refuse to admit the fact that the United States pulls in enough revenue each month to service the interest on the debt
The facts are that interest rates on that debt are darn near generational lows. In other words going up by a factor of, say, 10 or so, is neither unlikely nor even really all that historically noteworthy. Now going up by a factor of 20 or so, THAT would be historically high.
Also we can't spend 99.9% of revenue on debt payments. That would cause slight problems with everything else the govt is responsible for. Lets say we can afford no more than 10%.
So, as long as less that a hundredth of the revenue is spent on debt payments, when it inevitably goes up by a factor of ten to 10%... ummmm... oh oh...
The "left" "right" thing is just made up to keep people divided, they both agree on looting the populace. Its just that accidentally, momentarily, the left is sorta on the side of the populace. I'm sure they'll rapidly fix that mistake.
When is the EU going to put it's house in order......starting with Greece?
Shouldn't Iceland be first? Maybe they haven't rolled over completely to central control like other European states, but they are part of the Schengen, so they kinda count...
Pretty much every country in the EU is slated for economic collapse except Germany. Later this fall, maybe sooner, we will hear about Portugal and Spain.
"Newbie mistake #3 is applying human male standards of beauty to something inhuman"
It's not a matter of beauty, it's a matter of function. These things take minutes to cover mere meters.
The two are sometimes (often?) the same, looking at spots in the giant solution space of how far outside of static stability you're willing to leap in order to walk...
One local maximum seems to be human bipedal, give them some wide hips to store more batteries and the android would inevitably have a human female gait that we would think is hot and graceful and would inevitably (pendulum effects on the legs, dynamic stability of a spinal column, etc) be about as fast as a human female.
Another local maximum if you've got four legs and lots of rocks is turtles, personally I don't think they're hot; their gait is not terribly attractive, but it seems to work for them, or at least they're not extinct yet despite our best efforts.
The local maximum (or local maximum of beauty) if you're LiPoly powered, aluminum "boned" and only have 8 servos in your body, is apparently not coincident with human female gait, even if its beautiful in its own local maximum way.
it wouldn't be too hard to make something that mimics the muscular structure of the body......it's not like human muscles are particularly strong
No, its impossible at this time to even come close to human muscle as an engineering material IF you include strength to weight ratios of the entire system (heavy batteries), power to weight ratios, peak vs sustained power output, long term durability, total energy use / efficiency, etc.
People have been trying, and failing, to build artificial limbs for centuries for trauma victims, and not only are the artificial limbs not better than the original, but they generally don't even come close to the real thing. When athletes intentionally chop off their limbs to upgrade to cybernetic models, then building a humanoid torso and bolting the off the shelf prosthetic limbs to it, then we'll know it might be reasonable. However, note athletes are legendary at not being able to make intelligent long term decisions, so it still might not work well.
Did anyone else watch the video? Is it really that hard to make robots that can walk decently?
It seems like from a mechanical standpoint, it wouldn't be too hard to make something that mimics the muscular structure of the body......it's not like human muscles are particularly strong, or human nerves fast transmitting, or human sensors high precision. I'm having trouble understanding what the challenge is in building a robot that works reasonably well (or at least not dreadfully slow).
The devil is in the details. There's lots of muscles involved. Newbie mistake #1 is thinking you can build a walking mechanism using a really simplistic count of leg joints. Like trying to get away with about 4 servos per leg. You really do need a nearly fully articulated body including arms and spine, even if its cost is incredible compared to just two articulated legs. While walking to refill my water glass I felt my sore elbow moving as I dynamically balanced walking down the hall, and theoretically I wasn't using my elbow. Newbie mistake #2 is trying to use a single canned routine. Walk around some time and try to straighten or slump your back, it has an effect on gait. Even if you're not paying attention, your gait is pretty dynamic, and newbs can't program dynamic gait very well. Newbie mistake #3 is applying human male standards of beauty to something inhuman. To me, a reasonably well shaped 20s female human just coincidentally happens to have a "decent walk" that I would admire as she walks by. Other people, live and let live, their idea of living is Really liking the 4-legged gait of a sheep, or the 2 legged gait of a 'roo, etc. I'm sure to a robot, a similar robot would seem smooth and graceful, and if we don't like it, the robot's opinion would probably be to shrug shoulders and grunt "eh". Newbie mistake #4 is not emulating or handling the shock adsorption of soft tissue, both semi-statically and also dynamically. Not just female swaying as per above #3 or whatever, but the cushion of the spine and feet (and shoes!)
