If we can get Honda or Toyota to field a robot - Toyota's iWalk springs to mind as a platform - we would have enough entrants for a straight-up double-elimination tournament. Hell, if they're not too beat-to-hell after two fights, everyone fights everyone and we see which matchups go which ways.
As the designer notes in an earlier interview, earlier models had wider hips and a different torso shape, with a more bio-inspired, "automotive" design. Range of motion questions, as well as seasickness caused by the robot's swaying gait, caused them to remodel the joints until the machine's proportions bear an uncanny resemblance to Cameron's AMP suits. The designer of the real one praises Cameron and his team's vision and engineering acumen. While it wasn't designed by looking at Avatar's mecha, it represents a case where there was some convergent evolution during the design process.
Nonplussed has two meanings. I tripped on this last week.
nonplussed |nänplst| (also nonplused)
adjective
1 (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react: he would be completely nonplussed and embarrassed at the idea.
2 North American informal (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.
The hacker news discussions on this post took off. I just want to emphasize that this post is not a complaint. I’m not whining over this. I’m just showing some interesting side-effects of my email in the license text. I actually find these emails interesting, sometimes charming and they help me connect to the reality many people experience out there.
Actually, Bussard's polywell fusion would work great in space, considering that the enormous vacuum chamber a test reactor would require would be unnecessary, and so long as your radiators can dissipate all the waste heat, you could build some kind of space-cruiser ship without much in the way of launches by launching the magnetic coils in an IKEA-style "flat-pack" configuration, and unpacking them on orbit.
It's still "hot" fusion, but the only technical hurdle to this is scaling it up to critical volume is expensive, if you need to do it where there's air. Small scale test reactors work, and work reliably, and are even used as neutron sources sometimes - but power is proportional to the square of volume or something, and there's a critical volume where any smaller reactor cannot possibly reach break-even.
If the Rossi E-Cat works* - whether it generates energy is important, not the physical process through which it does - you could build a very compact, fast spacecraft with Roger Shawyer's superconducting, second-generation thruster which is supposed to generate (according to IBTimes) "produce thrust many orders of magnitude greater than that observed by Eagleworks" with an implication that it operates at the same power level. In that case, we now have a rather compelling power-to-thrust ratio, and our choice of electric power sources with Russian sodium-cooled satellite fission-reactors as a backstop if none of the lower-mass fusion reactors are ready in time.
*(I'm not going to rule it out - but I'm not going to hold my breath, either.)
"Making sense" is a generic statement which is expected to be understood within the given context.
Except it was not understood within given context. What made sense is, the results did not fit the null hypothesis, and probably didn't fit H1, either. (Null: No thrust detected beyond a threshold of 80 watts of photon pressure. H1: Anomalous thrust generated proportional to input power, exceeding photon pressure.) This is just the scientists saying, "We can't yet rule this out as a crank. Please send more money."
I fear you've misstated the Oberth effect by conflating it with rockets' efficiency at speed. The Oberth effect says you can get more thrust out of a unit of fuel by leaving it with less residual potential energy, by depositing it deeper within a body's gravity well. This coincidentally happens to be at the fastest point of a gravity assist.
Also, you leave out an interesting tangent, which is that rockets' maximum achievable speed is related to exhaust velocity. At this point, the rocket is accelerating the fuel away such that the fuel is at a standstill relative to an observer. To go faster with the same exhaust velocity, the fuel would end up chasing the rocket, which is a physical impossibility according to currently accepted laws of physics.
My money, and the money of every other physicist I know, is on the latter.
This could be true and still leave us with a useful space drive. Perhaps the device is generating an enormous plume of WIMPs, like maybe an enormous plume of neutrinos?
Maybe we should point the thruster at a neutrino detector and see if it lights up. If so, we may have a modulated neutrino source useful for communicating with submarines in two directions. ELF transmitters are huge, and receivers fit on a ship. Neutrino receivers are huge, and transmitters fit on a ship.
I don't see how you get from "power = energy ÷ time" (or, alternately, "energy = power * time") to your equation. Can you fill me in? It's been a while since college physics.
Charging "what the market will bear" isn't, if immediately after you agree to pay for a product or service you go bankrupt and/or homeless as a result of buying the product or service. 'Course, when the alternative is a quick/slow unpleasant death under hospital/hospice care that ends up costing the same... not much alternative there, either. Really, the only cheap option is euthanasia, and we're not willing, as a society, to go there yet. Another cheap option would be to allow end-of-life pain management at home in a DIY environment. Not like you're going to give yourself the wrong morphine dose, or misplace a vial, right?
