Makerbot have been releasing more and more expensive machines, using more and more custom components (e.g. custom geared steppers) with less ability to repair, and more difficult to customise without replacing large portions of the machine. Stratasys are well known for charging massive amounts for basic feedstock, 'renting' printers (that you still need to buy for full-price), waving their patents on fairly basing things at anyone who wants to compete with them, and basically being massive asses.
So stay tuned for a new, even more expensive Makerbot, with minimal pretence to being DIY/self assembled (just plug it together!), feedstock purchased directly from them is some odd packing and diameter/cross-section (for superior quality!), etc.
The 'labour' in this case is:
Buy ready-made camera stabilisation arm intended for quadrotors
Attach to hand-hold
That's it. That's all he did. Literally bolting one ready-made object to another ready-made object. I was expecting something like using the high-speed servos for moving the swash-plate to and writing his own controller, but this is a VERY low-effort and low-labour approach.
you need to use your brain waves in order to control the ball and make it move
I'm sorry to tell you, but in simple two-electrode EEG setups the chances that you're actually picking up potential differences due to brain activity are near zero. What you have is a forehead-muscle-contraction-controlled game, not a mind-controlled one. An Electromyogram not an Electroencephalogram.
I'd put constructing a SQUID on a similar level to constructing the main coil. The coil is just a big solenoid wound from superconductors and immersed in liquid Helium (or probably Nitrogen if you're building it at home). Building a SQUID at home requires you to not only construct your own chip fab, but do so on non-standard substrates (you need to make a superconductor-insulator-superconductor junction).
the options are rapidly getting unwieldy for curious bystanders to make sense of.
That's because it IS unwieldy, for anyone. Even EEG done properly is not cheap or simple, and EEG is not a wonderful method of visualising what is actually going on in the brain: you're measuring the potential difference between points of the surface of the skull, and making a guess as to roughly the region in the brain the current(s) that produced that potential difference are actually occurring in based on electrode placement.
fMRI and similar are better, but NOT something you can do at home (just building the superconducting main coil would be a massive feat).
It's a real shame that the two most common representations of cyborgs in popular culture (The Borg and Cybermen) are really shitty cyborgs, with all the downsides of biological and electromechanical components combined (stuck in a humanoid form, lurching about slowly, with rigid 'logical' thinking. They're basically zombies in tinfoil) without any of the upsides. The third most popular is the 6 Million Dollar Man who is somewhat better, but is still stuck in the idea of prosthetic bodies trying to ape the human body. When was the last time you saw, outside of manga/anime or more obscure science fiction novels, somebody putting their brain in a jar, and putting that jar in a non-humanoid body?
Ignoring the Bloody Stupid idea of putting passengers in them remotely, containerising air freight is a pretty good idea. As long as you load the containers evenly, you can just stick the thing under whatever aircraft is available, rather than having to manually load and unload the aircraft itself. Being able to swap (you wings & cockpit only equivalent of) a passenger 747-400D with a cargo 747-400F by swapping out a module would make things very interesting in the air shipping business.
Let me know when somebody actually runs a commercial thorium or breeder reactor.
No Throium (or LFTR) reactors yet, but Fast Breeders? Off the top of my head, PFR supplied the National Grid for almost 20 years, BN-600 has been operating for nearly 35 years, and BN-350 operated for over 20 years.
Even the risk of excessive monocropping leading to a potatoe famine like disaster is not absurd.
That has nothing to do with genetic modification. Remember the Gros Michel? We've been genetically modifying organisms for millennia, in various haphazard methods: from selective breeding, to cross-breeding, to (accidentally or deliberately) infecting crops with certain organisms, etc. The difference with GM is that we have a good idea of the outcome before starting, and we can minimise unwanted side-effects. The downside is that companies attempt to pattern genetic codes, but that's tied up in bigger IP law issues rather than an issue with GM itself.
There's a metric you're missing: responsiveness. One of the big gains of moving to SSDs is not tasks completing faster, but of UI elements responding sooner.
If your phone gets stolen you call your operator and read them the PIN. They send out a "kill" signal and the phone commits suicide.
You mean, some sort of international method of identifying mobile equipment? That is reported to the mobile operators whenever the phone makes an attempt to connect, allowing permanent blacklisting of the handset?
