No there is a point here, ideally plastic doesn't make it to ocean, but when(not if) it does then sinking is better than swimming. Floating plastic stays in food-chain forever, stuff that sinks gets eventually covered in sediment and becomes a head scratcher for future geologists. Deep water also shields from UV degradation and reduces the micro-plastic problem and then there is the benefit that it doesn't float half way around the planet.
Not an ideal solution perhaps, but it would improve the situation.
Half a dollar gives you a fancy looking one, if you go for cheapo ones you are looking at maybe 10-20 cents as long as you buy thousands of them. The cost comes from having to wash the damn cutlery.
Don't be ridiculous, in most cases there are bunch of alternatives. Humanity has gotten along without plastic for almost all of history. Little known fact - in soviet union they were really, really bad at making plastic stuff. There was very little of it and what existed had horrible material quality compared to modern plastics we are used to. Plastic packaging basically didn't exist. That was mere 30 years ago and they got along with life basically ok, well, maybe not ok, but the problems in soviet union had little to do with lack of plastics.
Plastic is often cheaper or more convenient solution, but it's exceedingly rare for it to be only solution.
Sort of, kind of, but not really. All the various plastics sum together into very complex mix of chemicals quite far from being completely inert. Plastics are not quite what it says on the tin, there is a whole lot more to it than just the main polymer that is indeed generally quite inert for biology. There are plasticizers, color dies, flame retardants and a whole host of other additives to fine tune the material characteristics. Normally that is not a problem for food safety, it's all locked in the material, but in the environment plastic is broken into fine powder by mechanical means and through UV degradation, surface area of the material increases a lot and the additives become exposed. At that point you cannot say anymore that plastic is biologically inert.
Now, you could say that it's a cost you are willing to live with and that is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that you have disgusting litter all over the world, everywhere. Plastic will never go away, but we are using much more than we need to and we dump a lot of it in places we really shouldn't. If people could rub two braincells together and not dump their garbage all over the place, perhaps we wouldn't have to make such regulations. But people are idiots so here we are.
Wrong, 'interaction' or 'disengagement' means that safety driver took control for any reason whatsoever, doesn't mean crash would have or even might have happened, but it's an easy thing to measure. Considering that Waymo is about to take the safety drivers out in Phoenix, its a good bet the things are not crashing every few thousand miles.
Estonia is hardly the aryan dreamland you imagine it to be, we have our own poor, minorities, criminals, drunkards, drug addicts and homeless like anywhere else. What I'm saying is that such a scheme is not doomed to fail from the start just because of social problems, if the local situation is properly taken into account it can be made to work. Problems are for solving not for whining.
Homeless shelters on wheels, decreasing quality, running out of money... all things that were expected when this was implemented in Tallinn. None of that actually happened, it worked out great. Buses are on time, go pretty much everywhere and are as clean as ever, it totally works. Mind you, this scheme was cooked up by a political party I otherwise despise, I guess even a blind man hits a bulls-eye every now and then. Of course, its not free as air, its just payed out of your taxes, but as far as use of your taxes go - it's a pretty good one.
You need to keep in mind that setting aside who pays for it, public transportation is just cheaper than a car in every way. You need less infrastructure and roads are expensive, a bus just takes less room than equivalent amount of cars, on roads and on parking lots. A bus itself is cheaper than equivalent number of cars, as Estonia has to import both, public transport is good for import/export balance. Buses use less fuel per passenger than cars, again something you don't need to import as much. And the improved air quality is worth something too.
From state perspective, more public transport is a very good thing and if done right its pretty convenient for a citizen too. You can look at it as extra tax on car owners, not a very big tax at that.
Why yes, yes they should be news even if normal crashes get ignored. The entire premise of self driving tech is that you get a failure condition and a crash, the problem gets fixed and it never again fails the same way.
Media coverage is one of the things that enforces that. With news articles out, the companies will make much more of an effort to fix the problems and that is a good thing. And if a company fails to fix a problem and the same type of crashes keep happening again and again, that too is important information to get out to the public.
