I have bad metal allergies (sensitivity). The cheap metal on the back of my watches made my skin break out. So when I got my SW, the same thing happened.
Next time, why not try a layer of nail polish on the back of the watch? And if you want to go all out, you can do the bezel and side as well, in your choice of colors.
A true smartwatch would provide both in addition to time based on UTC. I find it amazing that a purely mechanical watch, albeit those that cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars can do both (provided you set the cams inside for proper longitude and latitude) but a watch with a computer inside that can do these calculations is unavailable.
Or just buy 3 $10-dollar watches, and save almost 99.99% of your money.
On TV I saw the young dad from Parenthood talk to his wife via his Samsung smartwatch while he was climbing around on the roof of his house working on christmas decorations. Fortunately he didn't have to hold a smartphone to talk to his wife, so he could grab something to keep him from falling if he needed to.
For me, having a smartwatch allows the government and their corporate overlords monitor me more consistently than my smartphone or computer.
Ask anyone who's ever been pocket-dialed - you don't need to hold a smart phone to talk to people.
commonly leave it sitting on a table or something in the CR, so I then have to either have someone bring it to me
Use it so that if you get too far from your phone, it makes your phone ring so you'll remember to take it with you. And as a way to find your phone when you can't find it.
Umm, air pressure is only an issue if you open the door - which you wouldn't want to do on Venus anyway, unless you want to die of carbon dioxide poisioning.
Unlike needing a full pressure suit, think scuba gear and a protective layer. The temperature at 52km is a bit chilly at 13C / 55F, but it is in many respects a lot more hospitable than a space station in orbit.
Meanwhile the atmosphere offers plenty of CO2 and some nitrogen, but no hydrogen aside from the paltry amount in the 25ppm water vapor,
The clouds are made of sulfur dioxide - (SO2) which produces a sulfuric acid rain (H2SO4). So, mining that rain gives you H2O, or O2 and H2. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen, you can safely use H2 as your lifting gas, and not have the leakage problems that using monatomic helium gives.
which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.
But that's no longer true when you can increase production and lower labour at the same time, and everyone else in the supply chain is doing the same.
At some point, the surplus labour cannot be retrained to do "new" jobs because those jobs either already have a surplus of labour, or no longer exist, or they exist, but they're also automated.
At that point, "retraining programs" are just make-work projects (not to say that they mostly aren't already).
The more machines steal our jobs from us, the less we have to work and the more we can spend out time doing fun stuff. Isn't that what automatisation is all about anyway?
That would work if the "less work" was split evenly among everyone who wanted to work - then they would have the money to do fun stuff in their free time.
That hasn't happened. Productivity has doubled in the last 40 years, but real wages are stagnant, and the average work week hasn't gone down for those who work.
The worst part is that this trend is going to accelerate in the future, and more technology won't "fix" that.
The one thing overlooked wrt self-driving cars and other pervasive automation is that they will reduce demand for themselves as well. Who needs (or can afford) a self-driving car if they've semi-permanently become jobless through automation, and it's cheaper to take a self-driving taxi once in a while?
And who needs the office? The "virtual office" with "virtual secretaries", "virtual bookkeepers", "virtual sales staff", "virtual everything" will just be bits on a server somewhere. So all the associated jobs that kept that office tower running will cease to exist as well, so even less demand for self-driving cars to get to and from work.
That leads to the lessening of value of "prime office real estate," and all the knock-on effects that will have. So those robotic floor cleaners that did the office tower floors are now out of a job as well. Ditto the cafeteria robots, the toilet cleaning robots, etc., until those prime office towers are converted to - guess what - slum housing.
And since everything will be within walking distance, none of those "city-dwellers" will need self-driving cars, even if they could afford them.
May as well, for all we should care. No skin off our back. But Fidel is unlikely to last that much longer, and this sort of regimes tend to change dramatically with each new Dear Leader.
Yeah, he got succeeded by his brother. Wonder what is it about Commie countries nowadays? They started off by overthrowing monarchies wherever they could find them - Russia, Egypt, Libya, and so on. Nowadays, every surviving Communist country has de facto dynasties - North Korea, Cuba, Syria. If only the Romanovs had known and maneuvered to take over the Communist party, they may have saved themselves from getting massacred.
