shale gas is primarily a way to turn two barrels of crude into one barrel equivalent of natgas. Sometimes its described as a way to turn millions of dollars of capital investment into thousands of dollars of gas. It is very similar to ethanol as a primary energy source, in that in rare and unusual geography and situations it is occasionally net positive, but by in large its not gonna work.
Conveniently the north sea fields are in steep decline such that the UK is in turmoil from going from natgas exporting nation to importing nation a couple years back, so there will be no natgas competitor. Its like claiming people would never pay $10 for dinner at KFC, because they could just eat passenger pigeon and rack of dinosaur ribs. Oh wait, they're all gone. Well then.
As for the nukes, the nimby types and "hate what you fear and fear what you don't understand" types will slow that down. Add some green fearmongering, etc etc.
reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning... gas powered plants.
Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.
The fastest and cheapest way to bring down... carbon emissions is by
is by burning up all the gas? Can't emit carbon if there's none to burn.
I follow the energy business and the UK is in serious danger of disaster in the next decade or so. They don't have the technical equipment or the economic strength or the installed capital (like insulated buildings) to survive the transition from a fossil fuel exporter to pretty much having to import everything. The lights are going out and no more central heated homes. The strong "business as usual" and "kick the can down the road" isn't helping the situation. There will be people freezing to death in the winter, there will be rolling blackouts...
Also all/most of the coal was burned up in the industrial revolution. The last mine in cornwall (and it was a tin mine anyway) closed up more than a decade ago. They can import, for awhile. Its kinda expensive.
People have a very difficult time understanding technological limitations. If only the price gets high enough then the boffins will magically find an expensive way to do anything. Well, no, not really. Print as many pounds / euros as you want, they can't magically fill an empty fuel tank.
BTW, that's the KSC online shop, not directly from SpaceX, WTF?
Theres two classes of "product" I'm trying to avoid. Examples below:
1) I could steal a pix of cmdrtaco from the new york times without paying for copyrights and put it on a tee shirt with the caption "I love/. (tm)". The KSC online shop probably prevents that as I doubt they wanna get busted as IP pirates or gray market cloners or whatever phrase.
2) I could use my limited artistry skills to draw a parody of cmdrtaco's face and put it on a tee shirt with a caption "I love/.(tm)" and post it on cafepress. Note I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee, contractor, or have any financial relation with/, other than sending a couple bucks as a subscription years ago. So I'd be using their reputation for my personal profit.
I wanna avoid option 2 as well. If the KSC product is "officially licensed by spacex" then I will press the buy button myself, but oddly enough they do not mention that anywhere on the page that I could find. Otherwise its merely a black tee shirt where someone printed a company name on it... I can make that myself.
Its like the subtle difference between wearing a random blue polo shirt and dockers and calling it a best buy uniform, and wearing a genuine embroidered best buy tee shirt and dockers. I was thinking of wearing that for Halloween one year... probably best that it didn't work out.
Anyway, TLDR, I want a spacex tee shirt, not a tee shirt that has the word spacex written on it.
Well, yeah, but first you have to know what a salt is and why you'd want to use it. I thought the language of the quote was interesting, “stored in hash format” not “stored in hashed salted format”. Neither makes any sense when passing thru a journalist filter so we can assume the quote did not pass thru a PR filter or a journalist filter and that's, unfortunately, the actual technical state. Its probably by their own admission just a simple hash of the bare string that will momentarily be rainbowtabled. Luckily they don't have email addresses, and users never use the same email addrs/password combo at multiple web sites, so everyone will be OK (LOL)
The $12.5 billion merger was approved by regulators in China on Monday
How does China relate to this exactly? I looked at the wiki page and it seems they were an American company, HQ in chicago, etc. Did they own a lot of factories or property in China, thus needing permission?
the passwords are “stored in hash format” so they’re safe
Assuming their programmers know what a salt is (maybe they do, maybe they don't, he's not saying), and/or their users are not using passwords typically seen in a dictionary attack (yeah right)
1) screw the FB IPO thats a pump and dump scheme of the largest scale. I want to buy shares in spacex, they're actually doing something interesting, valuable, and apparently profitable. Which is probably why they're staying out of the stock market (the old saying, bad money always drives out good money...)
