The dinosaurs didn't die out. Many of them went extinct, but the rest evolved into birds, a group which is more diverse, ubiquitous, and arguably more interesting than the dinosaurs ever were.
I can win this prize no problem, for a cost of just $1 billion. List of expenses:
$200,000: one top-of-the-line superbike.
$999,800,000: Bribes for every highway patrolman on I-5.
Now, if you want me to deliver more than one live human, that could get more expensive.
The innumeracy of the public is at a lower level than that. This is like arguing about whether kids should be taught calculus in school when they're struggling with basic arithmetic.
What we need is not more equations in the press, but more graphs, tables, and diagrams. I can't count the number of times I've seen a journalist try to explain, say, changing poll results or the interplay between mortgage rates and foreclosures using text, plus a quote from an expert which they clearly don't understand, when all they need is a quick line chart.
I'm a college professor, and in my classes that require essays I insist that the students incorporate graphical charts, maps, and diagrams. Generally speaking, they're awful at it, but it gets them thinking about data.
Your answer is baked in: if revenues are increasing while traffic is decreasing, it must be because price per parcel has been skyrocketing in Australia. And it has. The difference is that in the U.S., the post office can't increase the rates without approval from Congress, and that ain't happening.
Since the poster is a "Non-American" with Internet access, odds are pretty good they have first-hand experience with a universal healthcare system that they don't consider a disaster. I'm not sure they'll find your post very convincing.
Overzeetop has the details, but the short answer is that we have a major political party that believes that government is incapable of providing the "basic staples of civilization" you're talking about, and uses its political power to prove itself correct.
But it's not like we're alone on the post office thing. Every major Western nation I can think of has at least considered making some changes to its postal system in the past 20 years. If you're looking for signs of America's downfall, there are plenty of better examples.
Y'know, all this concern for little old ladies trying to navigate their front steps would mean a lot more if it was coming from the AARP rather than the postal worker's union.
The Thin Man was great, but 1939's hit was The Thin Man III. And as great as they were, Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz were "mere" adaptations of famous books. The complaint is that 90% of modern blockbusters are either ludicrous action trash, vehicles for inane comedy stars, tired sequels to last year's blockbusters, or adaptations. My point is that it was the same in the old days.
You must be thinking of Hollywood's imaginary version of itself. Let's take 1939, probably the most idolized movie year of all time ("Gone with the Wind", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "The Wizard of Oz"). The other top-grossing movies that year were "Jesse James", a ludicrously unhistorical gunfight western, "Gunga Din", which was as derivative as it was racist, and "Babes in Arms", a Mickey Rooney vehicle -- Mickey Rooney being the Jim Carrey of his time. That plus a half-dozen stock westerns, the second sequel to "The Thin Man", and oh yes, another stupid Mickey Rooney film.
Oh, and let's not forget that Gone With The Wind and Wizard of Oz were both just movie versions of famous novels.
Whoever came up with this doesn't know much about sharks.
Most sharks and other carnivorous fish hunt from below, looking upward for their prey's silhouette against the bright and shiny sea surface. Doesn't matter what color your wetsuit is, it's not going to break up your silhouette.
In fact, the reason prey fish have silvery sides and bellies is to blend in with the shiny sea surface. You could try a reflective websuit, I suppose, but then you'd look even more like a fish.
Wisecracks aside, has anyone seen any discussion about what the thing they confiscated is? We've got a photo, and it's pretty distinctive, I'm sure some military technology expert recognizes it...
Yep. This isn't the first time customs agents for various countries have "accidentally" stumbled across North Korean contraband. It's a no-brainer to conclude that US intelligence agencies are responsible.
A lot of the concepts in this concept car are no good. The mass budget is just too tight, they've thrown out too much structural strength, safety equipment, comfort equipment, etc.
