Why 17 years after "Nanosystems" was published do we still not have an complete atomic level design for a molecular nanoassembler?
Patience, young grasshopper. Game of Life rules published in Martin Gardners column in October 1970, first turing machine in GoL that I'm aware of, April 2000. Wait at least another 13 years or so.
I find facebook is more and more the way people are talking to me. I'm not sure why.
Compare the spam volume on facebook to the spam volume in my email inbox. Often, I wonder why I bother with email anymore. If my online financial services somehow went facebook, I'd probably never use email again.
And for the G-G-G-Grandparent post, asking why 20 somethings prefer IM over telephone, but wont tell you why, that is because they are being polite. They have eight tabs open to eight different people carrying on eight independent conversations, but its considered rude to admit. That also explains why they sometimes respond slowly, or their writings appear stupider than they are in real life, and sometimes they send the wrong thing to the wrong person. Note that people like myself whom are a small multiple of "20 something age" also multitask, its just more popular amongst that age group.
If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 0.4 tonnes of delicious steak being converted to heat in a very small space as opposed to providing useful power all over the electrical grid. If there are any butchers here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 0.4 tonnes of ribeye will do.
Considering the explosive digestive effects of a mere one pound of taco bell... I could totally believe the damage.
If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 0.4 tonnes of delicious taco bell being converted to heat and gas in a very small space... If there are any taco bell customers here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 0.4 tonnes per second of tacos will do.
Getting to the moon seems like just getting escape velocity and proper aiming
Don't forget, at a precise instant. At each instant, your aim and desired delta-V vary. And a minor nit-pic that your delta-V can be somewhat less than escape velocity... After all you only need to match orbit w/ the moon, and if the moon were "orbiting" at escape velocity, it would have escaped.
getting a proper circular orbit means achieving velocity AND THEN adjusting to get a proper orbit.
You mean, getting any-ole vaguely circular orbit that doesn't dip below the atmosphere is no big deal. And yes you do need two burns because any delta-V change you make more or less results in a delta-position change at the other end of the orbit.
Download a copy of Orbiter (its free) and play around:
Is there any particular reason though why it would need to take until 2015? I imagine the development process is much simplified since the basic hardware they're using has already been developed and flight-tested, and they're just inserting in modern electronics and redesigning the service module.
Most "formerly top-secret Soviet re-entry vehicles" were designed to sit on top of ICBMs, and provide a ride that only a nuke would tolerate (heating, deceleration, no atmosphere, etc). On the plus side I heard some were lightly armored to discourage the star wars missile defense plan, provide some limited maneuverability on re-entry, and they are probably very reliable and stable.
So, they don't have to bother with the aerodynamics, materials science, and control/navigation/guidance systems. Well maybe the guidance systems will need updating, unless you want to end every mission with a landing on the whitehouse lawn, downtown NYC, or Montana.
As an anecdotal data point, my wife's prius is easily the fastest 0-20 car I've ever been in. Performance drops off above that point, and it requires new tires on clean fresh dry pavement.
No, it doesn't. You can cool things only by radiation in vacuum. And radiation is quite slow, on Earth the major contributor in cooling is convection.
Well OK this is very Slashdot, your point of view is that radiative cooling is pretty bad in comparison to convection cooled cooling towers on earth, or phase change cooling towers (with water misters) or conduction cooling if near a nice cool lake/river. And my point of view is that radiative is pretty good, compared to having to build a reactor cooling tower plus an atmosphere, or build an ocean. Really, radiative cooling is pretty good considering that its dumping heat into "nothing" or into the universe in general. Usually you don't get anything at all for nothing.
So, the ISS is radiating 1/2 into space and 1/2 into the earth and about ten KW takes about one ton of radiator. Move into a gravity well it'll need to be stronger and heavier, but maybe you can thermosiphon. On one hand, with proper insulation and something to block the sun, you can radiate into the black cold 2.7 degree sky, on the other hand, blocking the sun and moon surface blocks alot of angular area to radiate into. Its looking like radiating a KW takes about 100 pounds of radiator. Not too impressive compared to my car radiator, not too bad for radiating heat away into a vacuum "nothing".
Ah, the articles says they'll have 1080 square feet of cooling. I'm not sure whether that says the vacuum stinks at cooling or not.
