"And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ow ound round ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.
I agree with you, it is meant to be rapid prototyping, but it is not necessarily so. It really depends on the part you're making. If you consider the time it takes to design the item in 3D, adapting the design to the specifics of printing in 3D and your actual 3D printer, and the time to print the thing, it can take an awful lot of time. Sometimes, people would print in 3D something that can easily be done using classic machining -- or with clay, cardboard or papier-mâché, just because they can, it's fun or it's hype not because they actually need a plastic part or is faster.
What 3D printing is really good at besides highly complex shapes is rapid-iteration prototyping, where you print several iterations of a prototype with minor changes between each iteration. Then, you start saving a lot of time.
3D printers have indeed become more prevalent, and economies of scale might emerge for raw materials and the printers themselves -- but certainly no economies of scale for devices printed on them in sight just yet. Ask anyone who has built or used one if they would be ready to print "thousands" of devices without "significant retooling", or if current 3D printers are able to replace more traditional manufacturing processes even for small batches. Current open-source 3D printers are nice, but are prototyping tools only. Even qualifying them as "rapid prototyping tools" often seems stretching it to me right now. They do allow for rapid-cycle prototyping, though.
A poorly written summary that does not bring anything new that has not been discussed manytimes here since 2005.
Reverse osmosis (RO) is a membrane-technology filtration method that removes many types of large molecules and ions from solutions by applying pressure to the solution when it is on one side of a selective membrane. The result is that the solute is retained on the pressurized side of the membrane and the pure solvent is allowed to pass to the other side.
and from phys.org:
In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes.
And same article displays a chart showing water permability of about 100 L/cm/day/MPa for graphene in contrast to 0.5 for high-flux RO.
In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes. However, this is the first time that scientists have explored the potential role of nanoporous graphene as a filter for water desalination. Single-layer graphene, which is just one carbon atom thick, is the ultimate thin membrane, making it advantageous for water desalination since water flux across a membrane scales inversely with the membrane’s thickness. [...] The scientists explain that there are two main challenges facing the use of nanoporous graphene for desalination purposes. One is achieving a narrow pore size distribution, although rapid experimental progress in synthesizing highly ordered porous graphene suggests that this may soon be feasible. The other challenge is mechanical stability under applied pressure, which could be achieved using a thin-film support layer such as that used in RO materials.
discovery.com, really? From ESO's press release (http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1227/):
The team used the CRIRES instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. They combined high quality infrared observations (at wavelengths around 2.3 microns) [At infrared wavelengths, the parent star emits less light than in the optical regime, so this is a wavelength regime favorable for separating out the dim planet’s signal.] with a clever new trick to tease out the weak signal of the planet from the much stronger one from the parent star.
This method uses the velocity of the planet in orbit around its parent star to distinguish its radiation from that of the star and also from features coming from the Earth’s atmosphere. The same team of astronomers tested this technique before on a transiting planet, measuring its orbital velocity during its crossing of the stellar disc.
Lead author of the study Matteo Brogi (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) explains: “Thanks to the high quality observations provided by the VLT and CRIRES we were able to study the spectrum of the system in much more detail than has been possible before. Only about 0.01% of the light we see comes from the planet, and the rest from the star, so this was not easy”.
The majority of planets around other stars were discovered by their gravitational effects on their parent stars, which limits the information that can be gleaned about their mass: they only allow a lower limit to be calculated for a planet’s mass. The new technique pioneered here is much more powerful. Seeing the planet’s light directly has allowed the astronomers to measure the angle of the planet’s orbit and hence work out its mass precisely. By tracing the changes in the planet’s motion as it orbits its star, the team has determined reliably for the first time that Tau Boötis b orbits its host star at an angle of 44 degrees and has a mass six times that of the planet Jupiter in our own Solar System. [...] As well as detecting the glow of the atmosphere and measuring Tau Boötis b’s mass, the team has probed its atmosphere and measured the amount of carbon monoxide present, as well as the temperature at different altitudes by means of a comparison between the observations and theoretical models. A surprising result from this work was that the new observations indicated an atmosphere with a temperature that falls higher up. This result is the exact opposite of the temperature inversion — an increase in temperature with height — found for other hot Jupiter exoplanets
I second this. I'm not using VB6 anymore (not programming much anymore) but I'm still writing bits of VBA in Access on a regular basis, without any shame. There might be now (if so, please tell me), but last time I checked, there was still nothing in the FOSS world that could compare to what Access was doing 15 years ago in terms of rapid database development. I've used.NET, several PHP frameworks, each of them took me several weeks to learn, and in each of them, a small database front-end took several days to write, while I would have done the same in a few hours with Access.
Did you have a:look at the pictures they took that night? That's no cheap beginner scope. Looks like a decent polar-mounted 8" SC with at least a good DSLR camera. The guy is not the typical stargazer, and believe me (I'm there right now), you don't find easily these scopes in the shops in Kabul. This might very well be the best (civilian) scope in the country.
According to the Computer History Museum, the Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.