George H. W. Bush, George Bush, and now Jeb Bush trying for the job. No de facto dynasty there:-)
The problem is that as aging is not a disease anti-aging pills are not medicines and are much easier to put on the market. I'm not sure whether aging should be seen as a disease or not by the legislators, but at least it would put an end to these scams.
First definition of disease:
a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury.
And yay, it shall come to pass that scientists will no longer interest themselves in saving lives and making the world a better place and shall instead devote their attention to preventing hair loss and prolonging erections... and delaying the effects of aging, "leaving your skin feeling visibly younger."
Doesn't match the facts. They were looking for ways to have less internal scarring on major blood vessels, and now their first product will be to treat lupus.
Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when your body's immune system attacks your own tissues and organs. Inflammation caused by lupus can affect many different body systems — including your joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain, heart and lungs.
Lupus can be difficult to diagnose because its signs and symptoms often mimic those of other ailments. The most distinctive sign of lupus — a facial rash that resembles the wings of a butterfly unfolding across both cheeks — occurs in many but not all cases of lupus.
Some people are born with a tendency toward developing lupus, which may be triggered by infections, certain drugs or even sunlight. While there's no cure for lupus, treatments can help control symptoms.
Or deploy it at a slightly higher (or even lower) price and eat the competition alive. So, when the patents expire, who's left standing? And that gives you lots of money to spend on further research to improve the product, as well as the biggest marketing budget.
If you want to do manned flights, orbital stations have a few problems. There's the lack of air pressure, lack of anything exceeding microgravity, and extremes of heat and cold at the same time. Also, in orbit it's not possible to tap the sulfuric acid clouds to get the essentials - water, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Plus there is reason to believe that microbial life of some sort exists in the clouds.
Okay, a fundamental question then... What's the mission?
I don't see a mission for humans hovering over Venus. This isn't like a possible geology excavation on Mars where it might actually be easier if humans are on-site to direct or operate machines for specific applications.
I believe that humans should go explore space, but I also believe that with only finite resources and commitment to doing it, the effort should be focused on places where humans can actually be boots-on-the-ground to rove, to explore.
If it's floating above the clouds, it would be the ideal solar observation post. Gravity almost like earth, temperature tolerable.
As to why to do it, think of our increased dependence on communications networks. Would be nice to have a better understanding and earlier predictability of solar events that can take the networks down.
When you wrote "Most advances in medicine for the elderly don't let them live longer so much as they improve quality of life in their remaining years" you stated something that is easily disproved.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that mortality rates began to decline within the older ages. Research for more recent periods shows a surprising and continuing improvement in life expectancy among those aged 80 or above.
The progressive increase in survival in these oldest age groups was not anticipated by demographers, and it raises questions about how high the average life expectancy can realistically rise and about the potential length of the human lifespan. While some experts assume that life expectancy must be approaching an upper limit, data on life expectancies between 1840 and 2007 show a steady increase averaging about three months of life per year. The country with the highest average life expectancy has varied over time. In 1840 it was Sweden and today it is Japan—but the pattern is strikingly similar. So far there is little evidence that life expectancy has stopped rising even in Japan.
Older people are living longer. It's a trend that has been going on for a century. This has nothing to do with reduced infant mortality, since we're talking specifically about aging within the population that is 80 years old and more.
I have mod points, but when I read comments there are no drop down lists for me to comment.
They only appear after I've commented, on that thread, at which point I'm no longer able to moderate that thread.
Very annoying, any way to get the moderation options to always show up?
Just go to another story and spend your mod points there.
Slashdot Mirror
I have bad metal allergies (sensitivity). The cheap metal on the back of my watches made my skin break out. So when I got my SW, the same thing happened.
Next time, why not try a layer of nail polish on the back of the watch? And if you want to go all out, you can do the bezel and side as well, in your choice of colors.