The problem is people understand what it means WRT obscure corners of the banking industry or supply chain, but do not realize it is a general business management topic, applicable to almost all organizations and systems.
Looks like you didn't have a chance to try Google+. For nearly every bit of your profile information there, you can specify how widely it can be shared. I guess they want to migrate the now redundant functionality to their new shiny service.
I also see an implication that anyone with a private google profile will be issued a G+ invite before 7/31? Or maybe G+ will be wide open to the entire public before 7/31?
Does the Facebook/Skype use Flash or does it require you install Skype?
If it it uses Flash and you're on Windows you can block all websites from accessing your webcam in the Flash privacy settings. You have to do it after every update though because it resets.
My wife's magnetically glued to the facebook client on her ipod touch... I'm guessing that means it doesn't use flash, at least on apple i-products?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
KSR Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy? KSR rocks. Leon Frankowski's crosstime engineer series (not exactly sci fi but... sorta alternative history, like a robinson crusoe version of 1632) Some of Ringo's Posleen series such as the freely available Hells Faire might appeal to you, but if not, don't say I didn't warn you.. Google for the name Nathan Lowell and "quarter share" its kind of soft for sci fi yet strangely addictive for an audio book.
And this discussion is exactly why FB sucks and I got rid of it. Everyone's posts were so boringly vanilla bland so as to fit in with all the other American Idol fans. Those about to read hard sci fi salute you...
I think his point is "$10 and 5 minutes of your time" combined with a vast enforcement bureaucracy has a lot more to do with ripping people off and making money, than preventing the poisoning of the air.
Also "pretty much ban any aftermarket add ons, especially if they are any part of the emissions line in the car (exhaust, engine mgmt chips, etc)" sounds a lot like you are legally forced to buy a stealership installed $1000 muffler system, rather than the otherwise identical aftermarket that only costs $150 because the aftermarket aren't crooks like the stealership guys.
Finally, if the purpose was preventing pollution, you'd be unable to buy and register a SUV. Nothing I do to a two-door sports car could possible result in more emissions than a H1 or a suburban or a tahoe... absolutely nothing. Cut the cat out, cut the muffler out and put in straight pipes, reprogram the engine to run super rich so it won't burn out with a modest nitro kit, nothing could make it as bad as a SUV. I could leave the gas cap off and it would emit fewer HCs. I could halve my MPG and still get better MPG than a SUV...
In a world of SUV driving soccer moms, leave the hot rodders alone, they're not even statistical noise...
Try that argument after CA bans the SUV, or finds a way to enforce it other than nickel and diming the population...
Re:CNC frosting / fudge / etc is old stuff in the
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I bet her machine didn't do 3D frosting (as in create layers of frosting), which is what's news here. Also, her machine did frosting - not hardened chocolate - which is a whole other challenge.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
It did 3d layers. In general, "the cake is a lie", but not this time. Also I mentioned, they had a large sheetcake printer, but they also had a very 3-d robotic flower maker, which couldn't make anything bigger than, say, a drink coaster, as far as I know all it did was make different flower species, but what amazing little flowers it could make... She could mix her flower frosting color to appropriately match the bridesmaid dresses and the robot made flowers that matched the real world floral arrangements, very cool. 3-D frosting printing was common in the 90s, or at least grannie's employer was not amazingly noteworthy, they were just yet another bakery that happened to decorate cakes for weddings and other occasions, nothing terribly unusual or specially marketed. You'd have to ask a real foodie or a chef how popular that robotic stuff was/is, grannie is the only pastry chef I personally know...
And one thing I mentioned in my post was their chocolate lace printer, which is exactly what you claim is "new". I am no cake decorator, but apparently you refrigerate that stuff after it prints, peel it off, and smoosh it into the wedding cake frosting. The point of printing it is about 50% of it doesn't make it in one piece to the cake, you recycle the broken bits, and they had a way to print the brides name or whatever into the lace as it was printed. Also the computer had about one zillion lace designs on disk and at some expense custom lace was possible. Lets say she did 2 fancy cakes per day, that means you need 4 cakes worth of lace in stock due to losses, but there's 100 lace styles, so now you've got to organize 400 sheets in the fridge, if the bride is willing to go "off the rack" as opposed to demanding the chocolate lace match the lace on her dress, and if you can restock more or less daily. Hmm I'm thinking chocolate lace either has to be done by hand (which is very time consuming = expensive) or has to be done by robot, which is how grannies bakery did in the 90s.
