Oh, I can't wait for the day when mosquito zappers not only really work, but are inexpensive wearable accessories! I hate mosquitoes. I would love to have something in my hat, or belt buckle, or shoes, that is constantly scanning for mosquito-shaped flying objects and zapping them with miniscule lasers. Also, some kind of IR-equipped zapper hanging over the bed would be nice.
I think we should pour billions of dollars into mosquito extermination research. Sure, it may mess up the food chain a bit, but I frankly don't care. Let those birds, frogs, and dragonflies eat something else. Plenty of other buggies out there.
Eventually, I think we will have a sort of artificial dragonfly which will tirelessly hunt and kill mosquitoes around the house and yard. It will recharge on solar energy.
But real dragonflies should not be disregarded either. A dragonfly will eat many times its weight in mosquitoes every day, and it preys on both the larval stage of mosquitoes and the flying stage. Dragonflies are very skillful fliers. If you see lots of dragonflies near a pond, darting and diving in the air, they are your friends and are eliminating bloodsucking parasites for you.
A fun fact: prehistoric dragonflies grew to as large as 30 inch wingspans (based on known fossils).
Nice distro but they messed up the desktop
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I used to love Ubuntu; a few years ago, I threw it on a Dell laptop and it just worked (albeit with a bit of tweaking to get wifi connected). I was impressed by its ability to locate printers on the network. Now I have it on both a desktop and a couple of laptops. I also have it in VirtualBox on my XP work laptop and it works great there as well.
However, in recent versions they are pitching this Unity desktop thing which I despise. It may be great, it may be awesome, it may be the next big thing. But it's not for me. I'm an old Windows/X/KDE guy and I don't want to deal with icons down the side. So I'm stuck on an old revision and am starting to look around for another distro, possibly OpenSuse which I use at work and enjoy very much.
Now they are forcing Unity on us in the latest revision; there's no option to go back to the classic desktop (please correct me if I'm wrong but that's what Slashdot said a few days ago).
I will agree that Canonical has done a great job popularizing this Windows alternative and making it so easy to install and use. I wish them well. I just wish they'd stop limiting people's choices. Linux is about choices. Guess I'll have to look into some of these Ubuntu offshoots like Linux Mint.
Maybe Little Johnny shouldn't borrow $100,000 if he doesn't have a reasonable plan for a career after graduation.
It's possible to get by with work-study, part time jobs, summer jobs, and maybe even waiting a year or two before going to university, to try to work, think about what you'd like to do, come up with a plan.
The average 17-year-olds applying to college don't really know what they're going to do afterwards. If it's a down economy, maybe they should be thinking practical instead of borrowing up to the hilt and then hoping for the best afterward.
It's hard to feel a lot of sympathy. As for defaulting, currently the rules are pretty strict; you can't get out of your student loans, but you can defer payment until you are employed again. It's maybe not the ideal system but it does assume a lot of personal responsibility, maybe an assumption that we need to rethink.
Another question to ask is, why does a college education cost so much to begin with? Why has tuition increased so much faster than inflation, year after year? Maybe a smart alternative would be to take advantage of the enormous resources available online, such as MIT's online courseware and the thousands of other course curricula. A resourceful person could do the equivalent of a college education for just the cost of an internet connection (or at the library for free).
A couple of their models have some cosmetic similarity to the iPhone, and the way they arrange the app icons in the All Apps screen looks kind of like on an iPhone, but it's really just superficial. Did Apple really patent having one physical button below the display?
It's an entirely different operating system as anyone familiar with both devices would instantly notice.
Ultimately, Apple's aggressive pursuit of these kinds of similarities will find themselves on the receiving end of similar lawsuits. There's always prior art in these things and there is definitely a body of evidence that other companies, some large and some tiny, have done their share of development of handheld touch screen devices.
We'll soon have vehicles, planes, and tiny unmanned flying or wheeling devices that we send places to buy stuff, deliver stuff, or do other errants. Initially we won't trust their autonomous controls but will sit behind a console, steering them to their destination and home again. Eventually, we'll just tell the domestic droid to "Go buy a gallon of milk." (It will know that we prefer 2% over whole). Already, we have a lot of this tech in place and the military is using it.