2) I wanted to ask for a spacex tee shirt for fathers day, but all I can find is a couple IP violators, people ripping off newswire photographers, that kind of product. Their might be "real" shirts out there... where? I would think a tastefully done black tee shirt sold directly by spacex to wealthy/.ers could be a significant funding source for their operation. Well, honestly all it would probably pay for is free donuts and coffee on Friday, but I'd feel cool contributing to that too.
Am I bad for being a tiny little bit happy when I hear these stories? Just tiny bit not a lot? Like some chick got teased on the internet so she hung herself and I'm thinking, luckily for me, because 10 years later I'd probably dump her or steal "her" parking spot or not hold the door open for her like a gentleman should or decline to purchase a drink for her at the local watering hole and then being obviously ridiculously unstable she'd blame me and blow her brains out and I'd have to feel guilty for the rest of my life about it, even though what I did wasn't really all that awful (come on chick, find another parking spot?), so if there is a tiny silver lining to this at least someone other than me is feeling guilty? Almost like they did a community service?
Like this dude, OK he did some other dude, didn't want people to know, despite the fact that most civilized people don't really care and in this modern era you don't have to care about the uncivilized people who do care, so now he's dead. If this didn't happen, I can just imagine this dude got a job working with me, and some day in a staff meeting in front of everyone I'm all like "dude, you totally made a picket fence error in your for loop making it crash when it hits an uninitialized array element" and then, being about as stable as a plutonium atom fattened up with an extra neutron or two, dude walks into his cube, blames me for ruining his life (so he claims, anyway) and blows his head off, and then I've gotta go thru the rest of my life feeling guilty for calling out a dude for having the wrong end condition in a for loop. I can totally see this happening, and I just don't personally want to deal with unstable people blowing up, its just not my thing.
Its kinda like when you hear about a suicide where somebody jumps in front of a car, and you're like "sucks to be that guy, but at least they didn't jump in front of my car, because that would really suck for me".
I don't feel any ill will toward the guy who offed himself for no good reason, other then him being a remarkably amazingly poor role model for other kids dealing with bad feelings. I'm just glad he's not around so I could get blamed for him offing himself. Unstable means its gonna blow up sooner or later and murphy's law its gonna happen around me, so...
Pretty certain if I was video taping two people having sex that'd put me on the sex offender registry
LOL that would put a hell of a lot of professional cameramen from the pr0n industry in prison. Also a lot of CCTV watching security guards. I think you meant to add "without their permission in a private space".. Is it wrong to record people without their permission when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy?(admittedly banging away in front of a laptop, for anyone aware of their surroundings and born after 1950 or so, that's not very reasonable anymore, is it?) Coincidentally, looking at the charges...
Try some perl development the old fashioned way. Document a list of "PITA" about developing in perl. Simultaneously study at least one framework and slowly enumerate a list of "this is how framework X fixes the Y problem" ah "I know kung fu" or whatever. At some point those lists will converge. Then seamlessly start developing the new way using a framework.
You can also have a lot of fun trying to implement your own homemade framework. Being a text processing language, making a MVC like system isn't too hard. Again, at some point your toy MVC will converge with some perl framework and away you go.
I started doing RoR probably 5, maybe 6 years ago, and I agree, the learning curve for a framework is darn near vertical unless you're doing the overly simplistic demo apps... note demos are selected precisely because they make the framework look good, not because they're realistic. Eventually the insane vertical learning curve flattens out. Just like second semester calculus, sometimes you just gotta gut it out till you get it.
You may be better off forgetting about "web development" which is a pretty huge and complicated solution space. Come back to it later. Go to projecteuler.com and solve a couple simple compsci algorithms in your new language. I am teaching myself Scala at this time, for the heck of it, by implementing the craziest solutions I can to some P.E. problems. I wish I had learned Ruby in full detail before I started to learn RoR, would have been a much smoother learning curve.
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?
on
Perl 5.16.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
became moored in WIP status for the last 6-x years.
12 years, not 6.
The killer is no one in the perl dev community wants it. This says it all "Backward compatibility with earlier versions of Perl is not a goal". The problem is I don't love perl because of its syntax, although some of it is pretty cool, I love it because of the CPAN which does all my work for me. All my problems seem to be solved by combining at most ten or so CPAN modules. Its kind of like how the whole world is built out of only a hundred or so elements... if I wrote a perl program that used 100 CPAN modules, the result would be a new universe would spring into being, like the big bang. Or something like that.
