I remember reading stories about fuel cells for laptops (powered by alcohol) during the first year of Slashdot. And, supposedly, such cells were going to be sold for popular laptop models in "a few months." Twenty or so years later, I'm still waiting.
If a fuel cell idea is still completely, and totally, lab-bound, it is unlikely to become a product in the next 15-20 years or so, if previous progress on the subject is any guide.
Maybe you should inform yourself about the role of people in a product before you give them credit for something.
The inventor of Soylent is most definitely NOT a nutritionist. None of the people on the executive team are nutritionists.
The guy with the big long list of titles you mentioned? The only mention of him on the web page stated confirmed that the macronutrient ratios were of a certain value, and can form the macronutient base for a non-deficient diet. That's it. Notably, it didn't say he did any analysis for adequate micronutrients, bioavailibility, or any of the other things you need to know if you want to claim to sell a complete replacement for solid food.
It's right there on the blog for the official commercial Soylent product: http://blog.soylent.me/ It has a full list of ingredients, along with quantities.
When your recipe talks about adding a small amount of vanillin to "disguise the fishy taste of some of the ingredients", I don't think taste is at the top of your priority list.
And none of the reviews of the stuff have had great things to say about the texture.
Nestle Nutren is actually cheaper than Soylent. You can order Nestle Nutren 2.0 for about $2/can off of Amazon, and four cans (500 kcal) will power you for a day.
The different versions of Nutren have different caloric values, all purporting to provide a full day's nutrition with four cans, because they are targeted towards different populations. As in, a person confined to a hospital bed that can't do anything but drink can have their full day's requirements provided with four cans of 1.0. Somebody who's medical problem means they have a feeding tube, but are otherwise normal individuals, would have four cans of 2.0 dumped down their tube every day.
Yes, I suppose if you go with the bottom-dollar "Poor Man's Recipe", you can save some dough (not enough for me, personally, to choke that down, though.)
I imagine most people would start with the "Beginners's Recipe". It costs $6.59 for 1697 calories. (257 kcal/$). This is right off of the "SoylentMaker" website.
Surprise! Nestle Nutren 2.0, containing everything a human needs, with a taste, texture, and nutrient content that doesn't have any bugs to work out, is 500 calories for $2.15, (232 kcal/$) shipped right off of Amazon. (And I imagine local suppliers that don't have to mail crates of liquid would have it for less.)
If I'm replacing my meal with a liquid, I'll let somebody that knows what they are doing take that task off my hands for a 10% upcharge, thank you very much.
I don't know how they are marketed in Europe, but here in the US, they are sold (and labeled) as "meal-replacement" drinks. They have their own section in the store, separate from the ordinary beverages. In addition, they are developed by either drug companies or special "nutritional" divisions of larger firms. Sure, I'd be hesitant to drink an "all-in-one" developed by, say, Coke. But I think something developed by, say, Nestle Nutritionals, which develops their consumer-marketed products right alongside the ones designed specifically for medical use, should be okay.
(As a fascinating side-note, the logo for Nestle Nutritionals is a mommy bird feeding a baby bird. Given how birds feed their young (by essentially vomiting pre-chewed food), I'm not sure that was the best choice.)
My argument against Soylent is that it is developed by somebody who is not a nutritionist by either experience or training. If a Nutrition PhD student developed this stuff, I'd consider it. If it wasn't nasty glop, I'd consider it (although I'd certainly hesitate to try and live off of it.)
But there's no assurance at all it works as designed, and it's nasty besides. What does it have going for it?
And no, I have nothing whatsoever to do with the nutrition industry; my Slashdot posting history should be proof enough of that.
Go to your local drugstore. Go to the "Nutrition" isle. Purchase Ensure, Boost, Slim-Fast, or one of the store-brand generics. It has a smooth texture (unlike Soylent), a palatable tasted (unlike Soylent), and was developed by people that have some clue what they are doing (unlike Soylent.) If that's not enough calories for you, ask the Pharmacist to order Nutren or a similar product.
