Suppose you're 68, retired and bored. You live 300 km from the nearest university. And you don't have the qualifications to get in to university either.
If you are willing to put in the time and work required to learn about astronomy, including reading up on the maths and physics involved as it pops up, why shouldn't you be able to follow a course on the subject?
You may find out later, that this isn't something you have the necessary skills for yet, or that it's a lot more boring than you thought, but if you're curious about it, but you've never had the chance to learn about it outside of TV, why not?
If you live in a condo complex/apartment building it's more than likely that the doorway to your unit/apartment is in a common (publicly accessible) hallway with Sheetrock walls that can be easily breached with a fist!
That has to be a US thing. Right?
I would pay good money to see someone try to break through the walls in any of the apartment buildings I've lived in in Denmark and Sweden.
I think the thinnest outer wall I've seen was at least 15 cm concrete.
The only big new IP lately is Dishonoured, which is a sort of action stealth game in cyberpunk world
Are you sure it's not just a slight remodelling of Thief: The Dark Project, which was a stealth first person shooter, set in a medieval steampunk city?
If someone invents a battery that is 5x cheaper and better, they will make a lot of money. But the benefits to society at large will be MUCH larger
That depends entirely on the inventor/manufacturer.
If they decided to simply market it as a battery that is five time as good at five time the cost while pocketing the profits, society doesn't gain any benefits until the patents expire.
I'm pretty sure we can go to Saturn and back with existing technology - it's just a matter of being willing to pay for it.
It's not like it's impossible for us to park a few million or billion ton of rocket fuel in orbit (or however much is needed for a round trip) - it's just extremely expensive to do so.
Same with building a properly shielded capsule for the crew to be aboard.
100 W for 10 seconds is the same amount of power as 100 W for 10 minutes, but it's not the same amount of energy.
It's a bit like speed (meters/second) vs distance (meters). If you travel at 10 m/s for 10 seconds and 10 m/s for 10 minutes, it's the same speed (10 m/s) but not the same distance.
The reason this technology requires more power, is that the state changes and reads require more power to be activated than for NAND.
They use less energy, because in order to read or write the same amount of data, they need significantly less time than for NAND.
Since the scale for speed is so much bigger than it is for power, the end result is a reduced energy need - but you still need more power than for NAND.
That looks rather cool, but annoyingly it's only in 720p. Consoles again I suppose.
One thing that I personally hate in games is depth of field, and it's not even because of the performance hit. It's just so bloody annoying to have to move the cursor to something to see it properly, not to mention if you accidentally point at something at a different distance - now you can't see what you were actually looking at.
I do wonder if it'd be possible to do accurate eye tracking to do depth of field, even though I still suspect I'd want to disable it because of the same issues.
Although... there is being a gamer, and then there is the person who has a gaming command center in their parents' basement with the delivery tube for the Mountain Dew and Cheetos.
Would you consider Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld unfit for politics, because they have an obscene amount of cars and garage space?
No? Then why would you think that of someone who has created a "gaming command centre"? I'm pretty sure Jay Leno has more than a delivery tube in his garage for instance. In fact, considering its size (both in area and amount of vehicles), I'd be surprised if he didn't at the very least have a fridge if not an actual kitchen.
So, again - why is a "gaming command centre" worse than an extreme garage?
My objection was that for anything like that you could make work in a sky scraper, you could much more cheaply put the same technology out in rural areas.
What rural areas of Singapore are you talking about - the ones that are Malaysia or Indonesia?
As for blocking views, the Singapore skyline already has loads of high rise buildings, so blocking views is hardly a concern. Especially since it is a tiny island nation with a population density that almost rivals New York City.
To a certain extent, it'd probably be feasible for the existing skyscrapers to be modified to include their own vertical farm for limited self sufficiency, which makes this an even more viable and attractive solution.
Imagine working in a Manhattan office building, and knowing that not only is the most of the food in your canteen organic, but it's grown in the building, and you happen to have an office that looks out through the flowering fruit and vegetable fields. I, for one, would love that.
And like the C5 - and the Segway - its few devotees will continue to claim that the problems will be dealt with by re-designing entire cities in order to facilitate their particular mode of transport.
