logging is down 22% worldwide since the US and other countries enacted it.
Regardless of its pedigree and the fact it actually works, it's law. Laws are ineffective unless enforced. The FBI enforces federal law. The FBI showed up and enforced federal law in Tennessee. What did you expect them to do, send a politely worded letter and ask them to please mail their illegally obtained lumber to the FBI impound yard? When this was Gibson's second offense for the same damn thing? Or maybe you thought the local 55 year old balding slightly overweight county sheriff should show up with his trusty deputy Dudley and enforce the law? Which he can't do even if both he and you wanted him to, because it's federal law, and therefore not his law to enforce (though I'm sure he was invited by the FBI as a courtesy).
The FBI did precisely what it should have done to enforce the law with the least amount of danger to all involved. In a heavily armed portion of the country, they showed up with overwhelming force precisely so they wouldn't have to actually apply any force. If they had showed up with two guys in suits and a forklift, somebody probably would have been hurt. Instead they confiscated the lumber and left, because the law says "shall be confiscated." They did their jobs and did them quite well.
The rule of law is not some magical fairy dust you can just wish into existence. Laws are obeyed when they are enforced. A country is enjoying the rule of law when the laws are being enforced in an egalitarian fashion with a minimum of danger and damage to both the offenders and to innocent bystanders. The FBI successfully minimized the danger as proven by the fact there was no damage at all. As opposed to many many other places in the world where what passes for law enforcement is a heavily armed mob showing up at your warehouse, looking around and saying, "Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it," collecting a wad of cash and leaving, with some minor gratuitous damage and bullying along the way. Or if the owner doesn't pay, burning the place down.
The incident was a measured use of authorized power, carried out professionally and well.
I remember an episode of the A-team where they created a firearm No one got hit by it that time either. Maybe the sights were off.
Haven't you seen Die Hard 2? The A-Team is a false flag operation giving cover to the Bad Guys.
Note: I am speaking as a material engineer who spent about 6 years in R&D for the 65W LED bulbs you can now buy at HomeDepot.
Waitaminute waitaminute waitaminute. You can't do that. This is Slashdot. You're violating time-honored tradition.
First you have to tell us what you know without telling us how you know, so some dumbass can demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect. Then you tell us how you know what you know. It's only fair. Gotta keep the post count per article up ya know, or Dice will cry.
Let's go with Tolkein's Shire Calendar instead. Twelve 30 day months and the leftover days are split evenly between summer and winter, with leap days coming after Mid-summer's Day. It has the added bonus of new and strange month and weekday names. What more could you ask for?
Regardless, I use various automotive manual packages, I have several which will only run on 2k or XP.
The compatibility settings don't work? Probably worth a try, since fiddling with compatibility settings can get even old DX5 games to run in Windows 7.
It was a Cardassian, and he was trying to get Picard to say five lights.
Oh great, now it's five?
As the water cools, it rises to the surface, causing it to lower the temperature of the surface water...
Cold water does not rise, absent currents that force it to the surface, as in San Francisco. Ordinarily, it sinks under warmer water. Are you claiming that a specific Antarctic current has caused an inversion in the normal arrangement of warm and cold water?
I don't know why that idea even showed up, but that wasn't the only place. Farthest Star and Wall Around a Star, reprinted in an omnibus volume called The Saga of Cuckoo by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson also featured the same idea. Duplicates created by tachyon scan and transmission were sent out of the galaxy and got killed a lot. Meh.
What's with this "sheer horror of death" thing, anyway? The originals never even met their duplicates, so why would they even be concerned about their deaths, let alone driven insane. Makes no sense. The duplicates met each other at times, but still—it's not a realistic reaction. It's like having a twin brother die. Sad, sure, but enough to unhinge an even halfway normal person? Bah. Stupid literary device.
...and they have no-compete clauses with each other
No they don't. That would be an illegal cartel, and they know it. No, they have "gentleman's agreements" with each other not to compete. Which amounts to the same thing, but the only proof is the indirect evidence that they never actually compete, and so it's not particularly actionable in court.
And don't look now, but Ma Bell is very nearly completely reconstituted. The only piece missing is Pac Bell. Of course the FCC and FTC will remain determinedly oblivious to that fact.
Caramack is open and honest, and very intelligent to boot. He will have given Zenimax's lawyers less than zero to work with. And this means Facebook will be extremely unlikely to want to settle (and Zenimax wants too large a pay-off anyway, to cover their iD loses).
The one doesn't necessarily follow from the other.
I'm quite certain Mr. Carmack is open, honest, and very intelligent, and he's been around the corporate block enough times to wear the naivete off of even as stunning an intellect as his (plus he's married and you can bet his wife is paying attention to business even if he isn't*). All of that may be true, but Facebook may still settle.
So far Facebook has shown precious little interest in court fights. I expect Facebook will offer a considerably lower sum than they're asking. If they go so far as insultingly low, then there will be a fight, but if they don't, Zenimax will probably accept and that will be the end of it. Unless Zenimax's greed just overpowers them and they start demanding royalties forever after, in which case there probably will be a fight. But if the bogus IP claim is just a bargaining position, I could easily see this whole thing settling out of court in a matter of months. If they really are looking to get the purchase price of iD out of the deal, you're probably right, it will go to court.