We'll have more augmentation of our physical senses. Probably a lot of us will wear glasses or hair bands or necklaces equipped with earbuds, microphones, and computational ability to translate languages, whisper directions to us as we walk or drive about, remind us of to-do lists, and answer just about any factual question that we need answered. Googling--that is, sitting down at some clunky keyboard and typing in search terms--will be as quaint and old-fashioned as a horse and buggy are today.
We may have glasses that expand our sight into the infrared and ultraviolet, handy for night vision, spotting muggers around corners, etc. We'll see that a pot is too hot to pick up rather than have to actually touch it.
Speaking of which, smart pots will tell us when the food is done, and will turn the stove off on their own. Kitchen timers will be a thing of the past--they almost are, now--and cooking will be a matter of tossing food into some kind of processor which washes it, cuts it, cooks it, and serves it. Eventually, kitchens will be a wall of machines where food storage and preparation is totally self-contained, just as heating and air conditioning are self-contained today.
One could go on and on. We haven't even touched on medical advances. That other Slashdot article today about living to 150 is going to make some ripples as well. When you have an extra 60-70 years life expectancy, think of the new scientific discoveries you'll have time to produce, the artistic achievements, the new world records, the writing you can do.
It all boggles the mind. And most of us reading these articles today will be around to see it.
What crime was committed? He found some prototype in a bar and sold it to some news website. What crime was committed, exactly? The guy didn't sign an NDA or anything.
It would be like finding a $100 bill on the sidewalk and being convicted of theft because you didn't turn it in to the police. Who knows? Maybe that is a misdemeanor.
Sure, it wasn't the most ethical thing to do. An ethical person presumably would have turned the device in to its presumed owner, if there were any ownership markings on it.
The whole thing is kind of sleazy and it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth about Apple. Come on, you're already a rich corporation; how much could this guy have possibly hurt you? Did it stop even one person from buying one of your products?
Possibly too late, but I for one would love to see Sony come out with a state of the art, awesome Android handset to challenge Samsung and HTC. Why not? In decades past, Sony offered innovative yet affordable gear across the spectrum. We need more top players in the Android arena, to keep pushing the platform--not just phones but handheld tablets and other devices. There's plenty of room in this market for a solid engineering giant like Sony to jump in.
It can't happen as long as we presume innocence until proven guilty.
The DHS is reaching for new ways to achieve visible results without doing the hard work of battling for the budget needed to hire and train really smart, perceptive people for sensitive posts like TSA agents at airports.
When machines get smart enough to predict someone's future crimes, we're all going to be unemployed, anyway.
I suppose they don't, but it's probably cheaper and simpler to have panels immediate to the parking spot. Panel above, cable to outlet, outlet to car. Simple, simple. Otherwise, you get into running cables, needing junction boxes, transformers, all of which costs money to buy and install and maintain.
The problem is, sometimes there is no alternative. A distressing number of news sites are now switching to Facebook for their user talkback logins. My reaction is to go away. I do use Facebook, but I might say something on some random talkback that I don't necessarily want my Facebook friends and associates to see. Then don't say it, they respond. Well, ok, if they let me log in with my Google account, which allows me to designate who gets to see what, then I suppose that's somewhat better.
But even then, I'm suspicious that they'll "captcha" my Google credentials. They can't really do that, can they? They transfer you to a Google/Facebook login web service, the web service sends them back some sort of verification packet and you are good for this session.
With all the bits of my life that I'm putting onto the cloud, especially Google services, I'm a bit nervous about signing in everywhere. I'd rather use throw-away accounts for these one-off news sites and music sites. What the hell does Spotify need to have my Facebook identity cached for, anyway? Glad I don't use them, I guess.
It's not really hard to pay off the initial costs of solar panels; it just takes a long time. Rule of thumb is about 10-15 years depending on how many panels, how sunny your location, etc.
You don't necessarily have to mount your own solar panels to your own car; a whole bunch of them on top of a garage, or on top of your shaded spot (common to have parking shades in places like southern Arizona where it can be 115 F *outside* the car, 120 or 130 inside). It's a function of how many panels are feeding into your batteries.
This is the 80-20 thing, of course. Some areas are too cloudy, or people don't park all day, or various other factors interfere. But I think overall we could substantially reduce peak usage and hence burn a little less coal, plus have a little more range on our cars.
Range is going to be the currency of the future. Getting 300 miles per charge, in the cold of winter, with the heater and radio blasting, will be the immediate target. Going 500 miles between charges will tip the balance and fuel burning cars will go the way of the buggy.
