We're not talking about individual people, we're talking about industries. Specifically, we're talking about a writer at the Washington Post lamenting the technology that will be the downfall of the printed newspaper. His industry is changing, and rather than adapt to the new medium, he's throwing up FUD that the new technology is dangerous, and should have never been invented.
The projection keyboard is just as bad as the touchscreen keyboard. They're both terrible input devices, whose only value is that they're sealed from contaminants and are portable. There's no tactile response, and the hard impacts on your fingers accelerate the development of RSI issues. Eye trackers will never be as fast as a keyboard input. Your fingers move faster than your eyes, and you're now only tracking one point of focus rather than ten (or at least several, when you factor in key rollover issues with cheap USB keyboards). That's why touch typing is faster than hunt-and-peck. Direct brain reading is a wonderful thought, but there's no hint of any such thing even on the horizon, much less something commonplace. All our current "brain reading" technology requires months of training for both the software and the user, to train both sides to speak a common language, and even then, they're only capable of a handful of simple commands. Advancements in AI could finally bring about functional text-to-speech and voice command systems, but that's not something that can be used in a public environment.
Let's say it's a limitation that will not be resolved for at least another generation.
They're actually using SDR units, rather than commodity WiFi gear, so they probably could rig it up to operate as a proper RADAR system. They just don't have the precision necessary to track someone as they move through a small room.
While it's nice projects like this open up such technologies to hobbyists, the article is documenting something very novel. Traditional RADAR has trouble seeing through walls, as it cannot filter out all the noise from the wall's reflection. By sending two specially encoded signals that cancel each other out against stationary objects, they've sidestepped this issue entirely, and come up with something brand new. They've developed the much wanted Sci-Fi trope of a portable motion detector.
Fuck DRM. The school board is paying for all these books, not the students. It's not like the students are going to share the books with each other and cut the textbook makers out. If they actually want to fight piracy, the school board is a large visible entity and will be easy to take to court. The only reason to want DRM for these things is so the textbook makers can force obsolescence of one edition, and require the school board to spend lots of money on the next, even though the only difference is new homework problems in the workbooks.
The problem with poor grammar and not communicating clear is absolutely the keyboard's fault. It's not necessarily an issue from software keyboards, but poor input devices in general. When you have a crappy responseless touch screen keyboard, or worse, thumb typing on a number pad, your typing is slow. You make shortcuts to compensate and speed things up. You leave out unimportant words. You abbreviate or make acronyms of others. Sooner or later, no one has any clue what the fuck you're saying. It's all due to the keyboard. Now there are those that will take pride in continuing to use proper language even in the face of such a poor input device, but those are few and far between.
iPads are toys. They will continue to be toys for the forseeable future. While there are some worthwhile apps that allow you to be productive in a very limited scope, if you really want to get work done on a computer, it's at a PC, in front of a keyboard and mouse. It's not a limitation that can be resolved, as it's an inherent limitation of the input mechanism. You can't do anything but pre-programmed tasks on a tablet. Now toys are great. Everyone needs some time for rest and relaxation, but do we really want all these children learning about "computers" using something that is really nothing more than a plaything? Do we really want all these children growing up to write applications that are for little more than play?
Once someone first came up with the idea of combining two different types of data interfaces into a single hybrid port, wouldn't every single other instance of this be an "obvious" invention, and thus not patentable?
They're describing a plug where you have different contacts at different depths. Push one cable in one depth, and you hit one set of contacts. Push another cable in deeper, and you hit different contacts. How is this any different than a standard audio jack, where you have two or three rings and a center pin? The only difference here is that they're individual contacts, rather than a whole ring.
As mentioned elsewhere, the Moon missions were performed through a combination of limited exposure during a week or so trip outside the magnetosphere, combined with sheer luck that there was no significant coronal event during the trip.
Informative? Deflector shields (which were emitted by the deflector dish) were high powered. They were able to shunt vast amounts of power into that thing during various episodes, far more than into any other subsystem including the drives themselves, to solve one problem or another. At relativistic speeds, or superliminal speeds in their case, the interstellar gas gets blue shifted to remarkable energy levels. It's like having a nuclear detonation just off your bow, only it's sustained.
Rather, it was used as a short term solution, around the turn of the last century, to get dealers set up across the country quickly without having to spend the capital to do so themselves.
