You should talk to my wife, Private message me for her info. She works in the Instructional Technology group at Wellesley, based out of the library, and she has been managing the creation of their makerspace for a couple years now. They have two 3D printers, and 3D scanners, a makerspace "toy box" that they can bring around campus and setup on the fly. They have Kinects and Raspberry Pi's and even things as simple as Little Bits to get across ideas to students who have zero exposure to electronics.
There are several other universities she has interacted with that have similar setups, like Brandeis, Wheaton, and North Eastern. Ping me, she would be happy to talk with you to give you some info on how it has worked out.
Back when the Tunisian uprisings started, and then started in Libya and Egypt the crowds on the street were carrying around posters of Mark Zuckerberg because Facebook would let them communicate and coordinate and let the world know what was going on. That was a full embrace of freedom of speech, and I even started to build a Twitter encryption tool to help make it even easier to for people to communicate freely (More complete projects have come out since *).
This was also right around the time of the State Dept WikiLeaks reveal, and instead of talking about how we need to encourage freedom of speech, and the press and assembly, Secretary Clinton made a big speech about the primary and absolute need for elections for a democratic transition in these countries. The ground could have been laid then that this was an expression of the peoples rights and take it as an opportunity to have an open accepting forum of competing ideas and that it was OK to have disagreeing views as long as everyone could express themselves.
Instead we got badly run elections more than a year later with the military pushing people around, and women mostly shut out of the process. And, no automatic thinking that uncomfortable ideas can at least be heard. As long as you have freedom of speech you can try to change the system. When that is gone certain changes become impossible. It was a huge missed opportunity to change attitudes about speech.
Unless we use a Bussard Ramjet to collect interstellar dust...
The math on the Bussard Ramjet actually makes it a better brake than drive. The magnetic field causes more drag than the possible acceleration from the thrust generated by any fusion reaction they could create with intersteller dust.
I always just assumed Superman had a huge field around him that slightly pulled energy from yellow light and created a teeny tiny redshift for hundreds of miles around. It explained why a yellow sun was needed and why Krypton didn't provide super powers
My days of atheism are behind me. Google must be GOD, because I just asked it for the square root of pi and got back "square root(pi) = 1.77245385". No one but GOD should ever be able to know that answer...hmm...wait a minute, now I know the square root of pi. Does that make me God too?
Man a man thinks he knows something about the world.
One day an atheist, the next moment a monotheist and now a polytheist.
If there are fewer polling places won't that just make it easier for shinanegans at one polling place to affect more people. Fewer poll workers means fewer people to bribe. Fewer polling places means you are losing statistical redundancy. It might help exit poll accuracy, but it also means there is more time to spread out inconsistencies, and make them seem less catastrophic.
There are reasons 100% uptime computer systems use redundency all over the place. Spreading the voting over time adds redundancy, but if they are expecting this to save money, then I bet they plan to cut the number of polling places so that the removed redundancy is greater than that added by the longer term.
The last thing we need is for this to actually put MORE possibility of error into the system.
This was actually used in the show Babylon 5. If I am remembering the posts online by the exec. producer and main writer, JMS, he said that they wanted to use sound effects for space battles but also wanted to be accurate to the reality of space where there shouldn't be any sound.
So the technique they used was to describe the sound effects as assistive to the pilots like full surround sound in video games to give a viceral sense the position of the other things around. They maybe explained that a total of once of twice on the series itself, but the idea stuck with me as a very good idea even in the relatively normal environment of todays fighter jets or even for situational awareness in cars on the highway.
I think the point here is that along with being the neighborhood admin, these people(customers) are in fact your neighbors. You can say "Hey Phil, stop uploading to kazaa everyday will ya, I have stuff I need to email to work." And, Phil is likely to say "ok, can I send upload later at night?" and you reach a agreement.
Or, if you do have a spammer next door you are more likely to get through to the idiot than J, TechSupportDude and convince him to stop.
This is a classic example of making undesirable things harder, and desirable things easier. The social influencing power of your neighbor who has helped setup your internet connection is huge compared to annonymous tech guys on the other end of the phone, who typically have to resort to the old threat of "YOUR SERVICE WILL BE TERMINATED" which sucks for a costumer relations point of view.
If they only screwed around in the game world itself and left the real world alone (eg. credit cards, account data, etc) then the company should do the same. From the sound of it, they just showed that 'there is no spoon' to the rest of the game world. We love the movie and the character for doing so, but when someone does the same thing in a 'Real Life' virtual world then they get mad.
Man, this world is getting WAY too many levels to it when I have to destinguish the 'real world's' game world, and the movie world's game world and doing 'real' things in a particular game world and...Ah my brain just gave up.
I am only half joking when I say that. With all the debate nowadays about the value of manned space flight, this is actually a very good argument for putting people out there. Space is harsh and there are many perils that we have to learn to deal with out there. But, those are the equivalent to the new parasites in any new environment.
