Young kids tend to love the built in camera, especially using it with the Photobooth application. The Grandparents love video-chat with the grandkids. Everybody in-between in age thinks it's a waste of money.
I've used the built-in camera in my Macbook exactly once so far.
In the proposal, they state that they assume viable organisms are occasionally transferred between the planets on meteors. We only find one kind of life here on earth, the DNA-based kind. Since they assume that organisms can be occasionally transferred between Earth and Mars, if there is life on Mars, chances are it's DNA-based. Because either life developed on Mars and transferred here, or life developed here and tranferred there.
They're looking for a particular gene, which is found in all known life on Earth.
The gene that has changed the least over the past 3-4 billion years is the 16S (or the related eukaryotic 18S) ribosomal RNA gene. Ribosomal RNAs are the main structural and catalytic components of the ribosome, a molecular machine that translates RNA into proteins (8,9).
It is the slow rate of change of the 16S gene that makes it the best detector of life. Within the ~1500 nucleotides of the 16S gene, there are multiple 15 to 20 nucleotide segments that are exactly the same in all known organisms (8). These regions of the 16S gene are essential for its catalytic activity and have remained unchanged over billions of years (8).
That's all just so much Genetics gibberish to me, but they also explicitly state in the proposal that they're working under the assumption that meteor impacts have transferred life between Earth and Mars in the past, and therefore, there is likely to be a hereditary relationship between Earth and Mars life. Based on those two assumptions, it seems like a reasonable experiment to perform.
The Long Now Foundation exists to encourage "long term thinking". Projects like this one (and the clock) aren't supposed to be valuable, in themselves. They're mostly intended to inspire people to try to preserve the present for the future.
If reading about this project causes a bunch of people to have the reaction - "That's not the right way to do it! What you really want to do is...", then it's accomplishing its purpose. THey'd like nothing more than for there to be dozens of competing projects to preserve current culture and knowledge for future generations.
Not that I don't agree with most of your points, but one benefit of non-removable batteries is that the consumer won't try to replace the battery with one that's not the right specification. There have been several reports of mobile phones catching fire due to the use of off-spec 3rd-party batteries.
Also, removable batteries can be potentially damaged or shorted when they're left to rattle around loose in a briefcase or a drawer.
The battery in the video is roughly 10 times the size of the iPod Nano battery, it's being charged by a "dumb" charger at more than twice the recommended rate, and it doesn't have any of the safety features that are built into battery packs from reputable suppliers (or it would have stopped charging immediately).
They don't mention it in the video, but it's likely that the battery in the laptop used metal-encased Li-ion cells. The iPod family (and other handhelp products) use Li-polymer batteries, where the outside enclosure is made from soft plastic. I've seen a couple of this sort of battery "pop", up close and personal, and they really don't explode like that.
Some battery manufacturers use the term "venting gas, with flame" to describe what happens when the battery goes into thermal runaway. Euphemism though that may be, it's actually a really good description of what happens. The battery first swells to comical (or frightening) proportions as the envelope fills with vapor, then one corner or edge opens up, and hot gasses (and occasionally flame) squirt out in that direction.
The materials that the battery is made out of are mostly self-extinguishing, so the only real fire threat is if the flame jet hits something really flammable, like a newspaper, or thin cloth.
The problem with these bottle bombs is that it's difficult to predict when the pressure in the bottle will get high enouigh to burst it, and when it does burst, it sprays caustic chemicals everywhere. If you want to do something like this, stick to the Dry Ice and water variant. At least with those, the worst you're likely to get is a bad cut from flying plastic, rather than a full-body chemical burn.
The funny thing about labor markets is if one employer gets away with abusive practices, especially a prominent one, pretty soon they all do it to compete
This particular abuse (classifying low-level employees as "exempt" management employees, and pressuring them to work unpaid overtime) is very common among software/hardware companies. I don't know anyone in the software industry that hasn't had a job where they were rated "exempt", but didn't have any management responsibility, or any real independent control of how they performed their job functions.
On the other side of the coin, I've never known anybody to be fired for simply working their 40 hours and then leaving. In most companies, it doesn't even get noticed. I'm sure it does happen that people get fired for not working long enough hours, but I'd bet it's fairly rare. A certain amount of pressure is applied, and since everybody else is doing it, it's hard to say no.
A class-action lawsuit is really not the right solution to this problem, though - it's only going to make a bunch of lawyers very rich. Better enforcement of the existing labor laws might be a good place to start. Failing that, it might be time for the tech support workers of the world to organize.
