Good heavens, no! I hope that you and your family will be able to eat next year, despite the extra $5.27 you paid in federal taxes for foreign aid and relief. It accounts for a whopping 1% of the federal budget.
This is nothing more than tech demo clickbait; anyone following the capabilities of SLS already knew this was well within the realm of possibility.
Believe it or not, even on Slashdot not everyone has been following the progress of SLS. As for clickbait, sure it's for PR. Nothing wrong with that to get some publicity for a company's capabilities.
Also, it's a waste of weight and money to do it this way. SLS should be used for key parts, but the rest should be normal 3D printed plastic (like a Glock).
FTA: "Solid Concept says that the point of the exercise wasn't to create a cheaper pistol". In real production the metal parts could probably be made less expensively by traditional metal fab techniques. Plastic can be injection molded.
Good point about the evolution - kind of like those non-poisonous snakes that evolved to look like poisonous varieties. I guess we'll need smart agbots. I don't think a weed could evolve to the point where it's completely indistinguishable from the crop by a sufficiently advanced agbot. Parts of the spectrum outside of visible light (not that weeds couldn't change their coloring there, but it'd be tough to do the whole range from IR to UV), growth rate (weeds are generally opportunistic plants), position in the furrow? It sounds like an interesting challenge. Where can I get a job?
Another from of labor intensive agriculture that agbots might be able to do is the old American Indian style of planting the "Three Sisters" together. It works well, but is very labor intensive. It has to be done by hand - even Old World style farmers w/ draft animals found it too labor intensive.
Why livestock? I find the idea of using agbots for crops interesting. A possibly far-fetched idea: no-till farming is great for soil preservation, and reduces the need for fertilizer. The downside is that it increases the need for herbicides to control weeds (controlling weeds is one of the main purposes of plowing). Suppose you could have a little army of agbots cutting or pulling out the weeds instead? It would also reduce the tendency of weeds to evolve into herbicide resistant forms (I doubt any weed could evolve to be immune to getting cut or pulled).
Left and right are mindsets - not political movements.
While the two mindsets you describe exist and are, as you said, both useful, I don't think they have much to do with left vs. right these days (or liberal vs. conservative if you prefer). I think that left/liberal and right/conservative have, as used in contemporary American politics, become teams you root for, or just brand labels.
I'd hazard a guess that the results would have been similar with a gasoline powered car
That's ridiculous - they probably would have been much worse with a gasoline powered car:) Gasoline does have the charming habit of flowing out of a damaged tank, and setting everything around it on fire (often including the occupants).
Their strategy of remaining 'open' (ie. Android is open source, Chrome is based on Chromium, Chromebook is just Linux with a few binaries on top, etc.); but ensuring that the only really frictionless way to use their stuff is by playing by their rules, with your Google Account, in the Google Play Store, etc. seems to be the implementation of this.
I hate to say it, but that might be a very clever, and effective, business strategy. It's a sort of soft lock-in. Sure you can fork it, but the Google stuff isn't really bad enough to justify it.
I'm no Google fanboy, but what they're doing is hardly evil. Whether it's a good business idea or whether people will walk is the only issue. I hope for the latter, but I wouldn't call it evil if the former happened.
Good point, but if push came to shove, could Mozilla get funding from other companies? LG, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. like their stuff, could fund development out of pocket change, and don't want to get locked in by anybody.
Frankly I don't know much about Firefox OS, but it's starting to sound better and better. For that matter, couldn't there be an Android fork? (which would have companies w/ serious $ behind it).
Sounds like Google is starting to suffer from the same hubris that's killed so many companies that were once on top. Sort of a corporate variant of Napolean's "the world's cemeteries are filled with indispensable men". I can't think of anything Google has that can't be replaced, or for which there are already alternatives.
No. Google's statements about their self-driving cars are just PR announcements. 300k miles without an accident (or whatever it is). No indication of driving conditions rain, snow, etc. Do the human drivers turn off the autopilot when they know they're approaching a situation it doesn't handle well? A good idea for safety, but a bad one for testing the cars. The truth is, we just don't know how good they are.