Given that future of space tech directly depends on cost of getting stuff up there, any self respecting nerd should care about it. Or maybe you don't give two shits about space, but then why are you on/. to begin with?
Being around a loaded rocket is inherently risky business. But if you have to be there, then surely your personal escape capsule is the safest place to be. Astronauts on the way to loaded rocket and ground crews wouldn't be so fortunately equipped. Rocket might blow up during propellant loading, but it might also do that any time after it's loaded, say while the astronauts are climbing in.
The link shows a lot of things, vid in SCMP article shows quite a few different things. Someone is using artistic interpretation on how it actually played out.
https://youtu.be/YQK6_2Brnqk?t...
There are two versions, one the company released and a composition of recordings from the crowd SCMP released. You could say there is a bit of a disparity there. Almost as if company doctored it's footage, quite a bit.
They use western names for talking with westerners and its a good thing they do, Chinese names just don't work for non-Chinese, nobody can remember the damn things. And if they write them the way they are meant to be written - with Chinese characters, well forget about it. I work with Chinese a lot, it's a really good thing that most have sense to choose an additional western name for themselves. The rest... well they end up getting called by some variant of "hey you" because for the life of me I just can't keep the Chinese names straight and in half the cases I can't pronounce them properly to start with. Well, they can't pronounce my name any better, but at least they don't seem to have problems with remembering what my name is, so that's ok.
You idiot, post soviet countries have highest literacy rates in the world, education is the one of the few things CCCP was actually really good at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Similar stuff is being done fairly often, changing currency, alphabet, state language, measurement system, what have you. "It's hard" is a stupid excuse, changing is no harder than using the suboptimal standard forever to come. A lot of difficulty now is always outweighed by little difficulty forever to come. If it's clear that new system is better way to do things, then you switch and that's all there is to it.
If any western government tried something like this, every single citizen and their dog would know about it. I've asked some locals in China about it, none of them had a clue about what I was talking about.
Nope, it will take your outdated junk break it apart and sort it out into piles of higher grade electronics junk. Watch the vid somewhere down in the comments, it doesn't exactly extract components intact for instant reuse in manufacturing. It's more like recycling a TV, plastic this way, metal that way, pcb-s in a pile over yonder, leaded glass shipped to third world country to get rid of the headache.
Well sorta, but in their defense AI type systems seem to be very versatile as far as hammers go and we certainly haven't found every application they can do. Chucking AI at any random problem might not get you the best of all possible solutions, but in many cases it can give you a solution nobody has tried before, well worth the experiment.
Quit pretending that consumer electronics will last forever, sometimes a phone breaks and is not worth repairing anymore or nobody wants to buy the piece of outdated junk off you anymore. This is better than a landfill no matter how you look at it.
Robots come in all shapes and sizes, no need to discriminate. You know some people only count something as a robot if it has humanoid shape and mechanical looks, if it can do anything autonomously or if it's just a statue doesn't even matter to some people.
By the way, does anyone recognize what the manufacturer is for these 6 axis and scara arms?
1 in 3 humans get cancer, late in life. That is an important distinction. There are very few animals that are biologically immortal, all other animals die of cancer if they manage to avoid getting eaten, injured or sick for their entire life. Cancer is a symptom of abnormally long life expectancy in humans, not of commies fluoridating our precious bodily fluids.
It's not just appeal to ignorance, "radiation = cancer" ignorant overreaction is the very basis of the suspicion that radio signals might have something to do with cancer. Without it there is no reason to even suspect there might be a any link between radio signals and cancer. But the masses keep making noise, so scientists keep revisiting the problem over and over, out of thousands of studies there are going to be some false positives that media then happily cherry picks, completely ignoring 99% of studies that come up with "no link found". This is just another one of those, give me mechanism or overwhelming evidence or gtfo. There is not going to be overwhelming evidence, pretty much entire human population uses cellphones and there is no signal to be seen in cancer rates, zilch, nicht, nada. If there is any kind of effect it's extremely minor, so you better come up with a mechanism for that extremely minor effect before you have any kind of chance of showing it's actually true.