The bakery went out of business a couple years after grannie retired; maybe they blew too much money on robot frosting machines, in a world full of $1/day Chinese factories and $20/day illegals. Or maybe it was some other problem.
I googled several terms for robotic frosting equipment, and found absolutely nothing. This has got to be one of those situations where none of us know the French or Italian or Japanese noun to google for. Computery thingies that eat frosting and excrete frosting flowers are/were out there, somewhere, and they're not even remotely new. If only we knew what to google for, there's probably a whole economic ecosystem of these machines. Probably from the same people that make restaurant-grade appliances?
This gives Apple 'access to new component technology months or years before its rivals and allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate
B.S. Due to economies of scale, Apples competitors could always produce the components for cheaper than Apple, assuming they know what they're doing, which apparently they do not.
Given equal quality of management, etc, Apple will always get a lower rate of return on their cash that their competitors or a 3rd party would get.
The only reason for Apple to finance their own stuff, is because they have an extremely specific set of requirement for their individual device... Nothing stops Nokia or whoever from doing the same thing.
You recommend moving to a better state to escape oppressive statutes. In such a case, what's the best practice to find a job for both oneself and one's spouse or life partner, or to make sure that one's elderly parents are taken care of?
Sounds like you live out west where you need a jetliner to go from one state to another. He lives out east where there are states smaller than the midwestern county I live in, I believe Rhode Island could easily fit in my county with room to spare.
A crude analogy is on the east cost, state to state is a couple hours walk, in the upper midwest heartland state to state is a couple hours drive, and in the west and southwest state to state is an hours flight.
So if you live out west, yeah that idea is a problem. Where I live it means a "long" commute but no big deal. Where he lives, if it were not for collapsing infrastructure and high traffic, it would be considered a short commute.
Flakes of the future: "hold your arthritic wrist up against the magnetic CPU while running this program". "Here is a bracelet consisting of 16 broken, yet magnetic PIC microcontrollers (oh sorry, I forgot microcontrollers did not exist before the ardweeno)"
That and I'm curious how the curie limit would affect those little things. The smaller they get the smaller the volume to hold heat, although the surface area to volume ratio improves as they shrink...
Wouldn't it be simpler to make a chocolate CNC? That way you can make a bunch of squares in the background and just feed them into the fairly quick milling part of the machine. Fewer tubes to clean anyways.
You would have to freeze it in liquid nitrogen so that it wouldn't smoosh all over. That is how you mill rubber and elastomers in general. No I am not kidding, have not personally done it, but I know people. Get the rubber too cold it'll shatter, its an art form to get it cold enough but not too cold. Rubber machines pretty easily with decent surface finish when properly cooled, but it'll be uneven due to uneven cooling, which probably makes chocolate unusable, because it'll meet dimensional spec but probably look horribly uneven. If you had a magic cryostat to perfectly evenly cool the chocolate overnight, instead of bubba pouring liq N2 everywhere, then, maybe... Condensation is a huge PITA when liq N2 machining rubber and its only going to be worse with chocolate. That and no cutting fluid means edge buildup means, again, horrible surface finish. Then, the water rusts the machines, unless you use soluable coolant, which is at best semi-poisonous or at least not on the GRASS list. CNC chocolate is not gonna work.
CNC frosting / fudge / etc is old stuff in the USA
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Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer
The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.
I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?
I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?
Could be good. Maybe they might pay enough attention to make national rules for the inspection of electric vehicles. I live in PA,... when he told me, he literally makes up the rules.
Move to a better state. In WI, you have to prove the car can keep up with traffic aka is not a low speed vehicle like a tractor, by exceeding 35 MPH or so in a straight line, and then prove your brakes work by going from 60 to 0 in less than X feet where X is frankly not terribly impressive (something like 250 feet? Even a SUV can do that). Also if your chassis, the VIN of your vehicle, is newer than 1996 and you live in an emissions testing county you have to have a visual inspection every two years to prove there's no IC engine in the car. They have no concern if you tow a trailer with a completely non-emissions controlled gas generator on it, they only care about the car itself.
I have not checked the rules in some years, but this is how it was a decade or so ago. Exactly the same (non-emission) rules for any kit or custom car, not just electric. Can you keep up with traffic, can you stop safely, and can you not vomit pollution out the tailpipe?