Yeah, compared to forced STP air cooling with a pretty high "cold side" temperature, a vacuum stinks at cooling. But in an absolute sense, its really not so bad given that a vacuum is "nothing".
How much would be needed in air?
Not that hard of a question dude. My roughly 150 HP car engine could output maybe 40 KW CONTINUOUS (yeah, maybe 110 KW peak, maybe) and it has a radiator that's maybe a foot and a half, by maybe a tenth of a foot, by maybe a hundred cooling fins. So the fin area is about 15 square feet.
So, for a very rough first guess, accurate to one order of magnitude at best, they need "about a medium sized car radiator" worth, or about 15 square feet, plus a cooling fan.
The cooling fan wouldn't be of much use in a vacuum so on a weight basis its not exactly apples to apples comparison.
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Yeah, it does. An infinitely large radiator protected from the sun and from the surface would cool to around 2.7 degrees kelvin, pretty chilly. When you understand why it won't cool any further, then you'll know a lot more than you need for this engineering problem, although it is interesting. There are engineering limitations where adding another kilometer of radiator tubing to drop from 4K to 3K just isn't worth the cost of tubing, and/or the power required to pump the refrigerant thru the tubes. Radiation power increases as a pretty high power of temperature.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
Look up the rotation period of the moon. Very roughly, Dark for 2 weeks, Light for 2 weeks. Unless you make a engine thats about 1/2 the circumference of the moon (or, just the diameter, if you were REALLY hard core). Which is not totally out of the question, although it would be a heck of an amazing civil engineering project.
40 kW is approximately 17 outlets that can handle 20 A at 115 V.
So, if all they ran were grow lights, that would be about 30 grow lights? I'm thinking that is not enough to grow the food for even one person during the lunar night. Assuming all you did with your electricity was grow some chow. I think one grow light's worth of plants is not enough for one persons daily food intake, and you're not going to grow a crop in rotation 30 days.
True, you've got plenty of light during the long lunar day, maybe it would be possible to do reduced light for 8 hours to 3 plants, but thats probably going to screw up the growth cycle of... anything?
Hmm. So if you electrolyze water at a rate of 40 kW, and the average human needs about 3 Kg a day (rounded up) how many people can breathe? Of course you also need life support to freeze the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and some way to turn that CO2 into C and O2 or into plant matter.
No, I'm thinking you need well over 40 KW per person for a sustainable moon colony.
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
Then use a $20 walmart toaster oven. I have always meant to try this on a running hard drive. Thought it might make an interesting science fair experiment. Main problem seems to be melting the USB cable before the drive fails.
In the military I was informed that they simply used a cutting torch, no muss, no fuss, no thermite steam explosions. I was also informed the main problem was to breach the case ASAP before pressure builds up inside, as the drive air filters won't vent quickly enough, so the first job w/ the torch was to blow out the drive shell by the air filter. Large installations (NSA?) simply used a ultra heavy duty recycling shredder and they weighed what came in must equal at least 90% of what came out the other end.
Which is why it'll be ironic if they end up buying Time Warner.
1) TW just recently split off TW-Cable from the TW-content empire. So, it would be weird if TW-Cable's competitor comcast, would buy TW-Cable's previous owners, the TC-content group. Genealogically I guess it would be like.... I really can't describe it. But I don't think it fits the definition of ironic, unless you subscribe to the "street definition" where ironic simply means anything that makes you think.
2) Last time around, the pipe-company AOL bought the combined TW empire, mostly for the content. This time around, the pipe-company comcast might buy TW-content. Not so much ironic, as it sounds stupid, to try that failed play again. If it failed for ten years, then about a year after the split, how could a new pipe company successfully merge with TW-content? I'd love to see that board meeting, "I've got a plan that has never worked, lets try it!". Maybe they are trying to fail, in the hope of a federal bailout program, like "Cash4Cable" or "Cash4Content" or something?
Tricky question, don't you think?/. is a family-friendly website and nobody should answer that question.
Could be worse, first time I read it as "naked (Lara Croft) modders" and had a nasty vision of some very chilly dude designing new levels in his basement, instead of "(naked Lara Croft)-modders", which is probably what the author intended.
Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement?
Far, far too cold.