Judging by my experiences as a child and an adult, I'd say there is far more empirical evidence for the existence of the Tooth Fairy than for many of the things that adults commonly accept.
How often do undercover agents actually provoke action from protesters?
One time is too many, and should lead to criminal charges against all officials involved. Incitement to riot, etc. Since it's the cops doing it, they're pretty unlikely to investigate themselves, but I can dream.
How often? I don't know, because they don't usually announce themselves as agents provocateur, and as the article mentions, the NYPD for example, has better security than the NSA. That's what makes incidents like the one cited where one person was seen in some many roles, very interesting.
They say the best way to identify them is to look at their shoes - as good as their costumes are otherwise, they often forget to change their standard cop shoes. That's how they caught some agents provocateur in Quebec. I have faith that the NYPD is more professional though.
Over here (NL), it is usually the Autonomen, a group of hard core "professional" protesters, who join otherwise peaceful protests with the specific intent to stir up trouble.
Obviously that's bad, but it's far worse when the very people charged with keeping the peace, and given extraordinary powers to do it, engage in the same thing. It's suppression of the right to protest. Here in the US that's taken seriously enough that it's protected in the 1st Amendment to our Constitution.
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Good heavens, no! I hope that you and your family will be able to eat next year, despite the extra $5.27 you paid in federal taxes for foreign aid and relief. It accounts for a whopping 1% of the federal budget.
This is nothing more than tech demo clickbait; anyone following the capabilities of SLS already knew this was well within the realm of possibility.
Believe it or not, even on Slashdot not everyone has been following the progress of SLS. As for clickbait, sure it's for PR. Nothing wrong with that to get some publicity for a company's capabilities.
Also, it's a waste of weight and money to do it this way. SLS should be used for key parts, but the rest should be normal 3D printed plastic (like a Glock).
FTA: "Solid Concept says that the point of the exercise wasn't to create a cheaper pistol". In real production the metal parts could probably be made less expensively by traditional metal fab techniques. Plastic can be injection molded.
All the illegals will be complaining about the robots taking their jobs.
They'll be the first to get jobs building and maintaining the agbots. Illegal aliens: they're not just for ag jobs anymore.
No-till is already used on a mass scale:
The data show that approximately 35.5 percent of U.S. cropland planted to eight major crops, or 88 million acres, had no tillage operations in 2009.
It's harvested using standard equipment.
Good point about the evolution - kind of like those non-poisonous snakes that evolved to look like poisonous varieties. I guess we'll need smart agbots. I don't think a weed could evolve to the point where it's completely indistinguishable from the crop by a sufficiently advanced agbot. Parts of the spectrum outside of visible light (not that weeds couldn't change their coloring there, but it'd be tough to do the whole range from IR to UV), growth rate (weeds are generally opportunistic plants), position in the furrow? It sounds like an interesting challenge. Where can I get a job?
Another from of labor intensive agriculture that agbots might be able to do is the old American Indian style of planting the "Three Sisters" together. It works well, but is very labor intensive. It has to be done by hand - even Old World style farmers w/ draft animals found it too labor intensive.
Anti-biotics don't "pump cattle up"
Yes they do:
The growth-promotic effects of antibiotics are undisputed, but the collateral and long-term effect are a cause for a heated debate and banning in the European Union in 2005
The dreaded cow drone!
I wonder if it's bull proof?
P.S. By bull I mean a male bovine, not the metaphorical use of the term.
Why livestock? I find the idea of using agbots for crops interesting. A possibly far-fetched idea: no-till farming is great for soil preservation, and reduces the need for fertilizer. The downside is that it increases the need for herbicides to control weeds (controlling weeds is one of the main purposes of plowing). Suppose you could have a little army of agbots cutting or pulling out the weeds instead? It would also reduce the tendency of weeds to evolve into herbicide resistant forms (I doubt any weed could evolve to be immune to getting cut or pulled).
Left and right are mindsets - not political movements.
