It's nice to know this. Eventually we'll all be on the list, and then it'll just formalize what's been the case all along. And hey added bonus then when Wikileaks publishes the list, we all can tell who the truly dangerous people are because they're the only ones with the influence to not be on the list.
>What's the economy of the western world going to look like if the only thing we need is material for 3D printers, power, land, food and water? Will provision of the un-replicable become the job of the state?
For what it's worth, George O. Smith wrote a short scifi story about matter replicators -- essentially 3D printers -- and their effect on the world economy back in 1936, called "Pandora's Millions", that's collected in the excellent hard sci-fi book "Venus Equilateral". He predicts the nearly complete collapse of society, since we're based on a scarcity economy. The limitation is still energy required to drive the printers, which showed up in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, also a book based on what happens to society when 3D printers exist, and in that case, everyone had a printer but most people couldn't afford to use them for anything major because energy was so scarce. Stephenson's world wasn't really that different than ours, save that the rich had *very* cushy lives. In Smith's version, they already had free energy because of a previous invention, hence his forecast of complete societal collapse, at least until the bright engineers who are the heroes of the set of stories managed to figure out how to build things like capacitors that included internal charges, that can't be printed so can be used for money. Smith's version of the apocalypse had basically everyone who felt they needed jobs becoming service industry personnel because that's the only thing that a non-scarcity economy still needs (and even then, only until robots/automation can replace it.)
With all that said, I think it's going to be many decades before we can print strained metals, like hardened steel or hypereutectic aluminum, so while I think we'll be seeing the gradual collapse of prices for cheap plastic crap that Walmart sells, I don't think we're going to be printing functional internal combustion engines of any sort within the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
As I'm sure you figured out, that's exactly why they put the swimming first. They watch you like a hawk, with literally hundreds of people out in boats and ski-doos. Having the swimming first means that they get it all over with at once, in a couple of hours, rather than having them be out there literally all day.
Especially for the full-length Ironman, where the finalists don't finish until well after dark. Having to do the swim course in the dark would guarantee deaths.
While that's totally true,from a participant view, mass-start swimming *sucks* compared to mass-start running or cycling. I've gotten to race a couple where they did run-swim-bike and it was vastly more civilized: no getting kicked in the head repeatedly while you're in the water.
I remember reading about a decades old cancer treatment technique that included fevers with very high temperatures. The physicians of the time claimed it was the body heat that killed the tumors.
Don't know how valid that is, but I know that a doctor told me once when I have fever not to take an aspirin just to lower the body temperature (unless it's dangerously high) because fever creates conditions for the body to fight the germs.
I dunno about fighting cancer that way (it might work: I just don't know) but the germ thing is valid. Bacteria and viruses are optimized to reproduce as quickly as possible at body temperature. Their proteins are less efficient as temperature varies either way from that optimum. So when you run a temperature, you slow down their reproduction rate, which gives your immune system more time to form a response and go fight them. (Bacteria can reproduce in about half an hour, which means they can increase by nearly 1,000,000,000,000:1 in one day, where our cells take many hours to reproduce once, so when you're forming an immune response, which involves a cell chewing up one of the invading bacteria and producing antibodies against it, and then that cell reproducing repeatedly to form a whole population of cells making antibodies, it takes several days. Anything that slows down the bacteria helps.)
Why would the rip off Louis Vuitton bag be any worse that the real thing? There are good knock offs and bad ones. Some of those rip off items come off the same assembly line as the real ones.
In short, because of the decrease in cost of production of consumer goods, most all consumer goods have roughly similar quality, so what differentiates high-end goods from cheap stuff is the name because it can be copyrighted and protected. This is most obvious in t-shirts, where they all cost between about $3-$7USD in reasonably large quantities, but you can find people willing to pay $50 for a $7 t-shirt that says DKNY on it. So when you buy a Vuitton bag what you're buying is the name, so you can show off to your friends that you can afford to pay several hundred dollars for some leather. That, in short, is why the ripoff is worse than the real thing: it's not the function that matters, but the form. Now, if the ripoff says Vuitton on it, then you're set: you've just managed to advertise wealth you don't have. Think of these as fashion accessories, not computers, and his point becomes clearer.
