When robots are capable of assembling and maintaining a fully functional and habitable environment for us on the moon or mars, that's the time to start packing our suitcases.
Once the base and (cheap unmanned) supply chain is reliably up and running people can go and do the stuff that robots/remote sensing can't accomplish (still a hell of a lot).
This also has the virtue of enforcing a severe simlicity and modularity on the design of the whole venture since everything has to be autonomously assembled. Who wants a fancy home when you're hundeds of millions of miles from the hardware store anyway.
If we don't yet have the technology to do this then I'd question our ability to reliably send people on such missions and kepp them alive for much longer than it takes to plant a flag.
> We haven't seen nothing yet. It seems the more > juice, the higher the speed. I for one hope to see > mass production of Maglev trains. They will be > vastly superior to planes at less cost.
That's true technically, but there is the track construction and upkeep to factor in.
Also it's highly vulnerable to acts of unsophisticated vandalism/terrorism. Think of the damage a well placed brick or dead gopher could achieve at those speeds.
> Actually, it's well established that Japanese > engineers largely use foreign designs as their > prototypes.
It's great when things are "well established" isn't it? We can just accept them as a given and shift our critical reasoning down a gear or two.
Here is a list of other things that have been well established about the Japanese:
- They are short. - They wear little round glasses. - They have buck teeth. - They are all Ninjas.
I'm British and I'd guess you're an American. Perhaps someone would like to contribute some "well established" facts about us? I'm sure we'd be glad to confirm them.
Excuse me, must dash, my butler has just informed me that Mary Poppins has dropped in for afternoon tea...
I've heard many stories like this, and the fear of getting caught up innocently in something like this is doing awful things to our society.
Men are feeling a pressure to withdraw more and more from the lives of children, even their own.
For example, I'm a father of two but I would NEVER EVER consider doing ANY voluntary work with other peoples children simply because:
a) I'd worry about consequences to my family of any mistaken/false accusation. b) The general suspicion, "why would a 40 year old man want to work with children" ?
I've spoken to many men who feel the same way.
I know men who refuse to bathe their own baby daughters and I'm not "authorised" to video my own children in their school nativity play.
But it's not the perverts who're frightened away, they're driven to circumvent these trivial obstacles, It's the likes of you and I that are getting fenced.
What kind of society is coming when children are deprived of exposure to risk, independence, privacy, and un-vetted male role models?
And as far as I can tell this particular risk to our children is the same as it was 10 or 100 years ago. Now we just have the vocabulary for it.
> What's next? Keeping system configuration in CVS?
Hey! I claim "prior art"!
Seriously, I do this for entire binary installations including all configuration files for a custom server we've written.
It's a really nice solution.
One of the really great benefits is when someone has been footling some of the more complex configuration and broken things. It's really easy to find which files they've changed and what the changes are.
Sure there's nothing you couldn't any other way but it it certainly makes lots of things easier.
No doubt you could go further than we have with all sorts of fancy cron jobs to auto-update from a "trusted" branch nightly across your 5000 production servers but we only have 2:-)
> I know you're joking, but assuming that a > pringles can is 9.25in tall (the best figure I > could find), it would take 450,082 end to end > to reach that distance.:)
> I don't think there is much point in this.. a mobile phone could encapsulate most of this functionality for a quater the price. Simon.
That's true for us rich westerners.
Fancy smartphones are sold to us at a loss by the telcos because they assume (and it's a risk) that they'll recoup the cost as we use data services over a fixed term contract with inclusive rental charges.
Ask Vodafone how much a P800 would cost with no contract and you might find the Simputer starts looking like good value for money.
And let's not assume that its only value is in the hands of random end users - who obviously can't afford it.
Take a nationwide census as an example. Put one of these in the hands of the (thousands of) census takers on the ground and they'll (hopefully) gather more accurate data faster. With this information it's possible to spend development money more wisely on those who are never going to see a computer in their lives.
Another example would be stock control of perishable foodstuffs, each employee in the warehouses would have one, the benefits are obvious.
Yes its "expensive" technology and beyond the reach of most, but that doesn't mean it can't be a worthwhile investment in the right circumstances. It may well be the cheapest (real) solution if the right apps get written.
Fit a car with 4 small wheels that extend on hydraulics until the main wheels are clear of the ground. These wheels would be mounted at 90 degrees to the main wheels alowing true sideways movement.