Convincing your car insurance company to insure you, you're legally required to buy, they are not legally required to sell, thats a whole nother ball game. I suspect if anyone successfully starts selling electric cars, GM/Ford/etc will buy the car insurance companies with instructions to never insure an electric car.
My question is, what problem does this solve? You drive to the airport, unfold the wings, then get out of the car and do your pre-flight? How is that different from getting out of your car and doing your pre-flight on your regular aircraft?
Before someone chimes in with the "don't have to pay for hanger space" argument, if you can't afford hanger space then you'll never afford the annual inspection labor and parts, so its all kinda irrelevant.
Before someone chimes in with saving money by insuring only one vehicle, the likely cost of car insurance for a car as expensive as this the plane, probably exceeds the cost of buying a nice 4-door sedan every year...
The one "win" for this, is the weather is almost never bad enough to strand car drivers for more than a few hours per human generation. However the weather is often too severe for a typical light plane or a typical light plane pilot (whichever is less capable, and death statistics show the pilot never thinks he is the limiting factor). So if the airport is closed to VFR at either end, just drive... Unless of course, one airport is on an island.
The old saying still holds, if it floats, flies, or f**ks, its cheaper to rent than to own.
reader dkd903 points out that Google has been busy removing Twitter from real time search, due to a contract expiry with Twitter.
Has anyone out there in/. land ever google'd for something and found the answer in a twitter post? Has anyone on/. ever seen a twitter post containing something that could theoretically be something someone would search for?
I imagine its about as common as searching for airline tickets and finding a UFO.
75,000 years is a time longer then any advanced human civilization has ever existed on this planet. Even assuming continuous human civilization over this period, this is a timeframe representing very gradual change - longer then lifetimes, long enough to allow for population migration in a natural way.
Contrast to the current predictions: within a 100 years we could be looking at ecosystem collapses in the ocean, radical changes in farmland viability and seasonal flooding patterns. People alive today will still be alive when these changes happen - people living on the land today will watch it become unproductive over the course of a few decades.
There's no realistic way we can smoothly adapt to that sort of change. The farmland of the Roman empire became unproductive over the course of a few hundred years - yet that still was more then enough (amongst a few other factors) to set it up for a radical restructuring (fall).
Its fundamentally a radical (change is OK, and best prepare for it) vs conservative (change is forbidden) outlook. The problem is conservative outlook always historically fails.
What killed the romans was not climate change, which is perfectly normal. What killed them was not accepting climate change and adapting to reality.
Long before temperature changes affect farm fields, lack of phosphorous fertilizers and lack of diesel for tractors and lack of petroleum based bug sprays will make conservative farmers unproductive, and radical farmers rich.
Climate is not the only issue, nor even a terribly important issue, nor an issue that can be placed completely under human control. Climate changes; move with the punches. Pretending we can prevent it by outlawing it, only makes us a weaker society when it inevitably changes naturally anyway.
Jesus, +4 insightful? This is scientific ignorance at its peak, and nearly pure ad hominem.
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_. And the fact that its modded up here on slashdot, of all places, makes me sad.
Scientific insight not ignorance.
None of the players are even trying to do science, so don't feel bad that they're not overly scientific. All the players are scamming for money, glory, and most of all, control. The scientists are just a tiny subset of the "all players" therefore they're scammers.
If you want science, you won't find it in the global warming debate, or at least it'll be buried under megatons of garbage from both sides.
These are people who are supposed to be experts in what they sell.
Ah there's your mistake. They are actually supposed to be the cheapest people they could find who wouldn't screw up more than say, 90% of the sales to 90% of the population.
When I was a kid, I stocked shelves at a local supermarket. No one expected me to be a world-class expert chef. I still have no idea what to do with canned squid, or giant cans of ground allspice, or chitlins.
It sounds like you think you have a business owner - contractor relationship, but you're actually getting a (platonic) housewife - shelf stocker relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
refuse to admit the fact that the United States pulls in enough revenue each month to service the interest on the debt
The facts are that interest rates on that debt are darn near generational lows. In other words going up by a factor of, say, 10 or so, is neither unlikely nor even really all that historically noteworthy. Now going up by a factor of 20 or so, THAT would be historically high.
Also we can't spend 99.9% of revenue on debt payments. That would cause slight problems with everything else the govt is responsible for. Lets say we can afford no more than 10%.