I've read the abstract but it's not clear that they're talking about enormous quantities of added gold/platinum/whatever. One interesting thing about gold, silver, copper, platinum, and some of the other precious metals is that they're soluble in hot water, so what you form is these huge underground plumes of rising hot water, over local hot magma areas, and the plumes are filled with dissolved metals. When the water rises enough it cools and the metals precipitate out -- primarily in cracks through which the water moves, forming veins that contain very high concentrations of precious metals. These plumes can be many, many miles high, and can pull up/concentrate metals from significant depths, so it's not clear to me that early gravity sorting of heavy metals downwards would result in no heavy metals at the surface. (An interesting side-note is that since each metal has a different solubility in water, as the water rises and cools, different metals precipitate out at different points, so if you find silver you're likely to find at least some gold nearby, but most likely not at exactly the same spot.) Note that I'm not a geologist, just an amateur gold hunter, but this is the explanation I've been given by my geologist friends.
Those are all interesting and compelling reasons, but what does that have to do with it being mounted in a light saber case with a battery and marketed in this way. If you want to source 1w laser diodes at digikey, knock yourself out. What is the purpose for one mounted in a light saber like case though?
I'm sure 99% of them are going to be misused just as you say. But a lot of the time, consumer packaged laser diodes, in their fancy injection-molded plastic cases, are cheaper than the raw diodes/optics bought one-by-one. I guess it's economy of scale, or maybe that they know people buying the minimalist modules know what they're doing and are willing to pay a lot for it, while consumer-grade stuff simply won't sell unless you sell it at razor-thin margins. (Although $1K is a *lot* to pay for 1W, so in this case I'm guessing there's no bargain to be found by tearing it apart.) By way of comparison, when I got my first blue laser diode, I bought an entire blu-ray optics repair kit for a PS3 (as I recall) because the carrier, slides, and a bunch of fancy mechanical bits were 40% less than just the diode/optics were selling for elsewhere.
The real reason for the.xxx TLD isn't to segregate porn sites. It's a money grab against other companies. Now Disney, McDonalds, Pepsi, and thousands of other companies have to register their domains with the.XXX to be sure that no one else registers their names.
This isn't clear to me. If you're Pepsi, why not just wait for someone else to pay for pepsi.xxx and then sue them for cybersquatting and take it from them and get it for free?
DPSS pump for UV lasers for fine-feature photolithography.
Mount in x/y plotter for cnc marking of wood or papercutting.
Drilling vias in polyimide for flex PCB's.
Pump for adjustable-wavelength dye laser.
I could probably come up with another 20 legitimate uses if I felt like it, but I just mentioned those because I've used 1-10W lasers for all those things.
I'd love to play with a 1000mW laser, but since you can't look at the specular reflections, or objects you aim it at without protection, what's the point? What can you safely do with it once you pop a balloon with it, or light a book of matches or burn a wasps' nest? The fun would die out pretty quickly. You can't cut steel with it, you can't weld with it, or really do anything practical with it, and it'd be a boring toy once you've experienced the novelty of popping a balloon or two from across a field using nothing but a beam of light and find there isn't anything you can safely use it for.
Well, mine's not 1W, just 350mW, but it, in combination with a CNC mill, or even my previous setup where I had swapped it in place of a pen in an old HP x/y plotter, did a fine job of: drawing fancy graphics on wood, precisely and rapidly cutting paper (my girlfriend is a collage artist), precisely and rapidly cutting fabric for sewing projects, and I'm currently working on making really inexpensive PCB soldermask stencils using it. I do have some really nice laser goggles, and when it's running, I'm the only one in the room. One of these days it'll get an enclosure, but with a bit of care with the optics, it is focussed to a fine point across a working distance of about 3mm, about 2 cm from the front optic, and at any distance over about 4cm it's a big fat sub-mW/mm beam that couldn't burn anything. At 20 meters the beam is almost a meter wide. I can crank it out so it has a tight beam, but that's dangerous and not very useful, so I leave it tightened down where it is both useful and not particularly dangerous.
But I have never seen someone wear eye protection when using one, much less making sure everyone for miles around had eye protection when they're shining it through windows, at passing cars, etc. And they're coming down in price so any goofball can screw around with pretty powerful ones.
FWIW when I bought the 350mW laser I'm using on my CNC mill to do marking and drill soldermask stencils, I'd already purchased a set of laser goggles designed for that wavelength, and always wear them when it's powered up. The reason I did that is because I've worked in three high-power laser labs, two commercial and one academic, and in all three at least one coworker had partial blindness from an unintended exposure. (In two of those, the person had been wearing laser glasses, and had just gotten unlucky with a specular reflection off a tool sitting on a desk that deflected the beam upwards between the edge of the glasses and the person's cheek, which is why I got against-the-skin-all-the-way-around goggles.) One dubious benefit to high power lasers in private hands is that it'll most likely be the owner's eyes that get fried in the reasonably short term.
And as they stated, the LEDs are bright enough.. WTF we need lasers?