For a little idea of how many paraites we would bring with us just look at the Earth similar ailments that astronauts get. They rarely get sick and never get into car accidents.
It just goes to show that getting into space and staying there might not be as daangerous for the log stay as just visiting is.
Boy are those terrorists going to be upset when they realize the nuclear bombs they wanted were really made of used pinball machine parts.
And you only need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux copacitor, besides, if you are going to build a time machine you might as well do it with style.:)
Check the following link out. He did a good job trying to collect from primary sources, and actual known values to get the the answer. Read the article to find out, but it aint likely to be sputnick.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20021021/manho le.shtml
Why do they have to hang straight down?
on
More on Space Elevators
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a pretty decent knowledge of the physics involved in the construction and use of a Spave elevator. I know that they need to orbit in Geosync orbit so the cable doesn't change length. I know that the cable is actually hanging down to the Earth from the center and being pulled away from the Earth out at the tip of the cable beyond Geosync orbit.
But, the one thing that has always bugged me has been why the cable itself has to hang straight down from orbit. This places the "Ground" based end in much less practical areas. Couldn't there be multiple cables hanging down and strung like Christmas lights to northern and sorthern areas that would be more likely to use them. They would need to balance the weight to keep the orbiting cable in the correct spot, but with 4 or more anchor points it would provide multiple ways to orbit and redundency(sp) in case of catostrophic failure.
Any insight in this would be helpful. As far as I can tell the only problems would be the added weight and thus tension, but I haven't done the math and don't know how much stronger the cable material would need to be.
The Chemical they are talking about (DARPP-32) is what makes as long lasting as it is in humans and mice. We already have it in our brains and it creates a positive feedback mechanism that keeps the stimulating effects of caffeine going.
The mice without DARPP-32 reacted very minimally to ~6 cups of coffee worth of caffeine.
Set this up on a dog, add GPS, high quality maps, and a container for drugs. What you get is a very efficient, self fueling currier to take anything anywhere you like. If someone unknown tampers with it a small explosive would stop that pretty quick.
Now that I think about it, terrorists and MORE IMPORATANTLY the Anti-terrorists, are going to see all kinds of uses for this. The pigeons in the park all have small anthrax bombs, or rabid animals could be sent into schools. Most of these things are doable without the remote. This just makes the engineering of that kind of stuff easier.
Being that I am tired and needing sleep I am not going to kill myself trying to get this to work, but just FYI, it imediately crashe IE on my win2K machine.
I'm not saying this thing is busted just that it certainly seems that this guys request for more money to work on it is obviously nessesary. Oh, well, I was hoping I could get one program to work tonight even it it wasn't one I have been slaving over for the past week. I guess my computer karma is kinda low right now.
This guy should have IANAL tatooed on his forehead and permenently put in his sig.!
He calls this " 100% Legal"? I am as much an advocate for Fair Use as anyone you find on Slashdot, but if you listen to this guy you are asking for trouble. If you want ways to not get caught then maybe you should listen to this guy, but if you want "Legal" advise look in other posts.
Also, from a technical standpoint you really only need a decent text editor and Cygwin or gcc for the compiler, as has already been pointed out in other posts.
So, since the cellular network around the US is slower than molasses at the north pole, this will be the incentive for faster CPU's.
The faster you can compress and decompress data the faster the network seems. I'll bet 10 years from now 50% of the processing by that brand spanking new Itanium 9 will be in compression and decompression over 56K cell networks.
Hook this into Freenet. One of the issues I have found with Freenet is the UI is miserserable. The one thing going for this is the obvoiusness of how to use it.
Using Freenet would provide the ability to post things objectively without fear of legal reprisal. Pop in a easy "Do Not Serve" filter so people aren't barraged with spam, and it could be useful without being obnoxious.
I would think they could compartmentalize the areas with ink inside the sheets. They could make pre-folding sections that would have creases already there. as long as there are contacts running along the edge of the sheet to connect everything it "should" work. At the resolutions they are talking about I wouldn't expect the creases to be anymore annoying than the support wires in most flat screen CRTs.
So using this as a history lesson that we can learn from, and hopefully not repeat. What tech is possible right now that The Powers That Be are preventing us from using, and how can we fix that to give ourselves access to that tech.
I am thinking regulations on private rocketry, genetic engineering, hydrogen/fuel-cell powered vehicles, and high quality encryption. Though the last one is making headway. Anyone have some other suggestions.
Um send me an email w/your address as I don't want to spread the name of my company all over the net. Especially after I just called my coworkers dullards.
