I'm a bit surprised that it is worth it though. The vast majority of autocad drawings are really boring - building layouts, miscellaneous machine parts etc. It would be very labor intensive to go through zillions of stolen drawings to try to figure out which ones were actually valuable.
OTOH, this could be a sort of demonstration run. Once they find out how to quietly steal drawings, they might be able to modify the code to look for specific drawings from specific companies or government sites. They might be helped here by government agencies who have a uniform drawing numbering and description system.
A $50K car is well into the luxury market and time is very valuable to the sort of people who buy these cars. Renting takes time / effort - something that people in this demographic do not want to waste.
You would get some charge, but at some expense and weight, vehicle height, and maybe aesthetics (important in this market). I'm sure they thought about it, but decided that the small amount of extra charging wasn't worth it.
The range limit is a big problem because it means you need 2 cars. Even if only a small percentage of your trips are over the 160 or 300 mile limit, you still need to take those trips. You could rent a car for long trips, but one of the points of LUXURY items is reducing the amount of time you waste. Even ignoring the cost, many people don't have space to park 2 cars per person. (or even one per person, and a spare).
It is a bit cheaper (maybe X2) to operate than a gas car, but the difference doesn't cover the difference in purchase costs over the lifetime of the car.
The total life cycle emissions relative to a hybrid would be an interesting study. The answer would probably depend on where you were operating the Tesla and how the marginal additional energy is generated.
A plug-in hybrid might be more interesting, electric for the commute, but with unlimited range if needed for the occasional long trip.
All that said, anyone who wants one is welcome, it makes as much sense as a bunch of other high tech toys.
Its a pretty thorny question. A very simple algorithm with predictable results shouldn't have a right of free speech separate from its writer. On the other hand a hypothetical full-brain simulation might reasonably have the right to free speech.
As computers become complex enough to behave in a way that is comparable to human intelligence it will become important to figure out what rights they should have. In terms of raw compute power, this isn't in the distant future.
Its also not clear to me that it would fill a different niche than an ekranoplan (ground effect flying boat). These were developed by the Russians and worked, but as far as I know were not found to be militarily useful.
Same for comparisons with helicopters or slow ground attack aircraft.
No one NEEDS the content that the RIAA is trying to protect. A few months boycott and they would be gone for good (and we'd all have a lot more free time on our hands). They have annoyed almost their entire customer base - if only there were a way to leverage this into collective action.
The apparently also don't travel in airliners, or to foreign countries where data access is expensive, or to remote locations without any data. If you spend your life in a big modern city, its easy to get the impression that the internet is always accessible.
If I could really be connected all the time, I wouldn't mind cloud-based / streaming services, but in reality I spend a significant fraction of my time in locations where I do not and can not (for any reasonable price) have internet access.
Services that let you download and then play while disconnected could work, but that starts to sound suspiciously like "ownership" to me.
I think there are 3 different issues here. One is whether you pay one-time for the content, or pay each time you use it. One is where the content is stored and whether it will be available when you are not connected. The third is whether you will always have access to the content or if it will be removed at some point.
For me, I don't care much about the payment model as long as the total cost works out to the same. I do want my content available when I am not connected, and I really don't want content to disappear.
This seems a classic example of the sort of negative-sum game that should be prevented by government regulation. Each trading company spends money to be faster than the competition, but overall there is an increase in costs.
In addition when trading happens much faster than human reaction times there is a risk that software bugs, or unexpected behavior from the interaction of multiple semi-intelligent trading programs could cause large scale real monetary losses by moving money into inefficient investments.
I honestly don't see any global efficiency increase from trades that happen faster than 1 hour. Ideally prices and investments should be driven by new information and there is very little reliable information on faster timescales.
I understand that there are issues with slower trades - if you set a 1-hour clock, all trades will be posted microseconds before the clock ticks. A random delay may be the only way to fix it.
This is a very good experiment, but this is far from being competition for the large X-ray facilities. They are generating 10^5 photons in a 1% bandwidth at 1 KeV. The LCLS (X-ray Free Electron Laser at SLAC) generates about 10^13 photons in a ~0.3% bandwidth. (100 million times more) and operates at 6 X the repetition rate. The LCLS can also operate up to 10 KeV with the same pulse energy if needed. Near future facilities like the Euro XFEL will operate at 100X the average power of LCLS.
