You a certainly reducing the land footprint if you build a solar installation as a single tall tower, instead of an array of smaller panels covering a field.
However the pylon is going to create a large shadow. If a company minimizes land costs by buying a small plot of land and building a tall photovoltaic tower on it, then they are capturing sunlight that would otherwise fall on their neighbours' land. If the neighbours needed the sunlight for growing crops or for their own solar power installation, then they might even view this as "theft" of "their" sunlight.
Does 10 years worth of technology mean we can have actual robots warring? Or will it still be a bunch of pseudo-aggressive, violent affectated radio-controlled cars?
The real reason for more work today is that most of it is non-productive. As automation has replaced much real work, new non-jobs have been created. It is doing stuff like safety inspections, progress chasing, advertising (half the cost of some stuff today goes to its advertising), making financial cases (that can cost more than the work) and so on ad nauseum.
While you have a point about advertising and so on, don't write off safety inspections as "non productive".
Compare the rate of industrial accidents 70 years ago with the current rate, per person-year in a given industry. Calculate the cost of a person who was formerly a productive part of the economy becoming a lifetime drain on it if, through no fault of their own, they're unable to work thanks to a work-related injury.
Even if a particular safety inspection only reduces the chances of an accident by a trivial amount, it still represents an overall economic gain, given the costs of an accident.
From a conversations with a used bookseller I know. for the last 7 or 8 years at least, many used booksellers in the UK have been kept afloat by ABEBooks, to the extent that many have shut their retail shops and gone to 100% online sales, moving their stock in a cheap-to-rent storage unit.
The B-52 first flew in 1952,they only built them for 10 years, the youngest now flying dates from 1962. But this is a one-off. A combination of a robust design that's useful for a niche purpose, and the insane cost of a clean sheet, replacement. Note that the Vickers Valient, a similar British strategic nuclear bomber that dated from the same era, only lasted in service until the mid-60's as they were basically falling to pieces. That could easily have been the B-52, had it's designers made some bad decisions.
It's interesting to compare this with the C-130 which first flew a little later, 1954, and is still being built. The time interval over which they have been building them is longer than the time interval between the Wright Brothers, and the first C-130 flight.
This gives rise to the interesting thought that in certain niche areas (dropping insanely huge numbers of bombs, landing 10 tons of cargo on a remote dirt airstrip) we have reached "peak aeroplane" and did so decades ago. Essentially, spending a huge wodge of money on a clean sheet design to do those jobs will never result in benefits that justify the cost. Far better just to tweak the designs we have with a few incremental improvements.
Civil aircraft don't seem to have reached peak as there are still improvements (in running cost) to be made, which justify new designs. "The average amount of energy consumed per mile, per passenger, fell by 74% on domestic flights in America between 1970 and 2010", according to The Economist. But presumably that will also eventually peak out in the future, eventually making brand-new civil designs pointless.
The assertion in the article that the Apollo missions were initially intended to be automatic is incorrect. As far as I know, that was never the case.
However, an early objective was to make the missions fully autonomous, able (in theory) land on the moon and return without any contact with Earth. This was because of a concern the Soviet might try to actively jam communications in the event of the Cold War turning very very frosty.
Yuri Gagarin was a passenger on the first space flight in 1961 as his spacecraft was indeed fully automatic. It''s controls were locked out by a three-digit combination lock on the insistence of the doctors, who thought there was a chance spaceflight might make him go psychotic.
The head of the program thought this was BS, and was much more worried about an in-flight emergency that might make the controls necessary, and also kill communications with the ground. Consequently, Gagarin was quietly told what the combination was before the flight, when no doctors were around.
The attacker chose his target intelligently. If he hadn't have been stopped, this could have been horrific.
If he had attacked a cinema or a shopping mall with multiple exits, people would disperse and flee very easily and quickly as soon as he started shooting. Armed police would be on the scene in minutes.
On a train, hundreds of people would effectively be trapped in there with him until it could be brought to a halt and the doors opened. He would have walked the length of it, killing at will. This would have been worse than Anders Breivik's attack. The two that stopped him averted a nightmare.
Of course now, there'll be talk about airport security at railway stations. The UK has over 2500, including many small ones used by less than 100 passengers a month. So that's going to be a problem.
I've never even met an Amazon employee or ever been to Seattle, so have no way of knowing of Amazon really is a good or bad place to work.