Slashdot Mirror
You should talk to my wife, Private message me for her info. She works in the Instructional Technology group at Wellesley, based out of the library, and she has been managing the creation of their makerspace for a couple years now. They have two 3D printers, and 3D scanners, a makerspace "toy box" that they can bring around campus and setup on the fly. They have Kinects and Raspberry Pi's and even things as simple as Little Bits to get across ideas to students who have zero exposure to electronics.
There are several other universities she has interacted with that have similar setups, like Brandeis, Wheaton, and North Eastern. Ping me, she would be happy to talk with you to give you some info on how it has worked out.
Back when the Tunisian uprisings started, and then started in Libya and Egypt the crowds on the street were carrying around posters of Mark Zuckerberg because Facebook would let them communicate and coordinate and let the world know what was going on. That was a full embrace of freedom of speech, and I even started to build a Twitter encryption tool to help make it even easier to for people to communicate freely (More complete projects have come out since *).
This was also right around the time of the State Dept WikiLeaks reveal, and instead of talking about how we need to encourage freedom of speech, and the press and assembly, Secretary Clinton made a big speech about the primary and absolute need for elections for a democratic transition in these countries. The ground could have been laid then that this was an expression of the peoples rights and take it as an opportunity to have an open accepting forum of competing ideas and that it was OK to have disagreeing views as long as everyone could express themselves.
Instead we got badly run elections more than a year later with the military pushing people around, and women mostly shut out of the process. And, no automatic thinking that uncomfortable ideas can at least be heard. As long as you have freedom of speech you can try to change the system. When that is gone certain changes become impossible. It was a huge missed opportunity to change attitudes about speech.
(*) My project was mostly done over a hackathon weekend and is on github: https://github.com/YasminApp/yasmin-client
Others include CryptTweet which needs improvement but is workable here: http://plexusproject.org/
And SilentCircle which is targeting a different user group https://silentcircle.com/
Unless we use a Bussard Ramjet to collect interstellar dust...
The math on the Bussard Ramjet actually makes it a better brake than drive. The magnetic field causes more drag than the possible acceleration from the thrust generated by any fusion reaction they could create with intersteller dust.
That this scares the crap out of?
I always just assumed Superman had a huge field around him that slightly pulled energy from yellow light and created a teeny tiny redshift for hundreds of miles around. It explained why a yellow sun was needed and why Krypton didn't provide super powers
My days of atheism are behind me. Google must be GOD, because I just asked it for the square root of pi and got back "square root(pi) = 1.77245385". No one but GOD should ever be able to know that answer...hmm...wait a minute, now I know the square root of pi. Does that make me God too?
Man a man thinks he knows something about the world.
One day an atheist,
the next moment a monotheist and
now a polytheist.
If there are fewer polling places won't that just make it easier for shinanegans at one polling place to affect more people. Fewer poll workers means fewer people to bribe. Fewer polling places means you are losing statistical redundancy. It might help exit poll accuracy, but it also means there is more time to spread out inconsistencies, and make them seem less catastrophic.
There are reasons 100% uptime computer systems use redundency all over the place. Spreading the voting over time adds redundancy, but if they are expecting this to save money, then I bet they plan to cut the number of polling places so that the removed redundancy is greater than that added by the longer term.
The last thing we need is for this to actually put MORE possibility of error into the system.
I am Sparticus!
This was actually used in the show Babylon 5. If I am remembering the posts online by the exec. producer and main writer, JMS, he said that they wanted to use sound effects for space battles but also wanted to be accurate to the reality of space where there shouldn't be any sound.
So the technique they used was to describe the sound effects as assistive to the pilots like full surround sound in video games to give a viceral sense the position of the other things around. They maybe explained that a total of once of twice on the series itself, but the idea stuck with me as a very good idea even in the relatively normal environment of todays fighter jets or even for situational awareness in cars on the highway.
I think the point here is that along with being the neighborhood admin, these people(customers) are in fact your neighbors. You can say "Hey Phil, stop uploading to kazaa everyday will ya, I have stuff I need to email to work." And, Phil is likely to say "ok, can I send upload later at night?" and you reach a agreement.
Or, if you do have a spammer next door you are more likely to get through to the idiot than J, TechSupportDude and convince him to stop.
This is a classic example of making undesirable things harder, and desirable things easier. The social influencing power of your neighbor who has helped setup your internet connection is huge compared to annonymous tech guys on the other end of the phone, who typically have to resort to the old threat of "YOUR SERVICE WILL BE TERMINATED" which sucks for a costumer relations point of view.
If they only screwed around in the game world itself and left the real world alone (eg. credit cards, account data, etc) then the company should do the same. From the sound of it, they just showed that 'there is no spoon' to the rest of the game world. We love the movie and the character for doing so, but when someone does the same thing in a 'Real Life' virtual world then they get mad.
Man, this world is getting WAY too many levels to it when I have to destinguish the 'real world's' game world, and the movie world's game world and doing 'real' things in a particular game world and...Ah my brain just gave up.