So, as long as less that a hundredth of the revenue is spent on debt payments, when it inevitably goes up by a factor of ten to 10% ... ummmm ... oh oh ...
The "left" "right" thing is just made up to keep people divided, they both agree on looting the populace. Its just that accidentally, momentarily, the left is sorta on the side of the populace. I'm sure they'll rapidly fix that mistake.
When is the EU going to put it's house in order......starting with Greece?
Shouldn't Iceland be first? Maybe they haven't rolled over completely to central control like other European states, but they are part of the Schengen, so they kinda count...
Pretty much every country in the EU is slated for economic collapse except Germany. Later this fall, maybe sooner, we will hear about Portugal and Spain.
It's not a matter of beauty, it's a matter of function. These things take minutes to cover mere meters.
The two are sometimes (often?) the same, looking at spots in the giant solution space of how far outside of static stability you're willing to leap in order to walk...
One local maximum seems to be human bipedal, give them some wide hips to store more batteries and the android would inevitably have a human female gait that we would think is hot and graceful and would inevitably (pendulum effects on the legs, dynamic stability of a spinal column, etc) be about as fast as a human female.
Another local maximum if you've got four legs and lots of rocks is turtles, personally I don't think they're hot; their gait is not terribly attractive, but it seems to work for them, or at least they're not extinct yet despite our best efforts.
The local maximum (or local maximum of beauty) if you're LiPoly powered, aluminum "boned" and only have 8 servos in your body, is apparently not coincident with human female gait, even if its beautiful in its own local maximum way.
it wouldn't be too hard to make something that mimics the muscular structure of the body......it's not like human muscles are particularly strong
No, its impossible at this time to even come close to human muscle as an engineering material IF you include strength to weight ratios of the entire system (heavy batteries), power to weight ratios, peak vs sustained power output, long term durability, total energy use / efficiency, etc.
People have been trying, and failing, to build artificial limbs for centuries for trauma victims, and not only are the artificial limbs not better than the original, but they generally don't even come close to the real thing. When athletes intentionally chop off their limbs to upgrade to cybernetic models, then building a humanoid torso and bolting the off the shelf prosthetic limbs to it, then we'll know it might be reasonable. However, note athletes are legendary at not being able to make intelligent long term decisions, so it still might not work well.
Did anyone else watch the video? Is it really that hard to make robots that can walk decently?
It seems like from a mechanical standpoint, it wouldn't be too hard to make something that mimics the muscular structure of the body......it's not like human muscles are particularly strong, or human nerves fast transmitting, or human sensors high precision. I'm having trouble understanding what the challenge is in building a robot that works reasonably well (or at least not dreadfully slow).
The devil is in the details. There's lots of muscles involved. Newbie mistake #1 is thinking you can build a walking mechanism using a really simplistic count of leg joints. Like trying to get away with about 4 servos per leg. You really do need a nearly fully articulated body including arms and spine, even if its cost is incredible compared to just two articulated legs. While walking to refill my water glass I felt my sore elbow moving as I dynamically balanced walking down the hall, and theoretically I wasn't using my elbow. Newbie mistake #2 is trying to use a single canned routine. Walk around some time and try to straighten or slump your back, it has an effect on gait. Even if you're not paying attention, your gait is pretty dynamic, and newbs can't program dynamic gait very well. Newbie mistake #3 is applying human male standards of beauty to something inhuman. To me, a reasonably well shaped 20s female human just coincidentally happens to have a "decent walk" that I would admire as she walks by. Other people, live and let live, their idea of living is Really liking the 4-legged gait of a sheep, or the 2 legged gait of a 'roo, etc. I'm sure to a robot, a similar robot would seem smooth and graceful, and if we don't like it, the robot's opinion would probably be to shrug shoulders and grunt "eh". Newbie mistake #4 is not emulating or handling the shock adsorption of soft tissue, both semi-statically and also dynamically. Not just female swaying as per above #3 or whatever, but the cushion of the spine and feet (and shoes!)
It's about the bean counters who wedge themselves in the middle of everything.
The word to google for here is intermediation. The opposite, disintermediation, has a tolerable wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation
The problem is people understand what it means WRT obscure corners of the banking industry or supply chain, but do not realize it is a general business management topic, applicable to almost all organizations and systems.
Looks like you didn't have a chance to try Google+. For nearly every bit of your profile information there, you can specify how widely it can be shared. I guess they want to migrate the now redundant functionality to their new shiny service.
