Someone needs to make and publish plans for a good Stirling Engine that can operate in the temperature range of heat-pipe solar collectors like the ones produced by Thermomax.
Very robust systems that can heat or preheat your hot water can be made with heat-pump collector elements and very few additional moving parts. If you add Stirling Engines that can work off of hot water, then you can also get electricity generation in the bargain. That would be awesome!
The body would only have to be large enough to accommodate the full range of pilot motion inside the haptic harness. If you made the robot a bit pot-bellied, you could build something 30-40 feet tall. You'd want to limit the size of the thing to the scale where we build hydraulic "arms" for things like power-shovels and backhoes.
It's hydraulically actuated, so it's very strong and yet approaches the speed of a human arm (if it were scaled up). On top of that, there's haptic force feedback! In the video someone is holding an anvil like a freaking beer mug!
If you developed a full-body haptic feedback harness with their technology and put it in the center of mass of a giant robot body, you'd basically have a real-life Anime style mecha. Since the pilot's body would be tied to the orientation of the robot body, the pilot's own middle-ear would be the balancing mechanism! (You'd probably have to power it externally at first, which would give you something like Evangelion!)
(Back when I first posted about this, some idiot posted "Duh. It's called GEARS. But if you set those up for strength, they become SLOW." Unfortunately, the thread closed before I could respond. No gears involved, it's all hydraulics. Hydraulics can approach or surpass the speed of muscle, but with even more strength. I hate it when idiots get the last word, and they're just flat-out WRONG!)
The internet is truly warped. If you say something happened which sounds particularly likely, you are not believed. If you say something unlikely, they tell you, "photo, or it didn't happen." When you show the photo, then someone comments that "It's a photoshop, I can tell because of the pixels."
Do you think it's an accident? The makers of the GTA series are using the same schtick that many musicians with "explicit" lyrics or directors of "controversial films" use -- Any publicity is good publicity! They know that the more people they piss off, the more free publicity this game gets on the news and websites, the more people talk about it, the more people think about it, and the more will buy it.
Glass plates could be produced locally. A even better idea might be to use a parabolic reflector to route sunlight into fiber-optic cables. This has the added advantage of being able to realign the dish to concentrate Earthshine to help get through the 2 week long night.
> During the lunar day, the surface temperature averages 107C, and during the lunar night, it averages -153C.
Not a bigger challenge by a long shot. The solutions are simply the same ones needed to build shelters for human life. We already know a lot about how to do this using lunar materials. Once we have such a shelter built, inhabited, and well insulated, comfortable temperatures could be maintained passively by varying the amount of heat radiated away. On the other hand, providing sunlight to plants requires the power to come from *somewhere*. You just can't ignore thermodynamics.
I think you're talking about growing plants in the open on the surface. That's just plain silly!
Sunlight is the biggest problem. Most places on the Moon go through two weeks of darkness, and providing sunlight-equivalent illumination would be energy prohibitive. Soviet scientists have experimented with keeping plants on low artificial light at low temperatures for two weeks, alternating that with two weeks of light. Apparently, peas can grow like this.
Parallelism was a hot area when I was in grad school 10 years back. We used to say about Gallium Arsenide -- "Gallium Arsenide is the semiconductor of the future -- always was, always will be." Maybe the same thing is true with parallelism -- paradigm of the future -- it's always useful as a way of getting more work done per unit time, but it has high costs associated with it, so people will only use it if it feels like they absolutely have to.
Parallelism has had broad applicability in graphics. It's definitely useful. But I doubt it's going to obsolete what we can do sequentially.
No, some of us live in efficiencies. If your closet is small, then putting a PC in it is a pretty braindead idea. It seems like you don't know that you can build a machine that emits essentially 0 db. You can get a fanless power supply and passively cool a low power chip, which will be plenty for music recording purposes. This reduces you to one case fan, which can be undervolted and which will be completely inaudible. Many of the components for this are even fairly low-cost, like a CF to IDE adaptor for your boot partition.