From the paper:
"We implemented a very simple algorithm to heuristically estimate whether a given ngerprint might be an evolved version of a ngerprint seen previously. [...] Excluding users whose ngerprints changed because they disabled javascript (a common case in response to visiting panopticlick.eff.org, but perhaps not so common in the real world), our heuristic made a correct guess in 65% of cases, an incorrect guess in 0.56% of cases, and no guess in 35% of cases. 99.1% of guesses were correct, while the false positive rate was 0.86%. Our algorithm was clearly very crude, and no doubt could be significantly improved with effort."
The idea is not to force everybody to install it, but only propose it to users who have been spotted "illegally sharing protected content".
Users are supposed to install this software suite after the first or second "strike", so that they can't claim their internet access has been used by someone else for illegal purposes without their knowledge. If they don't, they're liable to be prosecuted for negligence in securing their internet access and computer.
On top of the classic spam control, anti-virus, parental control and firewall, the system is meant to warn users if they perform "suspicious actions", and generate an encrypted log of warnings and whereas they stopped after the warning or ignored them.
I for one would welcome such a (very stupid) scheme, as it shouldn't be too difficult to bypass, providing a "good faith certificate" for cheap. But for many users, it is very probably going to prove extremely annoying (remember Windows User Account Control), if not dangerous.
From the text of the decision, it appears that the provider (Edu4) had not only removed GPL copyrights from VNC, thus making the product likely to be considered counterfeit, but also introduced a backdoor
Considering that Edu4 [...]
- modified VNC protection mechanism by introducing a non-modifiable password known only from Edu4, thus allowing Edu4 to take control of any workstation, bypassing the protection mechanism Edu4 delivered;
- did not mention any of this to AFPA;
- [...]
NASA and their contractors have shown they can build stuff that lasts (like the Mars Rovers, Voyager, the Space Shuttle or any of the hundreds of satellites).
Most of these probes and their instruments far outlive their original mission duration -- Voyager 1 being the best known example. I've always wondered what part of that extended lifetime could be reasonably expected, and what part really comes as a surprise.
I guess engineers compute probability of failure for various instruments: any idea if they are usually right?
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they leave the sound on:
"And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ow ound round ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.
Really, this is NSFW for you guys? Time to move back across the pond...
I agree with you, it is meant to be rapid prototyping, but it is not necessarily so. It really depends on the part you're making. If you consider the time it takes to design the item in 3D, adapting the design to the specifics of printing in 3D and your actual 3D printer, and the time to print the thing, it can take an awful lot of time. Sometimes, people would print in 3D something that can easily be done using classic machining -- or with clay, cardboard or papier-mâché, just because they can, it's fun or it's hype not because they actually need a plastic part or is faster.
What 3D printing is really good at besides highly complex shapes is rapid-iteration prototyping, where you print several iterations of a prototype with minor changes between each iteration. Then, you start saving a lot of time.
3D printers have indeed become more prevalent, and economies of scale might emerge for raw materials and the printers themselves -- but certainly no economies of scale for devices printed on them in sight just yet. Ask anyone who has built or used one if they would be ready to print "thousands" of devices without "significant retooling", or if current 3D printers are able to replace more traditional manufacturing processes even for small batches. Current open-source 3D printers are nice, but are prototyping tools only. Even qualifying them as "rapid prototyping tools" often seems stretching it to me right now. They do allow for rapid-cycle prototyping, though.
A poorly written summary that does not bring anything new that has not been discussed many times here since 2005.
Check out RepRap and MakerBot
I know nothing of the subject, so I actually bothered reading a more decent summary of the initial article, and some definition of reverse osmosis.
From wikipedia:
Reverse osmosis (RO) is a membrane-technology filtration method that removes many types of large molecules and ions from solutions by applying pressure to the solution when it is on one side of a selective membrane. The result is that the solute is retained on the pressurized side of the membrane and the pure solvent is allowed to pass to the other side.
and from phys.org:
In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes.
And same article displays a chart showing water permability of about 100 L/cm/day/MPa for graphene in contrast to 0.5 for high-flux RO.
From phys.org:
In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes.
However, this is the first time that scientists have explored the potential role of nanoporous graphene as a filter for water desalination. Single-layer graphene, which is just one carbon atom thick, is the ultimate thin membrane, making it advantageous for water desalination since water flux across a membrane scales inversely with the membrane’s thickness.
[...]
The scientists explain that there are two main challenges facing the use of nanoporous graphene for desalination purposes. One is achieving a narrow pore size distribution, although rapid experimental progress in synthesizing highly ordered porous graphene suggests that this may soon be feasible. The other challenge is mechanical stability under applied pressure, which could be achieved using a thin-film support layer such as that used in RO materials.
discovery.com, really? From ESO's press release (http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1227/):
The team used the CRIRES instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. They combined high quality infrared observations (at wavelengths around 2.3 microns) [At infrared wavelengths, the parent star emits less light than in the optical regime, so this is a wavelength regime favorable for separating out the dim planet’s signal.] with a clever new trick to tease out the weak signal of the planet from the much stronger one from the parent star.