BUT, turbodiesel hybrid is the way to go. Turbodiesel is inherently more efficient than gasoline, but it's got a much flatter torque profile than gasoline, meaning you can't get much by putting the pedal to the metal. But that's where the electric motor comes in. Diesel and electric techs are a match made in heaven, as anyone who's ever designed a rail locomotive is well aware.
Ask yourself what the result of being hit with a 2lb drone falling from 500 feet is, and then try this comment again
It's got wings and propellers to lower its terminal velocity and spread out the impact, so it's going to hurt a lot less than a 2 pound rock. It'd probably hurt as much as getting hit by a falling red-tailed hawk, and we let those suckers fly around major cities without flight plans or a pilot's license.
But regardless, I stand by my point: a 2 pound drone will hurt a hell of a lot less than a 2000 lb helicopter.
Honestly, I don't buy into the "everything's coming up drones" hype for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Nobody's going to droneify a passenger jet, the safety calculus just doesn't work. But for aerial reconnaisance (police, traffic, news, search and rescue) with no cargo, the story changes. You can't make a useful manned aircraft that weighs less than half a ton or so, so you have to ask a new question:
If it's flying over your children, would you rather it weighed 2000 pounds or 2?
Safety's still an issue, of course, but I'd be willing to accept much less stringent safety requirements if the only consequence of a worst-case scenario crash was some bruising and a nasty cut that might need stitches.
I don't think the people in the article were claiming it was an end-all solution, or that it was particularly new. They're doing ag extension work in California wine country, where the fields are small, the profit margins are huge, and the crops are difficult to move through with ground-based machinery. Very different situation than what you're experiencing in the Northwest, I'm guessing, and probably ideal for a UAV.
Meh. These drones still have pilots, they're just not on board the plane / helicopter. A lot of the skills will be transferrable, and for those that aren't, there are always simulators. Pilots trained on nothing but video screens may be missing some kinesthetic sense of the aircraft, but I'd argue that that's not very useful for modern fly-by-wire passenger jets in any case.
Wow, is that a specious argument. "You can spray RoundUp from a cropduster, and RoundUp is bad, therefore crop dusters are bad". By the same argument, I can use a car to do a drive-by shooting, therefore cars should be outlawed.
There are a thousand other things you can spray from an aircraft: pyrethrin insecticides, narrow-targeted herbicides, antifungal and insecticidal bacteria, insecticidal nematode eggs, and so on. Many of these practices meet organic standards.
Historical reminder: DDT was not banned because of its human health effects. It is somewhat toxic, but no worse than a lot of other stuff we spray on crops today. It was banned because of its effects on other animals in the environment.
It's not syntactically wrong, it's semantically wrong. "peaked" implies that FTC's interest has reached a maximum, and is now declining. "piqued" means FTC's interest has just started. The author clearly meant #2.
The only thing worse than people being illiterate morons is people making up ridiculous excuses for illiteracy.
The 3-d printing "revolution" is actually two revolutions. First, putting the ability to make stuff in the hands of ordinary people. Second, putting the ability to make 3-d printers in the hands of ordinary people. The first, the "making revolution", is still a work in progress, as anyone who's actually tried to use 3-d design and print software knows. The second, the "Von Neumann revolution", was never what Makerbot was about.
So long as StrataSys continues to make a low-cost FDM printer for home use, I think we can continue to progress toward the making revolution. And if they don't, the groups working toward the Von Neumann revolution (RepRap and others) can always fork off another MakerBot-style company.
In any case, MakerBot was doomed. 3d Systems' Cube was about to eat its lunch in the general retail market -- the Cube looks like something you'd buy at Best Buy rather than something your nerdy cousin built, and it's half the price. And I give it two years before the Chinese clones hit Wal-Mart, at a $400 price point.
Slashdot Mirror
The dinosaurs didn't die out. Many of them went extinct, but the rest evolved into birds, a group which is more diverse, ubiquitous, and arguably more interesting than the dinosaurs ever were.
I can win this prize no problem, for a cost of just $1 billion. List of expenses:
$200,000: one top-of-the-line superbike.