While the two mindsets you describe exist and are, as you said, both useful, I don't think they have much to do with left vs. right these days (or liberal vs. conservative if you prefer). I think that left/liberal and right/conservative have, as used in contemporary American politics, become teams you root for, or just brand labels.
Tough steal
Couldn't you just buy it legally?
I'd hazard a guess that the results would have been similar with a gasoline powered car
That's ridiculous - they probably would have been much worse with a gasoline powered car :) Gasoline does have the charming habit of flowing out of a damaged tank, and setting everything around it on fire (often including the occupants).
Their strategy of remaining 'open' (ie. Android is open source, Chrome is based on Chromium, Chromebook is just Linux with a few binaries on top, etc.); but ensuring that the only really frictionless way to use their stuff is by playing by their rules, with your Google Account, in the Google Play Store, etc. seems to be the implementation of this.
I hate to say it, but that might be a very clever, and effective, business strategy. It's a sort of soft lock-in. Sure you can fork it, but the Google stuff isn't really bad enough to justify it.
Rare for me to defend Canucks, but I must point out we're talking about BC.
combined with "strategic" moves like this blocking of extensions, makes them look like nothing so much as a bunch of entitled sociopathic douche bags
I think words like "disorganized" and "unreliable" would describe it better.
Do no evil is marketing..
I'm no Google fanboy, but what they're doing is hardly evil. Whether it's a good business idea or whether people will walk is the only issue. I hope for the latter, but I wouldn't call it evil if the former happened.
Good point, but if push came to shove, could Mozilla get funding from other companies? LG, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc. like their stuff, could fund development out of pocket change, and don't want to get locked in by anybody.
Frankly I don't know much about Firefox OS, but it's starting to sound better and better. For that matter, couldn't there be an Android fork? (which would have companies w/ serious $ behind it).
Sounds like Google is starting to suffer from the same hubris that's killed so many companies that were once on top. Sort of a corporate variant of Napolean's "the world's cemeteries are filled with indispensable men". I can't think of anything Google has that can't be replaced, or for which there are already alternatives.
I stopped using Chrome because it's extensions were not up to par with Firefox addons.
And now I feel less inclined to use Chrome at all.
Ditto. What does Google hope to accomplish with this? Switching to Firefox takes less than 5 minutes.
No. Google's statements about their self-driving cars are just PR announcements. 300k miles without an accident (or whatever it is). No indication of driving conditions rain, snow, etc. Do the human drivers turn off the autopilot when they know they're approaching a situation it doesn't handle well? A good idea for safety, but a bad one for testing the cars. The truth is, we just don't know how good they are.
Ok, it's an American curse. A curse is a curse, just like the genuine American fortune cookies they sell in East Asia are nonetheless fortune cookies.
Judging by my experiences as a child and an adult, I'd say there is far more empirical evidence for the existence of the Tooth Fairy than for many of the things that adults commonly accept.
Ok, I take it back. You're the one that's fictional :)
RTFA. They clashed w/ DC cops, not NPS rangers.
Fictional characters as populist heroes is hardly something new, or do you believe that Robin Hood was real?
How often do undercover agents actually provoke action from protesters?
One time is too many, and should lead to criminal charges against all officials involved. Incitement to riot, etc. Since it's the cops doing it, they're pretty unlikely to investigate themselves, but I can dream.
How often? I don't know, because they don't usually announce themselves as agents provocateur, and as the article mentions, the NYPD for example, has better security than the NSA. That's what makes incidents like the one cited where one person was seen in some many roles, very interesting.
They say the best way to identify them is to look at their shoes - as good as their costumes are otherwise, they often forget to change their standard cop shoes. That's how they caught some agents provocateur in Quebec. I have faith that the NYPD is more professional though.
Over here (NL), it is usually the Autonomen, a group of hard core "professional" protesters, who join otherwise peaceful protests with the specific intent to stir up trouble.
Obviously that's bad, but it's far worse when the very people charged with keeping the peace, and given extraordinary powers to do it, engage in the same thing. It's suppression of the right to protest. Here in the US that's taken seriously enough that it's protected in the 1st Amendment to our Constitution.