These are professionally-developed products that have been in use for years and years. The high-test stuff, such as Nutren, is used for people with feeding tubes (but it is flavored and can be drunk) and they live off this stuff for decades.
I don't understand this. At all. Complete "solid food replacements" have been around since forever. As in, actual nutrition companies that have some clue what they are doing have sold this stuff for people with chewing problems, and for use with feeding tubes, for decades. Some of it even tastes pretty good and has a texture that won't make you gag.
Why the big hubbub about a complete amateur developing a nearly-unpalatable copy of what's already been done? Oh, I forgot! Crowdsourcing! Open Source! If the guy took BitCoins as payment, the Slashdot trifecta would be complete.
This victory is important, and handily demonstrates the impartiality of the circuit court judges involved, and Eugene Volkoh's intestinal fortitude. Why? Chrystal Cox is, to be frank, a horrible person. A nutjob. A known extortionist. The trial that will now take place will be a waste of everyone's time and money (she's going to lose), and it's unlikely the plaintiff's will be able to recover they now-extensive legal costs and the damages they are almost certainly due.
Example: She decided to go on a vendetta against Marc Rendazza (who, ironically, is a well-known civil-liberties attorney)... First, she asked Marc Rendazza to pay for her "reputation management services." When he hold her to take a hike, she got revenge by posting all sorts of utterly made-up horrible things about his 3-year-old daughter.
Make no mistake, when this does go to trial, she's going to lose, and she's going to lose hard. All she won here was an acknowledgement that despite being a horrible person, and despite the fact she's being sued for doing the exact same sort of thing she's done in the past, the defamation has to be proven in a court instead being assumed because she isn't a professional.
Now that the 1st-amendment issues have been settled, will Volkoh now drop her like a hot potato?
On one hand, I can see what the court is getting at here, but in terms of practical effect, it could be ugly. As if we needed more reasons to not trust anything we read on the internet.
I don't know why so many slashdotters are under the impression that the US govt. is somehow trying to avoid "legitimising" BitCoins. I know it's gratifying, in a "Fight The Power" kind of way to think so, but the US govt. has taken absolutely no action whatsoever to regulate their use beyond enforcing the exact same laws on currency trading that anyone moving large amounts of cash has to follow.
No, you aren't going to be paying your taxes in BitCoins ever, but there's no indication it won't be treated like gold bullion is today. BitCoins may get geeks salivating, but they don't create any problems for the govt. that gold doesn't. Or, for that matter, cash. In fact, BitCoins are probably less anonymous than a briefcase full of Benjamins.
I have yet to see a single action by the Feds showing they are treating BitCoins as Choice Two. They are treating BitCoins as choice #1. Which means, like any currency, he has to abide by the laws regarding the trading of currency. This is a very straightforward applicaton of money-laundering laws.
I'll repeat: No currency that routinely fluctuates by several % a day (and occasionally by over 10%) with a 50-basis-point bid-ask spread, is a serious currency. (Not even the stupidest retail currency investor would accept a 0.5% bid-ask spread when trading currency. It's only cheap when you compare it to the currency booth at the airport.)
Yes, relative to other national currencies, the JPY is volatile. Relative to BtCs? The JPY is solid as the proverbial rock.
The costs to hedge BtC exchange rates would be so high (is such a product even available?) that no sane business would ever attempt it. Yes, I supposed you could integrate a real-time feed into the current BtC rate into your pricing engine, add a few %, and let the consumer deal with it, but why bother?
BtC's currently fluctuate like commodities, not currencies.
Far too many people point to the rapid rise in value of BitCoins as a feature, not a bug. They are confusing investment returns with usefulness as a medium of exchange.
Any actual currency that unpredictably changed in value in relation to something you'd actually want to buy (like USD/EUR/etc.) by several % a day All. The. Time. would be considered an economic catastrophe for any economy that relied on said currency. For starters it makes a functioning credit market 100% impossible. You'd have to be out of your mind to borrow or lend money in the things... A lender could end up holding a worthless note, and a borrower could end up with a situation that would make a loan shark look practically free.