One neat thing about the Portal puzzles is that some of them can be solved in multiple ways. Watching someone else defeat the turrets in the most unlikely way imaginable was highly entertaining.
Back before we all got LCD monitors, where each pixel in the graphics system directly corresponds to a triplet of RGB cells on the display, there was this device known as a Cathode Ray Tube display, where the grid of light-emitting elements on the display didn't have any relationship to the grid of pixels in the graphics system.
In fact, several popular CRT designs used a triangular arrangement of phosphor dots. There were also striped displays, and staggered stripes, and possibly a few other variants.
As long as the individual light-emitting cells are at a higher pitch than the graphics system's pixel grid, there isn't any particular need for them to be in the same arrangement.
It's like a newtonian telescope, in that there's a big mirror with a clear spot in the middle, and a smaller mirror in front of it, facing the other way. This gives a similar folded light path as what you see in those telescopes. the field of view of an optical system is related to the focal length of the various lenses and mirrors (and the focal length of your eye's lens, but this system is mounted "the other way around", so your eye doesn't enter into it).
The focal length of the system, in this case, is going to be about 2x the distance between the two plates of glass in the display, so very short. That should give a good wide field of view. They ought to be able to tune it by changing the thickness of the active layer.
As you mentioned, the energy levels are just way too low to have much of an effect on tissue. This is presumably why study after study shows that there's no link between cell phone use and cancer...
What's your brother's qualification to determine what "dangerous" levels of RF from a phone are? In particular, what makes him MORE qualified than the FCC, FDA and other government agencies that set maximum transmit power levels for mobile phones?
I found a reference at Lego.uk (I've since lost it) that claims that the dies are precise to 0.005 mm. It's reasonable to assume that plastic shrinkage at least doubles that. Still, it's *way* more precise than anything else in the toy aisle.
If you buy the cheaper competition, you'll quickly see how much Lego's focus on Quality Assurance matters. It's not unusual for the cheaper knock-offs to have a few bricks in each set that simply don't connect at all to the others.
And those are all from the same batch - I doubt that year-to-year, or decade-to-decade, compatibility is even on the roadmap for those products.
1. They're expensive because they are built to a much higher level of quality than is typical for injection-molded plastic toys.
Have you ever seen a defective Lego brick? Or heard of a set with a missing piece? A lot of work (and expense) goes into avoiding that. Hence all the automation - if they had humans doing all that work, Lego would be even more expensive.
The bricks themselves are little marvels of engineering - they use extremely heavy, multi-piece molds, and sophisticated molding machines to keep the dimensional tolerances to within (IIRC).001 mm.
2. They're expensive because they're very durable.
Despite the relative cheapness of the plastic material itself, you can easily find Lego that's 30 years old, has been played with by dozens (or hundreds) of kids, snapped together and apart thousands of times, and still functions perfectly.
Given that they basically don't wear out, Lego bricks are priced higher than they would be if they were intended to be replaced from year to year.
3. They're expensive because people are willing to pay for them.
As a result of #1 and #2 above, Lego has a well-deserved reputation for quality. Despite plenty of lower-priced competition, Lego continues to sell well.
You can even buy bricks that are inter-operable with Lego for literally 1/10th the price, and they still don't out-sell the real thing. Why? Because they're simply not made as well - they don't stick together or come apart as well as Lego bricks, and they aren't nearly as sturdy.
Even as an 8-year-old, I noticed that the knock-off blocks were not worth building anything out of, and quickly separated them from my "real" Legos.
Guitar Hero! Build a robot that plays Guitar Hero (yes, by actually watching the TV and physically manipulating the guitar). You'll get practice in machine vision, compensating for the variable delays in the screen-to-sensor-to-actuator-to-guitar links, and to finance the project, you can sell saved games with 100% perfect on every song:-)
Work out a novel locomotion technique We've seen wheeled, tracked, and legged robots. Flying robots and swimming robots are coming along. And then there was the snake-bot. But there are a number of other locomotion techniques in nature that haven't been reduced to practice yet, as far as I know. Elastic jumping, like a Flea uses, would be one. Or maybe brachiation, like the tree-dwelling primates. I've never seen a robot that burrows through the ground, but that'd probably be a useful tool, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_locomotion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_locomotion
There really can't be any debate about this. Whether you think Socialist/Communist are pejorative terms or not, they definitely fit here. The GNU project (and the FSF, by extension) are founded on a set of explicit Communist principles.
In the ideal GNU world, all software would be given away for free to anyone who needed it, and programmers would donate their time and effort out of the the sheer joy of doing useful work. The anti-commercial bias of the FSF and other "free software" advocates is completely out in the open.
