"Treat other members of the community with basic respect and decency" isn't exactly some sort of new-age touchy-feely bullshit - it's pretty much been the foundation of every community in history - even hate-mongering groups like the KKK whose entire reason for existing it to chase off particular non-members with fear and violence. Klansmen are still decent to each other.
It's pretty much been the foundation of Free software communities as well - the only problem is that they've historically been a white boys club, and now that Free software has gone mainstream we're seeing an influx of non-white, non-boys. It's up to us whether we want to continue to be an open community in the face of rapidly growing membership appeal, with the growth and learning that involves.
Great. So, will you drop your trousers please so that we can all confirm that your gender really is what you say it is?
No? Then why are you asking others to do the same? They say they're X, call them X. Especially online, where you're unlikely to see anyone's trousers in the first place, on or off. Or should every woman with a beard, and every man with breasts, be required to drop their trousers when talking to you before you'll use the proper pronoun?
Easy. First recognize that noisy assholes are pretty much never actually even remotely representative of the groups they claim to represent. And that there will *always* be noisy assholes attacking *anything* with any public profile, for the simple reason that noisy assholes generally don't really care about the goal, they're in it for the fight itself. You can usually identify them by the fact that they throw around perjoratives and attack people expressing a different opinion, rather than actually engaging in a conversation.
The fact that you use the term SJW as a perjorative suggests your politics lean right. So can I assume you're fully in support of the racist corporate whores currently representing the party? And are on board with the many bigots harrassing random brown people going about their day, screaming at them to "get out of our country"? I'm betting not. And I'm betting that this paragraph got you a little fired up and ready to argue anyway.
So, you want to fight the assholes? The first step is to realize that the real problem is not their politics - it's that they're assholes. If their politics were aligned with yours then *you* might not see them, but they'd be pulling the same asshole shenanigans against the other side and be making your side look just as bad as they're currently making the other side look to you. In fact I can promise your that there's millions of them doing so right now - I run into them all the time.
Be the bigger man - don't try to shut them down for being SJWs or whatever - shut them down for being assholes. It probably won't work - if they could be shut up that easily they wouldn't still be annoying everyone. But it still lets you vent, and does so in a manner that reinforces in bystanders that the problem is not that their politics are different than yours - it's that they are acting like assholes.
However, there have been numerous studies showing that if you take the *exact* same resume, changing only the name to sound white, black, or female, the one that sounds like a white man is substantially more likely to lead to an interview. And you can't really blame that on anything but bias in the hiring institution, a factor that's probably amplified by an existing lack of diversity.
Nope, but they have decided not to do it because jogging is boring, high exertion, bad for the knees, and/or the weather's lousy or there's nowhere nice to run nearby.
There's a reason standing/walking desks are a thing, no reason playing video games should be constrained to sitting on your ass either. Heck, the incredibly popularity of the Wii showed that a lot of people are quite interested in playing more physically immersive video games. Personally I'm eager to play some decent tennis, shoot pool in nice locations, curling, skiing, etc. Not to mention what VR could do for an exercise bike, especially if the game could change the resistance on the fly. Biking through cool locales of course, but also pedal-boats, -copters, etc. And that's just the transportation aspect, you could layer quite sophisticated games into the experience as well.
Why not compare it to typical play, rather than just video games? That's generally done standing, walking, and/or running, but is becoming increasingly uncommon in part due to the increasingly compelling digital experiences available, and in part to diminishing easy access to opportunities for it.
So, why not get the best of both worlds? The convenient, compelling digital experience, and the health-and-endorphin simulating physical activity? We aren't designed to sit around all day after all, it does horrible things to our bodies.
The trees don't have to start out dead - cutting them down will kill them quite effectively as well. So long as new trees grow to take the old one's place, and more-than-none of the carbon in the original trees is turned into biochar, the overall process is carbon-negative (assuming no fossil fuels are used in the cutting and transportation process - otherwise you need to increase the amount of biochar produced to offset that).
It also doesn't have to be trees - any woody, or even just hot-enough-burning biowaste can potentially fill the roll.