But I know or suspect the following:
1) This story has become big, 2) Amazon will take a hit if the idea becomes commonplace that it's a slave driving hell-hole. Top talent will be deterred from applying to work there. 3) Amazon's PR spin team are certain to be now working on damage limitation round the clock, 4) Slashdot is a significant tech news site, and so the spin team will closely monitor all Slashdot stories about them. 5) AC comments saying "Amazon is a wonderful place to work" should consequently be regarded in the same light as Jeff Bezos's statement telling us "Amazon is a wonderful place to work".
I could easily imagine having this degree of commitment to a job if I was working in a World War 2 fighter-plane factory, and it was a case of "build hundreds of these things every month or the Nazis will win". Or if I was in the team working on a rocket that delivers a giant hydrogen bomb that will deflect an incoming asteroid of dinosaur-killing proportions.
The woman worked four days and nights straight selling gift cards!
Anonymous denunciations and self-criticism have been lifted straight from the playbooks of Chairman Mao and David Koresh. So this management abuse of employees, and their willingness to suck it up comes across as some kind of cult that works on the gullible, desperate and greedy, after the relentless Darwinian firing process has sieved out everybody else.
Is that anywhere close to the truth? I'm sure I would have walked in under a month and I'm genuinely puzzled as to why anybody else wouldn't.
The Royal Family used to have their own timezone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps Kim the Third has done if for the same sort of reason - he wants an extra half hour of daylight in the morning for shooting pheasants.
Mental health and substance abuse social work looks to be doubly golden. Because the takeover by machines will surely increase the number of unemployed people with mental health and substance abuse problems.
I'd be inclined to modify that statement, and say. "Audio detection does NOT work, now".
Each rotor of a quadcopter is going to emit sound that depends on the number of prop blades and the prop speed. The four rotors will emit at frequencies that are almost but not quite the same, The four frequencies continuously shift by minute amounts as the control system adjusts power to stay stable in the air.
The quadcopter therefore has a very distinctive sound signature. This signature is out there, waiting to be detected, if the money can be found to develop the technology to do it.
Presumably if that happened, there would be a push for stealth quadcopters. But that's another kettle of fish.
The Russian's don't give a damn about connecting London to North America.
What would be of more importance to them is better transport infrastructure between European Russia and the Russian Far East. Across much of thet route, roads are simply non-existant even today. If you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok then you're not taking a journey, you're mounting an expedition
Why would they want this infrastructure? Well large numbers of Chinese are moving north to settle in Russia. There's speculation that Chinese will be a majority in the Russian Far East few decades. See:
It was always an assumption that when the automation became good enough and cheap enough compete with low-paid Chinese workers, then manufacturing would come back, it would be onshored, After all, removing labour costs removes China's compelling cost advantage. Doesn't it?
Now this announcement is an indication that this may not happen. China has built up such a massive web of suppliers, often in close proximity, that it now has a compelling logistic advantage. Even if you wanted to build a completely automated laptop factory, with only a handful of maintenance workers and labour costs so low they're lost in the noise, then putting it in China might make more sense than putting it in Europe or the US.
I think I only ever sit through a movie from beginning to end at the cinema. I can't remember the last time I watched something on a computer without dragging the progress-bar cursor past a bit I found less engaging.
Nuclear submarines move. So if the experiment is run for long enough, then the skew caused by having one pass by in the nearest stretch of ocean won't be a worry.
Saying that, I imagine various navies and intelligence agencies will be paying a great deal of attention to this research, if they're not already doing so.
They contain gasses in the envelope that is lighter than air but not enough to provide sufficient buoyancy for lifting the entire weight of the craft. They'd technically be still heavier than air and would require the engines running to leave the ground. I don't know if the Goodyear airships are lighter or heavier than air.
You're right, I believe Zeppelin NTs are several hundred kilos heavy on take-off, when carrying payload and full load of fuel. Though they can be lighter than air when landing with the fuel mostly gone. Of course the other big complication to trimming a dirigible is air conditions, which can change during the flight. Buoyancy increases significantly if an airship flies from warm air into a bank of colder, denser air and the craft will remain buoyant until the helium cools to match the air temperature. In the old days, air
All this is what makes vectored thrust a fantastically useful thing for an airship pilot. It gives better control and also means the pilot can vector thrust up to land when his/her craft is lighter-than-air. I'd say this is vital for keeping costs down, as it avoids venting helium for landing.
Although the usefulness of vectored thrust was no lost on the early designers. See this picture of a pre-World War 1 British military blimp with rotatable props.
Slashdot Mirror
You a certainly reducing the land footprint if you build a solar installation as a single tall tower, instead of an array of smaller panels covering a field.