A true smartwatch would provide both in addition to time based on UTC. I find it amazing that a purely mechanical watch, albeit those that cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars can do both (provided you set the cams inside for proper longitude and latitude) but a watch with a computer inside that can do these calculations is unavailable.
Or just buy 3 $10-dollar watches, and save almost 99.99% of your money.
What can I do with a smart watch?
Do you really want /.ers to answer that ??? The most popular response will be like in real life - something about the sun not shining.
On TV I saw the young dad from Parenthood talk to his wife via his Samsung smartwatch while he was climbing around on the roof of his house working on christmas decorations. Fortunately he didn't have to hold a smartphone to talk to his wife, so he could grab something to keep him from falling if he needed to.
For me, having a smartwatch allows the government and their corporate overlords monitor me more consistently than my smartphone or computer.
Ask anyone who's ever been pocket-dialed - you don't need to hold a smart phone to talk to people.
commonly leave it sitting on a table or something in the CR, so I then have to either have someone bring it to me
Use it so that if you get too far from your phone, it makes your phone ring so you'll remember to take it with you. And as a way to find your phone when you can't find it.
Direct-to-video with huge sales.
Umm, air pressure is only an issue if you open the door - which you wouldn't want to do on Venus anyway, unless you want to die of carbon dioxide poisioning.
Unlike needing a full pressure suit, think scuba gear and a protective layer. The temperature at 52km is a bit chilly at 13C / 55F, but it is in many respects a lot more hospitable than a space station in orbit.
Meanwhile the atmosphere offers plenty of CO2 and some nitrogen, but no hydrogen aside from the paltry amount in the 25ppm water vapor,
The clouds are made of sulfur dioxide - (SO2) which produces a sulfuric acid rain (H2SO4). So, mining that rain gives you H2O, or O2 and H2. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen, you can safely use H2 as your lifting gas, and not have the leakage problems that using monatomic helium gives.
Or you can look here.
which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.
But that's no longer true when you can increase production and lower labour at the same time, and everyone else in the supply chain is doing the same.
At some point, the surplus labour cannot be retrained to do "new" jobs because those jobs either already have a surplus of labour, or no longer exist, or they exist, but they're also automated.
At that point, "retraining programs" are just make-work projects (not to say that they mostly aren't already).
The more machines steal our jobs from us, the less we have to work and the more we can spend out time doing fun stuff. Isn't that what automatisation is all about anyway?
That would work if the "less work" was split evenly among everyone who wanted to work - then they would have the money to do fun stuff in their free time.
That hasn't happened. Productivity has doubled in the last 40 years, but real wages are stagnant, and the average work week hasn't gone down for those who work.
The worst part is that this trend is going to accelerate in the future, and more technology won't "fix" that.
The one thing overlooked wrt self-driving cars and other pervasive automation is that they will reduce demand for themselves as well. Who needs (or can afford) a self-driving car if they've semi-permanently become jobless through automation, and it's cheaper to take a self-driving taxi once in a while?
And who needs the office? The "virtual office" with "virtual secretaries", "virtual bookkeepers", "virtual sales staff", "virtual everything" will just be bits on a server somewhere. So all the associated jobs that kept that office tower running will cease to exist as well, so even less demand for self-driving cars to get to and from work.
That leads to the lessening of value of "prime office real estate," and all the knock-on effects that will have. So those robotic floor cleaners that did the office tower floors are now out of a job as well. Ditto the cafeteria robots, the toilet cleaning robots, etc., until those prime office towers are converted to - guess what - slum housing.
And since everything will be within walking distance, none of those "city-dwellers" will need self-driving cars, even if they could afford them.
Perhaps in utopia having a job allows you to have more children and live in a bigger home.
Isn't that what we've had for the last few hundred years?
May as well, for all we should care. No skin off our back. But Fidel is unlikely to last that much longer, and this sort of regimes tend to change dramatically with each new Dear Leader.
Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008.
Yeah, he got succeeded by his brother. Wonder what is it about Commie countries nowadays? They started off by overthrowing monarchies wherever they could find them - Russia, Egypt, Libya, and so on. Nowadays, every surviving Communist country has de facto dynasties - North Korea, Cuba, Syria. If only the Romanovs had known and maneuvered to take over the Communist party, they may have saved themselves from getting massacred.