The very wide bandwidth of the harmonic generation described in the paper is very interesting because it can in principal support very short (few attosecond) bunches for future experiments, however at the moment they seem to be operating with 80 femtosecond bunches (or bunch trains), comparable to the FELs. (LCLS can run as short as a few femtoseconds with 10^12 photons). It is not clear how to compress their very broad band pulses to generate short pulses, though it is in principal possible. The minimum pulse length for FELs is likely to be around 100-200 attoseconds, so the harmonic generation scheme may eventually have a large advantage here.
It really is excellent work and a low power, ultra-short pulse tabletop X-ray source is a very valuable research tool, but I just want to point out that at the moment it is not a substitute for large X-ray facilities.
I think that any difference from the speed of light would have been scrutinized very carefully, but slower-than-light neutrinos would not have attracted the media attention.
The is a bit embarrassing since it was a simple technical glitch that caused the problem, but the scientific process is working correctly.
This is really important because it is possible to be deceptive by using sloppy language. Variable power sources (like wind and solar) are often quoted in watts, but is that peak? average over a day? average over a year? It can be a big (>X5) difference. Its fair to quote PEAK watts, or watt-hours over some period of time (hour, day year).
To be clear.
A watt is a unit of power. It tells you at any instant how much power is being generated or used. For solar and wind it is very important to describe whether this is peak or average. A 1GW peak solar plant would not be able to replace a 1GW coal or nuclear plant because it can only produce that much power under ideal conditions, presumably noon on a summer day with clear skies.
A watt-hour is a unit of energy. It tells you the energy used over some period of time. If you talk about the watt-hours, or giga-watt hours a plant produces in a year, you have what is in most cases a better model.
The is an exception for peak usage, where a variable power source happens to be able to produce power when demand is higher. Then you need to look at the entire generation mix to see what that is worth.
In addition, the desktop is likely to be the high profit margin market in the future. CAD/CAE, publishing, software development graphic design, etc, and most office work will still need large screens. The mobile market could easily turn into a race to the bottom. I'm surprised that MS wants to be there.
How does he know he's right? Certainly there is a subset of wealthy people who will wear fancy watches, but there are others who don't bother. If you are worth millions, a watch worth tens of thousands is a way to show off. If you are worth billions, the watch really isn't saying anything. Of course if you are worth billions YOU are not talking to the concierge, if you for some reason are even staying in a hotel, you have staff to deal with things.
I've actually checked (I work at a lab with sensitive radiation detection equipment). Nothing that I can measure makes it out of the watch - Tritium is a very low energy beta emitter so its easy to shield.
The light is from a radioactive Tritium source - automatic cool points, and its actually useful, the hands are bright enough to see in any light without needing a second hand to push a button.
At the very least it provides a good basis for a lawsuit if someone has their recordings destroyed. The 14th amendment connection of not allowing the destruction of personal property without due process helps. I think this is an important and very beneficial ruling.
NO, its not the first 100 miles, its the 10km/sec required to reach orbit. All of these "spaceship 1" type projects are nowhere near the delta-v required to reach orbit and this has caused a lot of confusion. Getting to 100 miles is relatively easy - the delta-V is below the exhaust velocity of chemical rockets so you don't need a huge mass ratio. The problem with orbit is that the delta-V is higher than a chemical propellant so the fuel / mass ratio of the rocket becomes large.
Earth to orbit is of course possible - we've been doing it for half a century, but its still expensive and difficult.
Its really surprising to me that mm-waves would interfere with electronics, the average power levels are low (mm wave sources are EXPENSIVE), and would have a difficult time making it though the packaging.
However... THAT IS NOT THE POINT! If she had any reason to believe that the scanner might cause her harm, and especially with a doctor's orders, she had a right to a manual pat-down.
I have pretty accurate cost numbers for a beechcraft bonanza (have one in a partnership and we've tracked the actual costs for 5 years). The bonanza carries 4 passengers and luggage with a ~800 mile range. Costs about $700K new, the one I am flying is worth about $90K. Cruise speed is about 180mph (at the fuel burn I am quoting).