That said, you want to a car that you can drive 1000 miles a day if you're doing a cross country trip, at least here in the U.S. or Canada. Technology to swap out batteries or recharge them within 15 minutes is what will make the difference.
I agree; I would want my (someday, future) rechargeable electric vehicle to have all its charge available to me at all times. I might want to run out to the 24-hour place for a Ben & Jerries fix at 3AM. Or, more seriously, there might be a medical emergency with a member of my family, or whatever. Who would want to limit their mobility during the off hours? It's like giving up use of your car half the time.
I'd like to see more emphasis on charging cars at work, since the majority use case in the U.S. is people driving to work, parking their car all day in the *sunlight* or inside a garage that is drenched in *sunlight*, then driving home at dusk and leaving it parked all night. There's got to be a way to refill at least a few miles' worth of power during that idle daytime.
Regarding peak power in the home, probably the best way to alleviate strain on the grid is to promote wide use of solar electric power and solar hot water systems. Then, people would be motivated to run their dishwashers and laundry machines during the day, contrary to the current advice which is to run them only at night to save on both power and cooling costs.
>>>>> That said, if someone's tailgating you there's generally a reason. Check your speed and lane to make sure YOU aren't being the jerk.
You obviously haven't driven in Massachusetts, where people tailgate no matter how fast you're going.
I tend to go the speed limit, or 5-10 mph above if conditions warrant it. Polite motorists keep their distance and pass if they need to. I work with them to let them pass, if they obviously want to get by.
When someone has their head up my tailpipe, though, I do exactly what you describe--gradually slow down. I don't want to be hitting the brakes to avoid a pedestrian or an animal or a bicyclist or a suddenly braking car in front, and have this guy/gal crumple my rear end, and maybe send us right into that obstacle.
When possible, I pull over to let them pass. To me, it's not a race, or a contest; I just want to get there safely. The anonymous cowards (posting anonymously because their attacks are so immature) cowardly go after a reasonable driver instead of the jerks breaking the law and tailgating. Yes, of course I stay out of the fast lanes if I'm slower than the other traffic. Even if someone's driving slowly in the passing lane, though, it's foolish to tailgate him. Just go around him.
I hate tailgaters (not the kind who picnic off the tailgate of their pickup, but the kind who like to drive with their nose up your tailpipe).
If you had car-to-car communication that would warn the car directly behind to increase its safety zone (as if the driver even knows what that is) then maybe they'd at least have a clue to back off. If they persist in aggressively tailing you at a dangerous speed (anything over 5 mph) then the system could notify the nearest patrol officer to come intervene. Of course, in some places like Boston or NYC, that would be virtually everybody.
A few extra meters between cars will give everybody more visibility and more time to react to sudden situations such as a child running into the road or a motorist suddenly turning, or someone running a red light. With the razor-thin margin of error that many drivers employ these days, it's just more likely that something bad will happen.
I'd also like to see an inexpensive, automated vehicle surveillance camera system. It would help cut down on aggressive driving when someone knows that their idiotic behavior is being captured and streamed to some distant server for possible use in court if not uploading to Youtube's Idiot Driver of the Day contest. Many's the time I've needed such a device. May have to set something up myself, hmm.
Oh, man, you just ruined my day! Those suckers would definitely take this idea and run with it.
TSA rep: "All passengers will place their heads into the magnetic lie detector and answer the simple question: 'Are you a hijacker?' If you answer in the affirmative, you will be detained. Please remove earrings and other metallic objects."
Armed with this technology, they should be able to nab one or two people out of a thousand, and they may even end up with a quota system. I can see it now, a leaked TSA memo: "Have you met your hijacker quota for the month?"
Featureless? I find Facebook cluttered and annoying, and I feel locked in by their decisions. Facebook keeps changing things around, as well; just when I've gotten used to things a certain way, it all shifts around. I don't like the one dimensional approach of Facebook wherein my friends are one giant group. I have several hundred "friends" and I can't remember most of them because I haven't put them into any subgroups. I am hearing that Facebook is implementing something like Google's circles, but frankly it's a bit too late.