100W from the driver + 250W from the motor seem to be a great idea. But it all depends on the weight of the electric powertrain. A skinny rider on an unpowered bike will be far faster than the same skinny rider who carries the fiberglass shell, the battery and the motor in addition to the bike's parts
Since the motor is providing up to 2½ times as much power as the rider, your claim is only true, if the bike and all its stuff is 2½ times as heavy as the rider.
Since the eWAW described in the article weighs in at roughly 25 kg in total, your claim would be true for a 10 kg rider.
Personally I haven't seen a 10 kg bicycle rider who was more than three years old.
A skinny rider + the bike alone would be maybe 50 kg + 20 kg bike = 100W/70 kg = 1.43 W/kg compared to the electric version which would be 50 kg + 25 kg bike = 350W/75 kg = 4.7 W/kg or more than 3 times the power to weight ratio. Or to put it another way, in order for the power to weight ratio to match, the electric drive train would have to weigh a massive 175 kg. Since we're only talking a motor and a battery, I suspect that if you were to go with 175 kg worth of motor and battery, you could probably get it to hit 200 km/h and still have about 100 kg worth of batteries.
Actually, you can get this 200 HP, 40 kg electric motor. That leaves us 35 kg to improve the tyres (motorcycle tires spring to mind) in order to have 100 kg worth of batteries. At a specific power of 250 Wh/kg, we're now looking at 25 kWh worth of batteries.
At full throttle that's 10 minutes worth, but then again, 200 horse power and 250 kg of vehicle including the driver would probably scare the living crap out of most riders at full throttle.
even some runners can keep up with traffic speed for a while.
While the Top Gear marathon challenge was probably staged to a certain extent (the congestion charge fare bit in particular), it does give you a rather realistic view of just how slow cars actually move in city traffic.
Their Cross London Airport Race seemed somewhat staged as well (with James May getting lost as usual), but there considering that Richard Hammond beat the others while on a bicycle, that too tells you a lot about traffic speeds in city traffic.
With the type of bike talked about in the article, you can rule out rain and sweat as a show stopper, and then you're only facing blood when you have serious accidents.
It's not a panacea, amongst other reasons due to some of the issues raised in the article, but all too many people seem to think it is impossible to ride a bike to and from work on a daily basis (I'm not saying you're one of them).
This is in stark contrast with what you see in large European cities like Copenhagen, where 35% of all workers and students use a bicycle for their commute. That's a city where the municipality alone has half a million people, and what most people would consider the urban area has another 700,000 inhabitants.
Is it a panacea? No. But I wouldn't mind seeing what'd happen in Copenhagen, if the eWAW and similar bicycles were legal to use and affordable in Denmark. I'm pretty sure we would see a lot more bike riders.
It obviously won't replace everything - goods still need to be transported, not everyone wants to ride a bike (even if they don't have to provide any power themselves) etc.
It's a relatively small area, and since the eWAW seems to be capable of about 60 km unassisted at 30 km/h with a small battery (I'm guessing 500 Wh), this would rival make a lot of car commutes once you take rush hour into consideration, and with commutes about 30 km or less, we're not looking at close to two million inhabitants.
With a 500 Wh battery, you'd need 1,000 MWh to charge the batteries needed for two million bikes. Let's call it 1200 MWh by including some inefficiencies in transmission and charging. And let's assume that on average they need to be charged in 4 hours.
That requires 300 MW in production capacity, or to put it into perspective, roughly the same energy as put out by 8,000 cars using 50 HP. 300 MW is less than 8% of the wind power capacity in Denmark as of 2011. And as someone pointed out, charging a 500 Wh battery can be done with a relatively small solar panel. And while it'd obviously increase the weight and cost, I wouldn't be surprised, if you could get most of the 250 W, that the motor peaks at, from panels installed on the bike itself.
Incidentally the cost of charging a 350 Wh battery is less than one Euro (DKK 4.22/kWh or roughly 57 cent/kWh) at the most expensive prices I can find. It's pretty difficult to find a cheaper way to travel 60 km.
Sadly these bikes aren't cheap. Not even close to cheap. They seem to cost in the neighbourhood of 5,000 to 10,000 Euros, which puts them fairly close to the cost of a small car, and thus makes them much less viable as a replacement for the car for commuting.
It's a shame, because it'd make for a serious decrease in local air and noise pollution.