I also see an implication that anyone with a private google profile will be issued a G+ invite before 7/31? Or maybe G+ will be wide open to the entire public before 7/31?
Does the Facebook/Skype use Flash or does it require you install Skype?
If it it uses Flash and you're on Windows you can block all websites from accessing your webcam in the Flash privacy settings. You have to do it after every update though because it resets.
My wife's magnetically glued to the facebook client on her ipod touch... I'm guessing that means it doesn't use flash, at least on apple i-products?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
KSR Kim Stanley Robinson's mars trilogy? KSR rocks. ... sorta alternative history, like a robinson crusoe version of 1632)
Leon Frankowski's crosstime engineer series (not exactly sci fi but
Some of Ringo's Posleen series such as the freely available Hells Faire might appeal to you, but if not, don't say I didn't warn you..
Google for the name Nathan Lowell and "quarter share" its kind of soft for sci fi yet strangely addictive for an audio book.
And this discussion is exactly why FB sucks and I got rid of it. Everyone's posts were so boringly vanilla bland so as to fit in with all the other American Idol fans. Those about to read hard sci fi salute you...
I think his point is "$10 and 5 minutes of your time" combined with a vast enforcement bureaucracy has a lot more to do with ripping people off and making money, than preventing the poisoning of the air.
Also "pretty much ban any aftermarket add ons, especially if they are any part of the emissions line in the car (exhaust, engine mgmt chips, etc)" sounds a lot like you are legally forced to buy a stealership installed $1000 muffler system, rather than the otherwise identical aftermarket that only costs $150 because the aftermarket aren't crooks like the stealership guys.
Finally, if the purpose was preventing pollution, you'd be unable to buy and register a SUV. Nothing I do to a two-door sports car could possible result in more emissions than a H1 or a suburban or a tahoe... absolutely nothing. Cut the cat out, cut the muffler out and put in straight pipes, reprogram the engine to run super rich so it won't burn out with a modest nitro kit, nothing could make it as bad as a SUV. I could leave the gas cap off and it would emit fewer HCs. I could halve my MPG and still get better MPG than a SUV...
In a world of SUV driving soccer moms, leave the hot rodders alone, they're not even statistical noise...
Try that argument after CA bans the SUV, or finds a way to enforce it other than nickel and diming the population...
I bet her machine didn't do 3D frosting (as in create layers of frosting), which is what's news here. Also, her machine did frosting - not hardened chocolate - which is a whole other challenge.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it has been done before, just not by your grandma.
It did 3d layers. In general, "the cake is a lie", but not this time. Also I mentioned, they had a large sheetcake printer, but they also had a very 3-d robotic flower maker, which couldn't make anything bigger than, say, a drink coaster, as far as I know all it did was make different flower species, but what amazing little flowers it could make... She could mix her flower frosting color to appropriately match the bridesmaid dresses and the robot made flowers that matched the real world floral arrangements, very cool. 3-D frosting printing was common in the 90s, or at least grannie's employer was not amazingly noteworthy, they were just yet another bakery that happened to decorate cakes for weddings and other occasions, nothing terribly unusual or specially marketed. You'd have to ask a real foodie or a chef how popular that robotic stuff was/is, grannie is the only pastry chef I personally know...
And one thing I mentioned in my post was their chocolate lace printer, which is exactly what you claim is "new". I am no cake decorator, but apparently you refrigerate that stuff after it prints, peel it off, and smoosh it into the wedding cake frosting. The point of printing it is about 50% of it doesn't make it in one piece to the cake, you recycle the broken bits, and they had a way to print the brides name or whatever into the lace as it was printed. Also the computer had about one zillion lace designs on disk and at some expense custom lace was possible. Lets say she did 2 fancy cakes per day, that means you need 4 cakes worth of lace in stock due to losses, but there's 100 lace styles, so now you've got to organize 400 sheets in the fridge, if the bride is willing to go "off the rack" as opposed to demanding the chocolate lace match the lace on her dress, and if you can restock more or less daily. Hmm I'm thinking chocolate lace either has to be done by hand (which is very time consuming = expensive) or has to be done by robot, which is how grannies bakery did in the 90s.
The bakery went out of business a couple years after grannie retired; maybe they blew too much money on robot frosting machines, in a world full of $1/day Chinese factories and $20/day illegals. Or maybe it was some other problem.