I hope they didn't charge an arm and a leg for those, or he is still gonna be missing a limb. :)
I am only half joking when I say that. With all the debate nowadays about the value of manned space flight, this is actually a very good argument for putting people out there. Space is harsh and there are many perils that we have to learn to deal with out there. But, those are the equivalent to the new parasites in any new environment.
For a little idea of how many paraites we would bring with us just look at the Earth similar ailments that astronauts get. They rarely get sick and never get into car accidents.
It just goes to show that getting into space and staying there might not be as daangerous for the log stay as just visiting is.
Boy are those terrorists going to be upset when they realize the nuclear bombs they wanted were really made of used pinball machine parts.
:)
And you only need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux copacitor, besides, if you are going to build a time machine you might as well do it with style.
Check the following link out. He did a good job trying to collect from primary sources, and actual known values to get the the answer. Read the article to find out, but it aint likely to be sputnick. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20021021/manho le.shtml
I have a pretty decent knowledge of the physics involved in the construction and use of a Spave elevator. I know that they need to orbit in Geosync orbit so the cable doesn't change length. I know that the cable is actually hanging down to the Earth from the center and being pulled away from the Earth out at the tip of the cable beyond Geosync orbit.
But, the one thing that has always bugged me has been why the cable itself has to hang straight down from orbit. This places the "Ground" based end in much less practical areas. Couldn't there be multiple cables hanging down and strung like Christmas lights to northern and sorthern areas that would be more likely to use them. They would need to balance the weight to keep the orbiting cable in the correct spot, but with 4 or more anchor points it would provide multiple ways to orbit and redundency(sp) in case of catostrophic failure.
Any insight in this would be helpful. As far as I can tell the only problems would be the added weight and thus tension, but I haven't done the math and don't know how much stronger the cable material would need to be.
The Chemical they are talking about (DARPP-32) is what makes as long lasting as it is in humans and mice. We already have it in our brains and it creates a positive feedback mechanism that keeps the stimulating effects of caffeine going.
The mice without DARPP-32 reacted very minimally to ~6 cups of coffee worth of caffeine.
Set this up on a dog, add GPS, high quality maps, and a container for drugs. What you get is a very efficient, self fueling currier to take anything anywhere you like. If someone unknown tampers with it a small explosive would stop that pretty quick.
Now that I think about it, terrorists and MORE IMPORATANTLY the Anti-terrorists, are going to see all kinds of uses for this. The pigeons in the park all have small anthrax bombs, or rabid animals could be sent into schools. Most of these things are doable without the remote. This just makes the engineering of that kind of stuff easier.
Being that I am tired and needing sleep I am not going to kill myself trying to get this to work, but just FYI, it imediately crashe IE on my win2K machine.
I'm not saying this thing is busted just that it certainly seems that this guys request for more money to work on it is obviously nessesary. Oh, well, I was hoping I could get one program to work tonight even it it wasn't one I have been slaving over for the past week. I guess my computer karma is kinda low right now.
This guy should have IANAL tatooed on his forehead and permenently put in his sig.!
He calls this " 100% Legal"? I am as much an advocate for Fair Use as anyone you find on Slashdot, but if you listen to this guy you are asking for trouble. If you want ways to not get caught then maybe you should listen to this guy, but if you want "Legal" advise look in other posts.
Also, from a technical standpoint you really only need a decent text editor and Cygwin or gcc for the compiler, as has already been pointed out in other posts.
So, since the cellular network around the US is slower than molasses at the north pole, this will be the incentive for faster CPU's.
The faster you can compress and decompress data the faster the network seems. I'll bet 10 years from now 50% of the processing by that brand spanking new Itanium 9 will be in compression and decompression over 56K cell networks.
Hook this into Freenet. One of the issues I have found with Freenet is the UI is miserserable. The one thing going for this is the obvoiusness of how to use it.
Using Freenet would provide the ability to post things objectively without fear of legal reprisal. Pop in a easy "Do Not Serve" filter so people aren't barraged with spam, and it could be useful without being obnoxious.
I would think they could compartmentalize the areas with ink inside the sheets. They could make pre-folding sections that would have creases already there. as long as there are contacts running along the edge of the sheet to connect everything it "should" work. At the resolutions they are talking about I wouldn't expect the creases to be anymore annoying than the support wires in most flat screen CRTs.
So using this as a history lesson that we can learn from, and hopefully not repeat. What tech is possible right now that The Powers That Be are preventing us from using, and how can we fix that to give ourselves access to that tech.
I am thinking regulations on private rocketry, genetic engineering, hydrogen/fuel-cell powered vehicles, and high quality encryption. Though the last one is making headway. Anyone have some other suggestions.
Um send me an email w/your address as I don't want to spread the name of my company all over the net. Especially after I just called my coworkers dullards.