To be honest, I suspect that this kind of death will simply look like the victim expired naturally, so you could probably arrange for this to be done in the bedroom with a simple breathing mask, while still allowing loved ones to be with him.
No, because those companies didn't put it in the cloud.
However, since you don't own the data in the cloud either, that should effectively mean that you cannot be sued for copyright infringement either.
Should - not "does".
However - a more pertinent question arises: Does that mean that anyone selling ebooks via Amazon's store do not own the copyright to those books? I'm pretty sure Amazon stores those books "in the cloud" as well.
And what does it do when it hasn't snowed, the air temperature is above freezing, but random parts of the road is below freezing and there's a light drizzle?
This tends to form a very localized phenomenon known as black ice - patches of road that look innocuous but are about as slippery as it gets.
That maps are as fucked up as they are (and I don't care about the 3D issues) is unforgivable. Simple as that.
That Siri has issues with accents is understandable. Accents and dialects are quite tricky, even for what you could consider the ultimate voice recognition engine in the world - the human brain.
If you had any idea of how many Americans can't understand Scottish for instance, you'd probably be a lot more forgiving about a computer program having issues. Hell, how often do you have to ask people you talk with on the phone or in real life to repeat what they just said, because you couldn't make it out?
Now, I don't know for sure, but I seriously doubt that anyone has manged to create a voice recognition system, that doesn't struggle with accents and dialects. It requires training, and surprise surprise, the only way to train such a system, is using real life examples.
You can't settle for samples from movies, tv, radio and scripted dialog, because they aren't how people actually talk. Those people will try to speak more intelligibly, exactly because they know that people outside their local area will be hearing them, and that they may not understand their particular accent or dialect.
Maps, however, are still a completed problem, and it being an unforgivable blunder bears repeating.
Serious question: If the language itself is generating setters and getters, how do you differentiate between truly private variables and variables that should be accessible from outside (but through verified inputs/outputs)?
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I never said you can't get through the walls. They aren't built out of a rare combination of unobtanium and thatllbehandium.
I said I'd love to see someone try to punch through a typical Danish or Swedish wall.
Not just that.
Suppose you're 68, retired and bored. You live 300 km from the nearest university. And you don't have the qualifications to get in to university either.
If you are willing to put in the time and work required to learn about astronomy, including reading up on the maths and physics involved as it pops up, why shouldn't you be able to follow a course on the subject?
You may find out later, that this isn't something you have the necessary skills for yet, or that it's a lot more boring than you thought, but if you're curious about it, but you've never had the chance to learn about it outside of TV, why not?
Humans are rarely too old to learn new things.
That has to be a US thing. Right?
I would pay good money to see someone try to break through the walls in any of the apartment buildings I've lived in in Denmark and Sweden.
I think the thinnest outer wall I've seen was at least 15 cm concrete.
Aren't all definitions artificial?
Are you sure it's not just a slight remodelling of Thief: The Dark Project, which was a stealth first person shooter, set in a medieval steampunk city?
That depends entirely on the inventor/manufacturer.
If they decided to simply market it as a battery that is five time as good at five time the cost while pocketing the profits, society doesn't gain any benefits until the patents expire.
I was expecting a review, not a quick run-down of a few features.
I'm pretty sure we can go to Saturn and back with existing technology - it's just a matter of being willing to pay for it.
It's not like it's impossible for us to park a few million or billion ton of rocket fuel in orbit (or however much is needed for a round trip) - it's just extremely expensive to do so.
Same with building a properly shielded capsule for the crew to be aboard.
No.
100 W for 10 seconds is the same amount of power as 100 W for 10 minutes, but it's not the same amount of energy.
It's a bit like speed (meters/second) vs distance (meters). If you travel at 10 m/s for 10 seconds and 10 m/s for 10 minutes, it's the same speed (10 m/s) but not the same distance.
Power is energy over time.
I.e. 1 W is 1 joule per second.
The reason this technology requires more power, is that the state changes and reads require more power to be activated than for NAND.
They use less energy, because in order to read or write the same amount of data, they need significantly less time than for NAND.
Since the scale for speed is so much bigger than it is for power, the end result is a reduced energy need - but you still need more power than for NAND.
That looks rather cool, but annoyingly it's only in 720p. Consoles again I suppose.