Because we have that: it's called an IMEI number. You report your phone as stolen, that IMEA gets put in a blacklist database, and mobile operators will no longer accept connections from that device.
You can still hit the start key (you want an on-screen element? But you have a labelled physical button right there!) and just start typing, and your search results will begin popping up immediately. Opening Thunderbird by typing start->t->return is nearly as fast as keeping it in the quicklaunch bar and hitting start+2. Both a lot faster than either the left 1/5-of-your screen or the full-screen start menu variants. Why people are complaining about UI on slashdot when a perfectly functional keyboard-only option has been enabled by default for the last 6 years (introduced in Vista) is beyond me...
And on the subject of keyboard shortcuts: for those complaining about the ribbon, hit alt. Tah-dah! instant tutorial and cheatsheet for learning the shortcuts to every UI option.
On the other hand an open standard with no regulation tends to breed low quality knock-offs that cheapen the image.
For this to happen, one of two things must be true:
1) The devices do not conform to the standard
2) The standard is not sufficiently well defined (e.g. specified tolerances are too loose)
They've only just retrieved the thing! Modern equipment is good, but we can't just wave a magic wand/tricorder over some dead mice and get a diagnosis yet.
Well, it's a streaming system not a download-to-not-own DRMed system, so a better comparison would be Pandora, Spotify et al. Personally, I'd rather purchase tracks and have them available offline to do with what I will (plus most of my music is not even available on streaming services, so I couldn't use them if I wanted to), but if you want to avoid the effort and would prefer something closer to a 'custom radio station' then subscription services are much of a muchness. With google backing it, and locked in competition with Apple, I can't see them dropping it anytime soon.
If you're talkimg about regular Google Play music downloads, rather than the newly launched streaming service, those are DRM-free.
Slashdot Mirror
Makerbot have been releasing more and more expensive machines, using more and more custom components (e.g. custom geared steppers) with less ability to repair, and more difficult to customise without replacing large portions of the machine. Stratasys are well known for charging massive amounts for basic feedstock, 'renting' printers (that you still need to buy for full-price), waving their patents on fairly basing things at anyone who wants to compete with them, and basically being massive asses.
So stay tuned for a new, even more expensive Makerbot, with minimal pretence to being DIY/self assembled (just plug it together!), feedstock purchased directly from them is some odd packing and diameter/cross-section (for superior quality!), etc.
You are not required to build something, thus this example is not valid.
Don't want to deal with archaeological finds at your dig? You don't have to build anything, thus this example is not valid!
The 'labour' in this case is:
Buy ready-made camera stabilisation arm intended for quadrotors
Attach to hand-hold
That's it. That's all he did. Literally bolting one ready-made object to another ready-made object. I was expecting something like using the high-speed servos for moving the swash-plate to and writing his own controller, but this is a VERY low-effort and low-labour approach.
you need to use your brain waves in order to control the ball and make it move
I'm sorry to tell you, but in simple two-electrode EEG setups the chances that you're actually picking up potential differences due to brain activity are near zero. What you have is a forehead-muscle-contraction-controlled game, not a mind-controlled one. An Electromyogram not an Electroencephalogram.
if you could get your hands on a few squids
I'd put constructing a SQUID on a similar level to constructing the main coil. The coil is just a big solenoid wound from superconductors and immersed in liquid Helium (or probably Nitrogen if you're building it at home). Building a SQUID at home requires you to not only construct your own chip fab, but do so on non-standard substrates (you need to make a superconductor-insulator-superconductor junction).
the options are rapidly getting unwieldy for curious bystanders to make sense of.
That's because it IS unwieldy, for anyone. Even EEG done properly is not cheap or simple, and EEG is not a wonderful method of visualising what is actually going on in the brain: you're measuring the potential difference between points of the surface of the skull, and making a guess as to roughly the region in the brain the current(s) that produced that potential difference are actually occurring in based on electrode placement.
fMRI and similar are better, but NOT something you can do at home (just building the superconducting main coil would be a massive feat).
The people called Roman, they go the the house?
B*****m
Language!
Ah, a Dualist in the wild!