Fixed costs: $12K/year (this is what it would cost to keep it in a hanger, insurance, all inspections done, etc, but not flying). Non-fuel flying costs are $65/hour (wear and tear on engine, inspections, etc). Fuel burn is 12gph costing about $80/hour
If the electric plane really only costs $20/hour in energy costs, that would be a big win. I'm a bit skeptical though until they publish detailed performance numbers - I've seen too many "concept" planes that ended up no where near their originally claimed performance.
It would not be too difficult to modify aircraft engines to run on auto-gas, but the certification is expensive, and auto-gas may not have the low vapor pressure required for use at high altitude. You would probably need to drop the compression a bit and that would somewhat reduce performance and efficiency.
BTW: aviation is slow to accept new technologies because of the safety issues. If the engine in your car seizes, you are in for an expensive repair and a delay. If the engine in your aircraft seizes, there is a significant chance that you and your family will DIE. Its a strong motivation to be very conservative. \
Automated systems can make very complex decisions based on lots of data, but they are not "smart" in quite the same way people are. In particular while computers can to a fantastic job of finding an optimal solution, the difficulty is in deciding on the merit function you are trying to optimize. It is not an easy question - what is the optimization function for a city?
"work environment" is completely subjective. Some people like busy active interaction, others like to work alone. Some like to talk to the public, others don't. Stress is also difficult to quantify: If an airline pilot screws up, hundreds of people die - but its really unlikely. If a software engineer screws up he gets fired - but he is much more likely to screw up than the pilot. As far as physical demands - some people would prefer a job where they get exercise working outdoors - being a lumberjack is OK
I wonder how porn star would rate on their list......how would you rate the "work environment".
I've a very vengeful consumer. I used Sony for all my home electronics, since the root-kit debacle I haven't bought anything from them - they've lost a LOT of sales from me. Tektronix started spamming me at work, now they are the last company I check for hardware, not the first (and I buy a LOT of test and measurement equipment at my lab). One of the nice things about modern world is that there is almost always another company that makes a similar product. This add irritated me - so I won't buy any Plantronics products for the next decade or two.
If slashdot needs more operating money, this wasn't the way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit surprised that it is worth it though. The vast majority of autocad drawings are really boring - building layouts, miscellaneous machine parts etc. It would be very labor intensive to go through zillions of stolen drawings to try to figure out which ones were actually valuable.
OTOH, this could be a sort of demonstration run. Once they find out how to quietly steal drawings, they might be able to modify the code to look for specific drawings from specific companies or government sites. They might be helped here by government agencies who have a uniform drawing numbering and description system.
A $50K car is well into the luxury market and time is very valuable to the sort of people who buy these cars. Renting takes time / effort - something that people in this demographic do not want to waste.
You would get some charge, but at some expense and weight, vehicle height, and maybe aesthetics (important in this market). I'm sure they thought about it, but decided that the small amount of extra charging wasn't worth it.
The range limit is a big problem because it means you need 2 cars. Even if only a small percentage of your trips are over the 160 or 300 mile limit, you still need to take those trips. You could rent a car for long trips, but one of the points of LUXURY items is reducing the amount of time you waste. Even ignoring the cost, many people don't have space to park 2 cars per person. (or even one per person, and a spare).
It is a bit cheaper (maybe X2) to operate than a gas car, but the difference doesn't cover the difference in purchase costs over the lifetime of the car.
The total life cycle emissions relative to a hybrid would be an interesting study. The answer would probably depend on where you were operating the Tesla and how the marginal additional energy is generated.
A plug-in hybrid might be more interesting, electric for the commute, but with unlimited range if needed for the occasional long trip.
All that said, anyone who wants one is welcome, it makes as much sense as a bunch of other high tech toys.
Its a pretty thorny question. A very simple algorithm with predictable results shouldn't have a right of free speech separate from its writer. On the other hand a hypothetical full-brain simulation might reasonably have the right to free speech.
As computers become complex enough to behave in a way that is comparable to human intelligence it will become important to figure out what rights they should have. In terms of raw compute power, this isn't in the distant future.
Its also not clear to me that it would fill a different niche than an ekranoplan (ground effect flying boat). These were developed by the Russians and worked, but as far as I know were not found to be militarily useful.
Same for comparisons with helicopters or slow ground attack aircraft.
No one NEEDS the content that the RIAA is trying to protect. A few months boycott and they would be gone for good (and we'd all have a lot more free time on our hands). They have annoyed almost their entire customer base - if only there were a way to leverage this into collective action.