This settlement meant that the company had to do NOTHING other than to go forth and sin no more. They did not have to pay a single solitary dime, consent to long-term monitoring, or do anything really, beyond promising they would not continue to do something they unambiguously should never have been doing in the first place.
Is the cord really a big problem when charging an electric car? I mean, I've never felt the need to have a gas pump that would squirt fuel right into the filler neck without using a hose...
I would have thought the biggest stumbling block to widespread charging infrastructure would be the truly ridiculous power feed that would be needed to charge a significant number of cars along long-haul routes.
Off-hand, four programmers for a manufacturing company with 150 employees seems a bit high. Is your current application environment really so inadequate or dynamic that you need four people to keep up with the changes?
But yes, a dedicated Help Desk Tech for day-to-day "box won't boot" problems is cheap and effective.
Wake me up when this has a chance of actually being a viable product. I doubt they can create the thing for a reasonable (non-heavily-subsidized) cost. Given that we are STILL waiting for laptop fuel cells which have been perpetually "around the corner" since literally the Dawn of Slashdot, I'm not holding my breath.
And once you have the car, you need the Hydrogen. There are currently zero economic ways of creating the stuff. You can either crack it off of Hydrocarbons (and if you are going to do that, why not just burn the damn things in a conventional car?) Or you can electrolyze it. Which is tremendously energy-inefficient. And then you have to compress it for storage/transport/delivery, wasting even more energy.
Hydrogen cars make sense if we have bountiful free electricity. Until that happens, electric cars make more sense, and neither will seriously challenge the dominance of the ICE.
This isn't a work of art or something... it's designed, from the ground up, to be a currency. Trying to argue to the IRS that a mined BitCoin isn't a cash-equivalent is not going to end well.
In college (15 years ago), my scientific calculator was a Sharp EL-509 (now succeeded with the EL531; $10 from Amazon) Unlike most scientific calculators, the '509 did order of operations automatically so you didn't have to convert your input into "calculator order" ahead of time. Really, it gave me the most-needed features of a graphing calculator, but in a form-factor that professors always let me use.
For my EE classes, the real benefit was not having to convert between vector and polar coordinates prior to problem input. I could input my problem in whatever coordinate form I had it in without having to go through tedious trig operations, which greatly sped up solving problems during exams (or homework, for that matter). With exams heavy on those conversions, I always finished the tests first.
In other news, the Police also do not need a warrant to attend your public meeting. They don't need a warrant to read the book you published on the rack of the local bookstore. They don't need a warrant to browse around your open store in the local strip mall.
And they don't need a warrant to download data you offered up to any member of the public and browse through it to find incriminating evidence.
If you have an office job "communication" consists of walking down the hallway to ask (or answer) a question instead of sending an e-mail. It means bumping into someone in the hallway and sharing a thorny problem you are working on (or even gloating on how you just came up with a clever solution.) If you have meetings, make sure you actively participate instead of fiddling with your laptop or phone. You spend time shooting (relevant) shit with your co-workers (and spend some time making small talk; that's important too.)
If you work remotely, it means much the same. Call people on the phone instead of doing everything via e-mail. Send out "FYI" notes if you find something the rest of your team should know. Cultivate a reputation as somebody who asks for advice when needed and is helpful in offering advice/education when requested. If you have regular meetings make sure you regularly get yourself on the agenda discussing something you are working on (either to ask for advice on how to solve a problem, or offering information on how you fixed it.) You can also sign yourself up to inform your teammates about things going on outside your team, like other projects, a new architecture coming down the wire, some new tool that's made your job easier, whatever.
If you don't interact with your team, you've rendered yourself into an utterly replaceable cog, that most certainly can (and probably will) be replaced in the future with somebody else who will offer to do the job cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading stories about fuel cells for laptops (powered by alcohol) during the first year of Slashdot. And, supposedly, such cells were going to be sold for popular laptop models in "a few months." Twenty or so years later, I'm still waiting.