Typical Rankine cycle plant tops out around 500-600C at the hot end. Higher would be nicer, but the problem is you need a material with immense tensile strength to contain the pressure, pleasant failure modes (not brittle), and good heat conductivity. Sorry but 600C is about as good as our technology gets. The cold end is of course much colder.
On the other hand, cement kilns really need about 1500C. Kilns don't operate at much pressure, and insulating material is preferable. Seems our current technology is much better at weak insulators than strong conductors.
The hot side of the plant is way too cold for a kiln. The cold side of the plant at around 50C or so at the power plant is waaaaaaaay too cold for a cement kiln, barely good enough to preheat the materials.
If you built a rankine cycle plant that had the same temperature at the hot and cold side, by definition it wouldn't make any power, so it would just be a waste. Or if you minimized the temperature at the cold end, the plant would be efficient, but the cold end would barely be useful for household heating in the winter, much less cement production...
If only the hot side of the plant could survive kiln operating temperatures... then during non-peak times, keep firing the furnace full blast, but make cement instead of electricity. But our technology is way to crude for that.
When you have no savings to speak of, consumption taxes hurt you the most.
If you assume people with no savings are the poor people (I'd disagree with that assumption), then no they do not. I have lived in an area with a sales tax for my entire life. The necessities of life are not taxed, anything above and beyond survival is taxed (and quite heavily!). Uncooked food, for example, is never taxed. Gold jewelry, heavily taxed.
The sales tax is collected by individual vendors, not by your bank as checks clear and credit purchases are posted or something like that.
This was all figured out decades ago, in sales tax states. In my state, poor people whom buy "poor people stuff" basically don't pay sales tax, at least compared to middle and upper incomes. Extremely progressive effective tax rate.
Yes, I'm sure the federal government could screw this up, but my state government has not screwed it up after several decades of utter incompetence...
You're taxing the poor bastard who'se working two jobs living paycheck to paycheck 100% on his meager wages while giving a break to the fat cat in the corporate office who can AFFORD to invest and save.
I suspect you do not live in an area with a sales tax, to have no idea at all how this works. On the other hand, I have lived in a state with a sales tax my entire life.
The way it works is there is a very long and complicated list of what gets taxed and what does not get taxed.
Uncooked food of any kind is not taxed. Restaurant food is taxed. "ready to eat" food at the deli counter is taxed if it is "warm" and ready to eat, but cold needing reheat is not taxed. Ready to eat junk food is not taxed. Beverages are not taxed unless they contain alcohol in which case they pay a proportionate amount based on the alcohol content (thus the tax on american beer 6-pack is much lower than real beer 6-pack). Packaged fresh meat is not taxed, if uncooked. Cooked but frozen meat is not taxed. Even cooked but refrigerated meat is not taxed. But a turkey sub is taxed not matter if warm or cold.
You do not pay a sales tax on rent, although the building owner pays an income tax on your paid rent, so its a stealth tax, but if you're poor enough the government gives a substantial tax credit prorated by your rent and your income when you pay income taxes, so rent is tax free if you're poor and only stealth-taxed if you're middle class or higher.
Medicine is, I believe, generally not taxed. Utilities are generally taxed, but if you're poor, you get govt help anyway, so its just the government paying tax to itself, weirdly enough.
I believe new clothes are taxed and second hand clothes are not taxed.
Cookware like frying pans is definitely taxed if new, but I believe paper plates are untaxed.
Optional use tobacco products are extremely heavily taxed. On the other hand, required use gasoline is also heavily taxed. Automobiles are taxed, but due to depreciation, of course most of the dollar amount taxed is from new cars. That tax isn't really out of pocket for the buyer, but out of pocket for the seller since you have to price low enough to clear the market, so the poor dude is going to pay $1000 and he doesn't particularly care what fraction of that $1000 is going to the previous owner and what fraction is skimmed off by the government.
Anything purchased second hand at a garage sale or farmer market is tax free, although that is probably technically illegal. Poor people buy alot more second hand than rich people.
Life used to be pretty complicated for store cashiers before barcode scanners started doing all the work, a couple decades ago.
Generally speaking, with very few exceptions, if everyone needs it to live as a basic expense, it is generally untaxed, and if its above and beyond simple survival, it is taxed, and if its "sinful", at least as defined by Puritan idiot tradition, its extremely heavily taxed.
Again, generally speaking, poor people pay very little sales tax in my state, compared to rich people.