LOL apparently you've never seen the Perl6 feature list, which can be summarized to "implement every programming concept known to mankind", or the CPAN which is "everything that can be turned into (what amounts to) a library, turned into a library and ready to freely download".
Its kind of like that Arthur Clarke story "The Nine Billion Names of God". If, one night, you glance at the sky and see the stars start going out, you'll know that someone has finally implemented all the Perl6 features. Either that, or its cloudy and going to rain.
There is no legal way to charge retail prices like 99 cents at the ITMS.
From what I remember of the case he pretty much did it willfully, which normally would force the charge to be $30K to $150K per song, so he should have to pay around $3M. I have no idea how he got the charge down into the non-willful infringement category of $750 to $30000 per song. Probably there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was doing it willfully but no real proof or signed confession so its simpler to go for the lesser charge.
Sounds like you think the jury can pretty much do what it wants. Not in this legal system, no.
I suspect you'd find the injustice of mandatory minimum sentencing to be pretty offensive too.
After the inevitable revolution that we're headed toward, this country will be a much better place to live. The hard part is likely going to be getting there alive.
You may want to look at the graph... this isn't one of those sociology graphs with a correlation coeff of 0.4 or whatever, this is creepily almost one dot on top of another. "We're operating on a totally new paradigm" is usually wrong.
A sensor as accurate as they're claiming should be able to measure the height of a grain of salt sitting on a table top.
Thats a pretty good estimate... isn't this sensor being claimed at 10 microns and a typical sieve size for table salt is around 70 microns?
I can one up measuring one crystal. If this sensor exists, you should be able to dump out a salt shaker on a two seater restaurant table around 4 x 2 feet, snap one "photo" or whatever you call the data gathering in a fraction of a full motion video second, and then computationally analyze the location and surface condition/damage of each individual salt crystal (well, other than the ones buried in the pile). 7 pixels per crystal should be good enough to find chipped salt crystals.
Like the "sand reckoner" if should be able to tell you how many grains of sand there are on a beach... by counting each one.
Actually, if this sensor exists, and it does kinect style full motion video cap, you should be able to dump the salt shaker out, and as the crystals are falling, analyze each individual crystal and chart its trajectory in real time as it falls to the table...
Your machines are 100k+ as you said yourself, your boss is not going to throw those out within 3 years and those machines have no place for such newfangled tech yet.
no no. A mill is kind of a basic unit of production machine and those cost $100K (well, it varies from $5K up to...) and a digitizer/taster probe costs about $400, plus or minus software, etc. Currently you stick a $400 probe and some software in a $100K mill and hours later your part has been probed a million times (maybe literally) and you have a giant computer file of coordinates that can be run thru limit checks or maybe imported into CAD program, whatever.
The point being that they don't mind hours of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital investment... If there is a way to do it instantly for $70 or even $7000 they'll whip out the corporate credit card so fast you'll hear a sonic boom. If machine shop X doesn't buy it, Y will, and X will shortly go out of business... Also CAD/CAM is arguably much more modern and high tech than most other businesses.
There are many situations where 'sight' only may not be a good fit (high speed metal cutting).
But thats the whole point I'm trying to make... 10 microns is usually good enough for that kind of work, and the existing 10 micron "class of solution" are only around 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than this "new tech" solution.
How does a high school student get access to one of those?
Essentially, the kid didn't win anything, the local taxpayers and the local science teacher won while the kid was watching them.
I'm about 1e9 times more impressed with the kid who probably bought live euglena from carolina.com for $25 and probably made his own colloidal silver in his basement using some silver coins and a electronics hobbyist power supply, dumped it into petrie dishes under some lights, then did some cell counts in a microscope. I'm impressed because the kid probably paid for it himself and did all/most of the work himself. That kid actually did science and earned his money (unless he made his brother do all the work or something... point being he Could have done all the work, at least)
The electron microscope kid just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Bleh.
Slashdot Mirror
an average adult male build and a weight of 70 kg (154 lbs)
Americans need not apply. This is "SMART CAR" sized not "SUV" sized.
shale gas is primarily a way to turn two barrels of crude into one barrel equivalent of natgas. Sometimes its described as a way to turn millions of dollars of capital investment into thousands of dollars of gas.
It is very similar to ethanol as a primary energy source, in that in rare and unusual geography and situations it is occasionally net positive, but by in large its not gonna work.
Watch when the poor freeze and starve because energy becomes too expensive for them to buy any.