There are two parts to this thing. There is the ECE interface that the browser provides, and the ECE module, which hooks in through that interface, and performs the various DRM functions. You would have to re-implement the ECE module provided by Netflix, not the ECE interface that is a published standard that anyone can comply with. The trouble is that even though you may provide the published interface, there is no requirement for the module to authorize you as a trusted browser. In fact, it would be foolish for any ECE module to authorize Firefox, Chromium, or any other open source browser as trusted, as the user has control over the source code, and thus the browsers inherently cannot be trusted to deny access to the user
If so, what is stopping other people (e.g. some Firefox extension developers) to build the exact same thing, allowing Netflix videos to play in other browsers?
Nothing prevents Firefox from implementing HTML5 ECE, but then nothing is requiring Netflix to support Firefox as an approved browser for their ECE module. Of course, trying to re-implement the ECE module itself to independently support Netflix is a federal crime under the DMCA.
one reason jets are hot is because its a consequence both of the required pressures need to both keep the reaction self sustaining and not escaping out the front (essentially a pressure wall from the compresor stage so it can only go rearward), and combustion itself.
Really, it's all due to efficiency. The higher your pressure ratio, the higher the thermodynamic efficiency of your cycle. The trouble comes down to scaling issues. In order to reach high pressure ratios, you necessarily end up with high temperatures, those high temperatures require exotic mechanisms to keep the hot sections within reasonable operating conditions, and those exotic mechanisms require lots of room to implement. The largest aircraft and industrial gas turbines run upwards of 40:1 pressure ratio. Turboshaft engines for helicopters are usually closer to 10:1. Little RC jet engines often run at an awful 3:1 or so.
For comparison, gasoline and diesel engines typically run around 25:1 and 75:1, respectively. Note that the rise in temperature during compression causes a feedback that further increases pressure, so those numbers are going to be much higher than the more commonly used compression ratios. That also explains why diesels operate at so much higher thermodynamic efficiencies than gasoline and turbine engines, even though gasoline and turbine engines use inherently more efficient cycles.
the physics/thermodynamics of the heat and flow etc is not something im expert on so i actually cant really speak to how they could get it working at 100C
A good compressor stage is going to manage around 1.5:1 pressure ratio. It's easier to pull energy out than to put it in, so a good turbine stage might do 2:1 pressure ratio, and you're likely going to have at least two stages for the power take off on a turboshaft. At 100C, assuming adiabatic compression from atmospheric, you're looking at around a 2:1 pressure ratio, but that's not what happened here. The air was compressed, and then heated by the engine, in effect taking the place of the combustion chamber. Chances are the compressor is running well shy of 1.5:1. Now if you don't have the pressure (or velocity) to reach your torque requirements, you can always make up for it in volume, but the turbine disk in that nacelle on top just doesn't have the area to do that either.
I understand how a helicopter engine works (no offense taken by the explanation). My problem with this design is two fold.
First, according to the article, the air they're feeding into the turbine is around 100C, and they even made a point of saying it was low temperature so no special cooling measures would be needed. In a turboshaft engine, the exhaust coming out of the gas turbine into the secondary is closer to 1000C. Temperature and pressure are intimately linked. You can't have one without the other (at least not without additional cooling stages), and if the combined flow from the compressor, engine cooling, and engine exhaust is only 100C, there's not going to be anywhere near enough useful energy in that flow to drive a turbine powerful enough to keep it aloft.
Second, they've got their turbines connected directly to the rotors, with no gearbox. Those turbines look like they're going to be around a foot in diameter in the full scale aircraft, and they're operating with no mechanical advantage at just a few hundred RPM. There's no way they're going to get enough torque out of those turbines with that short of a moment arm to drive the rotors. That's the whole reason we use gearboxes. GE got away with this same design in their UDF prototype because the difference in diameter between the propeller and turbine was much lower, plus they used seven stages for each propeller to do it. Here, I doubt if they would have room for more than two, and there's still the issue of finding enough room to turn the exhaust flow back down and out the bottom of the shroud.
Yeah, or look it up in the table in the back of one of the books on my shelf behind me, but it's morning, and my first day off in two weeks. Forgive my laziness.
Because fluid couplings are inherently inefficient. You use them in a turboshaft engine because of the very nature of your gas turbine core, releasing all of its energy as large volumes of exhaust air. You use them on cars and heavy industrial vehicles because they continue to produce significant torque even when stalled out at zero RPM, allowing you to move heavy loads from a standstill without burning up a mechanical clutch. When you don't have good reason to use a fluid coupling, you use a mechanical one for the efficiency gains.
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But there could be plenty of other dangerous stuff aboard that rocket and I have no idea what might have been in the satellites.
Nonsense. Hydrazine is wonderful stuff, and works as a cure-all tonic, guaranteed to make your worries no longer of concern!