The apparently also don't travel in airliners, or to foreign countries where data access is expensive, or to remote locations without any data. If you spend your life in a big modern city, its easy to get the impression that the internet is always accessible.
If I could really be connected all the time, I wouldn't mind cloud-based / streaming services, but in reality I spend a significant fraction of my time in locations where I do not and can not (for any reasonable price) have internet access.
Services that let you download and then play while disconnected could work, but that starts to sound suspiciously like "ownership" to me.
I think there are 3 different issues here. One is whether you pay one-time for the content, or pay each time you use it. One is where the content is stored and whether it will be available when you are not connected. The third is whether you will always have access to the content or if it will be removed at some point.
For me, I don't care much about the payment model as long as the total cost works out to the same. I do want my content available when I am not connected, and I really don't want content to disappear.
This seems a classic example of the sort of negative-sum game that should be prevented by government regulation. Each trading company spends money to be faster than the competition, but overall there is an increase in costs.
In addition when trading happens much faster than human reaction times there is a risk that software bugs, or unexpected behavior from the interaction of multiple semi-intelligent trading programs could cause large scale real monetary losses by moving money into inefficient investments.
I honestly don't see any global efficiency increase from trades that happen faster than 1 hour. Ideally prices and investments should be driven by new information and there is very little reliable information on faster timescales.
I understand that there are issues with slower trades - if you set a 1-hour clock, all trades will be posted microseconds before the clock ticks. A random delay may be the only way to fix it.
This is a very good experiment, but this is far from being competition for the large X-ray facilities. They are generating 10^5 photons in a 1% bandwidth at 1 KeV. The LCLS (X-ray Free Electron Laser at SLAC) generates about 10^13 photons in a ~0.3% bandwidth. (100 million times more) and operates at 6 X the repetition rate. The LCLS can also operate up to 10 KeV with the same pulse energy if needed. Near future facilities like the Euro XFEL will operate at 100X the average power of LCLS.
The very wide bandwidth of the harmonic generation described in the paper is very interesting because it can in principal support very short (few attosecond) bunches for future experiments, however at the moment they seem to be operating with 80 femtosecond bunches (or bunch trains), comparable to the FELs. (LCLS can run as short as a few femtoseconds with 10^12 photons). It is not clear how to compress their very broad band pulses to generate short pulses, though it is in principal possible. The minimum pulse length for FELs is likely to be around 100-200 attoseconds, so the harmonic generation scheme may eventually have a large advantage here.
It really is excellent work and a low power, ultra-short pulse tabletop X-ray source is a very valuable research tool, but I just want to point out that at the moment it is not a substitute for large X-ray facilities.
Josef Frisch
SLAC / LCLS
I think that any difference from the speed of light would have been scrutinized very carefully, but slower-than-light neutrinos would not have attracted the media attention.
The is a bit embarrassing since it was a simple technical glitch that caused the problem, but the scientific process is working correctly.
This is really important because it is possible to be deceptive by using sloppy language. Variable power sources (like wind and solar) are often quoted in watts, but is that peak? average over a day? average over a year? It can be a big (>X5) difference. Its fair to quote PEAK watts, or watt-hours over some period of time (hour, day year).
To be clear.
A watt is a unit of power. It tells you at any instant how much power is being generated or used. For solar and wind it is very important to describe whether this is peak or average. A 1GW peak solar plant would not be able to replace a 1GW coal or nuclear plant because it can only produce that much power under ideal conditions, presumably noon on a summer day with clear skies.
A watt-hour is a unit of energy. It tells you the energy used over some period of time. If you talk about the watt-hours, or giga-watt hours a plant produces in a year, you have what is in most cases a better model.
The is an exception for peak usage, where a variable power source happens to be able to produce power when demand is higher. Then you need to look at the entire generation mix to see what that is worth.
In addition, the desktop is likely to be the high profit margin market in the future. CAD/CAE, publishing, software development graphic design, etc, and most office work will still need large screens. The mobile market could easily turn into a race to the bottom. I'm surprised that MS wants to be there.