They'll be doing that soon enough because the natgas is basically gone. And they burned the coal in the industrial revolution.
Possibly some pie in the sky stuff will help lessen the impact. It will not eliminate the impact. Therefore we should not try to lessen the impact?
Conveniently the north sea fields are in steep decline such that the UK is in turmoil from going from natgas exporting nation to importing nation a couple years back, so there will be no natgas competitor. Its like claiming people would never pay $10 for dinner at KFC, because they could just eat passenger pigeon and rack of dinosaur ribs. Oh wait, they're all gone. Well then.
As for the nukes, the nimby types and "hate what you fear and fear what you don't understand" types will slow that down. Add some green fearmongering, etc etc.
So, it'll be coal.
reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning ... gas powered plants.
Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.
The fastest and cheapest way to bring down ... carbon emissions is by
is by burning up all the gas? Can't emit carbon if there's none to burn.
I follow the energy business and the UK is in serious danger of disaster in the next decade or so. They don't have the technical equipment or the economic strength or the installed capital (like insulated buildings) to survive the transition from a fossil fuel exporter to pretty much having to import everything. The lights are going out and no more central heated homes. The strong "business as usual" and "kick the can down the road" isn't helping the situation. There will be people freezing to death in the winter, there will be rolling blackouts...
Also all/most of the coal was burned up in the industrial revolution. The last mine in cornwall (and it was a tin mine anyway) closed up more than a decade ago. They can import, for awhile. Its kinda expensive.
People have a very difficult time understanding technological limitations. If only the price gets high enough then the boffins will magically find an expensive way to do anything. Well, no, not really. Print as many pounds / euros as you want, they can't magically fill an empty fuel tank.
BTW, that's the KSC online shop, not directly from SpaceX, WTF?
Theres two classes of "product" I'm trying to avoid. Examples below:
1) I could steal a pix of cmdrtaco from the new york times without paying for copyrights and put it on a tee shirt with the caption "I love /. (tm)". The KSC online shop probably prevents that as I doubt they wanna get busted as IP pirates or gray market cloners or whatever phrase.
2) I could use my limited artistry skills to draw a parody of cmdrtaco's face and put it on a tee shirt with a caption "I love /.(tm)" and post it on cafepress. Note I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee, contractor, or have any financial relation with /, other than sending a couple bucks as a subscription years ago. So I'd be using their reputation for my personal profit.
I wanna avoid option 2 as well. If the KSC product is "officially licensed by spacex" then I will press the buy button myself, but oddly enough they do not mention that anywhere on the page that I could find. Otherwise its merely a black tee shirt where someone printed a company name on it... I can make that myself.
Its like the subtle difference between wearing a random blue polo shirt and dockers and calling it a best buy uniform, and wearing a genuine embroidered best buy tee shirt and dockers. I was thinking of wearing that for Halloween one year... probably best that it didn't work out.
Anyway, TLDR, I want a spacex tee shirt, not a tee shirt that has the word spacex written on it.
Well, yeah, but first you have to know what a salt is and why you'd want to use it.
I thought the language of the quote was interesting, “stored in hash format” not “stored in hashed salted format”. Neither makes any sense when passing thru a journalist filter so we can assume the quote did not pass thru a PR filter or a journalist filter and that's, unfortunately, the actual technical state. Its probably by their own admission just a simple hash of the bare string that will momentarily be rainbowtabled.
Luckily they don't have email addresses, and users never use the same email addrs/password combo at multiple web sites, so everyone will be OK (LOL)
The $12.5 billion merger was approved by regulators in China on Monday
How does China relate to this exactly? I looked at the wiki page and it seems they were an American company, HQ in chicago, etc. Did they own a lot of factories or property in China, thus needing permission?
the passwords are “stored in hash format” so they’re safe
Assuming their programmers know what a salt is (maybe they do, maybe they don't, he's not saying), and/or their users are not using passwords typically seen in a dictionary attack (yeah right)
1) screw the FB IPO thats a pump and dump scheme of the largest scale. I want to buy shares in spacex, they're actually doing something interesting, valuable, and apparently profitable. Which is probably why they're staying out of the stock market (the old saying, bad money always drives out good money...)
2) I wanted to ask for a spacex tee shirt for fathers day, but all I can find is a couple IP violators, people ripping off newswire photographers, that kind of product. Their might be "real" shirts out there... where? I would think a tastefully done black tee shirt sold directly by spacex to wealthy /.ers could be a significant funding source for their operation. Well, honestly all it would probably pay for is free donuts and coffee on Friday, but I'd feel cool contributing to that too.