I googled several terms for robotic frosting equipment, and found absolutely nothing. This has got to be one of those situations where none of us know the French or Italian or Japanese noun to google for. Computery thingies that eat frosting and excrete frosting flowers are/were out there, somewhere, and they're not even remotely new. If only we knew what to google for, there's probably a whole economic ecosystem of these machines. Probably from the same people that make restaurant-grade appliances?
This gives Apple 'access to new component technology months or years before its rivals and allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate
B.S. Due to economies of scale, Apples competitors could always produce the components for cheaper than Apple, assuming they know what they're doing, which apparently they do not.
Given equal quality of management, etc, Apple will always get a lower rate of return on their cash that their competitors or a 3rd party would get.
The only reason for Apple to finance their own stuff, is because they have an extremely specific set of requirement for their individual device... Nothing stops Nokia or whoever from doing the same thing.
You recommend moving to a better state to escape oppressive statutes. In such a case, what's the best practice to find a job for both oneself and one's spouse or life partner, or to make sure that one's elderly parents are taken care of?
Sounds like you live out west where you need a jetliner to go from one state to another. He lives out east where there are states smaller than the midwestern county I live in, I believe Rhode Island could easily fit in my county with room to spare.
A crude analogy is on the east cost, state to state is a couple hours walk, in the upper midwest heartland state to state is a couple hours drive, and in the west and southwest state to state is an hours flight.
So if you live out west, yeah that idea is a problem. Where I live it means a "long" commute but no big deal. Where he lives, if it were not for collapsing infrastructure and high traffic, it would be considered a short commute.
Flakes of the future: "hold your arthritic wrist up against the magnetic CPU while running this program". "Here is a bracelet consisting of 16 broken, yet magnetic PIC microcontrollers (oh sorry, I forgot microcontrollers did not exist before the ardweeno)"
That and I'm curious how the curie limit would affect those little things. The smaller they get the smaller the volume to hold heat, although the surface area to volume ratio improves as they shrink...
I see that in Europe that junk would be hard pressed to qualify as "chocolate-like".
You cannot buy American chocolate in Europe because it is literally illegal due to not meeting standards.
European chocolate is "real" chocolate.
American chocolate is brown food coloring, crisco, and corn syrup for sweetness. If its sweet and brown its called "chocolate"
You can buy "real chocolate bars" in the US, its just they're called "gourmet" and cost about $4 per bar instead of the $1 bar of Hershey's Crisco.
(Don't know if you have Crisco in europe, its a generic veg oil that is hydrogenated into a room temp solid lard substitute.)
Wouldn't it be simpler to make a chocolate CNC? That way you can make a bunch of squares in the background and just feed them into the fairly quick milling part of the machine. Fewer tubes to clean anyways.
You would have to freeze it in liquid nitrogen so that it wouldn't smoosh all over. That is how you mill rubber and elastomers in general. No I am not kidding, have not personally done it, but I know people. Get the rubber too cold it'll shatter, its an art form to get it cold enough but not too cold. Rubber machines pretty easily with decent surface finish when properly cooled, but it'll be uneven due to uneven cooling, which probably makes chocolate unusable, because it'll meet dimensional spec but probably look horribly uneven. If you had a magic cryostat to perfectly evenly cool the chocolate overnight, instead of bubba pouring liq N2 everywhere, then, maybe... Condensation is a huge PITA when liq N2 machining rubber and its only going to be worse with chocolate. That and no cutting fluid means edge buildup means, again, horrible surface finish. Then, the water rusts the machines, unless you use soluable coolant, which is at best semi-poisonous or at least not on the GRASS list. CNC chocolate is not gonna work.
Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer
The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.
I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?
I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?
Could be good. Maybe they might pay enough attention to make national rules for the inspection of electric vehicles. I live in PA, ... when he told me, he literally makes up the rules.
Move to a better state. In WI, you have to prove the car can keep up with traffic aka is not a low speed vehicle like a tractor, by exceeding 35 MPH or so in a straight line, and then prove your brakes work by going from 60 to 0 in less than X feet where X is frankly not terribly impressive (something like 250 feet? Even a SUV can do that). Also if your chassis, the VIN of your vehicle, is newer than 1996 and you live in an emissions testing county you have to have a visual inspection every two years to prove there's no IC engine in the car. They have no concern if you tow a trailer with a completely non-emissions controlled gas generator on it, they only care about the car itself.