Google Plus, like Google's other well designed products, has a clean, streamlined feel to it. The circles thing is right there, apparent and easy to start using. It's kind of the basis of the system, in fact. They seem to have incorporated the best features of Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow people without adding them to some circle of yours. You can treat the system like Facebook, post micro logs or lengthy treatises as you wish, and you can categorize your contacts into as many arbitrarily named circles as you want. I suppose a professional services provider might have customer circles which would be useful for notifying people of new developments, sales, times available, etc. A music teacher could use this service to great effect. Really, there's great potential here.
Games? Meh, I guess if that's what they have to do to compete, as long as I don't have to have it rubbed in my face like on Facebook where someone is always being announced as having completed this or that level or milestone and then I have to tell it to hide all similar postings.
Technically literate people seem to be switching to G+ or at least spending a lot of time there, and I'm glad. I really hope it does well because it's a really well thought out product.
Why say impossible? It would be more realistic to say, "not possible with existing technology".
If carbon nanotubules don't quite have the tensile strength to resist the forces you have described, which as I understand it they don't yet, then maybe some new material or some new approach to an existing material will come along in the next few years that makes it work.
Another possibility is a one-way space elevator that doesn't go all the way to the ground but just hangs a few kliks above the ground. We could lower stuff slowly, then use parachutes to send it the rest of the way down. This would eliminate a lot of the problems you're describing, since the cable would hang freely and not be subject to so much stress.
Also, since the topic is recovering ore from space mining, it seems appropriate to think about a drop-only space elevator. Dropping ore without some kind of slow-down mechanism would cause it to melt on the way down, maybe not a disaster if it's big enough, but it seems wasteful and also rather dangerous.
Plus, it would be a great way for people to come back, too; just rappel down the cable to a certain height, then parachute gently down as the original astronauts did. There'd be much less reentry hazard and no heat shield to worry about (unless, of course, the cable breaks or whatever).
True. I guess if the cable itself snapped, it wouldn't all fall into a nice neat coil in one spot but might stretch a couple thousand miles, maybe even wrap all the way around the Earth a couple of times before settling. I guess that's not such a terrible thing, as long as it's not some nano-thin cable that literally cuts through any material and would thus bisect the globe right down to the core. That would be bad. We'd end up with two separate hemispheres, and all those complainers about the North-South division of wealth would have even more to whine about.
Time to invest in Equador? (One of the best places to build a space elevator.)
A wonderful Freudian slip, since Ecuador is on the equator. The Wikipedia entry on this subject has some interesting alternatives such as a sea-based anchor station. Probably putting the base far out to sea would be a little safer in case something fell off the cable from high up.
Tremendous engineering project that will truly change the world. I hope they get it off the ground in our lifetimes.
A space elevator would help a lot with the economics of space mining. Of course, a space based industry would consume much of the mining output and eventually be self-sustaining if not self-sufficient.
The fact that an innocent little paper like this can cause a stir over here is indicative of people's fear that the U.S., and the industrial West in general, are about to be eclipsed by China's rising economy. If they can gain a foothold in space, they will definitely become the dominant power for the next century or two.
I believe it was a horrible mistake to (1) retire the Shuttle program so soon and (2) cancel its replacements in the Constellation and Orion programs. We need more of a national consensus to maintain a manned presence in space. $1 trillion for bailouts to a bunch of failed banks and car companies, and they cut a measly $5 billion needed to keep developing Constellation. Disgraceful.
Crash it on the moon instead, then mine the heck out of it. Or else orbit it around the moon and push the ore back to Earth.
Realistically, though, this stuff is going to need a space elevator to economically get the ore back down to Earth.
I used to believe those nations who control the skies will be the top powers, but now I think more likely it's those nations or corporations that control the ladders up to the skies that will really hold all the cards.
I really hope this deal doesn't go through. T-Mobile is a great carrier. Not enough towers, but their plans are easy going and their customer service is top notch. I just added 2G of internet for my wife's phone, plus a few more anytime minutes, for $5 a month more. Now I just need to get her an Android phone so she can actually use it. T-Mo has good plans with and without contracts. Plus, they allow tethering for no extra charge, unlike Verizon and, I believe, AT&T. I just hope T-Mo can stay independent for a few more years until some other technology takes over, like VOIP over wimax.
I want to believe what you're saying is true, but do you have some citations? Can't someone bring a quart of some binary explosive on board and use it to rip a hole in the fuselage?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I can't wait for the day when mosquito zappers not only really work, but are inexpensive wearable accessories! I hate mosquitoes. I would love to have something in my hat, or belt buckle, or shoes, that is constantly scanning for mosquito-shaped flying objects and zapping them with miniscule lasers. Also, some kind of IR-equipped zapper hanging over the bed would be nice.
