It's not just space. Everything is like that. Everyone is so focused on making a quick buck that basic research has dropped off to a fraction of what it was. When we finish exploiting all the things people discovered in the 60s and 70s we'll hit a wall.
There was a proposal a few years ago that looked at construction in detail. If you could get an adequate strength material (which is hard enough to make on the ground, making it in orbit is going to be even harder) you don't really need to lift that much of it to get started. I think they were talking about a half dozen shuttle launches or something.
That gets you an elevator with a low lift capability. You use it to lift more cable to make the elevator stronger. Most of the mass of the final tether is lifted efficiently with a space elevator rather than rockets.
Seems like a good opportunity for someone to buy a crabby beach and set up a farm. You could harvest blood all year, and probably cheaper than the catch and release approach. If you did it right you might even be able to use the beach as a beach (for people) and during breeding season convert it into a ecotour destination.
"One last bit of trivia: this isn't really news. I mean, I obviously find it cool, but seriously, 1960 was the discovery."
Who cares. It's clearly stuff that matters, and fits well with the science and technology focus of Slashdot. It's nice to see Slashdot can still post something interesting.
I've found the opposite. People change their instant messengers as soon as they get annoying or something better comes along. And almost everyone has more than one installed so abandoning one isn't a big deal.
Even so, suppose Facebook did convince half a billion people to cough up a dollar a year for WhatsApp. It would take 32 years for it to pay itself back, plus maintenance and operational costs, plus inflation. I can think of a lot better investments than that. A savings account, for example. And do you seriously think we're all still going to be using it in thirty years?
WhatsApp is probably well worth $16 million. Not $16 billion.
It's quite a bit more difficult, yes. If you do it properly, it's not necessarily more error-prone. It's not academic wankery - it has a place where software is both very simple and must perform correctly.
I couldn't find out how many GM models come without OnStar in their base models, but not every GM model even has OnStar as an option. The OnStar site says "Available on over 40 GM models." Despite the conspiracy theories and OnStar's scary terms of (non-) service, it seems unlikely they really maintain a full cell subscription for every vehicle. Ford's Ford Sync system doesn't seem to contain it's own cellular radio at all - it uses your own cell phone. The other manufacturers' non-luxury cars seem to be similar. It's hard to find clear details, but it looks to me like Toyota may have built-in connectivity in Lexus vehicles but the system in Toyota cars requires a smart phone.
The evidence for genetic determination of academic performance is very weak. There's probably an effect, but not much of one. Socio-economic status of the parents is the major statistical factor. However, the intra-individual variance is large, showing that anybody can do well or poorly regardless of predisposing factors.
Driver error. When you're stopped you're supposed to keep the brake down (and the wheels straight). The usual reason is in case someone rear ends you. My car even helps out: if you press the brake all the way down it holds it on until you release it completely.
Sure, most people like to do the creeping forward thing. Most people are poor drivers.
I would be surprised if electronic throttle control isn't considerably safer than mechanical. Having the mechanical throttle actuator freeze wasn't uncommon where I lived a few years ago. You hoped it froze closed, but that wasn't always the case. I've never heard of anyone I know having a problem with an electronic throttle; only a few reports worldwide on the Internet.
An aerospace software engineer will know how to prove correctness. I wouldn't be surprised if the average software developer today didn't know you could do that, never mind knowing how. It's a huge pain in the ass to do for even simple programs. It makes sense if your code is running the flaps on an airplane. Not so much if it's showing vacation pictures to your friends.
I'm not disputing that antibiotics kill gut bacteria. But I don't know that there's any evidence that probiotic supermarket products help replenish it in any meaningful way. Remember that a normal course of antibiotics aren't going to kill everything anyway - the survivors will proliferate of their own accord once the antibiotic is discontinued.
It's possible these products do help. If so, it still seems that dirt would be an even better alternative since the available evidence suggests that variety is very important.
My point is that there's at least as much evidence that dirt (or nothing) works as well as anything you can buy in the supermarket. Note that real Kefir is a dairy product produced by fairly open air fermentation, traditionally in an animal hide bag. It contains a complex mixture of yeast and bacteria, not much like the pasteurized supermarket product with a few selected bacterial strains reintroduced.
There is some preliminary mechanistic evidence, and quite a bit of epidemiological evidence, that the gut microbiome is involved in autoimmune diseases, including MS. There is no evidence that gut bacteria migrating to the brain has anything to do with it, and considerable evidence that this is not the case. The specific causes of MS and other autoimmune diseases are unknown and probably very diverse. It's highly unlikely that a single event such as the stress of a loved one getting sick "trigger" them.
Pigs are fattened with food of all kinds. Should people stop eating food?
The vast majority of doctors aren't scientists, and many believe all sorts of odd things. I'm not saying you're wrong. It is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm not sure anyone has tested it appropriately.
Some potential problems I see are that yoghurt and other "probiotic" cultures tend to be monocultures, or close to it, and have to pass through concentrated stomach acid. There are some good studies that show people exposed to a wider variety of microorganisms have healthier immune systems. Dirt would seem to be a better probiotic supplement than the manufactured stuff. This Kefir stuff seems to only have ten or so bacterial strains in it.