Among other things, laser light is a lot more energy efficient. According to the article, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt as compared to 100 lumens per watt for LED lights.
They're using older numbers for LED's. Cree's at 231 lumens per watt. They hit 200 lumens/watt in 2010, and 170 back in 2008. The 100 lumens/watt numbers are likely accurate for currently-available LEDs and more specifically the packaging that is required for automotive environments (wide temp range, high reliability, vibration-withstanding ability) but higher-efficiency LED's will be qualifying for that within a couple years.
It is precisely this sort of ignorance why more diseases like polio have not gone the way of smallpox, i.e. been eradicated in the wild. In the case of polio, it's thanks to nutty preachers in the affected remaining hotspots making similarly dreary claims re: the polio vaccine.
It's also because the CIA funded a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as cover for testing children's blood to track Osama Bin Laden. The Muslim community has been saying for years that vaccination is a Western/Christian conspiracy against Islam. They think it's a system for sterilizing Muslim women or making Muslim children stupid or weak. I presume they're wrong, but the idea that vaccination is a conspiracy against Islamic figures is demonstrably true so it's hardly surprising they're not jumping up and down to get polio vaccinations. This is *precisely* why we still have polio, and the CIA's action has practically guaranteed that we'll continue having polio resurgences for another 30 years or so. I can hardly fault people for being suspicious of and refusing vaccinations when the CIA's doing stuff like this. (If you don't trust the above link, there are many many other links to this particular event: it even got a write-up in the New Yorker magazine about a month ago.)
I am surprised that so many people are saying the low price of the laptop matters. I have bought both laptop and desktop computers legitimately for that price. I've sold people old computers of mine for less. Hell, I've *given* people computers I don't use. I of course did not RTFA and maybe this is a top of the line laptop bought in a dark alley, but $60 does not cry "obviously stolen" to me.
No doubt. The last computer I paid more than $200 for was an Amiga 2000 back in the 1980's. Every laptop I have was acquired broken and under $40, and I fixed them and started using them. She got a broken laptop and got it fixed. What kind of person pays more than $60 for a broken laptop? Rich people, I guess. Now with that said, when I buy a broken laptop the first thing I do before I start using it is pull the hard drive (and look around on it to see what's there) and put in a new drive with linux on it, so I probably wouldn't get bitten the way she did... but the laptop I'm typing this on, I bought for $35 on ebay because it was broken (missing keys, didn't boot correctly because the cpu was no longer solidly bonded to the heatsink.) That looks like a $35 laptop to me, but maybe it was stolen.
The Vela Hotel and Advanced Vela satellites had photo, x-ray, neutron, and gamma ray detectors and silicon photodiodes set up as Bhangmeters for detecting nuclear tests. Presumably those would all be outer space/atmosphere/ground explosions.
Bacteria that do hydrogen oxidation as a method for driving their metabolism have been known for decades. The novel thing in this paper is that they've found a symbiont, where a eukaryote (in this case a mussel) coexists with hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, whereas previously the known hydrothermal vent symbionts contained bacteria with sulfur-based compounds or methane metabolic cycles. Unfortunately there appears to be nothing new about hydrogen metabolism, and nothing particularly useful for humans who want to harness hydrogen metabolism, in this.
Nope, it's 25 million registered users not just visitors. The visitor count sounds like it's quite significantly higher but I haven't seen any specific numbers.
Altium's a competitor to OrCAD, which was a separate company until it was bought by Cadence. Both Cadence Allegro (higher-end professional schematic/layout tool) and Altium can import schematics made in OrCAD, to be used in their respective layout tools, precisely because OrCAD is so widely used.
And yes, in the professional world, people *constantly* share schematics, because one company uses Mentor Graphics' PADS, another uses OrCAD, a third uses Altium, and the three companies are trying to build a project together, using existing boards, so they're all sending schematics from their respective packages back and forth and at some point someone has to redo the whole project practically from scratch in one tool or figure out how to import all the other schematics into one package. I'd say 15% of my time is spent merging schematics from different commercial packages, and having something that would help handle this problem lower in the food chain -- in the Eagle/KiCAD/gschem/LTSpice world -- would mean people working there wouldn't have the same frustrations and could use the extensive collections of OrCAD schematics that exist online.
OrCAD has about 60% of the schematics entry market in the professional world, according to friends who work at Altium, so it'd be awfully nice to add OrCAD to this. Likewise, I use gschem (which I believe can interact with KiCAD) so what I'd love to see is a way for this to be turned into a schematic exchange site.