I think we should pour billions of dollars into mosquito extermination research. Sure, it may mess up the food chain a bit, but I frankly don't care. Let those birds, frogs, and dragonflies eat something else. Plenty of other buggies out there.
Eventually, I think we will have a sort of artificial dragonfly which will tirelessly hunt and kill mosquitoes around the house and yard. It will recharge on solar energy.
But real dragonflies should not be disregarded either. A dragonfly will eat many times its weight in mosquitoes every day, and it preys on both the larval stage of mosquitoes and the flying stage. Dragonflies are very skillful fliers. If you see lots of dragonflies near a pond, darting and diving in the air, they are your friends and are eliminating bloodsucking parasites for you.
A fun fact: prehistoric dragonflies grew to as large as 30 inch wingspans (based on known fossils).
I used to love Ubuntu; a few years ago, I threw it on a Dell laptop and it just worked (albeit with a bit of tweaking to get wifi connected). I was impressed by its ability to locate printers on the network. Now I have it on both a desktop and a couple of laptops. I also have it in VirtualBox on my XP work laptop and it works great there as well.
However, in recent versions they are pitching this Unity desktop thing which I despise. It may be great, it may be awesome, it may be the next big thing. But it's not for me. I'm an old Windows/X/KDE guy and I don't want to deal with icons down the side. So I'm stuck on an old revision and am starting to look around for another distro, possibly OpenSuse which I use at work and enjoy very much.
Now they are forcing Unity on us in the latest revision; there's no option to go back to the classic desktop (please correct me if I'm wrong but that's what Slashdot said a few days ago).
I will agree that Canonical has done a great job popularizing this Windows alternative and making it so easy to install and use. I wish them well. I just wish they'd stop limiting people's choices. Linux is about choices. Guess I'll have to look into some of these Ubuntu offshoots like Linux Mint.
Maybe Little Johnny shouldn't borrow $100,000 if he doesn't have a reasonable plan for a career after graduation.
It's possible to get by with work-study, part time jobs, summer jobs, and maybe even waiting a year or two before going to university, to try to work, think about what you'd like to do, come up with a plan.
The average 17-year-olds applying to college don't really know what they're going to do afterwards. If it's a down economy, maybe they should be thinking practical instead of borrowing up to the hilt and then hoping for the best afterward.
It's hard to feel a lot of sympathy. As for defaulting, currently the rules are pretty strict; you can't get out of your student loans, but you can defer payment until you are employed again. It's maybe not the ideal system but it does assume a lot of personal responsibility, maybe an assumption that we need to rethink.
Another question to ask is, why does a college education cost so much to begin with? Why has tuition increased so much faster than inflation, year after year? Maybe a smart alternative would be to take advantage of the enormous resources available online, such as MIT's online courseware and the thousands of other course curricula. A resourceful person could do the equivalent of a college education for just the cost of an internet connection (or at the library for free).
How so?
A couple of their models have some cosmetic similarity to the iPhone, and the way they arrange the app icons in the All Apps screen looks kind of like on an iPhone, but it's really just superficial. Did Apple really patent having one physical button below the display?
It's an entirely different operating system as anyone familiar with both devices would instantly notice.
Ultimately, Apple's aggressive pursuit of these kinds of similarities will find themselves on the receiving end of similar lawsuits. There's always prior art in these things and there is definitely a body of evidence that other companies, some large and some tiny, have done their share of development of handheld touch screen devices.
We'll soon have vehicles, planes, and tiny unmanned flying or wheeling devices that we send places to buy stuff, deliver stuff, or do other errants. Initially we won't trust their autonomous controls but will sit behind a console, steering them to their destination and home again. Eventually, we'll just tell the domestic droid to "Go buy a gallon of milk." (It will know that we prefer 2% over whole). Already, we have a lot of this tech in place and the military is using it.
We'll have more augmentation of our physical senses. Probably a lot of us will wear glasses or hair bands or necklaces equipped with earbuds, microphones, and computational ability to translate languages, whisper directions to us as we walk or drive about, remind us of to-do lists, and answer just about any factual question that we need answered. Googling--that is, sitting down at some clunky keyboard and typing in search terms--will be as quaint and old-fashioned as a horse and buggy are today.