George H. W. Bush, George Bush, and now Jeb Bush trying for the job. No de facto dynasty there :-)
The problem is that as aging is not a disease anti-aging pills are not medicines and are much easier to put on the market. I'm not sure whether aging should be seen as a disease or not by the legislators, but at least it would put an end to these scams.
First definition of disease:
a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury.
Aging IS a disease, and a fatal one at that.
+1
"immortal, sunlight-fearing vampires"
Actually, with this, the vampires wouldn't fear sunlight any more.
And yay, it shall come to pass that scientists will no longer interest themselves in saving lives and making the world a better place and shall instead devote their attention to preventing hair loss and prolonging erections... and delaying the effects of aging, "leaving your skin feeling visibly younger."
Doesn't match the facts. They were looking for ways to have less internal scarring on major blood vessels, and now their first product will be to treat lupus.
Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when your body's immune system attacks your own tissues and organs. Inflammation caused by lupus can affect many different body systems — including your joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain, heart and lungs.
Lupus can be difficult to diagnose because its signs and symptoms often mimic those of other ailments. The most distinctive sign of lupus — a facial rash that resembles the wings of a butterfly unfolding across both cheeks — occurs in many but not all cases of lupus.
Some people are born with a tendency toward developing lupus, which may be triggered by infections, certain drugs or even sunlight. While there's no cure for lupus, treatments can help control symptoms.
There's more ... lots more.
Or deploy it at a slightly higher (or even lower) price and eat the competition alive. So, when the patents expire, who's left standing? And that gives you lots of money to spend on further research to improve the product, as well as the biggest marketing budget.
If you want to do manned flights, orbital stations have a few problems. There's the lack of air pressure, lack of anything exceeding microgravity, and extremes of heat and cold at the same time. Also, in orbit it's not possible to tap the sulfuric acid clouds to get the essentials - water, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Plus there is reason to believe that microbial life of some sort exists in the clouds.
Other than being half the distance from the sun ?
Not as close as Venus. And by that logic, we should cancel all Mars missions until the existing ones fail.
I guess they don't know history so well. AlterNIC could easily return under such a scenario.
Are you using slashdot classic or BETA?
Okay, a fundamental question then... What's the mission?
I don't see a mission for humans hovering over Venus. This isn't like a possible geology excavation on Mars where it might actually be easier if humans are on-site to direct or operate machines for specific applications.
I believe that humans should go explore space, but I also believe that with only finite resources and commitment to doing it, the effort should be focused on places where humans can actually be boots-on-the-ground to rove, to explore.
If it's floating above the clouds, it would be the ideal solar observation post. Gravity almost like earth, temperature tolerable.
As to why to do it, think of our increased dependence on communications networks. Would be nice to have a better understanding and earlier predictability of solar events that can take the networks down.
When you wrote "Most advances in medicine for the elderly don't let them live longer so much as they improve quality of life in their remaining years" you stated something that is easily disproved.
The old are living longer than ever before.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that mortality rates began to decline within the older ages. Research for more recent periods shows a surprising and continuing improvement in life expectancy among those aged 80 or above.
The progressive increase in survival in these oldest age groups was not anticipated by demographers, and it raises questions about how high the average life expectancy can realistically rise and about the potential length of the human lifespan. While some experts assume that life expectancy must be approaching an upper limit, data on life expectancies between 1840 and 2007 show a steady increase averaging about three months of life per year. The country with the highest average life expectancy has varied over time. In 1840 it was Sweden and today it is Japan—but the pattern is strikingly similar. So far there is little evidence that life expectancy has stopped rising even in Japan.
Older people are living longer. It's a trend that has been going on for a century. This has nothing to do with reduced infant mortality, since we're talking specifically about aging within the population that is 80 years old and more.
I have mod points, but when I read comments there are no drop down lists for me to comment. They only appear after I've commented, on that thread, at which point I'm no longer able to moderate that thread. Very annoying, any way to get the moderation options to always show up?
Just go to another story and spend your mod points there.