>explaining how or why someone thinks or acts a certain way does not remove them from accountability or responsibility
There appears to be a continuum from people who are nearly 100% rational and responsible, to people who aren't at all responsible for their actions, and we as a civilization have a whole pile of different ways to deal with these situations. We culturally do not hold four year old children, profoundly retarded people, or severely schizophrenic people responsible for their actions because they're not mentally capable of understanding morality in a manner consistent with the rest of civilization. There are much grayer cases. Most people with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome chew their fingers off. They can't help it: they can't not chew their fingers off. There isn't any morality involved when you can't control your brain. That's why we have a whole range of criminal offenses: various degrees of murder and manslaughter are ways of assigning a level of culpability for an action.
Obviously a lot of people try to use an explanation as an excuse when it would be very convenient to have an excuse. But there's a lot we don't yet know about how biology drives behavior. (There's some really weird reading to be done on the relationship between the nervous system, sweating, and shyness: there's a nerve that controls sweat response in the upper part of your body, that if cut, makes people stop being embarrassed/blush/feel awkward: Atul Gawande writes about it in his book "Complications".) I think it's entirely possible that there are piles of stuff we don't yet know about how behavior is controlled. (In fact, there are plenty of neurobiologists who will talk at length about how it's unclear that people ever actually make conscious decisions: we act based on some urge and then rationalize our action by concluding that we chose to do it based on some line of reasoning: there are several essays in the thoroughly cool book "What we believe (but cannot prove)" by John Brockman on the subject of free will, choice, and rationality that make the case that there's no direct physical evidence that we make conscious choices about anything, and there is some evidence to say we don't.)
As such, I think that explanation could indeed be excuse in many cases: we don't know. Given our current cultural expectations, we have chosen to generally behave as if explanation isn't excuse, and I'm not arguing we should change. I'm just arguing that that's not necessarily a fact, just a cultural assumption that seems to be working fairly well for us.
I'm at 1:3.5, and bought about a year before the housing bubble burst. The lending agencies were overjoyed to approve my loan, even though they could see the mortgage payments would be 65% of my paycheck. I've a friend who was more like 1:5 and she, too, got approved. (Although that's a whole different kettle of fish: the loan officer verbally told her what sort of loan they were setting her up with, and *after* she'd paid her $5K "earnest money" and was actually signing the papers, she realized in reading them that the loan officer had lied and she was actually getting an interest-only loan.) They love finding people who will be likely to both pay a bunch of money and then default, giving them the title to the house as well.
You don't have to eat ramen to survive: you just need to minimize your fixed costs (aside from the mortgage) very aggressively. No cable, no cellphones, no cars that require monthly payments, nothing other than what you absolutely need. (Mortgage, utilities, food.) It's not a huge amount of fun, but it's manageable. We do have computers -- 10 year old stuff -- because people give them to you for free if you look around, and they work fine. We did splurge on $20/month internet along with the POTS service. It's not extreme poverty, it's just being careful.
I almost bought a Waterford when I upgraded my racing bike last year. (Instead I got a carbon fiber Bianchi, 16.2 pounds. Dunno if this is a good idea but it's fun.) They're absolutely beautiful bikes.
I've gotten better wear out of Continentals than Michelins, but Michelins generally do better for puncture resistance, and I'm told the Krylions will last as long as Conti's. I'd like to find some manufacturer that actually makes tubes in the US or Europe -- even the Conti's I get are made in Taiwan, so if the Michelin tubes say they're made in the US I'd love to hear about it.
I've another coworker who is a walmart enthusiast. He bought a walmart pump, which promptly split from pressure in use. Then when his pedals were getting old he bought some walmart pedals and one fell out while he was riding, destroying the crank. (This could have been installation error, not manufacture error.) THEN he bought a pair of panniers -- cargo carriers that strap on the rear rack of the bike) again at walmart. They're designed with straight sides, so they occupy the space his heels need when he's pedalling, so he's kicking them constantly and they keep falling off. And guess what? he keeps buying stuff at walmart. I've started just giving him my old stuff so he'll have quality equipment with some wear rather than brand-new walmart crap. But all he can ever see is the price tag. This isn't the same guy who buys the cheap tubes, either: I work in a building full of price-is-the-only-purchase-metric-that-matters people.
I'm a bit biased since I was somewhat involved in designing the first dimmable LED bulbs -- but quality matters with LED bulbs, as much as it does with CFL's. Philips bulbs are great (again, maybe a little bit of bias here, but I've torn apart a dozen or so makes/manufacturers of other LED bulbs and Philips *are* good-quality) and there are other excellent LED bulbs out there. Most all the ones at Home Depot are quite good.