Now if Zenimax were so foolish as to be suing NewEgg, I would say bust out the popcorn, light a little candle at the shrine to PJ, and sit back and watch the fireworks. But if Facebook has a lawyer like Lee Cheng, he's never been let off the leash.
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* For evidence, I submit the fate of Armadillo Aerospace, and Mr. Carmack's public statements concerning it.
Unfortunately, Luckey has put in writing to Zenimax that Zenimax owns the IP used in OR, and that the tech can't be shared or used with third parties without Zenimax's involvement.
You've posted that twice now and I'm calling bullshit. Palmer Luckey created the Oculus Rift completely independently of John Carmack and Zenimax both. He started showing it around, Mr. Carmack got interested and started demoing it, still without working on it himself. It was only after Mr. Luckey managed a successful Kickstarter for the Rift that anybody really gave any credence to the idea in the first place. Mr. Carmack started addressing the software gap by volunteering to make the upcoming Doom 3 re-release compatible. That's when he actually started working on the project and his contract with Zenimax became an issue. Until that point, Zenimax owned nothing.
I don't believe for an instant that Mr. Luckey would sign away all his hardware design work on the Oculus Rift. It was his sole design, based on his own personal years of experience with older, inferior virtual reality displays, none of which Zenimax had anything at all to do with. I consider it far more likely that the other claim posted on Slashdot is true, that Zenimax signed a "we don't give a damn" agreement for John Carmack's time. They thought they were looking at a failed Kickstarter in the making, and paid no attention to Valve's interest, nor gave any credence to the whole idea. VR had failed before; VR would fail again. They went so far as to deny Mr. Carmack permission to follow through on his offer of Doom 3 support. That is not the action of a company with skin in the game. If they owned any Rift IP, they would not be actively working against it.
No, this is just sour grapes on the part of Zenimax.
(And thank you Aesop for providing the genesis of a marvelously concise phrase to describe that particular human behavior.)
That's what I hoping for too. We definitely need to get Carmack's word and get all the facts.
You can bet Mr. Carmack's lawyer has already told him not to say one mumbling word in public about either suit. We won't be getting his word for years to come, unless Facebook seriously unloads with both barrels. Odds are they'll pay Zenimax something with a gag order and we'll never hear any of the facts. And Zenimax is perfectly aware of the odds. So far as can be told publicly, Facebook isn't like NewEgg. They don't fight much. So the typical corporate shakedown tactic will succeed and that'll be the end of it.
... in countries that are excessively dry and not to far from the the equator.
You do realize northern Australia is 1379.21 KM from the equator, right? And the the entirety of the Sun Race course is farther than that? Nor does the desert have anything to do with insolation. It gets as much sun as it gets. Nobody drives race cars in the rain, solar or not. A certain amount of drama was added to both of the last two races because it was so cloudy.
Anyway, they changed the rules in 2005, because the speed limit had become a problem. Basically anybody could build a "car" that would make the trip, at the speed limit. Since then, they've gotten away from the original vehicles that were more bicycle than car.
No. Dealing with nuclear materials isn't "difficult".
Dealing with nuclear materials isn't difficult, but you and everybody else in the thread are glossing over the realities at Hanford. It's not just radioactive waste. It's enormous quantities of toxic chemical waste as well, and when you get right down to it, nobody actually knows what's inside a good many of the tanks of sludge they're dealing with. All we know is it's radioactive, chemically toxic, and corrosive to the tank it's sitting in. Records weren't kept of what was dumped where and when. It was appallingly bad management, for decades, and it accumulated a problem far worse than any trivial holding pond at a nuclear reactor site somewhere in the Midwest.
Hanford actually is a difficult and dangerous problem, all foot-dragging and finger-pointing aside. That is indeed part of the problem. 90% of the bureaucrats involved have no clue even where to begin, and they're so ignorant they don't know who to ask or how to find out.
The "problem" will end when the sludge finishes eating through the tanks it's in and it all leaks into the ground, contaminating the region's water supply for centuries. There will be a massive relocation program, a HUGE amount of blame-gaming, none of which will actually stick to anybody, and it then it will all go away. The bureaucrats involved have already proven their one skill: having a chair when the music stops.
Let's make a deal, global warming (or climate change, or whatever the buzzword of the week) deniers: You can keep your SUVs, your ACs turned to 60 degrees and all your other toys. And once the waters rise you drown like good old idiots and don't try to climb up on my mountains.
I don't own an SUV and I have yet to turn my AC on this year and I live 650 miles away from the nearest ocean and I still think this article is utter bullshit. Failed forest management policies cause wildfires. End of story. Any signal from the climate is completely overwhelmed by the policies of clowns who think the "natural" way is by definition better.
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
How come every time a nation / state / city is overspending, people always immediately turn to how to raise more tax revenues?
Overspending? Oklahoma ran out of fat to cut decades ago, and had very little to begin with. Then they ran out of muscle. Now they're busy cutting out bone. There are certain things a government in the developed world must do. If the government stops doing those things, the region ceases to be part of the developed world. Oklahoma is not overspending. Oklahoma is underspending, and underspending very badly. Roads don't just appear by magic you know. There are no pothole gnomes who magically fill holes in the road in the middle of the night for free. Leaving a bowl of milk and a ragged textbook on your front porch does not get you a new textbook the next morning.
Government is the only reliable way humans manage to achieve these things, and only a funded government manages to do them. An unfunded 'government' like what Somalia has is a sham and everybody except you knows it.