Now your comment about paycheck to paycheck is a totally different subject. Middle class to upper class whom live paycheck to paycheck because they buy all kinds of expensive junk do pay alot of sales tax.
I think "New Scientist" was trolled. The concept makes no sense. Sure it wasn't an Onion article?
The New Scientist reports that at present, all robot software is designed uniquely, even for parts common to all robots but that could be about to change as roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardized, resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use.
Here's a top secret copy of "std_robot.h": (blank space here)
No parts are common to all robots. Roombas and toys operating on extremely simplified flowcharts plus a touch of randomness, remote space exploration vehicles that are semi-autonomous, those battle-bot things that are just human controlled R/C cars with weapon hardpoints and are not real robots, hydraulic arm industrial welding robots, lynxmotion-ish multi-leg crawlers powered by servos, G-Code programmed numerically controlled lathes and milling machines, and last but not least RC airplanes converted into UAVs. They all have the general idea that something electronic controls something mechanical. Beyond that vague idea, what they all have in common is... Umm... yeah, nothing at all, thats it.
Gerkey, who hopes to one day see a robot "app store" where a person could download a program for their robot and have it work as easily as an iPhone app."
My fiancee and I live together, and every month she writes a check to me to help offset the bills and all that. I certainly don't want to trust Paypal (or pay their fees), so our options are to write a check or hand over several hundred in cash.
Been there, done that. We had an even simpler solution, she paid half the bills, I paid the other half. If you don't have enough bills to split the total evenly, get some more bills. Once we moved in together, more bills seems to appear naturally, like spontaneously generated, just like children.
That and the occasional random bill from a service company that you get through the mail.
Skilled tradesmen generally like to get a check in their hands immediately after their work is complete.
Often, a cash discount is available, depending on their level of fear of the IRS (the old fashioned scam, I usually charge $100 but if you let me write up a receipt for $50, I'll take $75 cash, and we'll both be happy and call it even, mm kay?)
* I have a friend who watches my son during the day. * I need to pay this person every two weeks. * I need proof that I've paid this person for a given time period so no disputes arise. * Being as this person only watches my child (apart from hers) she is not a "business" per se and thus doesn't accept credit cards.
I am honestly not being snarky or combative, but if checks are truly a thing of the past in some places I would like to see what they've been replaced with.
This isn't very complicated. Signed receipt. I, the undersigned, aka "AdamWeeden's Friend", acknowledge than I received $20 cash on date X for baby sitting little AdamWeeden Jr. for the two week period of Y to Z. "AdamWeedens friend" signs the receipt, you keep the receipt in your file cabinet.
A signed hash file of a receipt would probably work just as well, although they are obviously opening themselves to a known plaintext attack.
Technically, the IRS would be interested in this transaction, but in practice probably not. None the less, I would be very careful to leave language like "employed by" out of the receipt. If something happened to your friend (slipped on a banana peel thrown by little AdamWeeden Jr and broke a bone or something) your insurance company would probably be highly agitated by the whole situation. Neither problem area is much affected by check vs receipt, of course.
A few years ago, when AdSense was brand spanking new, I cashed my first cheque. The cheque was for $210 or so, of which my bank kept a $50 processing fee.
Luckily, subsequent cheques were a few thousand dollars each
I had no idea you could get that kind of loot from Adsense, and my first guess was you were referring to Zimbabwe dollars, where you get a trillion to one us $.
Slashdot Mirror
Why 17 years after "Nanosystems" was published do we still not have an complete atomic level design for a molecular nanoassembler?
Patience, young grasshopper. Game of Life rules published in Martin Gardners column in October 1970, first turing machine in GoL that I'm aware of, April 2000. Wait at least another 13 years or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life#cite_note-0
http://www.rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm
I find facebook is more and more the way people are talking to me. I'm not sure why.
Compare the spam volume on facebook to the spam volume in my email inbox. Often, I wonder why I bother with email anymore. If my online financial services somehow went facebook, I'd probably never use email again.
And for the G-G-G-Grandparent post, asking why 20 somethings prefer IM over telephone, but wont tell you why, that is because they are being polite. They have eight tabs open to eight different people carrying on eight independent conversations, but its considered rude to admit. That also explains why they sometimes respond slowly, or their writings appear stupider than they are in real life, and sometimes they send the wrong thing to the wrong person. Note that people like myself whom are a small multiple of "20 something age" also multitask, its just more popular amongst that age group.