China got into LED bulbs in a huge way, like they're buying/installing two orders of magnitude more LED lighting than the rest of the world combined. They were doing all their streetlighting with LED bulbs because replacing streetlights is *such* a pain. But they went with local low-cost manufacturers, who thought they could save some money but didn't do their research on die packaging and thermal bonding to the heatsink, and the bulbs did not give them anywhere *near* the claimed lifetime (and the experience has created a big backlash against LED streetlighting.)
With that said, the best LED dimmable bulbs dim better than incandescents, unless you're using really high-end dimmers, and even then they're at least as good as incandescents, and they should last longer than you're likely to live in the house. I love them.
>How Many Times Have You said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
*I* say that. You say that. But I work in a building full of engineers who shop at walmart and get irritated when the cheap walmart stuff breaks, so they wait until there's a 25% off sale and buy the exact same thing again, only this time they get two of them so it'll last twice as long. I'm totally not joking. Case in point: coworker buys cheap Walmart bicycle inner tubes. They fail. In the last week he's gotten four flat tires, and three of them were the tubes just coming apart: no puncture, just tearing at a mold seam line. So he bought the *same* tubes in bulk because then they only cost 50% as much, rather than going and paying 2x as much for some Continental tubes that don't fail until they're actually punctured.
Given the number of cars parked in the Walmart lot -- it's jammed -- compared to the number of cars parked at, say, Sears, I'm thinking we're vastly outnumbered. The market is demanding cheap. Those of us who feel otherwise are voices in the wilderness.
And yet even with all those roadblocks you're likely getting more money by staying independent than by selling yourself to the labels and living in slavery. Only the overproduced stars that are pretty much a disposable cog in the music industry and chosen to be advertised big get big money to keep the dream of being a rock star alive and musicians willing to sign up despite getting screwed.
Another consideration is that when you have a contract you have a budget, even if you're not taking home a hefty salary. I have one friend who is a genuine rock star, and another who is independent (and really good: he's won Guitar Magazine's 'best guitarist in the world' annual competition once.) They both make about the same amount of money from playing music, which is to say not very much, at all. However, the genuine rock star gets flown to Europe to perform, and their band travels around the US in enormous comfortable buses and has hotels everywhere they stay, whereas the independent guy drives around the US in an old beat-up van and stays in my basement for all the gigs he does in this state. Comfortably poor beats uncomfortably poor, and the record companies are willing to keep you in comfortable servitude to keep you making music for them.
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It's nice to know this. Eventually we'll all be on the list, and then it'll just formalize what's been the case all along. And hey added bonus then when Wikileaks publishes the list, we all can tell who the truly dangerous people are because they're the only ones with the influence to not be on the list.
>What's the economy of the western world going to look like if the only thing we need is material for 3D printers, power, land, food and water? Will provision of the un-replicable become the job of the state?
For what it's worth, George O. Smith wrote a short scifi story about matter replicators -- essentially 3D printers -- and their effect on the world economy back in 1936, called "Pandora's Millions", that's collected in the excellent hard sci-fi book "Venus Equilateral". He predicts the nearly complete collapse of society, since we're based on a scarcity economy. The limitation is still energy required to drive the printers, which showed up in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, also a book based on what happens to society when 3D printers exist, and in that case, everyone had a printer but most people couldn't afford to use them for anything major because energy was so scarce. Stephenson's world wasn't really that different than ours, save that the rich had *very* cushy lives. In Smith's version, they already had free energy because of a previous invention, hence his forecast of complete societal collapse, at least until the bright engineers who are the heroes of the set of stories managed to figure out how to build things like capacitors that included internal charges, that can't be printed so can be used for money. Smith's version of the apocalypse had basically everyone who felt they needed jobs becoming service industry personnel because that's the only thing that a non-scarcity economy still needs (and even then, only until robots/automation can replace it.)
With all that said, I think it's going to be many decades before we can print strained metals, like hardened steel or hypereutectic aluminum, so while I think we'll be seeing the gradual collapse of prices for cheap plastic crap that Walmart sells, I don't think we're going to be printing functional internal combustion engines of any sort within the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
As I'm sure you figured out, that's exactly why they put the swimming first. They watch you like a hawk, with literally hundreds of people out in boats and ski-doos. Having the swimming first means that they get it all over with at once, in a couple of hours, rather than having them be out there literally all day.
Especially for the full-length Ironman, where the finalists don't finish until well after dark. Having to do the swim course in the dark would guarantee deaths.
While that's totally true,from a participant view, mass-start swimming *sucks* compared to mass-start running or cycling. I've gotten to race a couple where they did run-swim-bike and it was vastly more civilized: no getting kicked in the head repeatedly while you're in the water.