This method uses the velocity of the planet in orbit around its parent star to distinguish its radiation from that of the star and also from features coming from the Earth’s atmosphere. The same team of astronomers tested this technique before on a transiting planet, measuring its orbital velocity during its crossing of the stellar disc.
Lead author of the study Matteo Brogi (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) explains: “Thanks to the high quality observations provided by the VLT and CRIRES we were able to study the spectrum of the system in much more detail than has been possible before. Only about 0.01% of the light we see comes from the planet, and the rest from the star, so this was not easy”.
The majority of planets around other stars were discovered by their gravitational effects on their parent stars, which limits the information that can be gleaned about their mass: they only allow a lower limit to be calculated for a planet’s mass. The new technique pioneered here is much more powerful. Seeing the planet’s light directly has allowed the astronomers to measure the angle of the planet’s orbit and hence work out its mass precisely. By tracing the changes in the planet’s motion as it orbits its star, the team has determined reliably for the first time that Tau Boötis b orbits its host star at an angle of 44 degrees and has a mass six times that of the planet Jupiter in our own Solar System.
[...]
As well as detecting the glow of the atmosphere and measuring Tau Boötis b’s mass, the team has probed its atmosphere and measured the amount of carbon monoxide present, as well as the temperature at different altitudes by means of a comparison between the observations and theoretical models. A surprising result from this work was that the new observations indicated an atmosphere with a temperature that falls higher up. This result is the exact opposite of the temperature inversion — an increase in temperature with height — found for other hot Jupiter exoplanets
I second this. I'm not using VB6 anymore (not programming much anymore) but I'm still writing bits of VBA in Access on a regular basis, without any shame. .NET, several PHP frameworks, each of them took me several weeks to learn, and in each of them, a small database front-end took several days to write, while I would have done the same in a few hours with Access.
There might be now (if so, please tell me), but last time I checked, there was still nothing in the FOSS world that could compare to what Access was doing 15 years ago in terms of rapid database development. I've used
Did you have a :look at the pictures they took that night? That's no cheap beginner scope. Looks like a decent polar-mounted 8" SC with at least a good DSLR camera. The guy is not the typical stargazer, and believe me (I'm there right now), you don't find easily these scopes in the shops in Kabul. This might very well be the best (civilian) scope in the country.
According to the Computer History Museum, the Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.
Indeed. But your biometric data is unlikely to be in present in a single database of perhaps a billion people. Yet.
From the paper:
"We implemented a very simple algorithm to heuristically estimate whether a given ngerprint might be an evolved version of a ngerprint seen previously. [...] Excluding users whose ngerprints changed because they disabled javascript (a common case in response to visiting panopticlick.eff.org, but perhaps not so common in the real world), our heuristic made a correct guess in 65% of cases, an incorrect guess in 0.56% of cases, and no guess in 35% of cases. 99.1% of guesses were correct, while the false positive rate was 0.86%. Our algorithm was clearly very crude, and no doubt could be significantly improved with effort."
But it's perfectly ok to read a newspaper?
Or on the soon-to-come Google Universe, I suppose...
Then, we'll just have to wait a bit more for streetview on Epsilon Eridani c.
The idea is not to force everybody to install it, but only propose it to users who have been spotted "illegally sharing protected content".
Users are supposed to install this software suite after the first or second "strike", so that they can't claim their internet access has been used by someone else for illegal purposes without their knowledge. If they don't, they're liable to be prosecuted for negligence in securing their internet access and computer.
On top of the classic spam control, anti-virus, parental control and firewall, the system is meant to warn users if they perform "suspicious actions", and generate an encrypted log of warnings and whereas they stopped after the warning or ignored them.
I for one would welcome such a (very stupid) scheme, as it shouldn't be too difficult to bypass, providing a "good faith certificate" for cheap. But for many users, it is very probably going to prove extremely annoying (remember Windows User Account Control), if not dangerous.
The hardware used in the experiment is an early generation Chimera chip where 52 of the 128 qubits were functioning.
Amazing indeed. I just wish NASA TV showed a bit more of this kind of footage -- advocate for NASA to hire a couple of good video editors?
For those who don't know it, a good source of NASA video archives (besides Youtube) is http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/.
1. Register for the CCTV monitoring biggest sex shop in Edinburgh
2. ???
3. Profit!
Considering that Edu4 [...]
- modified VNC protection mechanism by introducing a non-modifiable password known only from Edu4, thus allowing Edu4 to take control of any workstation, bypassing the protection mechanism Edu4 delivered;
- did not mention any of this to AFPA;
- [...]
Don't you think it already pretty much looks like -- or at least sound like -- Klingon?
NASA and their contractors have shown they can build stuff that lasts (like the Mars Rovers, Voyager, the Space Shuttle or any of the hundreds of satellites).
Most of these probes and their instruments far outlive their original mission duration -- Voyager 1 being the best known example. I've always wondered what part of that extended lifetime could be reasonably expected, and what part really comes as a surprise.
I guess engineers compute probability of failure for various instruments: any idea if they are usually right?