Slashdot Mirror
No there is a point here, ideally plastic doesn't make it to ocean, but when(not if) it does then sinking is better than swimming. Floating plastic stays in food-chain forever, stuff that sinks gets eventually covered in sediment and becomes a head scratcher for future geologists. Deep water also shields from UV degradation and reduces the micro-plastic problem and then there is the benefit that it doesn't float half way around the planet.
Not an ideal solution perhaps, but it would improve the situation.
Half a dollar gives you a fancy looking one, if you go for cheapo ones you are looking at maybe 10-20 cents as long as you buy thousands of them. The cost comes from having to wash the damn cutlery.
Don't be ridiculous, in most cases there are bunch of alternatives. Humanity has gotten along without plastic for almost all of history. Little known fact - in soviet union they were really, really bad at making plastic stuff. There was very little of it and what existed had horrible material quality compared to modern plastics we are used to. Plastic packaging basically didn't exist. That was mere 30 years ago and they got along with life basically ok, well, maybe not ok, but the problems in soviet union had little to do with lack of plastics.
Plastic is often cheaper or more convenient solution, but it's exceedingly rare for it to be only solution.
Sort of, kind of, but not really. All the various plastics sum together into very complex mix of chemicals quite far from being completely inert. Plastics are not quite what it says on the tin, there is a whole lot more to it than just the main polymer that is indeed generally quite inert for biology. There are plasticizers, color dies, flame retardants and a whole host of other additives to fine tune the material characteristics. Normally that is not a problem for food safety, it's all locked in the material, but in the environment plastic is broken into fine powder by mechanical means and through UV degradation, surface area of the material increases a lot and the additives become exposed. At that point you cannot say anymore that plastic is biologically inert.
Now, you could say that it's a cost you are willing to live with and that is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that you have disgusting litter all over the world, everywhere. Plastic will never go away, but we are using much more than we need to and we dump a lot of it in places we really shouldn't. If people could rub two braincells together and not dump their garbage all over the place, perhaps we wouldn't have to make such regulations. But people are idiots so here we are.
Wrong, 'interaction' or 'disengagement' means that safety driver took control for any reason whatsoever, doesn't mean crash would have or even might have happened, but it's an easy thing to measure. Considering that Waymo is about to take the safety drivers out in Phoenix, its a good bet the things are not crashing every few thousand miles.
Estonia is hardly the aryan dreamland you imagine it to be, we have our own poor, minorities, criminals, drunkards, drug addicts and homeless like anywhere else. What I'm saying is that such a scheme is not doomed to fail from the start just because of social problems, if the local situation is properly taken into account it can be made to work. Problems are for solving not for whining.
Homeless shelters on wheels, decreasing quality, running out of money... all things that were expected when this was implemented in Tallinn. None of that actually happened, it worked out great. Buses are on time, go pretty much everywhere and are as clean as ever, it totally works. Mind you, this scheme was cooked up by a political party I otherwise despise, I guess even a blind man hits a bulls-eye every now and then. Of course, its not free as air, its just payed out of your taxes, but as far as use of your taxes go - it's a pretty good one.
You need to keep in mind that setting aside who pays for it, public transportation is just cheaper than a car in every way. You need less infrastructure and roads are expensive, a bus just takes less room than equivalent amount of cars, on roads and on parking lots. A bus itself is cheaper than equivalent number of cars, as Estonia has to import both, public transport is good for import/export balance. Buses use less fuel per passenger than cars, again something you don't need to import as much. And the improved air quality is worth something too.
From state perspective, more public transport is a very good thing and if done right its pretty convenient for a citizen too. You can look at it as extra tax on car owners, not a very big tax at that.
Why yes, yes they should be news even if normal crashes get ignored. The entire premise of self driving tech is that you get a failure condition and a crash, the problem gets fixed and it never again fails the same way.
Media coverage is one of the things that enforces that. With news articles out, the companies will make much more of an effort to fix the problems and that is a good thing. And if a company fails to fix a problem and the same type of crashes keep happening again and again, that too is important information to get out to the public.
Given that future of space tech directly depends on cost of getting stuff up there, any self respecting nerd should care about it. Or maybe you don't give two shits about space, but then why are you on /. to begin with?