$999,800,000: Bribes for every highway patrolman on I-5.
Now, if you want me to deliver more than one live human, that could get more expensive.
Parents who aggressively control their kids' consumption of fizzy drinks will probably control the kid's misbehavior too.
The innumeracy of the public is at a lower level than that. This is like arguing about whether kids should be taught calculus in school when they're struggling with basic arithmetic.
What we need is not more equations in the press, but more graphs, tables, and diagrams. I can't count the number of times I've seen a journalist try to explain, say, changing poll results or the interplay between mortgage rates and foreclosures using text, plus a quote from an expert which they clearly don't understand, when all they need is a quick line chart.
I'm a college professor, and in my classes that require essays I insist that the students incorporate graphical charts, maps, and diagrams. Generally speaking, they're awful at it, but it gets them thinking about data.
This is what chaotic systems do. Not to worry, it doesn't change the accuracy of the forecast.
Your answer is baked in: if revenues are increasing while traffic is decreasing, it must be because price per parcel has been skyrocketing in Australia. And it has. The difference is that in the U.S., the post office can't increase the rates without approval from Congress, and that ain't happening.
Since the poster is a "Non-American" with Internet access, odds are pretty good they have first-hand experience with a universal healthcare system that they don't consider a disaster. I'm not sure they'll find your post very convincing.
Overzeetop has the details, but the short answer is that we have a major political party that believes that government is incapable of providing the "basic staples of civilization" you're talking about, and uses its political power to prove itself correct.
But it's not like we're alone on the post office thing. Every major Western nation I can think of has at least considered making some changes to its postal system in the past 20 years. If you're looking for signs of America's downfall, there are plenty of better examples.
Y'know, all this concern for little old ladies trying to navigate their front steps would mean a lot more if it was coming from the AARP rather than the postal worker's union.
"Speed enforced by drones" is just as true as "speed enforced by aircraft".
They could be lying, or their system could be deliberately designed this way, to limit the amount of information a mole could find.
The Thin Man was great, but 1939's hit was The Thin Man III. And as great as they were, Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz were "mere" adaptations of famous books. The complaint is that 90% of modern blockbusters are either ludicrous action trash, vehicles for inane comedy stars, tired sequels to last year's blockbusters, or adaptations. My point is that it was the same in the old days.
You must be thinking of Hollywood's imaginary version of itself. Let's take 1939, probably the most idolized movie year of all time ("Gone with the Wind", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "The Wizard of Oz"). The other top-grossing movies that year were "Jesse James", a ludicrously unhistorical gunfight western, "Gunga Din", which was as derivative as it was racist, and "Babes in Arms", a Mickey Rooney vehicle -- Mickey Rooney being the Jim Carrey of his time. That plus a half-dozen stock westerns, the second sequel to "The Thin Man", and oh yes, another stupid Mickey Rooney film.
Oh, and let's not forget that Gone With The Wind and Wizard of Oz were both just movie versions of famous novels.
Whoever came up with this doesn't know much about sharks.
Most sharks and other carnivorous fish hunt from below, looking upward for their prey's silhouette against the bright and shiny sea surface. Doesn't matter what color your wetsuit is, it's not going to break up your silhouette.
In fact, the reason prey fish have silvery sides and bellies is to blend in with the shiny sea surface. You could try a reflective websuit, I suppose, but then you'd look even more like a fish.
Wisecracks aside, has anyone seen any discussion about what the thing they confiscated is? We've got a photo, and it's pretty distinctive, I'm sure some military technology expert recognizes it...
Yep. This isn't the first time customs agents for various countries have "accidentally" stumbled across North Korean contraband. It's a no-brainer to conclude that US intelligence agencies are responsible.
http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/japan-seizes-suspicious-north-korean-cargo-transit-myanmar/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQJd8FsHXjzf35GeBg4bV1JrRfHQ?docId=CNG.caf81bda72044be6c361e53dc743c2a8.3e1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8227991.stm
A lot of the concepts in this concept car are no good. The mass budget is just too tight, they've thrown out too much structural strength, safety equipment, comfort equipment, etc.