How does he know he's right? Certainly there is a subset of wealthy people who will wear fancy watches, but there are others who don't bother. If you are worth millions, a watch worth tens of thousands is a way to show off. If you are worth billions, the watch really isn't saying anything. Of course if you are worth billions YOU are not talking to the concierge, if you for some reason are even staying in a hotel, you have staff to deal with things.
I've actually checked (I work at a lab with sensitive radiation detection equipment). Nothing that I can measure makes it out of the watch - Tritium is a very low energy beta emitter so its easy to shield.
The light is from a radioactive Tritium source - automatic cool points, and its actually useful, the hands are bright enough to see in any light without needing a second hand to push a button.
At the very least it provides a good basis for a lawsuit if someone has their recordings destroyed. The 14th amendment connection of not allowing the destruction of personal property without due process helps. I think this is an important and very beneficial ruling.
NO, its not the first 100 miles, its the 10km/sec required to reach orbit. All of these "spaceship 1" type projects are nowhere near the delta-v required to reach orbit and this has caused a lot of confusion. Getting to 100 miles is relatively easy - the delta-V is below the exhaust velocity of chemical rockets so you don't need a huge mass ratio. The problem with orbit is that the delta-V is higher than a chemical propellant so the fuel / mass ratio of the rocket becomes large.
Earth to orbit is of course possible - we've been doing it for half a century, but its still expensive and difficult.
--- Joe Frisch
Maybe they decided that they could make more money on piracy lawsuits than on selling movies.......
Remember that these are the same people who put adds touting the high performance of blue-ray on blue-ray disks..........
Its really surprising to me that mm-waves would interfere with electronics, the average power levels are low (mm wave sources are EXPENSIVE), and would have a difficult time making it though the packaging.
However... THAT IS NOT THE POINT! If she had any reason to believe that the scanner might cause her harm, and especially with a doctor's orders, she had a right to a manual pat-down.
I have pretty accurate cost numbers for a beechcraft bonanza (have one in a partnership and we've tracked the actual costs for 5 years). The bonanza carries 4 passengers and luggage with a ~800 mile range. Costs about $700K new, the one I am flying is worth about $90K. Cruise speed is about 180mph (at the fuel burn I am quoting).
Fixed costs: $12K/year (this is what it would cost to keep it in a hanger, insurance, all inspections done, etc, but not flying).
Non-fuel flying costs are $65/hour (wear and tear on engine, inspections, etc).
Fuel burn is 12gph costing about $80/hour
If the electric plane really only costs $20/hour in energy costs, that would be a big win. I'm a bit skeptical though until they publish detailed performance numbers - I've seen too many "concept" planes that ended up no where near their originally claimed performance.
It would not be too difficult to modify aircraft engines to run on auto-gas, but the certification is expensive, and auto-gas may not have the low vapor pressure required for use at high altitude. You would probably need to drop the compression a bit and that would somewhat reduce performance and efficiency.
BTW: aviation is slow to accept new technologies because of the safety issues. If the engine in your car seizes, you are in for an expensive repair and a delay. If the engine in your aircraft seizes, there is a significant chance that you and your family will DIE. Its a strong motivation to be very conservative. \
Automated systems can make very complex decisions based on lots of data, but they are not "smart" in quite the same way people are. In particular while computers can to a fantastic job of finding an optimal solution, the difficulty is in deciding on the merit function you are trying to optimize. It is not an easy question - what is the optimization function for a city?
"work environment" is completely subjective. Some people like busy active interaction, others like to work alone. Some like to talk to the public, others don't. Stress is also difficult to quantify: If an airline pilot screws up, hundreds of people die - but its really unlikely. If a software engineer screws up he gets fired - but he is much more likely to screw up than the pilot. As far as physical demands - some people would prefer a job where they get exercise working outdoors - being a lumberjack is OK
I wonder how porn star would rate on their list......how would you rate the "work environment".
I've a very vengeful consumer. I used Sony for all my home electronics, since the root-kit debacle I haven't bought anything from them - they've lost a LOT of sales from me. Tektronix started spamming me at work, now they are the last company I check for hardware, not the first (and I buy a LOT of test and measurement equipment at my lab). One of the nice things about modern world is that there is almost always another company that makes a similar product. This add irritated me - so I won't buy any Plantronics products for the next decade or two.
If slashdot needs more operating money, this wasn't the way to do it.
All good points, but then what is the value of the laser weapon over a conventional gun?