You might as well have said,
If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 0.4 tonnes of delicious steak being converted to heat in a very small space as opposed to providing useful power all over the electrical grid. If there are any butchers here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 0.4 tonnes of ribeye will do.
Considering the explosive digestive effects of a mere one pound of taco bell... I could totally believe the damage.
If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 0.4 tonnes of delicious taco bell being converted to heat and gas in a very small space ... If there are any taco bell customers here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 0.4 tonnes per second of tacos will do.
Getting to the moon seems like just getting escape velocity and proper aiming
Don't forget, at a precise instant. At each instant, your aim and desired delta-V vary. And a minor nit-pic that your delta-V can be somewhat less than escape velocity... After all you only need to match orbit w/ the moon, and if the moon were "orbiting" at escape velocity, it would have escaped.
getting a proper circular orbit means achieving velocity AND THEN adjusting to get a proper orbit.
You mean, getting any-ole vaguely circular orbit that doesn't dip below the atmosphere is no big deal. And yes you do need two burns because any delta-V change you make more or less results in a delta-position change at the other end of the orbit.
Download a copy of Orbiter (its free) and play around:
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
Is there any particular reason though why it would need to take until 2015? I imagine the development process is much simplified since the basic hardware they're using has already been developed and flight-tested, and they're just inserting in modern electronics and redesigning the service module.
Most "formerly top-secret Soviet re-entry vehicles" were designed to sit on top of ICBMs, and provide a ride that only a nuke would tolerate (heating, deceleration, no atmosphere, etc). On the plus side I heard some were lightly armored to discourage the star wars missile defense plan, provide some limited maneuverability on re-entry, and they are probably very reliable and stable.
So, they don't have to bother with the aerodynamics, materials science, and control/navigation/guidance systems. Well maybe the guidance systems will need updating, unless you want to end every mission with a landing on the whitehouse lawn, downtown NYC, or Montana.
So it's diesel - is it as gutless as I've been led to believe diesel cars are? I've never driven one, but I am genuinely curious....
No, its a hybrid. take a look at the very simplified electric motor torque curve at
http://lancet.mit.edu/motors/motors3.html#tscurve
Not exactly gutless when accelerating.
As an anecdotal data point, my wife's prius is easily the fastest 0-20 car I've ever been in. Performance drops off above that point, and it requires new tires on clean fresh dry pavement.
"Yeah, it does."
No, it doesn't. You can cool things only by radiation in vacuum. And radiation is quite slow, on Earth the major contributor in cooling is convection.
Well OK this is very Slashdot, your point of view is that radiative cooling is pretty bad in comparison to convection cooled cooling towers on earth, or phase change cooling towers (with water misters) or conduction cooling if near a nice cool lake/river. And my point of view is that radiative is pretty good, compared to having to build a reactor cooling tower plus an atmosphere, or build an ocean. Really, radiative cooling is pretty good considering that its dumping heat into "nothing" or into the universe in general. Usually you don't get anything at all for nothing.
For some actual numbers:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/HeatRejectionRadiators/index.html
So, the ISS is radiating 1/2 into space and 1/2 into the earth and about ten KW takes about one ton of radiator. Move into a gravity well it'll need to be stronger and heavier, but maybe you can thermosiphon. On one hand, with proper insulation and something to block the sun, you can radiate into the black cold 2.7 degree sky, on the other hand, blocking the sun and moon surface blocks alot of angular area to radiate into. Its looking like radiating a KW takes about 100 pounds of radiator. Not too impressive compared to my car radiator, not too bad for radiating heat away into a vacuum "nothing".
Ah, the articles says they'll have 1080 square feet of cooling. I'm not sure whether that says the vacuum stinks at cooling or not.
Yeah, compared to forced STP air cooling with a pretty high "cold side" temperature, a vacuum stinks at cooling. But in an absolute sense, its really not so bad given that a vacuum is "nothing".
How much would be needed in air?
Not that hard of a question dude. My roughly 150 HP car engine could output maybe 40 KW CONTINUOUS (yeah, maybe 110 KW peak, maybe) and it has a radiator that's maybe a foot and a half, by maybe a tenth of a foot, by maybe a hundred cooling fins. So the fin area is about 15 square feet.