And with only 12 years of development in, they've only got maybe another 10 to go. Excellent.
Sometimes the victims didn't handle it well.
Am I bad for being a tiny little bit happy when I hear these stories? Just tiny bit not a lot? Like some chick got teased on the internet so she hung herself and I'm thinking, luckily for me, because 10 years later I'd probably dump her or steal "her" parking spot or not hold the door open for her like a gentleman should or decline to purchase a drink for her at the local watering hole and then being obviously ridiculously unstable she'd blame me and blow her brains out and I'd have to feel guilty for the rest of my life about it, even though what I did wasn't really all that awful (come on chick, find another parking spot?), so if there is a tiny silver lining to this at least someone other than me is feeling guilty? Almost like they did a community service?
Like this dude, OK he did some other dude, didn't want people to know, despite the fact that most civilized people don't really care and in this modern era you don't have to care about the uncivilized people who do care, so now he's dead. If this didn't happen, I can just imagine this dude got a job working with me, and some day in a staff meeting in front of everyone I'm all like "dude, you totally made a picket fence error in your for loop making it crash when it hits an uninitialized array element" and then, being about as stable as a plutonium atom fattened up with an extra neutron or two, dude walks into his cube, blames me for ruining his life (so he claims, anyway) and blows his head off, and then I've gotta go thru the rest of my life feeling guilty for calling out a dude for having the wrong end condition in a for loop. I can totally see this happening, and I just don't personally want to deal with unstable people blowing up, its just not my thing.
Its kinda like when you hear about a suicide where somebody jumps in front of a car, and you're like "sucks to be that guy, but at least they didn't jump in front of my car, because that would really suck for me".
I don't feel any ill will toward the guy who offed himself for no good reason, other then him being a remarkably amazingly poor role model for other kids dealing with bad feelings. I'm just glad he's not around so I could get blamed for him offing himself. Unstable means its gonna blow up sooner or later and murphy's law its gonna happen around me, so...
Pretty certain if I was video taping two people having sex that'd put me on the sex offender registry
LOL that would put a hell of a lot of professional cameramen from the pr0n industry in prison. Also a lot of CCTV watching security guards. I think you meant to add "without their permission in a private space".. Is it wrong to record people without their permission when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy?(admittedly banging away in front of a laptop, for anyone aware of their surroundings and born after 1950 or so, that's not very reasonable anymore, is it?) Coincidentally, looking at the charges...
Secretly filming your roommate having gay sex is a little worse than just saying something random and mean on slashdot.
And how exactly do you know what atari2600a was doing while he wrote his post? Clint could have video.
Well that was embarassing. you don't want to see projecteuler.com. Try
http://projecteuler.net/
that works a heck of a lot better.
Try some perl development the old fashioned way. Document a list of "PITA" about developing in perl. Simultaneously study at least one framework and slowly enumerate a list of "this is how framework X fixes the Y problem" ah "I know kung fu" or whatever. At some point those lists will converge. Then seamlessly start developing the new way using a framework.
You can also have a lot of fun trying to implement your own homemade framework. Being a text processing language, making a MVC like system isn't too hard. Again, at some point your toy MVC will converge with some perl framework and away you go.
I started doing RoR probably 5, maybe 6 years ago, and I agree, the learning curve for a framework is darn near vertical unless you're doing the overly simplistic demo apps... note demos are selected precisely because they make the framework look good, not because they're realistic. Eventually the insane vertical learning curve flattens out. Just like second semester calculus, sometimes you just gotta gut it out till you get it.
You may be better off forgetting about "web development" which is a pretty huge and complicated solution space. Come back to it later. Go to projecteuler.com and solve a couple simple compsci algorithms in your new language. I am teaching myself Scala at this time, for the heck of it, by implementing the craziest solutions I can to some P.E. problems. I wish I had learned Ruby in full detail before I started to learn RoR, would have been a much smoother learning curve.
became moored in WIP status for the last 6-x years.
12 years, not 6.
The killer is no one in the perl dev community wants it. This says it all "Backward compatibility with earlier versions of Perl is not a goal". The problem is I don't love perl because of its syntax, although some of it is pretty cool, I love it because of the CPAN which does all my work for me. All my problems seem to be solved by combining at most ten or so CPAN modules. Its kind of like how the whole world is built out of only a hundred or so elements... if I wrote a perl program that used 100 CPAN modules, the result would be a new universe would spring into being, like the big bang. Or something like that.
