Keep in mind that a lot of Android users have low incomes and/or live in countries where an over the air OS update would be a significant cost to the average person. We might think that a smartphone is useless without at least a 1GB per month data plan, but hundreds of millions of users in the developing world think otherwise.
Yup, and it is actually much more difficult than that. We're talking really exotic stuff in terms of technology. Centuries off from anything that we have today probably.
You need lifeforms, or self replicating machines, that can survive in places like Mars and make useful byproducts for the colonizers, like oxygen, nutrients, etc. Either that, or some sort of replicator machine that could make anything, including copies of itself.
There is one massive problem with that idea and that is that this planet has all of the habitable land in the solar system and we don't have a clue how to create habitable land elsewhere.
The US government could easily fund outposts all over the solar system, but separated from habitable land and the natural services that such land provides, like air, potable water, topsoil, nutrients, etc, none of the outposts would survive without continuous supplies from Earth.
Even if we could come up with a magical technology that instantly terraformed all of Mars, that would only give us a few decades of breathing room, assuming exponential population growth. Mars is really small compared to Earth and exponential growth is really fast. If we could somehow magically terraform all asteroids in the solar system then that maybe would buy us another decade or two. In the longer run, barring faster than light travel, the best we could ever hope for is V^3 rate of expansion, since we would be colonizing 3-dimensional space at some constant speed V.
It's usually not that luck doesn't strike, because it generally does if you're doing something right. The problem is that you also tend to get struck by bad luck.
Based on the article I would guess that a random unexpected setback could easily have brought Tesla out of business in late 2008. Those sort of things happen all the time.
Chome for private use, Firefox for work, Opera for communicating with my wife, Safari for the girlfriend on the side, Explorer for the other girlfriend...
Okay, I'm over-exaggerating, but you get the point. There is probably a plug-in for Chrome or Firefox that achieves the same effect, but in practice I find it easier to just use a bunch of different browsers as sandboxes for different situations.
I would expect that if there's a gap between the solar panels and the roof,...
If you recall Thermodynamics 101 / Highschool physics, gaps function as insulators, which is helpful when you're trying to keep something cool or warm.
1. Don't let safety-critical decisions be based on unreliable time sources. 2. Let each device tag incoming messages with its own timestamps, which never leave the device. Due to the laws of nature messages can safely be assumed to have been transmitted no later than the time of reception.
Most of these people will not be able to get good enough fast enough to keep up with people who are already in the field.
In the long run we're all dead, so I wouldn't worry too much about the truly long-term prospects in any field of work unless I'm giving advice to kids.
Yes, but in addition to that the trade-offs are inherently different for re-usable rockets. Embrittlement is probably a pretty big problem if you intend to re-use your fuel tank many times, like SpaceX intends to.
If SpaceX fails to make their second stage re-usable I would not be surprised to see them switch to hydrogen for that stage at some point down the line.
The government needs a frame in which it can legally operate. For instance you don't want the government to get into iron mining, steel making and knife making just so it can run hospitals. It's fine for a government-run hospital to buy surgical knives from private companies.
The horror example where this separation from government subsidies never happened is the airline industry, where you have two giant corporations, Boeing and Airbus, that leech billions off of various governments.
Steel cans in low Earth orbit. Things have not really change much since the 1975 in terms of scale.
If we're talking about the scale of space habitats, the two factors in the equation are: 1. Cost per unit of weight from Earth to orbit. 2. The ability to mine, refine and manufacture in space.
Increase one of those and things might get interesting.
Nuclear has a gigantic upfront capital cost. Here's the deal:
You start investing hundreds of millions of dollars per year in planning and construction, starting today. The plant comes online 15 years from now and starts to make money back at a fairly low rate. That is, unless gas, solar or some other technology has managed to cut costs in which case you make nothing.
Sounds like you should buy a MacBook Air before they discontinue it, then. Their margins are probably a lot higher on this new and less powerful product.
It's amazing that nobody has managed to make a decent clone if the Air. It's been what, 5-10 years since Apple released the first one.
1) I don't know how something happened 2) Oh, but wouldn't it be exiting if there was a great over-arching story behind it all? 3) Therefore the government did it and is covering it up
Someone, someday, is going to figure it out and make a bazillion dollars.
Yeah, one day a company like Netflix may no longer ship physical discs, but instead rely on digital streaming over the Internet. Remember where you heard it first!
BASIC has one major advantage over every other language out there: absolutely no boilerplate, and absolutely no hidden intelligence in the interpreter. Everything that makes the program run is visible in the code, and everything in the code does something lesson-related in the most minimal programs. Contrast with C, which requires defining a main() function before the student knows what a function is. This simplicity and obviousness makes BASIC the perfect tool for demonstrating simple and obvious programs, but it's inelegant for learning any actual computer science concepts like memory management, design patterns, or data structures.
Python works almost as well for this learning stage.
This is an example of a valid 2-line Python program: x = 1+1 print x
Here is another valid program: def oneplusone():
return 1+1 print oneplusone()
This next program will crash at line 1 with "NameError: name 'oneplusone' is not defined": print oneplusone() def oneplusone():
return 1+1
The one stumbling block with Python is that indentation matters. Copy-pasting your classmate's code into your program can easily break it.