I remember reading about a decades old cancer treatment technique that included fevers with very high temperatures. The physicians of the time claimed it was the body heat that killed the tumors.
Don't know how valid that is, but I know that a doctor told me once when I have fever not to take an aspirin just to lower the body temperature (unless it's dangerously high) because fever creates conditions for the body to fight the germs.
I dunno about fighting cancer that way (it might work: I just don't know) but the germ thing is valid. Bacteria and viruses are optimized to reproduce as quickly as possible at body temperature. Their proteins are less efficient as temperature varies either way from that optimum. So when you run a temperature, you slow down their reproduction rate, which gives your immune system more time to form a response and go fight them. (Bacteria can reproduce in about half an hour, which means they can increase by nearly 1,000,000,000,000:1 in one day, where our cells take many hours to reproduce once, so when you're forming an immune response, which involves a cell chewing up one of the invading bacteria and producing antibodies against it, and then that cell reproducing repeatedly to form a whole population of cells making antibodies, it takes several days. Anything that slows down the bacteria helps.)
Why would the rip off Louis Vuitton bag be any worse that the real thing? There are good knock offs and bad ones. Some of those rip off items come off the same assembly line as the real ones.
In short, because of the decrease in cost of production of consumer goods, most all consumer goods have roughly similar quality, so what differentiates high-end goods from cheap stuff is the name because it can be copyrighted and protected. This is most obvious in t-shirts, where they all cost between about $3-$7USD in reasonably large quantities, but you can find people willing to pay $50 for a $7 t-shirt that says DKNY on it. So when you buy a Vuitton bag what you're buying is the name, so you can show off to your friends that you can afford to pay several hundred dollars for some leather. That, in short, is why the ripoff is worse than the real thing: it's not the function that matters, but the form. Now, if the ripoff says Vuitton on it, then you're set: you've just managed to advertise wealth you don't have. Think of these as fashion accessories, not computers, and his point becomes clearer.
I've read the abstract but it's not clear that they're talking about enormous quantities of added gold/platinum/whatever. One interesting thing about gold, silver, copper, platinum, and some of the other precious metals is that they're soluble in hot water, so what you form is these huge underground plumes of rising hot water, over local hot magma areas, and the plumes are filled with dissolved metals. When the water rises enough it cools and the metals precipitate out -- primarily in cracks through which the water moves, forming veins that contain very high concentrations of precious metals. These plumes can be many, many miles high, and can pull up/concentrate metals from significant depths, so it's not clear to me that early gravity sorting of heavy metals downwards would result in no heavy metals at the surface. (An interesting side-note is that since each metal has a different solubility in water, as the water rises and cools, different metals precipitate out at different points, so if you find silver you're likely to find at least some gold nearby, but most likely not at exactly the same spot.) Note that I'm not a geologist, just an amateur gold hunter, but this is the explanation I've been given by my geologist friends.
Those are all interesting and compelling reasons, but what does that have to do with it being mounted in a light saber case with a battery and marketed in this way. If you want to source 1w laser diodes at digikey, knock yourself out. What is the purpose for one mounted in a light saber like case though?
I'm sure 99% of them are going to be misused just as you say. But a lot of the time, consumer packaged laser diodes, in their fancy injection-molded plastic cases, are cheaper than the raw diodes/optics bought one-by-one. I guess it's economy of scale, or maybe that they know people buying the minimalist modules know what they're doing and are willing to pay a lot for it, while consumer-grade stuff simply won't sell unless you sell it at razor-thin margins. (Although $1K is a *lot* to pay for 1W, so in this case I'm guessing there's no bargain to be found by tearing it apart.) By way of comparison, when I got my first blue laser diode, I bought an entire blu-ray optics repair kit for a PS3 (as I recall) because the carrier, slides, and a bunch of fancy mechanical bits were 40% less than just the diode/optics were selling for elsewhere.
The real reason for the .xxx TLD isn't to segregate porn sites. It's a money grab against other companies. .XXX to be sure that no one else registers their names.
Now Disney, McDonalds, Pepsi, and thousands of other companies have to register their domains with the
This isn't clear to me. If you're Pepsi, why not just wait for someone else to pay for pepsi.xxx and then sue them for cybersquatting and take it from them and get it for free?
There is no legitimate use.
DPSS pump for UV lasers for fine-feature photolithography.
Mount in x/y plotter for cnc marking of wood or papercutting.
Drilling vias in polyimide for flex PCB's.
Pump for adjustable-wavelength dye laser.
I could probably come up with another 20 legitimate uses if I felt like it, but I just mentioned those because I've used 1-10W lasers for all those things.