Being around a loaded rocket is inherently risky business. But if you have to be there, then surely your personal escape capsule is the safest place to be. Astronauts on the way to loaded rocket and ground crews wouldn't be so fortunately equipped. Rocket might blow up during propellant loading, but it might also do that any time after it's loaded, say while the astronauts are climbing in.
Half the Guinness records are for stuff like longest toenail or whatnot. They don't care if a record is stupid, they just record it.
The link shows a lot of things, vid in SCMP article shows quite a few different things. Someone is using artistic interpretation on how it actually played out. https://youtu.be/YQK6_2Brnqk?t...
There are two versions, one the company released and a composition of recordings from the crowd SCMP released. You could say there is a bit of a disparity there. Almost as if company doctored it's footage, quite a bit.
They use western names for talking with westerners and its a good thing they do, Chinese names just don't work for non-Chinese, nobody can remember the damn things. And if they write them the way they are meant to be written - with Chinese characters, well forget about it. I work with Chinese a lot, it's a really good thing that most have sense to choose an additional western name for themselves. The rest... well they end up getting called by some variant of "hey you" because for the life of me I just can't keep the Chinese names straight and in half the cases I can't pronounce them properly to start with. Well, they can't pronounce my name any better, but at least they don't seem to have problems with remembering what my name is, so that's ok.
Eh? What are these people smoking, just use the damn watt for power output.
You idiot, post soviet countries have highest literacy rates in the world, education is the one of the few things CCCP was actually really good at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Similar stuff is being done fairly often, changing currency, alphabet, state language, measurement system, what have you. "It's hard" is a stupid excuse, changing is no harder than using the suboptimal standard forever to come. A lot of difficulty now is always outweighed by little difficulty forever to come. If it's clear that new system is better way to do things, then you switch and that's all there is to it.
If any western government tried something like this, every single citizen and their dog would know about it. I've asked some locals in China about it, none of them had a clue about what I was talking about.
Nope, it will take your outdated junk break it apart and sort it out into piles of higher grade electronics junk. Watch the vid somewhere down in the comments, it doesn't exactly extract components intact for instant reuse in manufacturing. It's more like recycling a TV, plastic this way, metal that way, pcb-s in a pile over yonder, leaded glass shipped to third world country to get rid of the headache.
Well sorta, but in their defense AI type systems seem to be very versatile as far as hammers go and we certainly haven't found every application they can do. Chucking AI at any random problem might not get you the best of all possible solutions, but in many cases it can give you a solution nobody has tried before, well worth the experiment.
Quit pretending that consumer electronics will last forever, sometimes a phone breaks and is not worth repairing anymore or nobody wants to buy the piece of outdated junk off you anymore. This is better than a landfill no matter how you look at it.
Robots come in all shapes and sizes, no need to discriminate. You know some people only count something as a robot if it has humanoid shape and mechanical looks, if it can do anything autonomously or if it's just a statue doesn't even matter to some people.
By the way, does anyone recognize what the manufacturer is for these 6 axis and scara arms?
The beatings will resume until morale improves!
1 in 3 humans get cancer, late in life. That is an important distinction. There are very few animals that are biologically immortal, all other animals die of cancer if they manage to avoid getting eaten, injured or sick for their entire life. Cancer is a symptom of abnormally long life expectancy in humans, not of commies fluoridating our precious bodily fluids.
It's not just appeal to ignorance, "radiation = cancer" ignorant overreaction is the very basis of the suspicion that radio signals might have something to do with cancer. Without it there is no reason to even suspect there might be a any link between radio signals and cancer. But the masses keep making noise, so scientists keep revisiting the problem over and over, out of thousands of studies there are going to be some false positives that media then happily cherry picks, completely ignoring 99% of studies that come up with "no link found". This is just another one of those, give me mechanism or overwhelming evidence or gtfo. There is not going to be overwhelming evidence, pretty much entire human population uses cellphones and there is no signal to be seen in cancer rates, zilch, nicht, nada. If there is any kind of effect it's extremely minor, so you better come up with a mechanism for that extremely minor effect before you have any kind of chance of showing it's actually true.