You must have been using a sub-par encoder then. A single layer DVD disc usually allows a significant step up in quality compared to what you would get with an LD disc.
That's called an immersed tube tunnel. The way it's done is they dig a trench at the bottom, lower concrete tunnel elements to form the tunnel and then cover the structure with rock and sand. This method has been used many times in the past and will be used in the future, for example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Immersed tunnels aren't always cheaper than boring or blasting through rock. For one thing, it is cumbersome and expensive to dig a trench in deep waters.
I do think it is plausible that it could have been -44 in the middle of the night, but the daytime temperature on a day like that would be something like -20.
US military application of existing GPS satellites can already achieve fixes down to 5cm. Centimeter-accurate positioning will never be allowed for civilian use, no matter how many satellite constellations you put up there.
I don't know about that. Is there anything malicious that a person could do with centimeter positioning that they can't already do with meter positioning?
Hell, I doubt that that there has ever been an instance where someone has managed to commit a crime because their GPS was meter-accurate, as opposed to for example 10-meter accurate or 100-meter accurate.
If I'm not mistaken the accuracy restrictions are mainly there to prevent foreign forces from developing munitions such as these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M..., but those restrictions will be extremely difficult to keep up when Russia, China, EU and others (India, Brazil, etc) have fully operational satellite constellations. You will pretty much need to get everyone to not compete on accuracy while there will be massive demand from the market for things like more accurate autonomous vehicles.
I wonder how long it will take for the magnitude of that achievement to be noticed, let alone to sink in with T.C. Mits. I have a feeling that it will get mentioned, and Bill Nye will share a few words on CNN, but that it won't get much play in the mainstream press. We'll find out soon enough, I guess.
Keeping fingers crossed...;-)
It probably won't, but the fruits of it will be noticed. I think the general public will like ubiquitous cell and data coverage, even in remote areas, or centimeter-accurate positioning. All of this stuff will be worldwide by nature.
Those are just two things that would be possible if it was cheap to launch and maintain thousands of satellites.
Slashdot Mirror
The most common version is now KitKat with 39.8%. Jelly Bean is second with 39.2% and Lollipop has just under 10%.
https://developer.android.com/...
Keep in mind that a lot of Android users have low incomes and/or live in countries where an over the air OS update would be a significant cost to the average person. We might think that a smartphone is useless without at least a 1GB per month data plan, but hundreds of millions of users in the developing world think otherwise.
Yup, and it is actually much more difficult than that. We're talking really exotic stuff in terms of technology. Centuries off from anything that we have today probably.
You need lifeforms, or self replicating machines, that can survive in places like Mars and make useful byproducts for the colonizers, like oxygen, nutrients, etc. Either that, or some sort of replicator machine that could make anything, including copies of itself.
There is one massive problem with that idea and that is that this planet has all of the habitable land in the solar system and we don't have a clue how to create habitable land elsewhere.
The US government could easily fund outposts all over the solar system, but separated from habitable land and the natural services that such land provides, like air, potable water, topsoil, nutrients, etc, none of the outposts would survive without continuous supplies from Earth.
Even if we could come up with a magical technology that instantly terraformed all of Mars, that would only give us a few decades of breathing room, assuming exponential population growth. Mars is really small compared to Earth and exponential growth is really fast. If we could somehow magically terraform all asteroids in the solar system then that maybe would buy us another decade or two. In the longer run, barring faster than light travel, the best we could ever hope for is V^3 rate of expansion, since we would be colonizing 3-dimensional space at some constant speed V.
It's usually not that luck doesn't strike, because it generally does if you're doing something right. The problem is that you also tend to get struck by bad luck.
Based on the article I would guess that a random unexpected setback could easily have brought Tesla out of business in late 2008. Those sort of things happen all the time.
Chome for private use, Firefox for work, Opera for communicating with my wife, Safari for the girlfriend on the side, Explorer for the other girlfriend...
Okay, I'm over-exaggerating, but you get the point. There is probably a plug-in for Chrome or Firefox that achieves the same effect, but in practice I find it easier to just use a bunch of different browsers as sandboxes for different situations.
Oh, he's sighing at himself. That's fine then.
Sigh...
I would expect that if there's a gap between the solar panels and the roof, ...
If you recall Thermodynamics 101 / Highschool physics, gaps function as insulators, which is helpful when you're trying to keep something cool or warm.
Sigh... back at you.
1. Don't let safety-critical decisions be based on unreliable time sources.
2. Let each device tag incoming messages with its own timestamps, which never leave the device. Due to the laws of nature messages can safely be assumed to have been transmitted no later than the time of reception.
I wonder if I should patent this...
Dual core should be fine for most day-to-day use. An SSD is almost a must-have. But most importantly: a good high-res display for looking at stuff.
This should be about right if you're going for a mac: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-...
This is more lightweight, but the CPU might be too slow: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-...
This should be OK if you can live without the apple: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1...
Most of these people will not be able to get good enough fast enough to keep up with people who are already in the field.