First, it's a "manifesto" - that's, like, 10 bonus communism points right there. It also makes references to "solidarity", "comrades", and various other well-worn Communist catch phrases.
I don't think a do-it yourself digital back for your old camera is a very realistic project, unless you're an experienced Analog & Digital electronics designer. Kodak used to have a pretty nice demo board for their CMOS imager chips, which was about as "plug and play" as you could hope for, but I haven't seen anything for their higher-end CCD sensors...
That probably means they'll have one for the 50MP version soon(ish). Reading the documents on that page should give you an idea of the level of work involved.
According to the diagram in the article, the Larrabee has 8 GDDR memory interfaces, which will supply rather a lot of bandwidth. Presumably, those are GDDR4 or GDDR5 interfaces, so that's 4.5 Gb/s * 8 = 4.5 GB/s bandwidth.
Getting data onto and off the board will still be a challenge - you're limited by PCI Express transfers.
First, Atom is much more complex than P54C. I found a source that claims an Atom has approximately 47 million transistors, and someone previously posted that the P54C core was more like 3 million transistors. Granted, more of those transistors are used for cache on the Atom than on the P54C, but it's still 15 times the size.
The Atom also has a bunch more architectural baggage that wouldn't be applicable to Larrabee's intended use. I doubt that Larrabee will need to support 32 and 64-bit modes, or three varieties of SSE, or enhanced virtualization whatsits.
Obviously they're not just going to slap a bunch of Pentium cores on there and call it good. But the high-level design can probably start off with the P54, and just rip out stuff that doesn't need to be supported, possibly including:
Scalar floating-point, 16-bit protected mode, real mode, operand size overrides, segment registers, the whole v86 mode, the i/o address space, BCD arithmetic, virtual memory, interrupts, #LOCK, etc, etc.
Once you've done that, you'll have a much simpler model to synthesize down to an implementation. And with a slightly-modified compiler spec, you can crank out code for it with existing compilers, like ICC and GCC.
I'm not saying that someone couldn't build a safe, economical breeder reactor. I was just saying that breeder reactors don't make economic sense in the US, because of the reprocessing issue, and that the earlier breeder reactors weren't particularly safe.
As far as I know, there aren't any intrinsically-safe reactor designs ready for commercial use.
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Young kids tend to love the built in camera, especially using it with the Photobooth application. The Grandparents love video-chat with the grandkids. Everybody in-between in age thinks it's a waste of money.
I've used the built-in camera in my Macbook exactly once so far.
In the proposal, they state that they assume viable organisms are occasionally transferred between the planets on meteors. We only find one kind of life here on earth, the DNA-based kind. Since they assume that organisms can be occasionally transferred between Earth and Mars, if there is life on Mars, chances are it's DNA-based. Because either life developed on Mars and transferred here, or life developed here and tranferred there.
They're looking for a particular gene, which is found in all known life on Earth.
That's all just so much Genetics gibberish to me, but they also explicitly state in the proposal that they're working under the assumption that meteor impacts have transferred life between Earth and Mars in the past, and therefore, there is likely to be a hereditary relationship between Earth and Mars life. Based on those two assumptions, it seems like a reasonable experiment to perform.
The Long Now Foundation exists to encourage "long term thinking". Projects like this one (and the clock) aren't supposed to be valuable, in themselves. They're mostly intended to inspire people to try to preserve the present for the future.
If reading about this project causes a bunch of people to have the reaction - "That's not the right way to do it! What you really want to do is...", then it's accomplishing its purpose. THey'd like nothing more than for there to be dozens of competing projects to preserve current culture and knowledge for future generations.
Not that I don't agree with most of your points, but one benefit of non-removable batteries is that the consumer won't try to replace the battery with one that's not the right specification. There have been several reports of mobile phones catching fire due to the use of off-spec 3rd-party batteries.
Also, removable batteries can be potentially damaged or shorted when they're left to rattle around loose in a briefcase or a drawer.
The battery in the video is roughly 10 times the size of the iPod Nano battery, it's being charged by a "dumb" charger at more than twice the recommended rate, and it doesn't have any of the safety features that are built into battery packs from reputable suppliers (or it would have stopped charging immediately).
They don't mention it in the video, but it's likely that the battery in the laptop used metal-encased Li-ion cells. The iPod family (and other handhelp products) use Li-polymer batteries, where the outside enclosure is made from soft plastic. I've seen a couple of this sort of battery "pop", up close and personal, and they really don't explode like that.