Quite so. Obviously it does create artifacts - warping can't reveal whatever was just exposed beyond that column for example, so the edges of things may have a tendency to shimmer with interpolated "noise" when you're in motion. Whether that's noticeable or not? No idea.
There's also going to be a performance penalty - unless using dedicated hardware for that part. Warping an HD image may be computationally cheaper than rendering it in the first place, but every ns spent doing so is a ns not available for rendering better graphics.
Probably both prices well worth paying though, if it lets your eyes see something much closer to what your inner ears are saying they should.
You can buy every component of a highly modular AR-15 except for the "central frame" with no regulation - they are not legally considered guns. All you need to 3D print that frame, the lower receiver, and you can have any weapon the AR-15 is designed to become, without breaking any laws, or creating any paper trail. Or you could just buy yourself an 80% complete kit and finish it yourself, it's still not legally considered a gun.
>A 3D printed receiver I could see being useful...
Exactly. And that's the point. A fully 3D printed gun is just a media novelty to get people talking.
The key however, is that the lower receiver, just a frame that holds together some of the key bits that do the actual work, and gets a serial number, is the *only* piece of a modern, modular gun, that is legally considered a gun. Everything else can be bought at any physical or online store with no more regulation than for cabinet hinges.
3D print the lower receiver, and you've got yourself everything you need for a modern LEGO gun. Heck, you don't even need the printer - you can buy 80% complete pre-milled lowers that you can finish yourself, complete with jigs. Also not legally considered a gun (that doesn't kick in until you reach 81% complete).
Good article, thanks. I've added it to my list of reference articles so that I hopefully remember to refer people to it who think that the "3D printed gun" debate has anything to do with 3D printing.
Clocks are damned near free - a $2 watch has a far more precise timer than almost any appliance requires - the beautiful thing about digital electronics is that the clock defines the time, and it mostly doesn't much matter if one tick is 10x as long as the one before it, so long as the shortest tick is longer than the minimum propagation delay required by the clocked circuitry.
As for a toaster - sure, you probably wouldn't want anything digital in there - there's a reason I was talking microwaves. And I don't believe I mentioned *self* diagnostics anywhere - just *simple* diagnostics. For a toaster it's already pretty simple - test the continuity/resistance of the heating element, test the integrity of the switch and ejection mechanism, and the timing circuit itself. For something more complicated it can often still be as easy as making easy-access contact pads on each circuit board to test the components worth replacing, and/or the various on-board sub-circuits. For something computerized, there's probably already JTAG headers, or similar on the board for design and production testing, and it's just a matter of actually spending the extra $0.05 to install the jack on the production model, as well as publishing the in-house information mapping diagnostic errors to specific probable causes, so that the repairman can get the same diagnostic information as the testing staff, without having to hand-solder on a port first and then try to guess at the root cause of any problems.
In point of fact, while pin-counts for, e.g. standalone CPUs are often quite high, most of those pins are usually for the memory bus, something that is internalized in the same SoC package in most consumer modern electronics. The remaining pins are generally used to interface with electronics orders of magnitude slower - high-def video feeds being the primary exception. Modem? Audio? That stuff's positively glacial in comparison. Even video isn't actually much trouble - it gets transmitted through pressure-pad HDMI sockets all the time. And of course it's usually a tradeoff - lots of pins for parallel interfaces, OR a few, high-speed pins for serial interfaces.
There's not even any reason solder would be a major problem - a soldering iron is a standard part of every appliance repair guy's arsenal - a reflow oven would be just another minor business expense. The circuit board just has to be laid out so that it's easy to replace the components in question. And perhaps more importantly, easy to determine what needs to be replaced.
We already have the disposal chain for the old parts - same as we use for the whole toaster - the rubbish bin. Sure, there's lots of room for improvement - but that's a completely separate issue from repair - other than the fact that repair can reduce it dramatically - tossing a dead part is a lot less waste than tossing the whole thing.
As for your production-line forecasting issues. Yes - you have a point. There's a solution there too though, sort of the natural partner to modularity - standardization. It works great in PCs, laptop makers though have proven extremely resistant to it, despite several attempts to promote standard modules for, e.g. video cards. You do see it in wireless cards though, and of course in RAM and hard drives, though even that seems to be diminishing, at least at the low end (and Apple)
*If* the design is modular, then most parts don't need to change regularly, at least not with regards to their interface. When's the last time hard drive interfaces changed drastically, to the point that new parts can't be used to repair old hardware? Or PC expansion cards? Once you have a good, standardized, modular interface, you can use it for many years before changes are needed.