Park NEXT to your space and deploy the "parking wheels".
Electric motors in the wheels gently move you in sideways and stops when you hit the sidewalk (pavement if you're from the U.K. like me).
In fact you could leave the car jacked up like this to make it easier to get in and out for the infirm.
It would also make wheel changing and inspections far easier.
Obviously this is going to take up room in/under the car but lets face it, some of these SUVs have plenty to spare.
But remember - don't park next to a cliff and nudge the park button with your elbow by accident...
> For spaceflight, we need people who think like > the old school programmers. The ones that > actually planned their programs before they > wrote them...
Once I would have agreed with you. However, I have noticed that "aesthetic" coding is often confused with "software quality". In the end the only thing that matters is if it works well enough, and thats something you can only determine by using it - preferably during testing.
I no longer buy the "it's cheaper to catch bugs early" mantra. It's true for gross architectural mistakes, but thats about all.
I think the best analogy is evolution and DNA. The coding in DNA is a mess, there's no "design" at all. But anything below "spec" is discarded.
The result is something that is far superior than anything we are capable of "desiging".
And all without coding standards and reviews, HERESY!
Now driver support will become even crappier since the same number of engineers will be split across NEWCARD and PCI versions of every new product for several years.
I suggest that it be a licensing requirement for NEWCARD devices that the details of how to access the cards functionality be published.
At least the open source community has a fighting chance of providing the kind of support that most card manufacturers ought to be.
Users can only select from the choices "reasonably" available to them. By "reasonably" I mean that most people are busy, they go to one big store and pick something because it's reduced, comes in a nice box or is made by someone they've heard of etc.
What is on the shelves, and how much space it gets is a hugely complex issue. Politics, stock levels, agreements, margins etc. all dictate what a customer sees and thus influence their choice.
In an ideal world good products would win, standards would be open and competition would be fair.
1) Anti-noise: to specifically cancel out the noise of the aircraft. There's no way you could "cancel" the noise of an explosion though! (as would be needed for a PDE) I believe this is effective on helicopters at least.
2) Noise vectoring: try to ensure that the noise goes in a specific direction. For a military aircraft it's often enough that you can't "hear it coming", obviously supersonic flight solves this issue!
I'm guessing that 2) *might* be possible by developing some sort of (ROBUST!) engine cowl that ensures that the worst of the sound energy goes upward/outward without soaking up too much of the thrust. Pure speculation on my part, and hey, they have to get the engine to work first!
Assuming for a moment that it's possible to get this technology to work, the question of noise has been raised as a show stopper with regards it's commercial use.
But two things spring to mind:
1) Stealth aircraft use noise damping technology, and some of this might be appropriate even for this weird engine.
2) Conventional engines will probably have to be used for take off and landing anyway. These can be commercial low-noise devices that just get the plane to/from off-shore locations where it can fire up it's PD engines.
Just make sure you've finished your complementary drink at that point or you'll be wearing it for the rest of the flight...
I've just (coincidentally) finished this story, from the first (very excellent) collection of P.K.D. short stories, "Beyond Lies The Wub". I've ordered the remaining 4 books in the series on the strength of that.
The book concentrates on the individual's loss of power in the face of the tension between omnipresent government and big business.
Our hero, Jennings, an electronics engineer signs a two year contract with Rethrick Industries - a catch being that all knowledge of his two years with them will be surgically removed on leaving. This is pretty much where the story starts.
On attempting to collect payment at the end of his mysterious contract he is presented instead with a bag of apparently "trinkets": bits of wire, tickets, a broken poker chip etc. He is told that he (before his memory was wiped) supplied the items to be given back instead of the money. He's obviously not pleased.
However as the story progresses these "trinkets" become far more valuable than money ever could...
And there I shall stop.
I enjoyed the story. I'm 3/4 of the way through "Beyond Lies The Wub" and at the end of almost every story I end up thinking "Ooh, XYZ really ripped off some of these ideas for this film or that book".
What amazes me about Dick is how stories written in the 50's haven't dated, either socially or (often) technologically.
In "Wub" there is a very interesting preface by Dick himself and some extra context set in a posthumous introduction by Roger Zelanzy a friend of his.
If you haven't read any of his stuff before (I hadn't) then this collection is a great place to start.
Re:so where are the details?
on
TAM 5 Has landed
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> yet all it can say on the site is 'the plane has landed' wheres all the info?