One thing that I personally hate in games is depth of field, and it's not even because of the performance hit. It's just so bloody annoying to have to move the cursor to something to see it properly, not to mention if you accidentally point at something at a different distance - now you can't see what you were actually looking at.
I do wonder if it'd be possible to do accurate eye tracking to do depth of field, even though I still suspect I'd want to disable it because of the same issues.
Would you consider Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld unfit for politics, because they have an obscene amount of cars and garage space?
No? Then why would you think that of someone who has created a "gaming command centre"? I'm pretty sure Jay Leno has more than a delivery tube in his garage for instance. In fact, considering its size (both in area and amount of vehicles), I'd be surprised if he didn't at the very least have a fridge if not an actual kitchen.
So, again - why is a "gaming command centre" worse than an extreme garage?
One and a half hour?!? In a developed country, that has had democracy for more than two hundred years?
How is this even remotely acceptable in what is supposedly a bastion of democracy?
What rural areas of Singapore are you talking about - the ones that are Malaysia or Indonesia?
As for blocking views, the Singapore skyline already has loads of high rise buildings, so blocking views is hardly a concern. Especially since it is a tiny island nation with a population density that almost rivals New York City.
To a certain extent, it'd probably be feasible for the existing skyscrapers to be modified to include their own vertical farm for limited self sufficiency, which makes this an even more viable and attractive solution.
Imagine working in a Manhattan office building, and knowing that not only is the most of the food in your canteen organic, but it's grown in the building, and you happen to have an office that looks out through the flowering fruit and vegetable fields. I, for one, would love that.
Which is why cities like Copenhagen doesn't see any kind of bicycle traffic at all, and the 35% of commutes that they claim are done by bicycle are all just part of a massive a conspiracy.
Since the motor is providing up to 2½ times as much power as the rider, your claim is only true, if the bike and all its stuff is 2½ times as heavy as the rider.
Since the eWAW described in the article weighs in at roughly 25 kg in total, your claim would be true for a 10 kg rider.
Personally I haven't seen a 10 kg bicycle rider who was more than three years old.
A skinny rider + the bike alone would be maybe 50 kg + 20 kg bike = 100W/70 kg = 1.43 W/kg compared to the electric version which would be 50 kg + 25 kg bike = 350W/75 kg = 4.7 W/kg or more than 3 times the power to weight ratio. Or to put it another way, in order for the power to weight ratio to match, the electric drive train would have to weigh a massive 175 kg. Since we're only talking a motor and a battery, I suspect that if you were to go with 175 kg worth of motor and battery, you could probably get it to hit 200 km/h and still have about 100 kg worth of batteries.
Actually, you can get this 200 HP, 40 kg electric motor. That leaves us 35 kg to improve the tyres (motorcycle tires spring to mind) in order to have 100 kg worth of batteries. At a specific power of 250 Wh/kg, we're now looking at 25 kWh worth of batteries.
At full throttle that's 10 minutes worth, but then again, 200 horse power and 250 kg of vehicle including the driver would probably scare the living crap out of most riders at full throttle.
While the Top Gear marathon challenge was probably staged to a certain extent (the congestion charge fare bit in particular), it does give you a rather realistic view of just how slow cars actually move in city traffic.
Their Cross London Airport Race seemed somewhat staged as well (with James May getting lost as usual), but there considering that Richard Hammond beat the others while on a bicycle, that too tells you a lot about traffic speeds in city traffic.
With the type of bike talked about in the article, you can rule out rain and sweat as a show stopper, and then you're only facing blood when you have serious accidents.
It's not a panacea, amongst other reasons due to some of the issues raised in the article, but all too many people seem to think it is impossible to ride a bike to and from work on a daily basis (I'm not saying you're one of them).
This is in stark contrast with what you see in large European cities like Copenhagen, where 35% of all workers and students use a bicycle for their commute. That's a city where the municipality alone has half a million people, and what most people would consider the urban area has another 700,000 inhabitants.
Is it a panacea? No. But I wouldn't mind seeing what'd happen in Copenhagen, if the eWAW and similar bicycles were legal to use and affordable in Denmark. I'm pretty sure we would see a lot more bike riders.
It obviously won't replace everything - goods still need to be transported, not everyone wants to ride a bike (even if they don't have to provide any power themselves) etc.