However the pylon is going to create a large shadow. If a company minimizes land costs by buying a small plot of land and building a tall photovoltaic tower on it, then they are capturing sunlight that would otherwise fall on their neighbours' land. If the neighbours needed the sunlight for growing crops or for their own solar power installation, then they might even view this as "theft" of "their" sunlight.
Is it smart enough to automatically call the secret police if it hears the words "Falun Gong".
Does 10 years worth of technology mean we can have actual robots warring? Or will it still be a bunch of pseudo-aggressive, violent affectated radio-controlled cars?
The real reason for more work today is that most of it is non-productive. As automation has replaced much real work, new non-jobs have been created. It is doing stuff like safety inspections, progress chasing, advertising (half the cost of some stuff today goes to its advertising), making financial cases (that can cost more than the work) and so on ad nauseum.
While you have a point about advertising and so on, don't write off safety inspections as "non productive".
Compare the rate of industrial accidents 70 years ago with the current rate, per person-year in a given industry. Calculate the cost of a person who was formerly a productive part of the economy becoming a lifetime drain on it if, through no fault of their own, they're unable to work thanks to a work-related injury.
Even if a particular safety inspection only reduces the chances of an accident by a trivial amount, it still represents an overall economic gain, given the costs of an accident.
From a conversations with a used bookseller I know. for the last 7 or 8 years at least, many used booksellers in the UK have been kept afloat by ABEBooks, to the extent that many have shut their retail shops and gone to 100% online sales, moving their stock in a cheap-to-rent storage unit.
Deploying fake weapons is a tactic that goes back hundreds of years. See Quaker gun
Can you think of any others?
The Bell Rock Lighthouse. Built between 1807 and 1810.
Proof - it's still there.
It's interesting to compare this with the C-130 which first flew a little later, 1954, and is still being built. The time interval over which they have been building them is longer than the time interval between the Wright Brothers, and the first C-130 flight.
This gives rise to the interesting thought that in certain niche areas (dropping insanely huge numbers of bombs, landing 10 tons of cargo on a remote dirt airstrip) we have reached "peak aeroplane" and did so decades ago. Essentially, spending a huge wodge of money on a clean sheet design to do those jobs will never result in benefits that justify the cost. Far better just to tweak the designs we have with a few incremental improvements.
Civil aircraft don't seem to have reached peak as there are still improvements (in running cost) to be made, which justify new designs. "The average amount of energy consumed per mile, per passenger, fell by 74% on domestic flights in America between 1970 and 2010", according to The Economist. But presumably that will also eventually peak out in the future, eventually making brand-new civil designs pointless.
However, an early objective was to make the missions fully autonomous, able (in theory) land on the moon and return without any contact with Earth. This was because of a concern the Soviet might try to actively jam communications in the event of the Cold War turning very very frosty.
Yuri Gagarin was a passenger on the first space flight in 1961 as his spacecraft was indeed fully automatic. It''s controls were locked out by a three-digit combination lock on the insistence of the doctors, who thought there was a chance spaceflight might make him go psychotic.
The head of the program thought this was BS, and was much more worried about an in-flight emergency that might make the controls necessary, and also kill communications with the ground. Consequently, Gagarin was quietly told what the combination was before the flight, when no doctors were around.
The attacker chose his target intelligently. If he hadn't have been stopped, this could have been horrific.
If he had attacked a cinema or a shopping mall with multiple exits, people would disperse and flee very easily and quickly as soon as he started shooting. Armed police would be on the scene in minutes.
On a train, hundreds of people would effectively be trapped in there with him until it could be brought to a halt and the doors opened. He would have walked the length of it, killing at will. This would have been worse than Anders Breivik's attack. The two that stopped him averted a nightmare.
Of course now, there'll be talk about airport security at railway stations. The UK has over 2500, including many small ones used by less than 100 passengers a month. So that's going to be a problem.
Don't think I'll get it though.
I've never even met an Amazon employee or ever been to Seattle, so have no way of knowing of Amazon really is a good or bad place to work.
But I know or suspect the following:
1) This story has become big,
2) Amazon will take a hit if the idea becomes commonplace that it's a slave driving hell-hole. Top talent will be deterred from applying to work there.
3) Amazon's PR spin team are certain to be now working on damage limitation round the clock,
4) Slashdot is a significant tech news site, and so the spin team will closely monitor all Slashdot stories about them.
5) AC comments saying "Amazon is a wonderful place to work" should consequently be regarded in the same light as Jeff Bezos's statement telling us "Amazon is a wonderful place to work".