And PCs, phones, etc. are probably the worst-case scenario, since the technology is developing so quickly. When's the last time there was a major advancement in microwaves, washing machines, or toasters? I bet you there's not really any need for more than one or two different electronics boards, total, for each. Heck, go with the more advanced board, with any extra features requiring special hardware easy to disable (dip switches?) or ignore, and you could produce one board for every microwave on the planet - a board that would be cheaper than anything currently produced thanks to sheer production volume. Microwave on the fritz? Take it to the repair shop and have them swap out the standard microwave control board. Ditto keypad, display, etc. The microwave source and power-circuit probably need a few different models, since not everyone needs a 30kW microwave, but the rest could be standardized - there's already not really any difference between existing microwave electronics beyond build quality.
Yes, it does tend to make things a little more expensive up front - that's probably one of the bigger reasons manufacturers avoid it. Price competition is fairly strong, and people generally don't think about repairability when making purchases. That's a cultural thing though, and could change - in fact it *has* changed - repairability used to be something people cared about.
You ever wonder why most microwaves have keypads and digital interfaces rather than the old fashioned timer knob? It's not because it's "cool" and "modern" - it's because the knob is more expensive than the keypad, display, and electronics combined. Electronics are *very* rarely the expensive part in an appliance. In part because high precision and noise exclusion is vary rarely required.
In fact, audio (particularly digital-to-analog audio) is probably one of the more demanding endeavors in that regard - a detail I suspect you're aware of. Which makes me wonder why you'd intentionally choose such a misguiding example.
That's because the phone is not designed to be repairable. There's usually 3-4 major chips in a cell phone, and there's absolutely no reason those chips couldn't be socketed rather than soldered. The device is already inherently modular, it's only the *choice* of interconnections that makes it monolithic and difficult to repair.
Yeah, at some point it stops making sense to make things more modular - your phone probably has RAM,CPU, and video all integrated into the same $5 chip, and it would drastically increase the cost to manufacture them separately. But the camera, circuit board, flash storage, screen, case, etc. are all manufactured as separate modules, and it would only increase the overall cost slightly to *keep* them as separate modules that could be easily replaced individually.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong.
Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one.
If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
This page looks a little outdated, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but claims only 130,675 editors have contributed in the last 30 days, and only ~48,000 editors have made 600 total contributions. With about 3,500 editors make >100 contributions per month.
Meanwhile, around 50 million Alexa devices have been sold.
Unless the participation rates have increased dramatically, or all 48,000 major contributors purchased an average of 1000 Alexa devices each, it's very unlikely that most Alexa users have made major contributions to Wikipedia.
In a market economy sense of Wikipedia being owed compensation for services rendered - absolutely not. You're right about that.
However, in a gift economy sense of maintaining a balanced flow of wealth - absolutely. Those who accept your gifts but never give gifts to you, gradually stop receiving gifts. (That was essentially what motivated the GPL3 - too many high-profile for-profit freeloaders building resentment in the community caused enough upset that some of the GPL2 community decided to further restrict the conditions of their gift, despite it costing them compatibility with the rest of the GPL2 community.)
And it seems to me that Amazon is doing just that with their donation, which from the limited information google quickly volunteered, would seem to be among the most generous contributions made.
They may indeed soon make the Hubble obsolete in most respects, which is a good thing since it frees the Hubble up for the things where they can't compete (assuming it lives that long). But the technology *today* isn't quite there yet. And I seriously doubt any ground-based telescope will ever be suitable for doing spectral analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Nor be able to compete with orbital stability for photographing things near the limits of the observable universe. Not even against telescopes 30 years older. And unless something untoward happens to disrupt the rekindled space race, once the Webb launches ground based telescopes will never again enjoy such a huge technology gap.
It is an incredible thing they're doing though. *So* much research is becoming far more accessible, as ground based telescopes remain much more affordable. And much (most?) of astronomy has no need to image objects outside our own galaxy.