The problem with the phrase "hold people responsible for their actions" is that many people seem to think it means "get revenge on people who we think wronged us." Modern criminal systems focus on rehabilitating criminals, not "punishing" them. Whether or not you're responsible for your actions only has bearing on whether or not you deserve retributive punishment. What you did and the chances of you doing it again are relevant to whether or not you can be allowed to run around unsupervised. Your gut made you kill and eat those people? Fine, we can try to look for treatments to help rehabilitate you, but as long as we don't have those you're still danger to society and need to be locked up.
The article describes heating the filament to set it, stretching it back out, then heating it again to contract. Fly fisherman (and kids with hairdryers) only do the first part. In the paper they describe:
A coiled nylon 6,6 muscle delivered over 1 million cycles during periodic actuation at 1 Hz (Fig. 3B), raising and lowering a 10-g weight producing 22 MPa of nominal stress. This actuation was powered by applying a 30 V/cm square-wave potential (normalized to coil length) at a 20% duty cycle. Although the coiled fiber did experience creep (inset of Fig. 3B), this creep was below 2% over the 1.2 million investigated cycles, stroke amplitude was negligibly affected, and the creep rate decreased with cycling.
It does indeed cycle. Reasonably quickly and a lot of times. The article also describes some applications they've successfully built, including automatic window openers that would require multiple cycles.
Actually, a lot of artificial muscles use heat. The heat is often provided by running an electric current. You could do the same with these. Electric heating wires for contraction, liquid cooling capillaries for relaxation.
Yup. I remember when GMail was invite only. Everyone HAD to have it, even when invites got ridiculously easy to get. Marketing genius. But what would you expect from the world's largest and most successful advertising company?
Reading the comments, it sounds like Glass is in a similar position. Anyone who "applies" will get an invitation to be an exclusive previewer, at the low, low price of $1500. Wouldn't it be be hilarious if Google announced they were cancelling the program after the preview purchases start to drop off?
When someone finally makes LCD contacts work I'll be seriously interested, just for the display. I'm not really interested in a low resolution display on a giant pair of glasses for the price of a flight to the other side of the world though.
I'm sure Ford does know everything about their richer customers. The millions who drive the cheapest econobox they can buy on credit? Doubt it. OnStar isn't even available in all GM vehicles, never mind installed and active by default.
Tesla builds luxury cars for rich people. Putting in a cellular radio and paying the subscription fee to keep it active is trivial compared to the margin on the car.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just space. Everything is like that. Everyone is so focused on making a quick buck that basic research has dropped off to a fraction of what it was. When we finish exploiting all the things people discovered in the 60s and 70s we'll hit a wall.
There was a proposal a few years ago that looked at construction in detail. If you could get an adequate strength material (which is hard enough to make on the ground, making it in orbit is going to be even harder) you don't really need to lift that much of it to get started. I think they were talking about a half dozen shuttle launches or something.
That gets you an elevator with a low lift capability. You use it to lift more cable to make the elevator stronger. Most of the mass of the final tether is lifted efficiently with a space elevator rather than rockets.
Don't work for a major corporation hey?
Seems like a good opportunity for someone to buy a crabby beach and set up a farm. You could harvest blood all year, and probably cheaper than the catch and release approach. If you did it right you might even be able to use the beach as a beach (for people) and during breeding season convert it into a ecotour destination.
"One last bit of trivia: this isn't really news. I mean, I obviously find it cool, but seriously, 1960 was the discovery."
Who cares. It's clearly stuff that matters, and fits well with the science and technology focus of Slashdot. It's nice to see Slashdot can still post something interesting.
It seems to me that "postmodern technology" would by definition be science fiction.
I've found the opposite. People change their instant messengers as soon as they get annoying or something better comes along. And almost everyone has more than one installed so abandoning one isn't a big deal.
Even so, suppose Facebook did convince half a billion people to cough up a dollar a year for WhatsApp. It would take 32 years for it to pay itself back, plus maintenance and operational costs, plus inflation. I can think of a lot better investments than that. A savings account, for example. And do you seriously think we're all still going to be using it in thirty years?
WhatsApp is probably well worth $16 million. Not $16 billion.
It's quite a bit more difficult, yes. If you do it properly, it's not necessarily more error-prone. It's not academic wankery - it has a place where software is both very simple and must perform correctly.
I couldn't find out how many GM models come without OnStar in their base models, but not every GM model even has OnStar as an option. The OnStar site says "Available on over 40 GM models." Despite the conspiracy theories and OnStar's scary terms of (non-) service, it seems unlikely they really maintain a full cell subscription for every vehicle. Ford's Ford Sync system doesn't seem to contain it's own cellular radio at all - it uses your own cell phone. The other manufacturers' non-luxury cars seem to be similar. It's hard to find clear details, but it looks to me like Toyota may have built-in connectivity in Lexus vehicles but the system in Toyota cars requires a smart phone.