Some battery manufacturers use the term "venting gas, with flame" to describe what happens when the battery goes into thermal runaway. Euphemism though that may be, it's actually a really good description of what happens. The battery first swells to comical (or frightening) proportions as the envelope fills with vapor, then one corner or edge opens up, and hot gasses (and occasionally flame) squirt out in that direction.
The materials that the battery is made out of are mostly self-extinguishing, so the only real fire threat is if the flame jet hits something really flammable, like a newspaper, or thin cloth.
The problem with these bottle bombs is that it's difficult to predict when the pressure in the bottle will get high enouigh to burst it, and when it does burst, it sprays caustic chemicals everywhere. If you want to do something like this, stick to the Dry Ice and water variant. At least with those, the worst you're likely to get is a bad cut from flying plastic, rather than a full-body chemical burn.
Oh, and remember to wear eye protection. Always.
This particular abuse (classifying low-level employees as "exempt" management employees, and pressuring them to work unpaid overtime) is very common among software/hardware companies. I don't know anyone in the software industry that hasn't had a job where they were rated "exempt", but didn't have any management responsibility, or any real independent control of how they performed their job functions.
On the other side of the coin, I've never known anybody to be fired for simply working their 40 hours and then leaving. In most companies, it doesn't even get noticed. I'm sure it does happen that people get fired for not working long enough hours, but I'd bet it's fairly rare. A certain amount of pressure is applied, and since everybody else is doing it, it's hard to say no.
A class-action lawsuit is really not the right solution to this problem, though - it's only going to make a bunch of lawyers very rich. Better enforcement of the existing labor laws might be a good place to start. Failing that, it might be time for the tech support workers of the world to organize.
One neat thing about the Portal puzzles is that some of them can be solved in multiple ways. Watching someone else defeat the turrets in the most unlikely way imaginable was highly entertaining.
Back before we all got LCD monitors, where each pixel in the graphics system directly corresponds to a triplet of RGB cells on the display, there was this device known as a Cathode Ray Tube display, where the grid of light-emitting elements on the display didn't have any relationship to the grid of pixels in the graphics system.
In fact, several popular CRT designs used a triangular arrangement of phosphor dots. There were also striped displays, and staggered stripes, and possibly a few other variants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask
As long as the individual light-emitting cells are at a higher pitch than the graphics system's pixel grid, there isn't any particular need for them to be in the same arrangement.
It's like a newtonian telescope, in that there's a big mirror with a clear spot in the middle, and a smaller mirror in front of it, facing the other way. This gives a similar folded light path as what you see in those telescopes. the field of view of an optical system is related to the focal length of the various lenses and mirrors (and the focal length of your eye's lens, but this system is mounted "the other way around", so your eye doesn't enter into it).
The focal length of the system, in this case, is going to be about 2x the distance between the two plates of glass in the display, so very short. That should give a good wide field of view. They ought to be able to tune it by changing the thickness of the active layer.
As you mentioned, the energy levels are just way too low to have much of an effect on tissue. This is presumably why study after study shows that there's no link between cell phone use and cancer...
What's your brother's qualification to determine what "dangerous" levels of RF from a phone are? In particular, what makes him MORE qualified than the FCC, FDA and other government agencies that set maximum transmit power levels for mobile phones?
I found a reference at Lego.uk (I've since lost it) that claims that the dies are precise to 0.005 mm. It's reasonable to assume that plastic shrinkage at least doubles that. Still, it's *way* more precise than anything else in the toy aisle.
If you buy the cheaper competition, you'll quickly see how much Lego's focus on Quality Assurance matters. It's not unusual for the cheaper knock-offs to have a few bricks in each set that simply don't connect at all to the others.
And those are all from the same batch - I doubt that year-to-year, or decade-to-decade, compatibility is even on the roadmap for those products.
1. They're expensive because they are built to a much higher level of quality than is typical for injection-molded plastic toys.
Have you ever seen a defective Lego brick? Or heard of a set with a missing piece? A lot of work (and expense) goes into avoiding that. Hence all the automation - if they had humans doing all that work, Lego would be even more expensive.
The bricks themselves are little marvels of engineering - they use extremely heavy, multi-piece molds, and sophisticated molding machines to keep the dimensional tolerances to within (IIRC) .001 mm.
2. They're expensive because they're very durable.
Despite the relative cheapness of the plastic material itself, you can easily find Lego that's 30 years old, has been played with by dozens (or hundreds) of kids, snapped together and apart thousands of times, and still functions perfectly.
Given that they basically don't wear out, Lego bricks are priced higher than they would be if they were intended to be replaced from year to year.