So, for a very rough first guess, accurate to one order of magnitude at best, they need "about a medium sized car radiator" worth, or about 15 square feet, plus a cooling fan.
The cooling fan wouldn't be of much use in a vacuum so on a weight basis its not exactly apples to apples comparison.
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Yeah, it does. An infinitely large radiator protected from the sun and from the surface would cool to around 2.7 degrees kelvin, pretty chilly. When you understand why it won't cool any further, then you'll know a lot more than you need for this engineering problem, although it is interesting. There are engineering limitations where adding another kilometer of radiator tubing to drop from 4K to 3K just isn't worth the cost of tubing, and/or the power required to pump the refrigerant thru the tubes. Radiation power increases as a pretty high power of temperature.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
Look up the rotation period of the moon. Very roughly, Dark for 2 weeks, Light for 2 weeks. Unless you make a engine thats about 1/2 the circumference of the moon (or, just the diameter, if you were REALLY hard core). Which is not totally out of the question, although it would be a heck of an amazing civil engineering project.
40 kW is approximately 17 outlets that can handle 20 A at 115 V.
So, if all they ran were grow lights, that would be about 30 grow lights? I'm thinking that is not enough to grow the food for even one person during the lunar night. Assuming all you did with your electricity was grow some chow. I think one grow light's worth of plants is not enough for one persons daily food intake, and you're not going to grow a crop in rotation 30 days.
True, you've got plenty of light during the long lunar day, maybe it would be possible to do reduced light for 8 hours to 3 plants, but thats probably going to screw up the growth cycle of ... anything?
Hmm. So if you electrolyze water at a rate of 40 kW, and the average human needs about 3 Kg a day (rounded up) how many people can breathe? Of course you also need life support to freeze the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and some way to turn that CO2 into C and O2 or into plant matter.
No, I'm thinking you need well over 40 KW per person for a sustainable moon colony.
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
Then use a $20 walmart toaster oven. I have always meant to try this on a running hard drive. Thought it might make an interesting science fair experiment. Main problem seems to be melting the USB cable before the drive fails.
In the military I was informed that they simply used a cutting torch, no muss, no fuss, no thermite steam explosions. I was also informed the main problem was to breach the case ASAP before pressure builds up inside, as the drive air filters won't vent quickly enough, so the first job w/ the torch was to blow out the drive shell by the air filter. Large installations (NSA?) simply used a ultra heavy duty recycling shredder and they weighed what came in must equal at least 90% of what came out the other end.
I'd guess the foundry people would object to contaminating their carefully selected alloy...
Modded as funny, but if it was a food grade stainless alloy, adding a bunch of lead solder is inappropriate, unless the foundry is in China.
Which is why it'll be ironic if they end up buying Time Warner.
1) TW just recently split off TW-Cable from the TW-content empire. So, it would be weird if TW-Cable's competitor comcast, would buy TW-Cable's previous owners, the TC-content group. Genealogically I guess it would be like .... I really can't describe it. But I don't think it fits the definition of ironic, unless you subscribe to the "street definition" where ironic simply means anything that makes you think.
2) Last time around, the pipe-company AOL bought the combined TW empire, mostly for the content. This time around, the pipe-company comcast might buy TW-content. Not so much ironic, as it sounds stupid, to try that failed play again. If it failed for ten years, then about a year after the split, how could a new pipe company successfully merge with TW-content? I'd love to see that board meeting, "I've got a plan that has never worked, lets try it!". Maybe they are trying to fail, in the hope of a federal bailout program, like "Cash4Cable" or "Cash4Content" or something?
If you're a relatively mundane manufacturing company and you leak customer data -- who cares?
"Chinese Employee Loses iPhone Prototype Kills Self"
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/07/21/1814212/Chinese-Employee-Loses-iPhone-Prototype-Kills-Self
Most people not monetarily involved, think he was killed, not killed himself.
Tricky question, don't you think? /. is a family-friendly website and nobody should answer that question.
Could be worse, first time I read it as "naked (Lara Croft) modders" and had a nasty vision of some very chilly dude designing new levels in his basement, instead of "(naked Lara Croft)-modders", which is probably what the author intended.
Could the waste heat from a coal or nuclear power plant be used to 'bake' the cement?