We may have glasses that expand our sight into the infrared and ultraviolet, handy for night vision, spotting muggers around corners, etc. We'll see that a pot is too hot to pick up rather than have to actually touch it.
Speaking of which, smart pots will tell us when the food is done, and will turn the stove off on their own. Kitchen timers will be a thing of the past--they almost are, now--and cooking will be a matter of tossing food into some kind of processor which washes it, cuts it, cooks it, and serves it. Eventually, kitchens will be a wall of machines where food storage and preparation is totally self-contained, just as heating and air conditioning are self-contained today.
One could go on and on. We haven't even touched on medical advances. That other Slashdot article today about living to 150 is going to make some ripples as well. When you have an extra 60-70 years life expectancy, think of the new scientific discoveries you'll have time to produce, the artistic achievements, the new world records, the writing you can do.
It all boggles the mind. And most of us reading these articles today will be around to see it.
What crime was committed? He found some prototype in a bar and sold it to some news website. What crime was committed, exactly? The guy didn't sign an NDA or anything.
It would be like finding a $100 bill on the sidewalk and being convicted of theft because you didn't turn it in to the police. Who knows? Maybe that is a misdemeanor.
Sure, it wasn't the most ethical thing to do. An ethical person presumably would have turned the device in to its presumed owner, if there were any ownership markings on it.
The whole thing is kind of sleazy and it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth about Apple. Come on, you're already a rich corporation; how much could this guy have possibly hurt you? Did it stop even one person from buying one of your products?
Don't worry, if we (the U.S.) don't do it, others will.
Humans will explore the solar system and, perhaps eventually, the stars. It just may not be Americans, anymore.
Possibly too late, but I for one would love to see Sony come out with a state of the art, awesome Android handset to challenge Samsung and HTC. Why not? In decades past, Sony offered innovative yet affordable gear across the spectrum. We need more top players in the Android arena, to keep pushing the platform--not just phones but handheld tablets and other devices. There's plenty of room in this market for a solid engineering giant like Sony to jump in.
It can't happen as long as we presume innocence until proven guilty.
The DHS is reaching for new ways to achieve visible results without doing the hard work of battling for the budget needed to hire and train really smart, perceptive people for sensitive posts like TSA agents at airports.
When machines get smart enough to predict someone's future crimes, we're all going to be unemployed, anyway.
I suppose they don't, but it's probably cheaper and simpler to have panels immediate to the parking spot. Panel above, cable to outlet, outlet to car. Simple, simple. Otherwise, you get into running cables, needing junction boxes, transformers, all of which costs money to buy and install and maintain.
The problem is, sometimes there is no alternative. A distressing number of news sites are now switching to Facebook for their user talkback logins. My reaction is to go away. I do use Facebook, but I might say something on some random talkback that I don't necessarily want my Facebook friends and associates to see. Then don't say it, they respond. Well, ok, if they let me log in with my Google account, which allows me to designate who gets to see what, then I suppose that's somewhat better.
But even then, I'm suspicious that they'll "captcha" my Google credentials. They can't really do that, can they? They transfer you to a Google/Facebook login web service, the web service sends them back some sort of verification packet and you are good for this session.
With all the bits of my life that I'm putting onto the cloud, especially Google services, I'm a bit nervous about signing in everywhere. I'd rather use throw-away accounts for these one-off news sites and music sites. What the hell does Spotify need to have my Facebook identity cached for, anyway? Glad I don't use them, I guess.
It's not really hard to pay off the initial costs of solar panels; it just takes a long time. Rule of thumb is about 10-15 years depending on how many panels, how sunny your location, etc.
You don't necessarily have to mount your own solar panels to your own car; a whole bunch of them on top of a garage, or on top of your shaded spot (common to have parking shades in places like southern Arizona where it can be 115 F *outside* the car, 120 or 130 inside). It's a function of how many panels are feeding into your batteries.
This is the 80-20 thing, of course. Some areas are too cloudy, or people don't park all day, or various other factors interfere. But I think overall we could substantially reduce peak usage and hence burn a little less coal, plus have a little more range on our cars.
Range is going to be the currency of the future. Getting 300 miles per charge, in the cold of winter, with the heater and radio blasting, will be the immediate target. Going 500 miles between charges will tip the balance and fuel burning cars will go the way of the buggy.