3. They're expensive because people are willing to pay for them.
As a result of #1 and #2 above, Lego has a well-deserved reputation for quality. Despite plenty of lower-priced competition, Lego continues to sell well.
You can even buy bricks that are inter-operable with Lego for literally 1/10th the price, and they still don't out-sell the real thing. Why? Because they're simply not made as well - they don't stick together or come apart as well as Lego bricks, and they aren't nearly as sturdy.
Even as an 8-year-old, I noticed that the knock-off blocks were not worth building anything out of, and quickly separated them from my "real" Legos.
1. "Mimetic Polyalloy" is techno-gibberish from the Terminator movies.
2. "The "Fields Medal" and "Fields Metal" have nothing to do with each other.
Guitar Hero! :-)
Build a robot that plays Guitar Hero (yes, by actually watching the TV and physically manipulating the guitar). You'll get practice in machine vision, compensating for the variable delays in the screen-to-sensor-to-actuator-to-guitar links, and to finance the project, you can sell saved games with 100% perfect on every song
Work out a novel locomotion technique
We've seen wheeled, tracked, and legged robots. Flying robots and swimming robots are coming along. And then there was the snake-bot. But there are a number of other locomotion techniques in nature that haven't been reduced to practice yet, as far as I know. Elastic jumping, like a Flea uses, would be one. Or maybe brachiation, like the tree-dwelling primates. I've never seen a robot that burrows through the ground, but that'd probably be a useful tool, actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_locomotion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_locomotion
There really can't be any debate about this. Whether you think Socialist/Communist are pejorative terms or not, they definitely fit here. The GNU project (and the FSF, by extension) are founded on a set of explicit Communist principles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_need
In the ideal GNU world, all software would be given away for free to anyone who needed it, and programmers would donate their time and effort out of the the sheer joy of doing useful work. The anti-commercial bias of the FSF and other "free software" advocates is completely out in the open.
Seriously, have you even read the GNU Manifesto?
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
First, it's a "manifesto" - that's, like, 10 bonus communism points right there. It also makes references to "solidarity", "comrades", and various other well-worn Communist catch phrases.
Or this essay:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/my_doom.html
Where RMS compares working on proprietary software to lying under oath, or committing murder (really!).
I don't think a do-it yourself digital back for your old camera is a very realistic project, unless you're an experienced Analog & Digital electronics designer. Kodak used to have a pretty nice demo board for their CMOS imager chips, which was about as "plug and play" as you could hope for, but I haven't seen anything for their higher-end CCD sensors...
Actually, they do have an evaluation board listed for the previous version of this sensor:
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/business/ISS/Products/Fullframe/KAF-39000/support.jhtml?pq-path=11937/11938/12138/12249/12265
That probably means they'll have one for the 50MP version soon(ish). Reading the documents on that page should give you an idea of the level of work involved.
According to the diagram in the article, the Larrabee has 8 GDDR memory interfaces, which will supply rather a lot of bandwidth. Presumably, those are GDDR4 or GDDR5 interfaces, so that's 4.5 Gb/s * 8 = 4.5 GB/s bandwidth.
Getting data onto and off the board will still be a challenge - you're limited by PCI Express transfers.
First, Atom is much more complex than P54C. I found a source that claims an Atom has approximately 47 million transistors, and someone previously posted that the P54C core was more like 3 million transistors. Granted, more of those transistors are used for cache on the Atom than on the P54C, but it's still 15 times the size.
The Atom also has a bunch more architectural baggage that wouldn't be applicable to Larrabee's intended use. I doubt that Larrabee will need to support 32 and 64-bit modes, or three varieties of SSE, or enhanced virtualization whatsits.
Obviously they're not just going to slap a bunch of Pentium cores on there and call it good. But the high-level design can probably start off with the P54, and just rip out stuff that doesn't need to be supported, possibly including:
Scalar floating-point, 16-bit protected mode, real mode, operand size overrides, segment registers, the whole v86 mode, the i/o address space, BCD arithmetic, virtual memory, interrupts, #LOCK, etc, etc.
Once you've done that, you'll have a much simpler model to synthesize down to an implementation. And with a slightly-modified compiler spec, you can crank out code for it with existing compilers, like ICC and GCC.
I'm not saying that someone couldn't build a safe, economical breeder reactor. I was just saying that breeder reactors don't make economic sense in the US, because of the reprocessing issue, and that the earlier breeder reactors weren't particularly safe.
As far as I know, there aren't any intrinsically-safe reactor designs ready for commercial use.