Again - those are photos of nearby objects - they don't need long exposures. Neptune is practically right next door, and even NGC 6388 is still within the Milky Way (and they don't share a Hubble photo of that for comparison - here's one that seems to show far more detail: https://www.spacetelescope.org... )
That seems an utter travesty, especially in light of the burgeoning reusable rocket industry that promises to rapidly make servicing things in space routine. (really, doing anything in space)
Though... Remove the sunshield, and you should be able to fit the whole thing inside the bay of a BFS cargo ship with meters..ish to spare (in diameter, far more in length). If they make that space pressurizable, the whole giant thing could be captured, rebuilt at leisure in a spacious pressurized environment over the course of weeks or months, and then released to resume its mission. Hmm, though a pleasantly warm atmosphere would probably destroy the delicate calibration between mirrors that all those sun shields are there to provide the thermal stability to ensure. Still... you *might* be able to find a way to do it, even if it means working in vacuum, but still at least in the enclosed security of the cargo bay.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's a brilliant idea to use a BFS as a satellite refurbishment workshop. All you'd really need is independently pressurizable living quarters and a well-equipped workshop. You could no doubt make the whole thing into a module (or collection of them) that could be quickly mounted in the cargo bay when on a servicing mission.
Hey, I saw the size of those shards - more than enough to see through to navigate the city. Or read a book, though the eye strain would be hideous.
And please sir - one must never acknowledge the existence of "authors" or other such active gods in the universe, nor the constraints of "episode" they impose, lest the power of the "plot device" render all further discussion moot.
The devil's in the details though. Literally in this case. "Nearly identical" is great for taking pictures of local planets creating images dozens or hundeds of pixels across, but when you're trying to photograph other stars or galaxies, which may only constitute a handful of pixels, then that "nearly" identical could show itself in a substantial amount of lost detail.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to. Stop whining. ;-)
"Treat other members of the community with basic respect and decency" isn't exactly some sort of new-age touchy-feely bullshit - it's pretty much been the foundation of every community in history - even hate-mongering groups like the KKK whose entire reason for existing it to chase off particular non-members with fear and violence. Klansmen are still decent to each other.
It's pretty much been the foundation of Free software communities as well - the only problem is that they've historically been a white boys club, and now that Free software has gone mainstream we're seeing an influx of non-white, non-boys. It's up to us whether we want to continue to be an open community in the face of rapidly growing membership appeal, with the growth and learning that involves.
Great. So, will you drop your trousers please so that we can all confirm that your gender really is what you say it is?
No? Then why are you asking others to do the same? They say they're X, call them X. Especially online, where you're unlikely to see anyone's trousers in the first place, on or off. Or should every woman with a beard, and every man with breasts, be required to drop their trousers when talking to you before you'll use the proper pronoun?
>How do you...
Easy. First recognize that noisy assholes are pretty much never actually even remotely representative of the groups they claim to represent. And that there will *always* be noisy assholes attacking *anything* with any public profile, for the simple reason that noisy assholes generally don't really care about the goal, they're in it for the fight itself. You can usually identify them by the fact that they throw around perjoratives and attack people expressing a different opinion, rather than actually engaging in a conversation.
The fact that you use the term SJW as a perjorative suggests your politics lean right. So can I assume you're fully in support of the racist corporate whores currently representing the party? And are on board with the many bigots harrassing random brown people going about their day, screaming at them to "get out of our country"? I'm betting not. And I'm betting that this paragraph got you a little fired up and ready to argue anyway.
So, you want to fight the assholes? The first step is to realize that the real problem is not their politics - it's that they're assholes. If their politics were aligned with yours then *you* might not see them, but they'd be pulling the same asshole shenanigans against the other side and be making your side look just as bad as they're currently making the other side look to you. In fact I can promise your that there's millions of them doing so right now - I run into them all the time.
Be the bigger man - don't try to shut them down for being SJWs or whatever - shut them down for being assholes. It probably won't work - if they could be shut up that easily they wouldn't still be annoying everyone. But it still lets you vent, and does so in a manner that reinforces in bystanders that the problem is not that their politics are different than yours - it's that they are acting like assholes.