Far, far too cold.
Typical Rankine cycle plant tops out around 500-600C at the hot end. Higher would be nicer, but the problem is you need a material with immense tensile strength to contain the pressure, pleasant failure modes (not brittle), and good heat conductivity. Sorry but 600C is about as good as our technology gets. The cold end is of course much colder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
On the other hand, cement kilns really need about 1500C. Kilns don't operate at much pressure, and insulating material is preferable. Seems our current technology is much better at weak insulators than strong conductors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_kiln
The hot side of the plant is way too cold for a kiln. The cold side of the plant at around 50C or so at the power plant is waaaaaaaay too cold for a cement kiln, barely good enough to preheat the materials.
If you built a rankine cycle plant that had the same temperature at the hot and cold side, by definition it wouldn't make any power, so it would just be a waste. Or if you minimized the temperature at the cold end, the plant would be efficient, but the cold end would barely be useful for household heating in the winter, much less cement production...
If only the hot side of the plant could survive kiln operating temperatures... then during non-peak times, keep firing the furnace full blast, but make cement instead of electricity. But our technology is way to crude for that.
When you have no savings to speak of, consumption taxes hurt you the most.
If you assume people with no savings are the poor people (I'd disagree with that assumption), then no they do not. I have lived in an area with a sales tax for my entire life. The necessities of life are not taxed, anything above and beyond survival is taxed (and quite heavily!). Uncooked food, for example, is never taxed. Gold jewelry, heavily taxed.
The sales tax is collected by individual vendors, not by your bank as checks clear and credit purchases are posted or something like that.
This was all figured out decades ago, in sales tax states. In my state, poor people whom buy "poor people stuff" basically don't pay sales tax, at least compared to middle and upper incomes. Extremely progressive effective tax rate.
Yes, I'm sure the federal government could screw this up, but my state government has not screwed it up after several decades of utter incompetence...
You're taxing the poor bastard who'se working two jobs living paycheck to paycheck 100% on his meager wages while giving a break to the fat cat in the corporate office who can AFFORD to invest and save.
I suspect you do not live in an area with a sales tax, to have no idea at all how this works. On the other hand, I have lived in a state with a sales tax my entire life.
The way it works is there is a very long and complicated list of what gets taxed and what does not get taxed.
Uncooked food of any kind is not taxed. Restaurant food is taxed. "ready to eat" food at the deli counter is taxed if it is "warm" and ready to eat, but cold needing reheat is not taxed. Ready to eat junk food is not taxed. Beverages are not taxed unless they contain alcohol in which case they pay a proportionate amount based on the alcohol content (thus the tax on american beer 6-pack is much lower than real beer 6-pack). Packaged fresh meat is not taxed, if uncooked. Cooked but frozen meat is not taxed. Even cooked but refrigerated meat is not taxed. But a turkey sub is taxed not matter if warm or cold.
You do not pay a sales tax on rent, although the building owner pays an income tax on your paid rent, so its a stealth tax, but if you're poor enough the government gives a substantial tax credit prorated by your rent and your income when you pay income taxes, so rent is tax free if you're poor and only stealth-taxed if you're middle class or higher.
Medicine is, I believe, generally not taxed. Utilities are generally taxed, but if you're poor, you get govt help anyway, so its just the government paying tax to itself, weirdly enough.
I believe new clothes are taxed and second hand clothes are not taxed.
Cookware like frying pans is definitely taxed if new, but I believe paper plates are untaxed.
Optional use tobacco products are extremely heavily taxed. On the other hand, required use gasoline is also heavily taxed. Automobiles are taxed, but due to depreciation, of course most of the dollar amount taxed is from new cars. That tax isn't really out of pocket for the buyer, but out of pocket for the seller since you have to price low enough to clear the market, so the poor dude is going to pay $1000 and he doesn't particularly care what fraction of that $1000 is going to the previous owner and what fraction is skimmed off by the government.
Anything purchased second hand at a garage sale or farmer market is tax free, although that is probably technically illegal. Poor people buy alot more second hand than rich people.
Life used to be pretty complicated for store cashiers before barcode scanners started doing all the work, a couple decades ago.