The evidence for genetic determination of academic performance is very weak. There's probably an effect, but not much of one. Socio-economic status of the parents is the major statistical factor. However, the intra-individual variance is large, showing that anybody can do well or poorly regardless of predisposing factors.
Driver error. When you're stopped you're supposed to keep the brake down (and the wheels straight). The usual reason is in case someone rear ends you. My car even helps out: if you press the brake all the way down it holds it on until you release it completely.
Sure, most people like to do the creeping forward thing. Most people are poor drivers.
I would be surprised if electronic throttle control isn't considerably safer than mechanical. Having the mechanical throttle actuator freeze wasn't uncommon where I lived a few years ago. You hoped it froze closed, but that wasn't always the case. I've never heard of anyone I know having a problem with an electronic throttle; only a few reports worldwide on the Internet.
Most people know about that stop because that's how you listen to the radio while you're waiting for your wife/girlfriend/whatever to finish shopping.
An aerospace software engineer will know how to prove correctness. I wouldn't be surprised if the average software developer today didn't know you could do that, never mind knowing how. It's a huge pain in the ass to do for even simple programs. It makes sense if your code is running the flaps on an airplane. Not so much if it's showing vacation pictures to your friends.
I'm not disputing that antibiotics kill gut bacteria. But I don't know that there's any evidence that probiotic supermarket products help replenish it in any meaningful way. Remember that a normal course of antibiotics aren't going to kill everything anyway - the survivors will proliferate of their own accord once the antibiotic is discontinued.
It's possible these products do help. If so, it still seems that dirt would be an even better alternative since the available evidence suggests that variety is very important.
My point is that there's at least as much evidence that dirt (or nothing) works as well as anything you can buy in the supermarket. Note that real Kefir is a dairy product produced by fairly open air fermentation, traditionally in an animal hide bag. It contains a complex mixture of yeast and bacteria, not much like the pasteurized supermarket product with a few selected bacterial strains reintroduced.
There is some preliminary mechanistic evidence, and quite a bit of epidemiological evidence, that the gut microbiome is involved in autoimmune diseases, including MS. There is no evidence that gut bacteria migrating to the brain has anything to do with it, and considerable evidence that this is not the case. The specific causes of MS and other autoimmune diseases are unknown and probably very diverse. It's highly unlikely that a single event such as the stress of a loved one getting sick "trigger" them.
Pigs are fattened with food of all kinds. Should people stop eating food?
The vast majority of doctors aren't scientists, and many believe all sorts of odd things. I'm not saying you're wrong. It is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm not sure anyone has tested it appropriately.
Some potential problems I see are that yoghurt and other "probiotic" cultures tend to be monocultures, or close to it, and have to pass through concentrated stomach acid. There are some good studies that show people exposed to a wider variety of microorganisms have healthier immune systems. Dirt would seem to be a better probiotic supplement than the manufactured stuff. This Kefir stuff seems to only have ten or so bacterial strains in it.
The problem with the phrase "hold people responsible for their actions" is that many people seem to think it means "get revenge on people who we think wronged us." Modern criminal systems focus on rehabilitating criminals, not "punishing" them. Whether or not you're responsible for your actions only has bearing on whether or not you deserve retributive punishment. What you did and the chances of you doing it again are relevant to whether or not you can be allowed to run around unsupervised. Your gut made you kill and eat those people? Fine, we can try to look for treatments to help rehabilitate you, but as long as we don't have those you're still danger to society and need to be locked up.
The article describes heating the filament to set it, stretching it back out, then heating it again to contract. Fly fisherman (and kids with hairdryers) only do the first part. In the paper they describe:
It does indeed cycle. Reasonably quickly and a lot of times. The article also describes some applications they've successfully built, including automatic window openers that would require multiple cycles.
Actually, a lot of artificial muscles use heat. The heat is often provided by running an electric current. You could do the same with these. Electric heating wires for contraction, liquid cooling capillaries for relaxation.
Heating plastic to make it shrink or hold a new shape isn't new. Getting it to cycle from shrunken to unshrunken and back is.
Yup. I remember when GMail was invite only. Everyone HAD to have it, even when invites got ridiculously easy to get. Marketing genius. But what would you expect from the world's largest and most successful advertising company?
Reading the comments, it sounds like Glass is in a similar position. Anyone who "applies" will get an invitation to be an exclusive previewer, at the low, low price of $1500. Wouldn't it be be hilarious if Google announced they were cancelling the program after the preview purchases start to drop off?
When someone finally makes LCD contacts work I'll be seriously interested, just for the display. I'm not really interested in a low resolution display on a giant pair of glasses for the price of a flight to the other side of the world though.
I'm sure Ford does know everything about their richer customers. The millions who drive the cheapest econobox they can buy on credit? Doubt it. OnStar isn't even available in all GM vehicles, never mind installed and active by default.
I do. They didn't get over the air updates either.
Tesla builds luxury cars for rich people. Putting in a cellular radio and paying the subscription fee to keep it active is trivial compared to the margin on the car.