That's happening too.
However, there have been numerous studies showing that if you take the *exact* same resume, changing only the name to sound white, black, or female, the one that sounds like a white man is substantially more likely to lead to an interview. And you can't really blame that on anything but bias in the hiring institution, a factor that's probably amplified by an existing lack of diversity.
Nope, but they have decided not to do it because jogging is boring, high exertion, bad for the knees, and/or the weather's lousy or there's nowhere nice to run nearby.
There's a reason standing/walking desks are a thing, no reason playing video games should be constrained to sitting on your ass either. Heck, the incredibly popularity of the Wii showed that a lot of people are quite interested in playing more physically immersive video games. Personally I'm eager to play some decent tennis, shoot pool in nice locations, curling, skiing, etc. Not to mention what VR could do for an exercise bike, especially if the game could change the resistance on the fly. Biking through cool locales of course, but also pedal-boats, -copters, etc. And that's just the transportation aspect, you could layer quite sophisticated games into the experience as well.
Why not compare it to typical play, rather than just video games? That's generally done standing, walking, and/or running, but is becoming increasingly uncommon in part due to the increasingly compelling digital experiences available, and in part to diminishing easy access to opportunities for it.
So, why not get the best of both worlds? The convenient, compelling digital experience, and the health-and-endorphin simulating physical activity? We aren't designed to sit around all day after all, it does horrible things to our bodies.
The trees don't have to start out dead - cutting them down will kill them quite effectively as well. So long as new trees grow to take the old one's place, and more-than-none of the carbon in the original trees is turned into biochar, the overall process is carbon-negative (assuming no fossil fuels are used in the cutting and transportation process - otherwise you need to increase the amount of biochar produced to offset that).
It also doesn't have to be trees - any woody, or even just hot-enough-burning biowaste can potentially fill the roll.
Quite so. Obviously it does create artifacts - warping can't reveal whatever was just exposed beyond that column for example, so the edges of things may have a tendency to shimmer with interpolated "noise" when you're in motion. Whether that's noticeable or not? No idea.
There's also going to be a performance penalty - unless using dedicated hardware for that part. Warping an HD image may be computationally cheaper than rendering it in the first place, but every ns spent doing so is a ns not available for rendering better graphics.
Probably both prices well worth paying though, if it lets your eyes see something much closer to what your inner ears are saying they should.
You can buy every component of a highly modular AR-15 except for the "central frame" with no regulation - they are not legally considered guns. All you need to 3D print that frame, the lower receiver, and you can have any weapon the AR-15 is designed to become, without breaking any laws, or creating any paper trail. Or you could just buy yourself an 80% complete kit and finish it yourself, it's still not legally considered a gun.
https://www.wired.com/story/de...
>A 3D printed receiver I could see being useful...
Exactly. And that's the point. A fully 3D printed gun is just a media novelty to get people talking.
The key however, is that the lower receiver, just a frame that holds together some of the key bits that do the actual work, and gets a serial number, is the *only* piece of a modern, modular gun, that is legally considered a gun. Everything else can be bought at any physical or online store with no more regulation than for cabinet hinges.
3D print the lower receiver, and you've got yourself everything you need for a modern LEGO gun. Heck, you don't even need the printer - you can buy 80% complete pre-milled lowers that you can finish yourself, complete with jigs. Also not legally considered a gun (that doesn't kick in until you reach 81% complete).
As posted above by another:
https://www.wired.com/story/de...
So, really, this article is about trying to trace whoever printed that cache of black-market 3D-printed lower receivers you just confiscated.
Good article, thanks. I've added it to my list of reference articles so that I hopefully remember to refer people to it who think that the "3D printed gun" debate has anything to do with 3D printing.
Clocks are damned near free - a $2 watch has a far more precise timer than almost any appliance requires - the beautiful thing about digital electronics is that the clock defines the time, and it mostly doesn't much matter if one tick is 10x as long as the one before it, so long as the shortest tick is longer than the minimum propagation delay required by the clocked circuitry.