We're not talking about individual people, we're talking about industries. Specifically, we're talking about a writer at the Washington Post lamenting the technology that will be the downfall of the printed newspaper. His industry is changing, and rather than adapt to the new medium, he's throwing up FUD that the new technology is dangerous, and should have never been invented.
The projection keyboard is just as bad as the touchscreen keyboard. They're both terrible input devices, whose only value is that they're sealed from contaminants and are portable. There's no tactile response, and the hard impacts on your fingers accelerate the development of RSI issues. Eye trackers will never be as fast as a keyboard input. Your fingers move faster than your eyes, and you're now only tracking one point of focus rather than ten (or at least several, when you factor in key rollover issues with cheap USB keyboards). That's why touch typing is faster than hunt-and-peck. Direct brain reading is a wonderful thought, but there's no hint of any such thing even on the horizon, much less something commonplace. All our current "brain reading" technology requires months of training for both the software and the user, to train both sides to speak a common language, and even then, they're only capable of a handful of simple commands. Advancements in AI could finally bring about functional text-to-speech and voice command systems, but that's not something that can be used in a public environment.
Let's say it's a limitation that will not be resolved for at least another generation.
Small enough to actually track people, large enough to penetrate walls, and free to use within limited output power.
They're actually using SDR units, rather than commodity WiFi gear, so they probably could rig it up to operate as a proper RADAR system. They just don't have the precision necessary to track someone as they move through a small room.
While it's nice projects like this open up such technologies to hobbyists, the article is documenting something very novel. Traditional RADAR has trouble seeing through walls, as it cannot filter out all the noise from the wall's reflection. By sending two specially encoded signals that cancel each other out against stationary objects, they've sidestepped this issue entirely, and come up with something brand new. They've developed the much wanted Sci-Fi trope of a portable motion detector.
Fuck DRM. The school board is paying for all these books, not the students. It's not like the students are going to share the books with each other and cut the textbook makers out. If they actually want to fight piracy, the school board is a large visible entity and will be easy to take to court. The only reason to want DRM for these things is so the textbook makers can force obsolescence of one edition, and require the school board to spend lots of money on the next, even though the only difference is new homework problems in the workbooks.
The problem with poor grammar and not communicating clear is absolutely the keyboard's fault. It's not necessarily an issue from software keyboards, but poor input devices in general. When you have a crappy responseless touch screen keyboard, or worse, thumb typing on a number pad, your typing is slow. You make shortcuts to compensate and speed things up. You leave out unimportant words. You abbreviate or make acronyms of others. Sooner or later, no one has any clue what the fuck you're saying. It's all due to the keyboard. Now there are those that will take pride in continuing to use proper language even in the face of such a poor input device, but those are few and far between.
iPads are toys. They will continue to be toys for the forseeable future. While there are some worthwhile apps that allow you to be productive in a very limited scope, if you really want to get work done on a computer, it's at a PC, in front of a keyboard and mouse. It's not a limitation that can be resolved, as it's an inherent limitation of the input mechanism. You can't do anything but pre-programmed tasks on a tablet. Now toys are great. Everyone needs some time for rest and relaxation, but do we really want all these children learning about "computers" using something that is really nothing more than a plaything? Do we really want all these children growing up to write applications that are for little more than play?
You can still run Windows on Xeons. It's not another architecture, just x86. Did you mean Itanium?
Once someone first came up with the idea of combining two different types of data interfaces into a single hybrid port, wouldn't every single other instance of this be an "obvious" invention, and thus not patentable?
They're describing a plug where you have different contacts at different depths. Push one cable in one depth, and you hit one set of contacts. Push another cable in deeper, and you hit different contacts. How is this any different than a standard audio jack, where you have two or three rings and a center pin? The only difference here is that they're individual contacts, rather than a whole ring.
As mentioned elsewhere, the Moon missions were performed through a combination of limited exposure during a week or so trip outside the magnetosphere, combined with sheer luck that there was no significant coronal event during the trip.
Power requirements.
Informative? Deflector shields (which were emitted by the deflector dish) were high powered. They were able to shunt vast amounts of power into that thing during various episodes, far more than into any other subsystem including the drives themselves, to solve one problem or another. At relativistic speeds, or superliminal speeds in their case, the interstellar gas gets blue shifted to remarkable energy levels. It's like having a nuclear detonation just off your bow, only it's sustained.
Because Star Trek actually got it right that you would need shields for basic space travel, not just combat.
Rather, it was used as a short term solution, around the turn of the last century, to get dealers set up across the country quickly without having to spend the capital to do so themselves.