It's a relatively small area, and since the eWAW seems to be capable of about 60 km unassisted at 30 km/h with a small battery (I'm guessing 500 Wh), this would rival make a lot of car commutes once you take rush hour into consideration, and with commutes about 30 km or less, we're not looking at close to two million inhabitants.
With a 500 Wh battery, you'd need 1,000 MWh to charge the batteries needed for two million bikes. Let's call it 1200 MWh by including some inefficiencies in transmission and charging. And let's assume that on average they need to be charged in 4 hours.
That requires 300 MW in production capacity, or to put it into perspective, roughly the same energy as put out by 8,000 cars using 50 HP. 300 MW is less than 8% of the wind power capacity in Denmark as of 2011. And as someone pointed out, charging a 500 Wh battery can be done with a relatively small solar panel. And while it'd obviously increase the weight and cost, I wouldn't be surprised, if you could get most of the 250 W, that the motor peaks at, from panels installed on the bike itself.
Incidentally the cost of charging a 350 Wh battery is less than one Euro (DKK 4.22/kWh or roughly 57 cent/kWh) at the most expensive prices I can find. It's pretty difficult to find a cheaper way to travel 60 km.
Sadly these bikes aren't cheap. Not even close to cheap. They seem to cost in the neighbourhood of 5,000 to 10,000 Euros, which puts them fairly close to the cost of a small car, and thus makes them much less viable as a replacement for the car for commuting.
It's a shame, because it'd make for a serious decrease in local air and noise pollution.
The basement was mostly an "excuse".
To be honest, I suspect that this kind of death will simply look like the victim expired naturally, so you could probably arrange for this to be done in the bedroom with a simple breathing mask, while still allowing loved ones to be with him.
May I suggest you look into getting your hands on some good old-fashioned nitrogen?
Not nitrous oxide - just pure nitrogen (N2).
It makes up 78% of our atmosphere, and as such, humans do not have a natural response to too much nitrogen in the air that we breathe (unlike CO2).
If you breathe pure N2, you will pass out very quickly, and if you keep breathing it, you will be brain dead within maybe 10 minutes.
A few people (I think it's 1 in 1,000 or 10,000) have an adverse reaction, but otherwise it will be a quick, quiet and painless death.
And, you know, accidents do happen, where people happen to work in a small basement with a large dewar of liquid nitrogen ...
No, because those companies didn't put it in the cloud.
However, since you don't own the data in the cloud either, that should effectively mean that you cannot be sued for copyright infringement either.
Should - not "does".
However - a more pertinent question arises: Does that mean that anyone selling ebooks via Amazon's store do not own the copyright to those books? I'm pretty sure Amazon stores those books "in the cloud" as well.
And what does it do when it hasn't snowed, the air temperature is above freezing, but random parts of the road is below freezing and there's a light drizzle?
This tends to form a very localized phenomenon known as black ice - patches of road that look innocuous but are about as slippery as it gets.
That is quite frankly the best joke I've seen or heard in quite a while!
And being on sick leave, I spend a hell of a lot of time watching various comedy show.
It's now been about two minutes since I read your joke, and I am still laughing out loud!
Thank you kind sir. Thank you.
That maps are as fucked up as they are (and I don't care about the 3D issues) is unforgivable. Simple as that.
That Siri has issues with accents is understandable. Accents and dialects are quite tricky, even for what you could consider the ultimate voice recognition engine in the world - the human brain.
If you had any idea of how many Americans can't understand Scottish for instance, you'd probably be a lot more forgiving about a computer program having issues. Hell, how often do you have to ask people you talk with on the phone or in real life to repeat what they just said, because you couldn't make it out?
Now, I don't know for sure, but I seriously doubt that anyone has manged to create a voice recognition system, that doesn't struggle with accents and dialects. It requires training, and surprise surprise, the only way to train such a system, is using real life examples.
You can't settle for samples from movies, tv, radio and scripted dialog, because they aren't how people actually talk. Those people will try to speak more intelligibly, exactly because they know that people outside their local area will be hearing them, and that they may not understand their particular accent or dialect.
Maps, however, are still a completed problem, and it being an unforgivable blunder bears repeating.
Serious question:
If the language itself is generating setters and getters, how do you differentiate between truly private variables and variables that should be accessible from outside (but through verified inputs/outputs)?