I could easily imagine having this degree of commitment to a job if I was working in a World War 2 fighter-plane factory, and it was a case of "build hundreds of these things every month or the Nazis will win". Or if I was in the team working on a rocket that delivers a giant hydrogen bomb that will deflect an incoming asteroid of dinosaur-killing proportions.
The woman worked four days and nights straight selling gift cards!
Anonymous denunciations and self-criticism have been lifted straight from the playbooks of Chairman Mao and David Koresh. So this management abuse of employees, and their willingness to suck it up comes across as some kind of cult that works on the gullible, desperate and greedy, after the relentless Darwinian firing process has sieved out everybody else.
Is that anywhere close to the truth? I'm sure I would have walked in under a month and I'm genuinely puzzled as to why anybody else wouldn't.
The Royal Family used to have their own timezone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Perhaps Kim the Third has done if for the same sort of reason - he wants an extra half hour of daylight in the morning for shooting pheasants.
Ok, it's a hoverboard - in the narrow sense of it being a board and it hovers.
One would expect it to to still hover with 80kg of person standing on it. Does it do that? A cursory look shows me no pictures of this.
Mental health and substance abuse social work looks to be doubly golden. Because the takeover by machines will surely increase the number of unemployed people with mental health and substance abuse problems.
I'd be inclined to modify that statement, and say. "Audio detection does NOT work, now".
Each rotor of a quadcopter is going to emit sound that depends on the number of prop blades and the prop speed. The four rotors will emit at frequencies that are almost but not quite the same, The four frequencies continuously shift by minute amounts as the control system adjusts power to stay stable in the air.
The quadcopter therefore has a very distinctive sound signature. This signature is out there, waiting to be detected, if the money can be found to develop the technology to do it.
Presumably if that happened, there would be a push for stealth quadcopters. But that's another kettle of fish.
Basically a disposable, one-shot flame thrower that's set off by a trip wire. Used by the Russians and the Germans in WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For when you really want the kids to stay off your lawn.
The Russian's don't give a damn about connecting London to North America.
What would be of more importance to them is better transport infrastructure between European Russia and the Russian Far East. Across much of thet route, roads are simply non-existant even today. If you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok then you're not taking a journey, you're mounting an expedition
Why would they want this infrastructure? Well large numbers of Chinese are moving north to settle in Russia. There's speculation that Chinese will be a majority in the Russian Far East few decades. See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Internat... http://newobserveronline.com/r...
Better commincations across Russia will help them counter this and help tie the country together.
It was always an assumption that when the automation became good enough and cheap enough compete with low-paid Chinese workers, then manufacturing would come back, it would be onshored, After all, removing labour costs removes China's compelling cost advantage. Doesn't it?
Now this announcement is an indication that this may not happen. China has built up such a massive web of suppliers, often in close proximity, that it now has a compelling logistic advantage. Even if you wanted to build a completely automated laptop factory, with only a handful of maintenance workers and labour costs so low they're lost in the noise, then putting it in China might make more sense than putting it in Europe or the US.
After all, competitions in music, literature, sculpture, painting and architecture were part of the Olympics at one time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This would be an awesome technique for Monty Python to promote their next box-set.
They could have unsolicited downloads this sketch onto people's devices. I'm sure everybody would be delighted to receive it.
It's not just reading.
I think I only ever sit through a movie from beginning to end at the cinema. I can't remember the last time I watched something on a computer without dragging the progress-bar cursor past a bit I found less engaging.
Saying that, I imagine various navies and intelligence agencies will be paying a great deal of attention to this research, if they're not already doing so.
They contain gasses in the envelope that is lighter than air but not enough to provide sufficient buoyancy for lifting the entire weight of the craft. They'd technically be still heavier than air and would require the engines running to leave the ground. I don't know if the Goodyear airships are lighter or heavier than air.
You're right, I believe Zeppelin NTs are several hundred kilos heavy on take-off, when carrying payload and full load of fuel. Though they can be lighter than air when landing with the fuel mostly gone. Of course the other big complication to trimming a dirigible is air conditions, which can change during the flight. Buoyancy increases significantly if an airship flies from warm air into a bank of colder, denser air and the craft will remain buoyant until the helium cools to match the air temperature. In the old days, air
All this is what makes vectored thrust a fantastically useful thing for an airship pilot. It gives better control and also means the pilot can vector thrust up to land when his/her craft is lighter-than-air. I'd say this is vital for keeping costs down, as it avoids venting helium for landing.
Although the usefulness of vectored thrust was no lost on the early designers. See this picture of a pre-World War 1 British military blimp with rotatable props.