There are two parts to this thing. There is the ECE interface that the browser provides, and the ECE module, which hooks in through that interface, and performs the various DRM functions. You would have to re-implement the ECE module provided by Netflix, not the ECE interface that is a published standard that anyone can comply with. The trouble is that even though you may provide the published interface, there is no requirement for the module to authorize you as a trusted browser. In fact, it would be foolish for any ECE module to authorize Firefox, Chromium, or any other open source browser as trusted, as the user has control over the source code, and thus the browsers inherently cannot be trusted to deny access to the user
If so, what is stopping other people (e.g. some Firefox extension developers) to build the exact same thing, allowing Netflix videos to play in other browsers?
Nothing prevents Firefox from implementing HTML5 ECE, but then nothing is requiring Netflix to support Firefox as an approved browser for their ECE module. Of course, trying to re-implement the ECE module itself to independently support Netflix is a federal crime under the DMCA.
one reason jets are hot is because its a consequence both of the required pressures need to both keep the reaction self sustaining and not escaping out the front (essentially a pressure wall from the compresor stage so it can only go rearward), and combustion itself.
Really, it's all due to efficiency. The higher your pressure ratio, the higher the thermodynamic efficiency of your cycle. The trouble comes down to scaling issues. In order to reach high pressure ratios, you necessarily end up with high temperatures, those high temperatures require exotic mechanisms to keep the hot sections within reasonable operating conditions, and those exotic mechanisms require lots of room to implement. The largest aircraft and industrial gas turbines run upwards of 40:1 pressure ratio. Turboshaft engines for helicopters are usually closer to 10:1. Little RC jet engines often run at an awful 3:1 or so.
For comparison, gasoline and diesel engines typically run around 25:1 and 75:1, respectively. Note that the rise in temperature during compression causes a feedback that further increases pressure, so those numbers are going to be much higher than the more commonly used compression ratios. That also explains why diesels operate at so much higher thermodynamic efficiencies than gasoline and turbine engines, even though gasoline and turbine engines use inherently more efficient cycles.
the physics/thermodynamics of the heat and flow etc is not something im expert on so i actually cant really speak to how they could get it working at 100C
A good compressor stage is going to manage around 1.5:1 pressure ratio. It's easier to pull energy out than to put it in, so a good turbine stage might do 2:1 pressure ratio, and you're likely going to have at least two stages for the power take off on a turboshaft. At 100C, assuming adiabatic compression from atmospheric, you're looking at around a 2:1 pressure ratio, but that's not what happened here. The air was compressed, and then heated by the engine, in effect taking the place of the combustion chamber. Chances are the compressor is running well shy of 1.5:1. Now if you don't have the pressure (or velocity) to reach your torque requirements, you can always make up for it in volume, but the turbine disk in that nacelle on top just doesn't have the area to do that either.
I understand how a helicopter engine works (no offense taken by the explanation). My problem with this design is two fold.
First, according to the article, the air they're feeding into the turbine is around 100C, and they even made a point of saying it was low temperature so no special cooling measures would be needed. In a turboshaft engine, the exhaust coming out of the gas turbine into the secondary is closer to 1000C. Temperature and pressure are intimately linked. You can't have one without the other (at least not without additional cooling stages), and if the combined flow from the compressor, engine cooling, and engine exhaust is only 100C, there's not going to be anywhere near enough useful energy in that flow to drive a turbine powerful enough to keep it aloft.
Second, they've got their turbines connected directly to the rotors, with no gearbox. Those turbines look like they're going to be around a foot in diameter in the full scale aircraft, and they're operating with no mechanical advantage at just a few hundred RPM. There's no way they're going to get enough torque out of those turbines with that short of a moment arm to drive the rotors. That's the whole reason we use gearboxes. GE got away with this same design in their UDF prototype because the difference in diameter between the propeller and turbine was much lower, plus they used seven stages for each propeller to do it. Here, I doubt if they would have room for more than two, and there's still the issue of finding enough room to turn the exhaust flow back down and out the bottom of the shroud.
Yeah, or look it up in the table in the back of one of the books on my shelf behind me, but it's morning, and my first day off in two weeks. Forgive my laziness.
Recordable DVD media comes with a pre-defined groove along which the laser tracks. You can't simply write using a finer spiral pattern.
I'd rather waste weeks of my time sequentially swapping out 800 discs, and require a whole drawer to hold them all.
Because fluid couplings are inherently inefficient. You use them in a turboshaft engine because of the very nature of your gas turbine core, releasing all of its energy as large volumes of exhaust air. You use them on cars and heavy industrial vehicles because they continue to produce significant torque even when stalled out at zero RPM, allowing you to move heavy loads from a standstill without burning up a mechanical clutch. When you don't have good reason to use a fluid coupling, you use a mechanical one for the efficiency gains.