LOL apparently you've never seen the Perl6 feature list, which can be summarized to "implement every programming concept known to mankind", or the CPAN which is "everything that can be turned into (what amounts to) a library, turned into a library and ready to freely download".
Its the ultimate glue language.
The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.
http://perl6.org/compilers/features
Its kind of like that Arthur Clarke story "The Nine Billion Names of God". If, one night, you glance at the sky and see the stars start going out, you'll know that someone has finally implemented all the Perl6 features. Either that, or its cloudy and going to rain.
There's a whole wikipedia article on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright_infringement
There is no legal way to charge retail prices like 99 cents at the ITMS.
From what I remember of the case he pretty much did it willfully, which normally would force the charge to be $30K to $150K per song, so he should have to pay around $3M. I have no idea how he got the charge down into the non-willful infringement category of $750 to $30000 per song. Probably there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was doing it willfully but no real proof or signed confession so its simpler to go for the lesser charge.
Sounds like you think the jury can pretty much do what it wants. Not in this legal system, no.
I suspect you'd find the injustice of mandatory minimum sentencing to be pretty offensive too.
After the inevitable revolution that we're headed toward, this country will be a much better place to live. The hard part is likely going to be getting there alive.
You may want to look at the graph... this isn't one of those sociology graphs with a correlation coeff of 0.4 or whatever, this is creepily almost one dot on top of another. "We're operating on a totally new paradigm" is usually wrong.
A sensor as accurate as they're claiming should be able to measure the height of a grain of salt sitting on a table top.
Thats a pretty good estimate ... isn't this sensor being claimed at 10 microns and a typical sieve size for table salt is around 70 microns?
I can one up measuring one crystal. If this sensor exists, you should be able to dump out a salt shaker on a two seater restaurant table around 4 x 2 feet, snap one "photo" or whatever you call the data gathering in a fraction of a full motion video second, and then computationally analyze the location and surface condition/damage of each individual salt crystal (well, other than the ones buried in the pile). 7 pixels per crystal should be good enough to find chipped salt crystals.
Like the "sand reckoner" if should be able to tell you how many grains of sand there are on a beach... by counting each one.
Actually, if this sensor exists, and it does kinect style full motion video cap, you should be able to dump the salt shaker out, and as the crystals are falling, analyze each individual crystal and chart its trajectory in real time as it falls to the table...
Your machines are 100k+ as you said yourself, your boss is not going to throw those out within 3 years and those machines have no place for such newfangled tech yet.
no no. A mill is kind of a basic unit of production machine and those cost $100K (well, it varies from $5K up to ...) and a digitizer/taster probe costs about $400, plus or minus software, etc. Currently you stick a $400 probe and some software in a $100K mill and hours later your part has been probed a million times (maybe literally) and you have a giant computer file of coordinates that can be run thru limit checks or maybe imported into CAD program, whatever.
The point being that they don't mind hours of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital investment... If there is a way to do it instantly for $70 or even $7000 they'll whip out the corporate credit card so fast you'll hear a sonic boom. If machine shop X doesn't buy it, Y will, and X will shortly go out of business... Also CAD/CAM is arguably much more modern and high tech than most other businesses.
There are many situations where 'sight' only may not be a good fit (high speed metal cutting).
But thats the whole point I'm trying to make... 10 microns is usually good enough for that kind of work, and the existing 10 micron "class of solution" are only around 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than this "new tech" solution.
How does a high school student get access to one of those?
Essentially, the kid didn't win anything, the local taxpayers and the local science teacher won while the kid was watching them.
I'm about 1e9 times more impressed with the kid who probably bought live euglena from carolina.com for $25 and probably made his own colloidal silver in his basement using some silver coins and a electronics hobbyist power supply, dumped it into petrie dishes under some lights, then did some cell counts in a microscope. I'm impressed because the kid probably paid for it himself and did all/most of the work himself. That kid actually did science and earned his money (unless he made his brother do all the work or something... point being he Could have done all the work, at least)
The electron microscope kid just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Bleh.
Incidentally I find I can use this effect to justify all kinds of frowned upon office behaviour.
You forgot posting on /.
Crazy as it sounds I've solved more problems while on /. than while doing any other activity.