That said, you want to a car that you can drive 1000 miles a day if you're doing a cross country trip, at least here in the U.S. or Canada. Technology to swap out batteries or recharge them within 15 minutes is what will make the difference.
I agree; I would want my (someday, future) rechargeable electric vehicle to have all its charge available to me at all times. I might want to run out to the 24-hour place for a Ben & Jerries fix at 3AM. Or, more seriously, there might be a medical emergency with a member of my family, or whatever. Who would want to limit their mobility during the off hours? It's like giving up use of your car half the time.
I'd like to see more emphasis on charging cars at work, since the majority use case in the U.S. is people driving to work, parking their car all day in the *sunlight* or inside a garage that is drenched in *sunlight*, then driving home at dusk and leaving it parked all night. There's got to be a way to refill at least a few miles' worth of power during that idle daytime.
Regarding peak power in the home, probably the best way to alleviate strain on the grid is to promote wide use of solar electric power and solar hot water systems. Then, people would be motivated to run their dishwashers and laundry machines during the day, contrary to the current advice which is to run them only at night to save on both power and cooling costs.
>>>>> That said, if someone's tailgating you there's generally a reason. Check your speed and lane to make sure YOU aren't being the jerk.
You obviously haven't driven in Massachusetts, where people tailgate no matter how fast you're going.
I tend to go the speed limit, or 5-10 mph above if conditions warrant it. Polite motorists keep their distance and pass if they need to. I work with them to let them pass, if they obviously want to get by.
When someone has their head up my tailpipe, though, I do exactly what you describe--gradually slow down. I don't want to be hitting the brakes to avoid a pedestrian or an animal or a bicyclist or a suddenly braking car in front, and have this guy/gal crumple my rear end, and maybe send us right into that obstacle.
When possible, I pull over to let them pass. To me, it's not a race, or a contest; I just want to get there safely. The anonymous cowards (posting anonymously because their attacks are so immature) cowardly go after a reasonable driver instead of the jerks breaking the law and tailgating. Yes, of course I stay out of the fast lanes if I'm slower than the other traffic. Even if someone's driving slowly in the passing lane, though, it's foolish to tailgate him. Just go around him.
Beyond that, what can one do?
I hate tailgaters (not the kind who picnic off the tailgate of their pickup, but the kind who like to drive with their nose up your tailpipe).
If you had car-to-car communication that would warn the car directly behind to increase its safety zone (as if the driver even knows what that is) then maybe they'd at least have a clue to back off. If they persist in aggressively tailing you at a dangerous speed (anything over 5 mph) then the system could notify the nearest patrol officer to come intervene. Of course, in some places like Boston or NYC, that would be virtually everybody.
A few extra meters between cars will give everybody more visibility and more time to react to sudden situations such as a child running into the road or a motorist suddenly turning, or someone running a red light. With the razor-thin margin of error that many drivers employ these days, it's just more likely that something bad will happen.
I'd also like to see an inexpensive, automated vehicle surveillance camera system. It would help cut down on aggressive driving when someone knows that their idiotic behavior is being captured and streamed to some distant server for possible use in court if not uploading to Youtube's Idiot Driver of the Day contest. Many's the time I've needed such a device. May have to set something up myself, hmm.
Oh, man, you just ruined my day! Those suckers would definitely take this idea and run with it.
TSA rep: "All passengers will place their heads into the magnetic lie detector and answer the simple question: 'Are you a hijacker?' If you answer in the affirmative, you will be detained. Please remove earrings and other metallic objects."
Armed with this technology, they should be able to nab one or two people out of a thousand, and they may even end up with a quota system. I can see it now, a leaked TSA memo: "Have you met your hijacker quota for the month?"
Featureless? I find Facebook cluttered and annoying, and I feel locked in by their decisions. Facebook keeps changing things around, as well; just when I've gotten used to things a certain way, it all shifts around. I don't like the one dimensional approach of Facebook wherein my friends are one giant group. I have several hundred "friends" and I can't remember most of them because I haven't put them into any subgroups. I am hearing that Facebook is implementing something like Google's circles, but frankly it's a bit too late.