Yeah, they've been wasting their time on the technology and engineering rather than a REALLY COOL website.
Anyway, I'm sure someone reading this forum can donate them a Casio wrist watch running Apache that they can insert right into the plane for live updates.
> Just wait until DRM gets widely established. > Nothing new will work in old hardware. > You'll have to buy everything all over again.
I really don't think this will ever happen. There are enough H/W manufacturers with no finger in the content pie to ensure a perpetual supply "old fashioned" compliant players.
Hell, Sony can't even stop itself selling DRM defeating equipment!
Personally I think that any attempt to go mainstream with DRM technology will backfire bigtime. Joe User out on the street, who just wants CDs that work, will stop buying and/or just get illegal copies from geek friends that play on anything.
The whole scheme will lose the music industry billions and the world will be a better place as a result.
I can't remember exactly when, I think it was in New Scientist about 5-7 years ago, but there was a short article about a phaser like device.
There were no pictures but it was described to be about the size of a fridge.
If memory served, it consisted of an ultraviolet laser, whose purpose was to ionize the air between the device and the target. It then dumped a huge electrical charge down the path of the laser.
I've no idea about range etc. I can't even remember if it was designed to be a weapon or not.
Slashdot Mirror
When robots are capable of assembling and maintaining a fully functional and habitable environment for us on the moon or mars, that's the time to start packing our suitcases.
Once the base and (cheap unmanned) supply chain is reliably up and running people can go and do the stuff that robots/remote sensing can't accomplish (still a hell of a lot).
This also has the virtue of enforcing a severe simlicity and modularity on the design of the whole venture since everything has to be autonomously assembled. Who wants a fancy home when you're hundeds of millions of miles from the hardware store anyway.
If we don't yet have the technology to do this then I'd question our ability to reliably send people on such missions and kepp them alive for much longer than it takes to plant a flag.
> We haven't seen nothing yet. It seems the more
> juice, the higher the speed. I for one hope to see
> mass production of Maglev trains. They will be
> vastly superior to planes at less cost.
That's true technically, but there is the track construction and upkeep to factor in.
Also it's highly vulnerable to acts of unsophisticated vandalism/terrorism. Think of the damage a well placed brick or dead gopher could achieve at those speeds.
> Actually, it's well established that Japanese
> engineers largely use foreign designs as their
> prototypes.
It's great when things are "well established" isn't it? We can just accept them as a given and shift our critical reasoning down a gear or two.
Here is a list of other things that have been well established about the Japanese:
- They are short.
- They wear little round glasses.
- They have buck teeth.
- They are all Ninjas.
I'm British and I'd guess you're an American. Perhaps someone would like to contribute some "well established" facts about us? I'm sure we'd be glad to confirm them.
Excuse me, must dash, my butler has just informed me that Mary Poppins has dropped in for afternoon tea...
I've heard many stories like this, and the fear of getting caught up innocently in something like this is doing awful things to our society.
Men are feeling a pressure to withdraw more and more from the lives of children, even their own.
For example, I'm a father of two but I would NEVER EVER consider doing ANY voluntary work with other peoples children simply because:
a) I'd worry about consequences to my family of any mistaken/false accusation.
b) The general suspicion, "why would a 40 year old man want to work with children" ?
I've spoken to many men who feel the same way.
I know men who refuse to bathe their own baby daughters and I'm not "authorised" to video my own children in their school nativity play.
But it's not the perverts who're frightened away, they're driven to circumvent these trivial obstacles, It's the likes of you and I that are getting fenced.
What kind of society is coming when children are deprived of exposure to risk, independence, privacy, and un-vetted male role models?
And as far as I can tell this particular risk to our children is the same as it was 10 or 100 years ago. Now we just have the vocabulary for it.
> What's next? Keeping system configuration in CVS?
:-)
Hey! I claim "prior art"!
Seriously, I do this for entire binary installations including all configuration files for a custom server we've written.
It's a really nice solution.
One of the really great benefits is when someone has been footling some of the more complex configuration and broken things. It's really easy to find which files they've changed and what the changes are.
Sure there's nothing you couldn't any other way but it it certainly makes lots of things easier.
No doubt you could go further than we have with all sorts of fancy cron jobs to auto-update from a "trusted" branch nightly across your 5000 production servers but we only have 2
> I know you're joking, but assuming that a :)
> pringles can is 9.25in tall (the best figure I
> could find), it would take 450,082 end to end
> to reach that distance.