If a fuel cell idea is still completely, and totally, lab-bound, it is unlikely to become a product in the next 15-20 years or so, if previous progress on the subject is any guide.
Maybe you should inform yourself about the role of people in a product before you give them credit for something.
The inventor of Soylent is most definitely NOT a nutritionist. None of the people on the executive team are nutritionists.
The guy with the big long list of titles you mentioned? The only mention of him on the web page stated confirmed that the macronutrient ratios were of a certain value, and can form the macronutient base for a non-deficient diet. That's it. Notably, it didn't say he did any analysis for adequate micronutrients, bioavailibility, or any of the other things you need to know if you want to claim to sell a complete replacement for solid food.
It's right there on the blog for the official commercial Soylent product: http://blog.soylent.me/ It has a full list of ingredients, along with quantities.
When your recipe talks about adding a small amount of vanillin to "disguise the fishy taste of some of the ingredients", I don't think taste is at the top of your priority list.
And none of the reviews of the stuff have had great things to say about the texture.
Nestle Nutren is actually cheaper than Soylent. You can order Nestle Nutren 2.0 for about $2/can off of Amazon, and four cans (500 kcal) will power you for a day.
The different versions of Nutren have different caloric values, all purporting to provide a full day's nutrition with four cans, because they are targeted towards different populations. As in, a person confined to a hospital bed that can't do anything but drink can have their full day's requirements provided with four cans of 1.0. Somebody who's medical problem means they have a feeding tube, but are otherwise normal individuals, would have four cans of 2.0 dumped down their tube every day.
Yes, I suppose if you go with the bottom-dollar "Poor Man's Recipe", you can save some dough (not enough for me, personally, to choke that down, though.)
I imagine most people would start with the "Beginners's Recipe". It costs $6.59 for 1697 calories. (257 kcal/$). This is right off of the "SoylentMaker" website.
Surprise! Nestle Nutren 2.0, containing everything a human needs, with a taste, texture, and nutrient content that doesn't have any bugs to work out, is 500 calories for $2.15, (232 kcal/$) shipped right off of Amazon. (And I imagine local suppliers that don't have to mail crates of liquid would have it for less.)
If I'm replacing my meal with a liquid, I'll let somebody that knows what they are doing take that task off my hands for a 10% upcharge, thank you very much.
I don't know how they are marketed in Europe, but here in the US, they are sold (and labeled) as "meal-replacement" drinks. They have their own section in the store, separate from the ordinary beverages. In addition, they are developed by either drug companies or special "nutritional" divisions of larger firms. Sure, I'd be hesitant to drink an "all-in-one" developed by, say, Coke. But I think something developed by, say, Nestle Nutritionals, which develops their consumer-marketed products right alongside the ones designed specifically for medical use, should be okay.
(As a fascinating side-note, the logo for Nestle Nutritionals is a mommy bird feeding a baby bird. Given how birds feed their young (by essentially vomiting pre-chewed food), I'm not sure that was the best choice.)
My argument against Soylent is that it is developed by somebody who is not a nutritionist by either experience or training. If a Nutrition PhD student developed this stuff, I'd consider it. If it wasn't nasty glop, I'd consider it (although I'd certainly hesitate to try and live off of it.)
But there's no assurance at all it works as designed, and it's nasty besides. What does it have going for it?
And no, I have nothing whatsoever to do with the nutrition industry; my Slashdot posting history should be proof enough of that.
Your prostate, which produces the stuff sperm swims around in, does not care how much roughage you get.
You are thinking of the colon; an organ which, cancer or no, always is very concerned about proper roughage.
Go to your local drugstore. Go to the "Nutrition" isle. Purchase Ensure, Boost, Slim-Fast, or one of the store-brand generics. It has a smooth texture (unlike Soylent), a palatable tasted (unlike Soylent), and was developed by people that have some clue what they are doing (unlike Soylent.) If that's not enough calories for you, ask the Pharmacist to order Nutren or a similar product.