Remote Controlling machines on the Moon would be tough with the 1 second lag. I ran across an article about Japanese researchers experimenting with the simulated lag to an orbiting satellite, but I can't find it right this second. Latencies to Mars are going to be many minutes. To do "remote control" you'd need to be able to give high-level commands, like: "okay, you assemble that wall over there. You help him by fastening the screws. You over there, you pile dirt on the back and sides of the hab module..."
Anybody who is building a recording studio should know how to deal with the PCs: put them in the next room, on the other side of your acoustic insulation, and just bring the cables through. You need to do that anyway, so there's no point making them quieter. Some of us are poor and really don't have a real pair of rooms for a real studio.
The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! I've been looking for drives like this for years! This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work, people building multimedia PCs, or those who just plain like quiet drives. You can even use a smaller SSD drive to get blazing random access performance just for games while using the Green Power for other purposes, and get the best of both worlds. (The Gigabyte iRam is spec'd perfectly for this, but it's a bit pricey.)
What he's describing is not just Freenet. There's also a little bit of Bittorrent in there as well, and some more ingredients. Freenet is about distribution to prevent censorship. What he's proposing is to decentralize to turn the *entire Internet* into a huge broadcast cache. This will also have the effect of making censorship difficult, but that's only a byproduct.
A New Way to Look at Networking is a Google Tech Talk. It's about an hour long, but there's a lot of very good and fascinating historical information, which sets the groundwork for this guy's proposal. Van Jacobson was around at the early days when TCP/IP were being invented. He's proposing a new protocol layered on top of TCP/IP that can turn the Internet into a true broadcast medium -- one which is even more proof against censorship than the current one!
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to make and publish plans for a good Stirling Engine that can operate in the temperature range of heat-pipe solar collectors like the ones produced by Thermomax.
http://www.thermomax-group.com/
Very robust systems that can heat or preheat your hot water can be made with heat-pump collector elements and very few additional moving parts. If you add Stirling Engines that can work off of hot water, then you can also get electricity generation in the bargain. That would be awesome!
There's too many headlines concerning "X Considered Harmful"
The body would only have to be large enough to accommodate the full range of pilot motion inside the haptic harness. If you made the robot a bit pot-bellied, you could build something 30-40 feet tall. You'd want to limit the size of the thing to the scale where we build hydraulic "arms" for things like power-shovels and backhoes.
Get a look at the Large Dextrous Arm.
http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html
It's hydraulically actuated, so it's very strong and yet approaches the speed of a human arm (if it were scaled up). On top of that, there's haptic force feedback! In the video someone is holding an anvil like a freaking beer mug!
If you developed a full-body haptic feedback harness with their technology and put it in the center of mass of a giant robot body, you'd basically have a real-life Anime style mecha. Since the pilot's body would be tied to the orientation of the robot body, the pilot's own middle-ear would be the balancing mechanism! (You'd probably have to power it externally at first, which would give you something like Evangelion!)
(Back when I first posted about this, some idiot posted "Duh. It's called GEARS. But if you set those up for strength, they become SLOW." Unfortunately, the thread closed before I could respond. No gears involved, it's all hydraulics. Hydraulics can approach or surpass the speed of muscle, but with even more strength. I hate it when idiots get the last word, and they're just flat-out WRONG!)
The internet is truly warped. If you say something happened which sounds particularly likely, you are not believed. If you say something unlikely, they tell you, "photo, or it didn't happen." When you show the photo, then someone comments that "It's a photoshop, I can tell because of the pixels."
In this case...
It was a she. Some brunette who worked as a graphic designer.
I met someone in college who slept with him.
It doesn't have hands yet, but it works. You even step into the boots with your feet in the same way Ripley did in Aliens.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/25/sarcos-military-exoskeleton-becomes-a-frightening-reality/
Actually, just the slash in the closing tag.