Pringles cans are bigger when measured in cm.
> I wonder how many pringles cans that took.
275,000
They connected them end to end in an unbroken chain between the base station and client.
> I don't think there is much point in this.. a mobile phone could encapsulate most of this functionality for a quater the price. Simon.
That's true for us rich westerners.
Fancy smartphones are sold to us at a loss by the telcos because they assume (and it's a risk) that they'll recoup the cost as we use data services
over a fixed term contract with inclusive rental charges.
Ask Vodafone how much a P800 would cost with no contract and you might find the Simputer starts looking like good value for money.
And let's not assume that its only value is in the hands of random end users - who obviously can't afford it.
Take a nationwide census as an example. Put one of these in the hands of the (thousands of) census takers on the ground and they'll (hopefully) gather more accurate data faster. With this information it's possible to spend development money more wisely on those who are never going to see a computer in their lives.
Another example would be stock control of perishable foodstuffs, each employee in the warehouses would have one, the benefits are obvious.
Yes its "expensive" technology and beyond the reach of most, but that doesn't mean it can't be a worthwhile investment in the right circumstances. It may well be the cheapest (real) solution if the right apps get written.
I guess we'll have to wait and see...
(And I'd be amazed if nobody has tried this).
No computers or fancy algorithms.
Fit a car with 4 small wheels that extend on hydraulics until the main wheels are clear of the ground. These wheels would be mounted at 90 degrees to the main wheels alowing true sideways movement.
Park NEXT to your space and deploy the "parking wheels".
Electric motors in the wheels gently move you in sideways and stops when you hit the sidewalk (pavement if you're from the U.K. like me).
In fact you could leave the car jacked up like this to make it easier to get in and out for the infirm.
It would also make wheel changing and inspections far easier.
Obviously this is going to take up room in/under the car but lets face it, some of these SUVs have plenty to spare.
But remember - don't park next to a cliff and nudge the park button with your elbow by accident...
> What happens when the system crashes? :)
This is actually an insightful question.
With a self-parking car you're basically putting control of a large dangerous piece of equipment in the hands of a computer very near to pedestrians.
In this instance, just having the car stop and brake when it fails seems like a good plan.
But other things it's got do "deal with" will include:
- children running behind the car
- sensor damage and obstruction
- objects it's navigating by (other cars) moving
- uneven surfaces - potholes
- Sensor confusing "obstacles", gates, cliffs
- Mechanical failure - bad clutch, brakes etc.
These are things the developers are going to have to deal with and will have to convince regulatrory bodies that they've got an answer.
> For spaceflight, we need people who think like
> the old school programmers. The ones that
> actually planned their programs before they
> wrote them...
Once I would have agreed with you. However, I have noticed that "aesthetic" coding is often confused with "software quality". In the end the only thing that matters is if it works well enough, and thats something you can only determine by using it - preferably during testing.
I no longer buy the "it's cheaper to catch bugs early" mantra. It's true for gross architectural mistakes, but thats about all.
I think the best analogy is evolution and DNA. The coding in DNA is a mess, there's no "design" at all. But anything below "spec" is discarded.
The result is something that is far superior than anything we are capable of "desiging".
And all without coding standards and reviews, HERESY!
Trouble Shooting
1. Under no circumstances grant control of exoskeliton to penguin.
1) ED209 and stairs, need I say more?
2) At least they had the good grace to let Murphy die first!
Now driver support will become even crappier since the same number of engineers will be split across NEWCARD and PCI versions of every new product for several years.
I suggest that it be a licensing requirement for NEWCARD devices that the details of how to access the cards functionality be published.
At least the open source community has a fighting chance of providing the kind of support that most card manufacturers ought to be.
If only it were.
Users can only select from the choices "reasonably" available to them. By "reasonably" I mean that most people are busy, they go to one big store and pick something because it's reduced, comes in a nice box or is made by someone they've heard of etc.
What is on the shelves, and how much space it gets is a hugely complex issue. Politics, stock levels, agreements, margins etc. all dictate what a customer sees and thus influence their choice.
In an ideal world good products would win, standards would be open and competition would be fair.
Meanwhile, here on earth...
The two technologies I know of are:
1) Anti-noise: to specifically cancel out the noise of the aircraft. There's no way you could "cancel" the noise of an explosion though! (as would be needed for a PDE) I believe this is effective on helicopters at least.