These are professionally-developed products that have been in use for years and years. The high-test stuff, such as Nutren, is used for people with feeding tubes (but it is flavored and can be drunk) and they live off this stuff for decades.
I don't understand this. At all. Complete "solid food replacements" have been around since forever. As in, actual nutrition companies that have some clue what they are doing have sold this stuff for people with chewing problems, and for use with feeding tubes, for decades. Some of it even tastes pretty good and has a texture that won't make you gag.
Why the big hubbub about a complete amateur developing a nearly-unpalatable copy of what's already been done? Oh, I forgot! Crowdsourcing! Open Source! If the guy took BitCoins as payment, the Slashdot trifecta would be complete.
This victory is important, and handily demonstrates the impartiality of the circuit court judges involved, and Eugene Volkoh's intestinal fortitude. Why? Chrystal Cox is, to be frank, a horrible person. A nutjob. A known extortionist. The trial that will now take place will be a waste of everyone's time and money (she's going to lose), and it's unlikely the plaintiff's will be able to recover they now-extensive legal costs and the damages they are almost certainly due.
Example: She decided to go on a vendetta against Marc Rendazza (who, ironically, is a well-known civil-liberties attorney)... First, she asked Marc Rendazza to pay for her "reputation management services." When he hold her to take a hike, she got revenge by posting all sorts of utterly made-up horrible things about his 3-year-old daughter.
Make no mistake, when this does go to trial, she's going to lose, and she's going to lose hard. All she won here was an acknowledgement that despite being a horrible person, and despite the fact she's being sued for doing the exact same sort of thing she's done in the past, the defamation has to be proven in a court instead being assumed because she isn't a professional.
Now that the 1st-amendment issues have been settled, will Volkoh now drop her like a hot potato?
On one hand, I can see what the court is getting at here, but in terms of practical effect, it could be ugly. As if we needed more reasons to not trust anything we read on the internet.
I don't know why so many slashdotters are under the impression that the US govt. is somehow trying to avoid "legitimising" BitCoins. I know it's gratifying, in a "Fight The Power" kind of way to think so, but the US govt. has taken absolutely no action whatsoever to regulate their use beyond enforcing the exact same laws on currency trading that anyone moving large amounts of cash has to follow.
No, you aren't going to be paying your taxes in BitCoins ever, but there's no indication it won't be treated like gold bullion is today. BitCoins may get geeks salivating, but they don't create any problems for the govt. that gold doesn't. Or, for that matter, cash. In fact, BitCoins are probably less anonymous than a briefcase full of Benjamins.
I have yet to see a single action by the Feds showing they are treating BitCoins as Choice Two. They are treating BitCoins as choice #1. Which means, like any currency, he has to abide by the laws regarding the trading of currency. This is a very straightforward applicaton of money-laundering laws.
I'll repeat: No currency that routinely fluctuates by several % a day (and occasionally by over 10%) with a 50-basis-point bid-ask spread, is a serious currency. (Not even the stupidest retail currency investor would accept a 0.5% bid-ask spread when trading currency. It's only cheap when you compare it to the currency booth at the airport.)
Yes, relative to other national currencies, the JPY is volatile. Relative to BtCs? The JPY is solid as the proverbial rock.
The costs to hedge BtC exchange rates would be so high (is such a product even available?) that no sane business would ever attempt it. Yes, I supposed you could integrate a real-time feed into the current BtC rate into your pricing engine, add a few %, and let the consumer deal with it, but why bother?
BtC's currently fluctuate like commodities, not currencies.
Far too many people point to the rapid rise in value of BitCoins as a feature, not a bug. They are confusing investment returns with usefulness as a medium of exchange.
Any actual currency that unpredictably changed in value in relation to something you'd actually want to buy (like USD/EUR/etc.) by several % a day All. The. Time. would be considered an economic catastrophe for any economy that relied on said currency. For starters it makes a functioning credit market 100% impossible. You'd have to be out of your mind to borrow or lend money in the things... A lender could end up holding a worthless note, and a borrower could end up with a situation that would make a loan shark look practically free.