Do you think it's an accident? The makers of the GTA series are using the same schtick that many musicians with "explicit" lyrics or directors of "controversial films" use -- Any publicity is good publicity! They know that the more people they piss off, the more free publicity this game gets on the news and websites, the more people talk about it, the more people think about it, and the more will buy it.
It's all about the money, baby!
So you want your Free as in Beer? The promise is that we'll have Free as in Speech, which is much more important.
Glass plates could be produced locally. A even better idea might be to use a parabolic reflector to route sunlight into fiber-optic cables. This has the added advantage of being able to realign the dish to concentrate Earthshine to help get through the 2 week long night.
> During the lunar day, the surface temperature averages 107C, and during the lunar night, it averages -153C.
Not a bigger challenge by a long shot. The solutions are simply the same ones needed to build shelters for human life. We already know a lot about how to do this using lunar materials. Once we have such a shelter built, inhabited, and well insulated, comfortable temperatures could be maintained passively by varying the amount of heat radiated away. On the other hand, providing sunlight to plants requires the power to come from *somewhere*. You just can't ignore thermodynamics.
I think you're talking about growing plants in the open on the surface. That's just plain silly!
Sunlight is the biggest problem. Most places on the Moon go through two weeks of darkness, and providing sunlight-equivalent illumination would be energy prohibitive. Soviet scientists have experimented with keeping plants on low artificial light at low temperatures for two weeks, alternating that with two weeks of light. Apparently, peas can grow like this.
They should've found a way to put F on the front of the acronym, so that it could be FLCL-Cooling.
"If it ever got cheap, GaAs would be great. It's just too damn expensive."
If it ever got easy to do, massive parallelism would be great. It's just too damn hard for a lot of things, though.
Parallelism was a hot area when I was in grad school 10 years back. We used to say about Gallium Arsenide -- "Gallium Arsenide is the semiconductor of the future -- always was, always will be." Maybe the same thing is true with parallelism -- paradigm of the future -- it's always useful as a way of getting more work done per unit time, but it has high costs associated with it, so people will only use it if it feels like they absolutely have to.
Parallelism has had broad applicability in graphics. It's definitely useful. But I doubt it's going to obsolete what we can do sequentially.
Want to put money on whether they'll lie again?
True or not, they're still lying bastards!
No, some of us live in efficiencies. If your closet is small, then putting a PC in it is a pretty braindead idea. It seems like you don't know that you can build a machine that emits essentially 0 db. You can get a fanless power supply and passively cool a low power chip, which will be plenty for music recording purposes. This reduces you to one case fan, which can be undervolted and which will be completely inaudible. Many of the components for this are even fairly low-cost, like a CF to IDE adaptor for your boot partition.
Remote Controlling machines on the Moon would be tough with the 1 second lag. I ran across an article about Japanese researchers experimenting with the simulated lag to an orbiting satellite, but I can't find it right this second. Latencies to Mars are going to be many minutes. To do "remote control" you'd need to be able to give high-level commands, like: "okay, you assemble that wall over there. You help him by fastening the screws. You over there, you pile dirt on the back and sides of the hab module..."
The Green Power drives are also impressively quiet! I've been looking for drives like this for years! This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work, people building multimedia PCs, or those who just plain like quiet drives. You can even use a smaller SSD drive to get blazing random access performance just for games while using the Green Power for other purposes, and get the best of both worlds. (The Gigabyte iRam is spec'd perfectly for this, but it's a bit pricey.)
What he's describing is not just Freenet. There's also a little bit of Bittorrent in there as well, and some more ingredients. Freenet is about distribution to prevent censorship. What he's proposing is to decentralize to turn the *entire Internet* into a huge broadcast cache. This will also have the effect of making censorship difficult, but that's only a byproduct.
A New Way to Look at Networking is a Google Tech Talk. It's about an hour long, but there's a lot of very good and fascinating historical information, which sets the groundwork for this guy's proposal. Van Jacobson was around at the early days when TCP/IP were being invented. He's proposing a new protocol layered on top of TCP/IP that can turn the Internet into a true broadcast medium -- one which is even more proof against censorship than the current one!