For what it's worth, Apple's 2007-vintage Macs were like that. When I upgraded to a 2009 model, the battery was above 90% health five years on when the CPU shat the bed.
Actually, it's usually because of economies of scale making both guns and ammo expensive. With only one source of cartridges and no reloading supplies, who's going to make the second electrically primed.308? And with only one rare gun shooting it, who's going to retool a production line to make electrically primed ammunition or primers?
Somebody's got to give people a real, significant advantage to make people buy into a new ammunition ecosystem. Metal Storm's MAUL may - only two moving parts, the trigger and the buckshot, extremely light... but people are shy about getting stuck with useless hardware for want of consumables, so...we'll see.
Done correctly, electronic guns can reduce points of failure, not increase them. You’re still going to want to use lithium primary batteries, or some kind of float charger in your gun safe, but after 10 years unmaintained, conventional firearms are a little less reliable than they used to be, too.
To complicate your calculus further, what if the tactical response by armed robbers to smartguns is the practice of quickly killing their victims before a smartgun can unlock itself? This could have the effect of making every single mugging more deadly, not just those involving a defender with a smartgun.
Not the webpage documenting the perjury in front of congress - and while I can’t find the best presentation of these facts, I did find this here:
This was the final salvo in the battle for control of America’s paper production. Randolph Hearst the newspaper and lumber baron, reportedly feared a major loss of revenues and aligned with his son-in-law Harry Anslinger, an opportunistic minor government official. Anslinger hated Mexicans and blacks, and demonized cannabis as “marijuana”—a denigrating reference to its Hispanic name.
He rallied support against this “marijuana” drug being imported from Mexico and the Caribbean, so that many of the legislators who voted for his bill did not realize that they were criminalizing the hemp plant grown in their own gardens and communities. To strengthen support, Anslinger and his cronies suborned perjury to the US Congress about the American Medical Association (AMA) position. In 1937, the AMA actually opposed Prohibition, regarding cannabis as a safe drug.[4]
Yeah, and EMV actually has inadequate protection against cloning, because it has inadequate standards for the use of the chip [arxiv.org], and “some EMV implementers have merely used counters, timestamps or home-grown algorithms to supply” the nonce for the transaction. That does require a compromised reader, but you don’t have to compromise the reader itself, only its communications channel. This can often be done from outside a building.
And if you don’t trust your logistics chain - PS, you shouldn’t - you might crack open a terminal and find a burner cellphone inside that’s MitMing every single credit card transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
If we can get Honda or Toyota to field a robot - Toyota's iWalk springs to mind as a platform - we would have enough entrants for a straight-up double-elimination tournament. Hell, if they're not too beat-to-hell after two fights, everyone fights everyone and we see which matchups go which ways.
As the designer notes in an earlier interview, earlier models had wider hips and a different torso shape, with a more bio-inspired, "automotive" design. Range of motion questions, as well as seasickness caused by the robot's swaying gait, caused them to remodel the joints until the machine's proportions bear an uncanny resemblance to Cameron's AMP suits. The designer of the real one praises Cameron and his team's vision and engineering acumen. While it wasn't designed by looking at Avatar's mecha, it represents a case where there was some convergent evolution during the design process.
Nonplussed has two meanings. I tripped on this last week.
Yes, you are a hazard. See page 15 of this study:
http://www.michigan.gov/docume...
Though, it looks like statistically, you're more a hazard to yourself than any other single driver.
To put perspective in perspective, remember that a photon drive requires 300 freakin' megawatts to get one lousy Newton of thrust.
Actually, Bussard's polywell fusion would work great in space, considering that the enormous vacuum chamber a test reactor would require would be unnecessary, and so long as your radiators can dissipate all the waste heat, you could build some kind of space-cruiser ship without much in the way of launches by launching the magnetic coils in an IKEA-style "flat-pack" configuration, and unpacking them on orbit.
It's still "hot" fusion, but the only technical hurdle to this is scaling it up to critical volume is expensive, if you need to do it where there's air. Small scale test reactors work, and work reliably, and are even used as neutron sources sometimes - but power is proportional to the square of volume or something, and there's a critical volume where any smaller reactor cannot possibly reach break-even.
If the Rossi E-Cat works* - whether it generates energy is important, not the physical process through which it does - you could build a very compact, fast spacecraft with Roger Shawyer's superconducting, second-generation thruster which is supposed to generate (according to IBTimes) "produce thrust many orders of magnitude greater than that observed by Eagleworks" with an implication that it operates at the same power level. In that case, we now have a rather compelling power-to-thrust ratio, and our choice of electric power sources with Russian sodium-cooled satellite fission-reactors as a backstop if none of the lower-mass fusion reactors are ready in time.