As for a toaster - sure, you probably wouldn't want anything digital in there - there's a reason I was talking microwaves. And I don't believe I mentioned *self* diagnostics anywhere - just *simple* diagnostics. For a toaster it's already pretty simple - test the continuity/resistance of the heating element, test the integrity of the switch and ejection mechanism, and the timing circuit itself. For something more complicated it can often still be as easy as making easy-access contact pads on each circuit board to test the components worth replacing, and/or the various on-board sub-circuits. For something computerized, there's probably already JTAG headers, or similar on the board for design and production testing, and it's just a matter of actually spending the extra $0.05 to install the jack on the production model, as well as publishing the in-house information mapping diagnostic errors to specific probable causes, so that the repairman can get the same diagnostic information as the testing staff, without having to hand-solder on a port first and then try to guess at the root cause of any problems.
In point of fact, while pin-counts for, e.g. standalone CPUs are often quite high, most of those pins are usually for the memory bus, something that is internalized in the same SoC package in most consumer modern electronics. The remaining pins are generally used to interface with electronics orders of magnitude slower - high-def video feeds being the primary exception. Modem? Audio? That stuff's positively glacial in comparison. Even video isn't actually much trouble - it gets transmitted through pressure-pad HDMI sockets all the time. And of course it's usually a tradeoff - lots of pins for parallel interfaces, OR a few, high-speed pins for serial interfaces.
There's not even any reason solder would be a major problem - a soldering iron is a standard part of every appliance repair guy's arsenal - a reflow oven would be just another minor business expense. The circuit board just has to be laid out so that it's easy to replace the components in question. And perhaps more importantly, easy to determine what needs to be replaced.
We already have the disposal chain for the old parts - same as we use for the whole toaster - the rubbish bin. Sure, there's lots of room for improvement - but that's a completely separate issue from repair - other than the fact that repair can reduce it dramatically - tossing a dead part is a lot less waste than tossing the whole thing.
As for your production-line forecasting issues. Yes - you have a point. There's a solution there too though, sort of the natural partner to modularity - standardization. It works great in PCs, laptop makers though have proven extremely resistant to it, despite several attempts to promote standard modules for, e.g. video cards. You do see it in wireless cards though, and of course in RAM and hard drives, though even that seems to be diminishing, at least at the low end (and Apple)
*If* the design is modular, then most parts don't need to change regularly, at least not with regards to their interface. When's the last time hard drive interfaces changed drastically, to the point that new parts can't be used to repair old hardware? Or PC expansion cards? Once you have a good, standardized, modular interface, you can use it for many years before changes are needed.
And PCs, phones, etc. are probably the worst-case scenario, since the technology is developing so quickly. When's the last time there was a major advancement in microwaves, washing machines, or toasters? I bet you there's not really any need for more than one or two different electronics boards, total, for each. Heck, go with the more advanced board, with any extra features requiring special hardware easy to disable (dip switches?) or ignore, and you could produce one board for every microwave on the planet - a board that would be cheaper than anything currently produced thanks to sheer production volume. Microwave on the fritz? Take it to the repair shop and have them swap out the standard microwave control board. Ditto keypad, display, etc. The microwave source and power-circuit probably need a few different models, since not everyone needs a 30kW microwave, but the rest could be standardized - there's already not really any difference between existing microwave electronics beyond build quality.
Yes, it does tend to make things a little more expensive up front - that's probably one of the bigger reasons manufacturers avoid it. Price competition is fairly strong, and people generally don't think about repairability when making purchases. That's a cultural thing though, and could change - in fact it *has* changed - repairability used to be something people cared about.
You ever wonder why most microwaves have keypads and digital interfaces rather than the old fashioned timer knob? It's not because it's "cool" and "modern" - it's because the knob is more expensive than the keypad, display, and electronics combined. Electronics are *very* rarely the expensive part in an appliance. In part because high precision and noise exclusion is vary rarely required.
In fact, audio (particularly digital-to-analog audio) is probably one of the more demanding endeavors in that regard - a detail I suspect you're aware of. Which makes me wonder why you'd intentionally choose such a misguiding example.
That's because the phone is not designed to be repairable. There's usually 3-4 major chips in a cell phone, and there's absolutely no reason those chips couldn't be socketed rather than soldered. The device is already inherently modular, it's only the *choice* of interconnections that makes it monolithic and difficult to repair.