I'd love to play with a 1000mW laser, but since you can't look at the specular reflections, or objects you aim it at without protection, what's the point? What can you safely do with it once you pop a balloon with it, or light a book of matches or burn a wasps' nest? The fun would die out pretty quickly. You can't cut steel with it, you can't weld with it, or really do anything practical with it, and it'd be a boring toy once you've experienced the novelty of popping a balloon or two from across a field using nothing but a beam of light and find there isn't anything you can safely use it for.
Well, mine's not 1W, just 350mW, but it, in combination with a CNC mill, or even my previous setup where I had swapped it in place of a pen in an old HP x/y plotter, did a fine job of: drawing fancy graphics on wood, precisely and rapidly cutting paper (my girlfriend is a collage artist), precisely and rapidly cutting fabric for sewing projects, and I'm currently working on making really inexpensive PCB soldermask stencils using it. I do have some really nice laser goggles, and when it's running, I'm the only one in the room. One of these days it'll get an enclosure, but with a bit of care with the optics, it is focussed to a fine point across a working distance of about 3mm, about 2 cm from the front optic, and at any distance over about 4cm it's a big fat sub-mW/mm beam that couldn't burn anything. At 20 meters the beam is almost a meter wide. I can crank it out so it has a tight beam, but that's dangerous and not very useful, so I leave it tightened down where it is both useful and not particularly dangerous.
But I have never seen someone wear eye protection when using one, much less making sure everyone for miles around had eye protection when they're shining it through windows, at passing cars, etc. And they're coming down in price so any goofball can screw around with pretty powerful ones.
FWIW when I bought the 350mW laser I'm using on my CNC mill to do marking and drill soldermask stencils, I'd already purchased a set of laser goggles designed for that wavelength, and always wear them when it's powered up. The reason I did that is because I've worked in three high-power laser labs, two commercial and one academic, and in all three at least one coworker had partial blindness from an unintended exposure. (In two of those, the person had been wearing laser glasses, and had just gotten unlucky with a specular reflection off a tool sitting on a desk that deflected the beam upwards between the edge of the glasses and the person's cheek, which is why I got against-the-skin-all-the-way-around goggles.) One dubious benefit to high power lasers in private hands is that it'll most likely be the owner's eyes that get fried in the reasonably short term.
And as they stated, the LEDs are bright enough.. WTF we need lasers?
Among other things, laser light is a lot more energy efficient. According to the article, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt as compared to 100 lumens per watt for LED lights.
They're using older numbers for LED's. Cree's at 231 lumens per watt. They hit 200 lumens/watt in 2010, and 170 back in 2008. The 100 lumens/watt numbers are likely accurate for currently-available LEDs and more specifically the packaging that is required for automotive environments (wide temp range, high reliability, vibration-withstanding ability) but higher-efficiency LED's will be qualifying for that within a couple years.
It is precisely this sort of ignorance why more diseases like polio have not gone the way of smallpox, i.e. been eradicated in the wild. In the case of polio, it's thanks to nutty preachers in the affected remaining hotspots making similarly dreary claims re: the polio vaccine.
It's also because the CIA funded a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as cover for testing children's blood to track Osama Bin Laden. The Muslim community has been saying for years that vaccination is a Western/Christian conspiracy against Islam. They think it's a system for sterilizing Muslim women or making Muslim children stupid or weak. I presume they're wrong, but the idea that vaccination is a conspiracy against Islamic figures is demonstrably true so it's hardly surprising they're not jumping up and down to get polio vaccinations. This is *precisely* why we still have polio, and the CIA's action has practically guaranteed that we'll continue having polio resurgences for another 30 years or so. I can hardly fault people for being suspicious of and refusing vaccinations when the CIA's doing stuff like this. (If you don't trust the above link, there are many many other links to this particular event: it even got a write-up in the New Yorker magazine about a month ago.)
I am surprised that so many people are saying the low price of the laptop matters. I have bought both laptop and desktop computers legitimately for that price. I've sold people old computers of mine for less. Hell, I've *given* people computers I don't use. I of course did not RTFA and maybe this is a top of the line laptop bought in a dark alley, but $60 does not cry "obviously stolen" to me.
No doubt. The last computer I paid more than $200 for was an Amiga 2000 back in the 1980's. Every laptop I have was acquired broken and under $40, and I fixed them and started using them. She got a broken laptop and got it fixed. What kind of person pays more than $60 for a broken laptop? Rich people, I guess. Now with that said, when I buy a broken laptop the first thing I do before I start using it is pull the hard drive (and look around on it to see what's there) and put in a new drive with linux on it, so I probably wouldn't get bitten the way she did... but the laptop I'm typing this on, I bought for $35 on ebay because it was broken (missing keys, didn't boot correctly because the cpu was no longer solidly bonded to the heatsink.) That looks like a $35 laptop to me, but maybe it was stolen.