Generally speaking, with very few exceptions, if everyone needs it to live as a basic expense, it is generally untaxed, and if its above and beyond simple survival, it is taxed, and if its "sinful", at least as defined by Puritan idiot tradition, its extremely heavily taxed.
Again, generally speaking, poor people pay very little sales tax in my state, compared to rich people.
Now your comment about paycheck to paycheck is a totally different subject. Middle class to upper class whom live paycheck to paycheck because they buy all kinds of expensive junk do pay alot of sales tax.
I think "New Scientist" was trolled. The concept makes no sense. Sure it wasn't an Onion article?
The New Scientist reports that at present, all robot software is designed uniquely, even for parts common to all robots but that could be about to change as roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardized, resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use.
Here's a top secret copy of "std_robot.h":
(blank space here)
No parts are common to all robots. Roombas and toys operating on extremely simplified flowcharts plus a touch of randomness, remote space exploration vehicles that are semi-autonomous, those battle-bot things that are just human controlled R/C cars with weapon hardpoints and are not real robots, hydraulic arm industrial welding robots, lynxmotion-ish multi-leg crawlers powered by servos, G-Code programmed numerically controlled lathes and milling machines, and last but not least RC airplanes converted into UAVs. They all have the general idea that something electronic controls something mechanical. Beyond that vague idea, what they all have in common is... Umm ... yeah, nothing at all, thats it.
Gerkey, who hopes to one day see a robot "app store" where a person could download a program for their robot and have it work as easily as an iPhone app."
Why an app store? Why not:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=robot
Why would it work as easily as an iPhone app? All iPhones are "the same" more or less. In the future, why would all robots be the same?
Mystifying how the article got it so wrong.
I got the lolcat caption all ready here, but what picture for the background?
I can haz cheezburgers. Eat lotz and lotz of greezy cheezeburgers for years and years. Then I needz uh internet connected pacemakerz.
Sorry for the lolcat, but I had to do it.
My fiancee and I live together, and every month she writes a check to me to help offset the bills and all that. I certainly don't want to trust Paypal (or pay their fees), so our options are to write a check or hand over several hundred in cash.
Been there, done that. We had an even simpler solution, she paid half the bills, I paid the other half. If you don't have enough bills to split the total evenly, get some more bills. Once we moved in together, more bills seems to appear naturally, like spontaneously generated, just like children.
That and the occasional random bill from a service company that you get through the mail.
Skilled tradesmen generally like to get a check in their hands immediately after their work is complete.
Often, a cash discount is available, depending on their level of fear of the IRS (the old fashioned scam, I usually charge $100 but if you let me write up a receipt for $50, I'll take $75 cash, and we'll both be happy and call it even, mm kay?)
* I have a friend who watches my son during the day.
* I need to pay this person every two weeks.
* I need proof that I've paid this person for a given time period so no disputes arise.
* Being as this person only watches my child (apart from hers) she is not a "business" per se and thus doesn't accept credit cards.
I am honestly not being snarky or combative, but if checks are truly a thing of the past in some places I would like to see what they've been replaced with.
This isn't very complicated. Signed receipt. I, the undersigned, aka "AdamWeeden's Friend", acknowledge than I received $20 cash on date X for baby sitting little AdamWeeden Jr. for the two week period of Y to Z. "AdamWeedens friend" signs the receipt, you keep the receipt in your file cabinet.
A signed hash file of a receipt would probably work just as well, although they are obviously opening themselves to a known plaintext attack.
Technically, the IRS would be interested in this transaction, but in practice probably not. None the less, I would be very careful to leave language like "employed by" out of the receipt. If something happened to your friend (slipped on a banana peel thrown by little AdamWeeden Jr and broke a bone or something) your insurance company would probably be highly agitated by the whole situation. Neither problem area is much affected by check vs receipt, of course.
A few years ago, when AdSense was brand spanking new, I cashed my first cheque.
The cheque was for $210 or so, of which my bank kept a $50 processing fee.
Luckily, subsequent cheques were a few thousand dollars each
I had no idea you could get that kind of loot from Adsense, and my first guess was you were referring to Zimbabwe dollars, where you get a trillion to one us $.
Location: obviously somewhere in Europe.
I can't think of any companies that provide something positive for the customer but no return for shareholders that are still in business.
Non-profit corporations. Note I mean non-profit by choice, such as some hospitals, charities, not non-profit by mismanagement like GM.