*(I'm not going to rule it out - but I'm not going to hold my breath, either.)
"Making sense" is a generic statement which is expected to be understood within the given context.
Except it was not understood within given context. What made sense is, the results did not fit the null hypothesis, and probably didn't fit H1, either. (Null: No thrust detected beyond a threshold of 80 watts of photon pressure. H1: Anomalous thrust generated proportional to input power, exceeding photon pressure.) This is just the scientists saying, "We can't yet rule this out as a crank. Please send more money."
I fear you've misstated the Oberth effect by conflating it with rockets' efficiency at speed. The Oberth effect says you can get more thrust out of a unit of fuel by leaving it with less residual potential energy, by depositing it deeper within a body's gravity well. This coincidentally happens to be at the fastest point of a gravity assist.
Also, you leave out an interesting tangent, which is that rockets' maximum achievable speed is related to exhaust velocity. At this point, the rocket is accelerating the fuel away such that the fuel is at a standstill relative to an observer. To go faster with the same exhaust velocity, the fuel would end up chasing the rocket, which is a physical impossibility according to currently accepted laws of physics.
My money, and the money of every other physicist I know, is on the latter.
This could be true and still leave us with a useful space drive. Perhaps the device is generating an enormous plume of WIMPs, like maybe an enormous plume of neutrinos?
Maybe we should point the thruster at a neutrino detector and see if it lights up. If so, we may have a modulated neutrino source useful for communicating with submarines in two directions. ELF transmitters are huge, and receivers fit on a ship. Neutrino receivers are huge, and transmitters fit on a ship.
Edison found there were thousands of ways to build a light bulb that didn't work before he found one that did.
Does this constitute cherry-picking, or R&D?
Asking in good faith because I believe the answer to this question will add value to the discussion.
I don't see how you get from "power = energy ÷ time" (or, alternately, "energy = power * time") to your equation. Can you fill me in? It's been a while since college physics.
In that case, you could just put the software on a socketed card like a TPM module.
Start with a list of ongoing genocides, and work your way down the list.
I believe the overwhelming Democrat position on this board is, "Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and this must be that time!"
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Charging "what the market will bear" isn't, if immediately after you agree to pay for a product or service you go bankrupt and/or homeless as a result of buying the product or service. 'Course, when the alternative is a quick/slow unpleasant death under hospital/hospice care that ends up costing the same... not much alternative there, either. Really, the only cheap option is euthanasia, and we're not willing, as a society, to go there yet. Another cheap option would be to allow end-of-life pain management at home in a DIY environment. Not like you're going to give yourself the wrong morphine dose, or misplace a vial, right?
I believe the implication is that a bill could be un-finalized to buy you another three-day delay.
The better to get them treatment.
For what it's worth, Apple's 2007-vintage Macs were like that. When I upgraded to a 2009 model, the battery was above 90% health five years on when the CPU shat the bed.
Actually, it's usually because of economies of scale making both guns and ammo expensive. With only one source of cartridges and no reloading supplies, who's going to make the second electrically primed .308? And with only one rare gun shooting it, who's going to retool a production line to make electrically primed ammunition or primers?
Somebody's got to give people a real, significant advantage to make people buy into a new ammunition ecosystem. Metal Storm's MAUL may - only two moving parts, the trigger and the buckshot, extremely light... but people are shy about getting stuck with useless hardware for want of consumables, so...we'll see.
Electronic Arms 10/22 Bullpup
Voere VEC–91
Remington Model 700 EtronX
Metal Storm MAUL
Done correctly, electronic guns can reduce points of failure, not increase them. You’re still going to want to use lithium primary batteries, or some kind of float charger in your gun safe, but after 10 years unmaintained, conventional firearms are a little less reliable than they used to be, too.
To complicate your calculus further, what if the tactical response by armed robbers to smartguns is the practice of quickly killing their victims before a smartgun can unlock itself? This could have the effect of making every single mugging more deadly, not just those involving a defender with a smartgun.
Why is marijuana outlawed? The real reasons are worse than you think.
Not the webpage documenting the perjury in front of congress - and while I can’t find the best presentation of these facts, I did find this here:
And if you don’t trust your logistics chain - PS, you shouldn’t - you might crack open a terminal and find a burner cellphone inside that’s MitMing every single credit card transaction.
It’s not a new thing, Schneier wrote this in 2010.
With an electronic sticker, you can intercept the command from the EMV card saying the PIN is wrong, and re-write the acceptance command. Alas, the PIN confirmation isn’t encrypted.
Another good walkthrough of what’s become known as a “wedge attack”.
Too late - it's called a credit score.