Google Plus, like Google's other well designed products, has a clean, streamlined feel to it. The circles thing is right there, apparent and easy to start using. It's kind of the basis of the system, in fact. They seem to have incorporated the best features of Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow people without adding them to some circle of yours. You can treat the system like Facebook, post micro logs or lengthy treatises as you wish, and you can categorize your contacts into as many arbitrarily named circles as you want. I suppose a professional services provider might have customer circles which would be useful for notifying people of new developments, sales, times available, etc. A music teacher could use this service to great effect. Really, there's great potential here.
Games? Meh, I guess if that's what they have to do to compete, as long as I don't have to have it rubbed in my face like on Facebook where someone is always being announced as having completed this or that level or milestone and then I have to tell it to hide all similar postings.
Technically literate people seem to be switching to G+ or at least spending a lot of time there, and I'm glad. I really hope it does well because it's a really well thought out product.
Why say impossible? It would be more realistic to say, "not possible with existing technology".
If carbon nanotubules don't quite have the tensile strength to resist the forces you have described, which as I understand it they don't yet, then maybe some new material or some new approach to an existing material will come along in the next few years that makes it work.
Another possibility is a one-way space elevator that doesn't go all the way to the ground but just hangs a few kliks above the ground. We could lower stuff slowly, then use parachutes to send it the rest of the way down. This would eliminate a lot of the problems you're describing, since the cable would hang freely and not be subject to so much stress.
Also, since the topic is recovering ore from space mining, it seems appropriate to think about a drop-only space elevator. Dropping ore without some kind of slow-down mechanism would cause it to melt on the way down, maybe not a disaster if it's big enough, but it seems wasteful and also rather dangerous.
Plus, it would be a great way for people to come back, too; just rappel down the cable to a certain height, then parachute gently down as the original astronauts did. There'd be much less reentry hazard and no heat shield to worry about (unless, of course, the cable breaks or whatever).
True. I guess if the cable itself snapped, it wouldn't all fall into a nice neat coil in one spot but might stretch a couple thousand miles, maybe even wrap all the way around the Earth a couple of times before settling. I guess that's not such a terrible thing, as long as it's not some nano-thin cable that literally cuts through any material and would thus bisect the globe right down to the core. That would be bad. We'd end up with two separate hemispheres, and all those complainers about the North-South division of wealth would have even more to whine about.
I was responding to the gp's point that /. comments have gone down in quality.
Time to invest in Equador? (One of the best places to build a space elevator.)
A wonderful Freudian slip, since Ecuador is on the equator. The Wikipedia entry on this subject has some interesting alternatives such as a sea-based anchor station. Probably putting the base far out to sea would be a little safer in case something fell off the cable from high up.
Tremendous engineering project that will truly change the world. I hope they get it off the ground in our lifetimes.
Many of the moderators here are incompetent, too.
A space elevator would help a lot with the economics of space mining. Of course, a space based industry would consume much of the mining output and eventually be self-sustaining if not self-sufficient.
The fact that an innocent little paper like this can cause a stir over here is indicative of people's fear that the U.S., and the industrial West in general, are about to be eclipsed by China's rising economy. If they can gain a foothold in space, they will definitely become the dominant power for the next century or two.
I believe it was a horrible mistake to (1) retire the Shuttle program so soon and (2) cancel its replacements in the Constellation and Orion programs. We need more of a national consensus to maintain a manned presence in space. $1 trillion for bailouts to a bunch of failed banks and car companies, and they cut a measly $5 billion needed to keep developing Constellation. Disgraceful.
Crash it on the moon instead, then mine the heck out of it. Or else orbit it around the moon and push the ore back to Earth.
Realistically, though, this stuff is going to need a space elevator to economically get the ore back down to Earth.
I used to believe those nations who control the skies will be the top powers, but now I think more likely it's those nations or corporations that control the ladders up to the skies that will really hold all the cards.
I really hope this deal doesn't go through. T-Mobile is a great carrier. Not enough towers, but their plans are easy going and their customer service is top notch. I just added 2G of internet for my wife's phone, plus a few more anytime minutes, for $5 a month more. Now I just need to get her an Android phone so she can actually use it. T-Mo has good plans with and without contracts. Plus, they allow tethering for no extra charge, unlike Verizon and, I believe, AT&T. I just hope T-Mo can stay independent for a few more years until some other technology takes over, like VOIP over wimax.
I want to believe what you're saying is true, but do you have some citations? Can't someone bring a quart of some binary explosive on board and use it to rip a hole in the fuselage?