In the long run we're all dead, so I wouldn't worry too much about the truly long-term prospects in any field of work unless I'm giving advice to kids.
Yes, but in addition to that the trade-offs are inherently different for re-usable rockets. Embrittlement is probably a pretty big problem if you intend to re-use your fuel tank many times, like SpaceX intends to.
If SpaceX fails to make their second stage re-usable I would not be surprised to see them switch to hydrogen for that stage at some point down the line.
The government needs a frame in which it can legally operate. For instance you don't want the government to get into iron mining, steel making and knife making just so it can run hospitals. It's fine for a government-run hospital to buy surgical knives from private companies.
The horror example where this separation from government subsidies never happened is the airline industry, where you have two giant corporations, Boeing and Airbus, that leech billions off of various governments.
What can we do now?
Steel cans in low Earth orbit. Things have not really change much since the 1975 in terms of scale.
If we're talking about the scale of space habitats, the two factors in the equation are:
1. Cost per unit of weight from Earth to orbit.
2. The ability to mine, refine and manufacture in space.
Increase one of those and things might get interesting.
Nuclear has a gigantic upfront capital cost. Here's the deal:
You start investing hundreds of millions of dollars per year in planning and construction, starting today. The plant comes online 15 years from now and starts to make money back at a fairly low rate. That is, unless gas, solar or some other technology has managed to cut costs in which case you make nothing.
Any takers?
Sounds like you should buy a MacBook Air before they discontinue it, then. Their margins are probably a lot higher on this new and less powerful product.
It's amazing that nobody has managed to make a decent clone if the Air. It's been what, 5-10 years since Apple released the first one.
I think it's basically this:
1) I don't know how something happened
2) Oh, but wouldn't it be exiting if there was a great over-arching story behind it all?
3) Therefore the government did it and is covering it up
Someone, someday, is going to figure it out and make a bazillion dollars.
Yeah, one day a company like Netflix may no longer ship physical discs, but instead rely on digital streaming over the Internet. Remember where you heard it first!
BASIC has one major advantage over every other language out there: absolutely no boilerplate, and absolutely no hidden intelligence in the interpreter. Everything that makes the program run is visible in the code, and everything in the code does something lesson-related in the most minimal programs. Contrast with C, which requires defining a main() function before the student knows what a function is. This simplicity and obviousness makes BASIC the perfect tool for demonstrating simple and obvious programs, but it's inelegant for learning any actual computer science concepts like memory management, design patterns, or data structures.
Python works almost as well for this learning stage.
This is an example of a valid 2-line Python program:
x = 1+1
print x
Here is another valid program:
def oneplusone():
return 1+1
print oneplusone()
This next program will crash at line 1 with "NameError: name 'oneplusone' is not defined":
print oneplusone()
def oneplusone():
return 1+1
The one stumbling block with Python is that indentation matters. Copy-pasting your classmate's code into your program can easily break it.
From the screenshot it looks like the work could be done in less than a second on an 8-bit 20 MHz MCU.
It's an error in the summary and/or article. Elon still claims that the Model 3 will sell for 30k before subsidies.
You must have been using a sub-par encoder then. A single layer DVD disc usually allows a significant step up in quality compared to what you would get with an LD disc.
That's called an immersed tube tunnel. The way it's done is they dig a trench at the bottom, lower concrete tunnel elements to form the tunnel and then cover the structure with rock and sand. This method has been used many times in the past and will be used in the future, for example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Immersed tunnels aren't always cheaper than boring or blasting through rock. For one thing, it is cumbersome and expensive to dig a trench in deep waters.
I do think it is plausible that it could have been -44 in the middle of the night, but the daytime temperature on a day like that would be something like -20.
US military application of existing GPS satellites can already achieve fixes down to 5cm. Centimeter-accurate positioning will never be allowed for civilian use, no matter how many satellite constellations you put up there.
I don't know about that. Is there anything malicious that a person could do with centimeter positioning that they can't already do with meter positioning?
Hell, I doubt that that there has ever been an instance where someone has managed to commit a crime because their GPS was meter-accurate, as opposed to for example 10-meter accurate or 100-meter accurate.
If I'm not mistaken the accuracy restrictions are mainly there to prevent foreign forces from developing munitions such as these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M..., but those restrictions will be extremely difficult to keep up when Russia, China, EU and others (India, Brazil, etc) have fully operational satellite constellations. You will pretty much need to get everyone to not compete on accuracy while there will be massive demand from the market for things like more accurate autonomous vehicles.
I wonder how long it will take for the magnitude of that achievement to be noticed, let alone to sink in with T.C. Mits. I have a feeling that it will get mentioned, and Bill Nye will share a few words on CNN, but that it won't get much play in the mainstream press. We'll find out soon enough, I guess.
Keeping fingers crossed... ;-)
It probably won't, but the fruits of it will be noticed. I think the general public will like ubiquitous cell and data coverage, even in remote areas, or centimeter-accurate positioning. All of this stuff will be worldwide by nature.
Those are just two things that would be possible if it was cheap to launch and maintain thousands of satellites.