This settlement meant that the company had to do NOTHING other than to go forth and sin no more. They did not have to pay a single solitary dime, consent to long-term monitoring, or do anything really, beyond promising they would not continue to do something they unambiguously should never have been doing in the first place.
Yeah, that'll teach 'em!
Is the cord really a big problem when charging an electric car? I mean, I've never felt the need to have a gas pump that would squirt fuel right into the filler neck without using a hose...
I would have thought the biggest stumbling block to widespread charging infrastructure would be the truly ridiculous power feed that would be needed to charge a significant number of cars along long-haul routes.
Off-hand, four programmers for a manufacturing company with 150 employees seems a bit high. Is your current application environment really so inadequate or dynamic that you need four people to keep up with the changes?
But yes, a dedicated Help Desk Tech for day-to-day "box won't boot" problems is cheap and effective.
Wake me up when this has a chance of actually being a viable product. I doubt they can create the thing for a reasonable (non-heavily-subsidized) cost. Given that we are STILL waiting for laptop fuel cells which have been perpetually "around the corner" since literally the Dawn of Slashdot, I'm not holding my breath.
And once you have the car, you need the Hydrogen. There are currently zero economic ways of creating the stuff. You can either crack it off of Hydrocarbons (and if you are going to do that, why not just burn the damn things in a conventional car?) Or you can electrolyze it. Which is tremendously energy-inefficient. And then you have to compress it for storage/transport/delivery, wasting even more energy.
Hydrogen cars make sense if we have bountiful free electricity. Until that happens, electric cars make more sense, and neither will seriously challenge the dominance of the ICE.
This isn't a work of art or something... it's designed, from the ground up, to be a currency. Trying to argue to the IRS that a mined BitCoin isn't a cash-equivalent is not going to end well.
In college (15 years ago), my scientific calculator was a Sharp EL-509 (now succeeded with the EL531; $10 from Amazon) Unlike most scientific calculators, the '509 did order of operations automatically so you didn't have to convert your input into "calculator order" ahead of time. Really, it gave me the most-needed features of a graphing calculator, but in a form-factor that professors always let me use.
For my EE classes, the real benefit was not having to convert between vector and polar coordinates prior to problem input. I could input my problem in whatever coordinate form I had it in without having to go through tedious trig operations, which greatly sped up solving problems during exams (or homework, for that matter). With exams heavy on those conversions, I always finished the tests first.
In other news, the Police also do not need a warrant to attend your public meeting. They don't need a warrant to read the book you published on the rack of the local bookstore. They don't need a warrant to browse around your open store in the local strip mall.
And they don't need a warrant to download data you offered up to any member of the public and browse through it to find incriminating evidence.
If you have an office job "communication" consists of walking down the hallway to ask (or answer) a question instead of sending an e-mail. It means bumping into someone in the hallway and sharing a thorny problem you are working on (or even gloating on how you just came up with a clever solution.) If you have meetings, make sure you actively participate instead of fiddling with your laptop or phone. You spend time shooting (relevant) shit with your co-workers (and spend some time making small talk; that's important too.)
If you work remotely, it means much the same. Call people on the phone instead of doing everything via e-mail. Send out "FYI" notes if you find something the rest of your team should know. Cultivate a reputation as somebody who asks for advice when needed and is helpful in offering advice/education when requested. If you have regular meetings make sure you regularly get yourself on the agenda discussing something you are working on (either to ask for advice on how to solve a problem, or offering information on how you fixed it.) You can also sign yourself up to inform your teammates about things going on outside your team, like other projects, a new architecture coming down the wire, some new tool that's made your job easier, whatever.
If you don't interact with your team, you've rendered yourself into an utterly replaceable cog, that most certainly can (and probably will) be replaced in the future with somebody else who will offer to do the job cheaper.