2) Noise vectoring: try to ensure that the noise goes in a specific direction. For a military aircraft it's often enough that you can't "hear it coming", obviously supersonic flight solves this issue!
I'm guessing that 2) *might* be possible by developing some sort of (ROBUST!) engine cowl that ensures that the worst of the sound energy goes upward/outward without soaking up too much of the thrust. Pure speculation on my part, and hey, they have to get the engine to work first!
good points! noise==vibration
Assuming for a moment that it's possible to get this technology to work, the question of noise has been raised as a show stopper with regards it's commercial use.
But two things spring to mind:
1) Stealth aircraft use noise damping technology, and some of this might be appropriate even for this weird engine.
2) Conventional engines will probably have to be used for take off and landing anyway. These can be commercial low-noise devices that just get the plane to/from off-shore locations where it can fire up it's PD engines.
Just make sure you've finished your complementary drink at that point or you'll be wearing it for the rest of the flight...
I've just (coincidentally) finished this story, from the first (very excellent) collection of P.K.D. short stories, "Beyond Lies The Wub". I've ordered the remaining 4 books in the series on the strength of that.
The book concentrates on the individual's loss of power in the face of the tension between omnipresent government and big business.
Our hero, Jennings, an electronics engineer signs a two year contract with Rethrick Industries - a catch being that all knowledge of his two years with them will be surgically removed on leaving. This is pretty much where the story starts.
On attempting to collect payment at the end of his mysterious contract he is presented instead with a bag of apparently "trinkets": bits of wire, tickets, a broken poker chip etc. He is told that he (before his memory was wiped) supplied the items to be given back instead of the money. He's obviously not pleased.
However as the story progresses these "trinkets" become far more valuable than money ever could...
And there I shall stop.
I enjoyed the story. I'm 3/4 of the way through "Beyond Lies The Wub" and at the end of almost every story I end up thinking "Ooh, XYZ really ripped off some of these ideas for this film or that book".
What amazes me about Dick is how stories written in the 50's haven't dated, either socially or (often) technologically.
In "Wub" there is a very interesting preface by Dick himself and some extra context set in a posthumous introduction by Roger Zelanzy a friend of his.
If you haven't read any of his stuff before (I hadn't) then this collection is a great place to start.
> yet all it can say on the site is 'the plane has landed' wheres all the info?
Yeah, they've been wasting their time on the technology and engineering rather than a REALLY COOL website.
Anyway, I'm sure someone reading this forum can donate them a Casio wrist watch running Apache that they can insert right into the plane for live updates.
Wouldn't a picture of the device SOMEWHERE on their website be a good idea? An artists impression at least!
Can it really look so bad that they want to hide it?
Are they re-using the plastics from 80's Garfield the cat novelty phones or maybe it's a Billy Bass add-on?
It's just been launched in the UK, don't know what the uptake has been like yet.
The act of peeling tape is to apply a large force to a small area of the tape, overcomming the adhesion locally.
A Gecko may well use the same trick.
Consider this experiment: Paint your hand and plant it flat on a piece of paper. Lift your hand and the paper comes too.
Try it again but this time peel your hand away palm first then fingers then finger tips. The paper stays on the table.
This is how Spider Man does it, rent the DVD and use slow motion - It's True!
> Just wait until DRM gets widely established.
> Nothing new will work in old hardware.
> You'll have to buy everything all over again.
I really don't think this will ever happen. There are enough H/W manufacturers with no finger in the content pie to ensure a perpetual supply "old fashioned" compliant players.
Hell, Sony can't even stop itself selling DRM defeating equipment!
Personally I think that any attempt to go mainstream with DRM technology will backfire bigtime. Joe User out on the street, who just wants CDs that work, will stop buying and/or just get illegal copies from geek friends that play on anything.
The whole scheme will lose the music industry billions and the world will be a better place as a result.
Or perhaps more accurately lightning guns.
I can't remember exactly when, I think it was in New Scientist about 5-7 years ago, but there was a short article about a phaser like device.
There were no pictures but it was described to be about the size of a fridge.
If memory served, it consisted of an ultraviolet laser, whose purpose was to ionize the air between the device and the target. It then dumped a huge electrical charge down the path of the laser.
I've no idea about range etc. I can't even remember if it was designed to be a weapon or not.
Set phaser to "dance like a chicken"...