I have not checked the rules in some years, but this is how it was a decade or so ago. Exactly the same (non-emission) rules for any kit or custom car, not just electric. Can you keep up with traffic, can you stop safely, and can you not vomit pollution out the tailpipe?
Convincing your car insurance company to insure you, you're legally required to buy, they are not legally required to sell, thats a whole nother ball game. I suspect if anyone successfully starts selling electric cars, GM/Ford/etc will buy the car insurance companies with instructions to never insure an electric car.
My question is, what problem does this solve? You drive to the airport, unfold the wings, then get out of the car and do your pre-flight? How is that different from getting out of your car and doing your pre-flight on your regular aircraft?
Before someone chimes in with the "don't have to pay for hanger space" argument, if you can't afford hanger space then you'll never afford the annual inspection labor and parts, so its all kinda irrelevant.
Before someone chimes in with saving money by insuring only one vehicle, the likely cost of car insurance for a car as expensive as this the plane, probably exceeds the cost of buying a nice 4-door sedan every year...
The one "win" for this, is the weather is almost never bad enough to strand car drivers for more than a few hours per human generation. However the weather is often too severe for a typical light plane or a typical light plane pilot (whichever is less capable, and death statistics show the pilot never thinks he is the limiting factor). So if the airport is closed to VFR at either end, just drive... Unless of course, one airport is on an island.
The old saying still holds, if it floats, flies, or f**ks, its cheaper to rent than to own.
Or a shave?
Too expensive said NASA.
But they built it anyway, and it sits in storage because no one has a launch plan.
Aka the Triana although the official marketing name was the DSCOVR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory
reader dkd903 points out that Google has been busy removing Twitter from real time search, due to a contract expiry with Twitter.
Has anyone out there in /. land ever google'd for something and found the answer in a twitter post? Has anyone on /. ever seen a twitter post containing something that could theoretically be something someone would search for?
I imagine its about as common as searching for airline tickets and finding a UFO.
Nah - They wouldn't do that next..... Would they?
Insert realdoll joke in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
75,000 years is a time longer then any advanced human civilization has ever existed on this planet. Even assuming continuous human civilization over this period, this is a timeframe representing very gradual change - longer then lifetimes, long enough to allow for population migration in a natural way.
Contrast to the current predictions: within a 100 years we could be looking at ecosystem collapses in the ocean, radical changes in farmland viability and seasonal flooding patterns. People alive today will still be alive when these changes happen - people living on the land today will watch it become unproductive over the course of a few decades.
There's no realistic way we can smoothly adapt to that sort of change. The farmland of the Roman empire became unproductive over the course of a few hundred years - yet that still was more then enough (amongst a few other factors) to set it up for a radical restructuring (fall).
Its fundamentally a radical (change is OK, and best prepare for it) vs conservative (change is forbidden) outlook. The problem is conservative outlook always historically fails.
What killed the romans was not climate change, which is perfectly normal. What killed them was not accepting climate change and adapting to reality.
Long before temperature changes affect farm fields, lack of phosphorous fertilizers and lack of diesel for tractors and lack of petroleum based bug sprays will make conservative farmers unproductive, and radical farmers rich.
Climate is not the only issue, nor even a terribly important issue, nor an issue that can be placed completely under human control. Climate changes; move with the punches. Pretending we can prevent it by outlawing it, only makes us a weaker society when it inevitably changes naturally anyway.
Jesus, +4 insightful? This is scientific ignorance at its peak, and nearly pure ad hominem.
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_. And the fact that its modded up here on slashdot, of all places, makes me sad.
Scientific insight not ignorance.
None of the players are even trying to do science, so don't feel bad that they're not overly scientific.
All the players are scamming for money, glory, and most of all, control. The scientists are just a tiny subset of the "all players" therefore they're scammers.
If you want science, you won't find it in the global warming debate, or at least it'll be buried under megatons of garbage from both sides.
These are people who are supposed to be experts in what they sell.
Ah there's your mistake. They are actually supposed to be the cheapest people they could find who wouldn't screw up more than say, 90% of the sales to 90% of the population.
When I was a kid, I stocked shelves at a local supermarket. No one expected me to be a world-class expert chef. I still have no idea what to do with canned squid, or giant cans of ground allspice, or chitlins.
It sounds like you think you have a business owner - contractor relationship, but you're actually getting a (platonic) housewife - shelf stocker relationship.