It's a real shame that the two most common representations of cyborgs in popular culture (The Borg and Cybermen) are really shitty cyborgs, with all the downsides of biological and electromechanical components combined (stuck in a humanoid form, lurching about slowly, with rigid 'logical' thinking. They're basically zombies in tinfoil) without any of the upsides. The third most popular is the 6 Million Dollar Man who is somewhat better, but is still stuck in the idea of prosthetic bodies trying to ape the human body. When was the last time you saw, outside of manga/anime or more obscure science fiction novels, somebody putting their brain in a jar, and putting that jar in a non-humanoid body?
What problem does this solve?
Ignoring the Bloody Stupid idea of putting passengers in them remotely, containerising air freight is a pretty good idea. As long as you load the containers evenly, you can just stick the thing under whatever aircraft is available, rather than having to manually load and unload the aircraft itself. Being able to swap (you wings & cockpit only equivalent of) a passenger 747-400D with a cargo 747-400F by swapping out a module would make things very interesting in the air shipping business.
Let me know when somebody actually runs a commercial thorium or breeder reactor.
No Throium (or LFTR) reactors yet, but Fast Breeders? Off the top of my head, PFR supplied the National Grid for almost 20 years, BN-600 has been operating for nearly 35 years, and BN-350 operated for over 20 years.
Even the risk of excessive monocropping leading to a potatoe famine like disaster is not absurd.
That has nothing to do with genetic modification. Remember the Gros Michel?
We've been genetically modifying organisms for millennia, in various haphazard methods: from selective breeding, to cross-breeding, to (accidentally or deliberately) infecting crops with certain organisms, etc. The difference with GM is that we have a good idea of the outcome before starting, and we can minimise unwanted side-effects. The downside is that companies attempt to pattern genetic codes, but that's tied up in bigger IP law issues rather than an issue with GM itself.
There's a metric you're missing: responsiveness. One of the big gains of moving to SSDs is not tasks completing faster, but of UI elements responding sooner.
If your phone gets stolen you call your operator and read them the PIN. They send out a "kill" signal and the phone commits suicide.
You mean, some sort of international method of identifying mobile equipment? That is reported to the mobile operators whenever the phone makes an attempt to connect, allowing permanent blacklisting of the handset?
Because we have that: it's called an IMEI number. You report your phone as stolen, that IMEA gets put in a blacklist database, and mobile operators will no longer accept connections from that device.
That's pretty standard in the UK too.
GMT is essentially UTC. BST is GMT+1.
TLA, ho!
and searching is one more click than before
You can still hit the start key (you want an on-screen element? But you have a labelled physical button right there!) and just start typing, and your search results will begin popping up immediately. Opening Thunderbird by typing start->t->return is nearly as fast as keeping it in the quicklaunch bar and hitting start+2. Both a lot faster than either the left 1/5-of-your screen or the full-screen start menu variants. Why people are complaining about UI on slashdot when a perfectly functional keyboard-only option has been enabled by default for the last 6 years (introduced in Vista) is beyond me...
And on the subject of keyboard shortcuts: for those complaining about the ribbon, hit alt. Tah-dah! instant tutorial and cheatsheet for learning the shortcuts to every UI option.
On the other hand an open standard with no regulation tends to breed low quality knock-offs that cheapen the image.
For this to happen, one of two things must be true:
1) The devices do not conform to the standard
2) The standard is not sufficiently well defined (e.g. specified tolerances are too loose)
Can we name one of them "Lundmark's Nebula"? Though we'd have to name a star in the other galaxy 'Arisia'...
Is to make rules more stringent, and ban Bananas
Bit more details would make it interesting.
They've only just retrieved the thing! Modern equipment is good, but we can't just wave a magic wand/tricorder over some dead mice and get a diagnosis yet.
Well, it's a streaming system not a download-to-not-own DRMed system, so a better comparison would be Pandora, Spotify et al. Personally, I'd rather purchase tracks and have them available offline to do with what I will (plus most of my music is not even available on streaming services, so I couldn't use them if I wanted to), but if you want to avoid the effort and would prefer something closer to a 'custom radio station' then subscription services are much of a muchness. With google backing it, and locked in competition with Apple, I can't see them dropping it anytime soon.
If you're talkimg about regular Google Play music downloads, rather than the newly launched streaming service, those are DRM-free.
Or any of the numerous userscripts that don't require you to go via some shady and superfluous website.
Luxembourg? Works for Amazon.