BUT, turbodiesel hybrid is the way to go. Turbodiesel is inherently more efficient than gasoline, but it's got a much flatter torque profile than gasoline, meaning you can't get much by putting the pedal to the metal. But that's where the electric motor comes in. Diesel and electric techs are a match made in heaven, as anyone who's ever designed a rail locomotive is well aware.
It's got wings and propellers to lower its terminal velocity and spread out the impact, so it's going to hurt a lot less than a 2 pound rock. It'd probably hurt as much as getting hit by a falling red-tailed hawk, and we let those suckers fly around major cities without flight plans or a pilot's license.
But regardless, I stand by my point: a 2 pound drone will hurt a hell of a lot less than a 2000 lb helicopter.
Honestly, I don't buy into the "everything's coming up drones" hype for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Nobody's going to droneify a passenger jet, the safety calculus just doesn't work. But for aerial reconnaisance (police, traffic, news, search and rescue) with no cargo, the story changes. You can't make a useful manned aircraft that weighs less than half a ton or so, so you have to ask a new question:
If it's flying over your children, would you rather it weighed 2000 pounds or 2?
Safety's still an issue, of course, but I'd be willing to accept much less stringent safety requirements if the only consequence of a worst-case scenario crash was some bruising and a nasty cut that might need stitches.
I don't think the people in the article were claiming it was an end-all solution, or that it was particularly new. They're doing ag extension work in California wine country, where the fields are small, the profit margins are huge, and the crops are difficult to move through with ground-based machinery. Very different situation than what you're experiencing in the Northwest, I'm guessing, and probably ideal for a UAV.
Meh. These drones still have pilots, they're just not on board the plane / helicopter. A lot of the skills will be transferrable, and for those that aren't, there are always simulators. Pilots trained on nothing but video screens may be missing some kinesthetic sense of the aircraft, but I'd argue that that's not very useful for modern fly-by-wire passenger jets in any case.
Wow, is that a specious argument. "You can spray RoundUp from a cropduster, and RoundUp is bad, therefore crop dusters are bad". By the same argument, I can use a car to do a drive-by shooting, therefore cars should be outlawed.
There are a thousand other things you can spray from an aircraft: pyrethrin insecticides, narrow-targeted herbicides, antifungal and insecticidal bacteria, insecticidal nematode eggs, and so on. Many of these practices meet organic standards.
Historical reminder: DDT was not banned because of its human health effects. It is somewhat toxic, but no worse than a lot of other stuff we spray on crops today. It was banned because of its effects on other animals in the environment.
It's not syntactically wrong, it's semantically wrong. "peaked" implies that FTC's interest has reached a maximum, and is now declining. "piqued" means FTC's interest has just started. The author clearly meant #2.
The only thing worse than people being illiterate morons is people making up ridiculous excuses for illiteracy.
The 3-d printing "revolution" is actually two revolutions. First, putting the ability to make stuff in the hands of ordinary people. Second, putting the ability to make 3-d printers in the hands of ordinary people. The first, the "making revolution", is still a work in progress, as anyone who's actually tried to use 3-d design and print software knows. The second, the "Von Neumann revolution", was never what Makerbot was about.
So long as StrataSys continues to make a low-cost FDM printer for home use, I think we can continue to progress toward the making revolution. And if they don't, the groups working toward the Von Neumann revolution (RepRap and others) can always fork off another MakerBot-style company.
In any case, MakerBot was doomed. 3d Systems' Cube was about to eat its lunch in the general retail market -- the Cube looks like something you'd buy at Best Buy rather than something your nerdy cousin built, and it's half the price. And I give it two years before the Chinese clones hit Wal-Mart, at a $400 price point.