Yeah, at some point it stops making sense to make things more modular - your phone probably has RAM,CPU, and video all integrated into the same $5 chip, and it would drastically increase the cost to manufacture them separately. But the camera, circuit board, flash storage, screen, case, etc. are all manufactured as separate modules, and it would only increase the overall cost slightly to *keep* them as separate modules that could be easily replaced individually.
Where are you seeing exclusivity? I see "is A as important as B? Because right now B gets all the attention"
That's the diametric opposite of a mutually exclusive statement.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong.
Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one.
If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
Lets run the numbers, shall we?
This page looks a little outdated, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but claims only 130,675 editors have contributed in the last 30 days, and only ~48,000 editors have made 600 total contributions. With about 3,500 editors make >100 contributions per month.
Meanwhile, around 50 million Alexa devices have been sold.
Unless the participation rates have increased dramatically, or all 48,000 major contributors purchased an average of 1000 Alexa devices each, it's very unlikely that most Alexa users have made major contributions to Wikipedia.
In a market economy sense of Wikipedia being owed compensation for services rendered - absolutely not. You're right about that.
However, in a gift economy sense of maintaining a balanced flow of wealth - absolutely. Those who accept your gifts but never give gifts to you, gradually stop receiving gifts. (That was essentially what motivated the GPL3 - too many high-profile for-profit freeloaders building resentment in the community caused enough upset that some of the GPL2 community decided to further restrict the conditions of their gift, despite it costing them compatibility with the rest of the GPL2 community.)
And it seems to me that Amazon is doing just that with their donation, which from the limited information google quickly volunteered, would seem to be among the most generous contributions made.
They may indeed soon make the Hubble obsolete in most respects, which is a good thing since it frees the Hubble up for the things where they can't compete (assuming it lives that long). But the technology *today* isn't quite there yet. And I seriously doubt any ground-based telescope will ever be suitable for doing spectral analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Nor be able to compete with orbital stability for photographing things near the limits of the observable universe. Not even against telescopes 30 years older. And unless something untoward happens to disrupt the rekindled space race, once the Webb launches ground based telescopes will never again enjoy such a huge technology gap.
It is an incredible thing they're doing though. *So* much research is becoming far more accessible, as ground based telescopes remain much more affordable. And much (most?) of astronomy has no need to image objects outside our own galaxy.
Again - those are photos of nearby objects - they don't need long exposures. Neptune is practically right next door, and even NGC 6388 is still within the Milky Way (and they don't share a Hubble photo of that for comparison - here's one that seems to show far more detail: https://www.spacetelescope.org... )
That seems an utter travesty, especially in light of the burgeoning reusable rocket industry that promises to rapidly make servicing things in space routine. (really, doing anything in space)
Though... Remove the sunshield, and you should be able to fit the whole thing inside the bay of a BFS cargo ship with meters..ish to spare (in diameter, far more in length). If they make that space pressurizable, the whole giant thing could be captured, rebuilt at leisure in a spacious pressurized environment over the course of weeks or months, and then released to resume its mission. Hmm, though a pleasantly warm atmosphere would probably destroy the delicate calibration between mirrors that all those sun shields are there to provide the thermal stability to ensure. Still... you *might* be able to find a way to do it, even if it means working in vacuum, but still at least in the enclosed security of the cargo bay.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's a brilliant idea to use a BFS as a satellite refurbishment workshop. All you'd really need is independently pressurizable living quarters and a well-equipped workshop. You could no doubt make the whole thing into a module (or collection of them) that could be quickly mounted in the cargo bay when on a servicing mission.
Hey, I saw the size of those shards - more than enough to see through to navigate the city. Or read a book, though the eye strain would be hideous.
And please sir - one must never acknowledge the existence of "authors" or other such active gods in the universe, nor the constraints of "episode" they impose, lest the power of the "plot device" render all further discussion moot.
The devil's in the details though. Literally in this case. "Nearly identical" is great for taking pictures of local planets creating images dozens or hundeds of pixels across, but when you're trying to photograph other stars or galaxies, which may only constitute a handful of pixels, then that "nearly" identical could show itself in a substantial amount of lost detail.