The Vela Hotel and Advanced Vela satellites had photo, x-ray, neutron, and gamma ray detectors and silicon photodiodes set up as Bhangmeters for detecting nuclear tests. Presumably those would all be outer space/atmosphere/ground explosions.
Bacteria that do hydrogen oxidation as a method for driving their metabolism have been known for decades. The novel thing in this paper is that they've found a symbiont, where a eukaryote (in this case a mussel) coexists with hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, whereas previously the known hydrothermal vent symbionts contained bacteria with sulfur-based compounds or methane metabolic cycles. Unfortunately there appears to be nothing new about hydrogen metabolism, and nothing particularly useful for humans who want to harness hydrogen metabolism, in this.
Nope, it's 25 million registered users not just visitors. The visitor count sounds like it's quite significantly higher but I haven't seen any specific numbers.
Altium's a competitor to OrCAD, which was a separate company until it was bought by Cadence. Both Cadence Allegro (higher-end professional schematic/layout tool) and Altium can import schematics made in OrCAD, to be used in their respective layout tools, precisely because OrCAD is so widely used.
And yes, in the professional world, people *constantly* share schematics, because one company uses Mentor Graphics' PADS, another uses OrCAD, a third uses Altium, and the three companies are trying to build a project together, using existing boards, so they're all sending schematics from their respective packages back and forth and at some point someone has to redo the whole project practically from scratch in one tool or figure out how to import all the other schematics into one package. I'd say 15% of my time is spent merging schematics from different commercial packages, and having something that would help handle this problem lower in the food chain -- in the Eagle/KiCAD/gschem/LTSpice world -- would mean people working there wouldn't have the same frustrations and could use the extensive collections of OrCAD schematics that exist online.
OrCAD has about 60% of the schematics entry market in the professional world, according to friends who work at Altium, so it'd be awfully nice to add OrCAD to this. Likewise, I use gschem (which I believe can interact with KiCAD) so what I'd love to see is a way for this to be turned into a schematic exchange site.
>explaining how or why someone thinks or acts a certain way does not remove them from accountability or responsibility
There appears to be a continuum from people who are nearly 100% rational and responsible, to people who aren't at all responsible for their actions, and we as a civilization have a whole pile of different ways to deal with these situations. We culturally do not hold four year old children, profoundly retarded people, or severely schizophrenic people responsible for their actions because they're not mentally capable of understanding morality in a manner consistent with the rest of civilization. There are much grayer cases. Most people with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome chew their fingers off. They can't help it: they can't not chew their fingers off. There isn't any morality involved when you can't control your brain. That's why we have a whole range of criminal offenses: various degrees of murder and manslaughter are ways of assigning a level of culpability for an action.
Obviously a lot of people try to use an explanation as an excuse when it would be very convenient to have an excuse. But there's a lot we don't yet know about how biology drives behavior. (There's some really weird reading to be done on the relationship between the nervous system, sweating, and shyness: there's a nerve that controls sweat response in the upper part of your body, that if cut, makes people stop being embarrassed/blush/feel awkward: Atul Gawande writes about it in his book "Complications".) I think it's entirely possible that there are piles of stuff we don't yet know about how behavior is controlled. (In fact, there are plenty of neurobiologists who will talk at length about how it's unclear that people ever actually make conscious decisions: we act based on some urge and then rationalize our action by concluding that we chose to do it based on some line of reasoning: there are several essays in the thoroughly cool book "What we believe (but cannot prove)" by John Brockman on the subject of free will, choice, and rationality that make the case that there's no direct physical evidence that we make conscious choices about anything, and there is some evidence to say we don't.)
As such, I think that explanation could indeed be excuse in many cases: we don't know. Given our current cultural expectations, we have chosen to generally behave as if explanation isn't excuse, and I'm not arguing we should change. I'm just arguing that that's not necessarily a fact, just a cultural assumption that seems to be working fairly well for us.
I'm at 1:3.5, and bought about a year before the housing bubble burst. The lending agencies were overjoyed to approve my loan, even though they could see the mortgage payments would be 65% of my paycheck. I've a friend who was more like 1:5 and she, too, got approved. (Although that's a whole different kettle of fish: the loan officer verbally told her what sort of loan they were setting her up with, and *after* she'd paid her $5K "earnest money" and was actually signing the papers, she realized in reading them that the loan officer had lied and she was actually getting an interest-only loan.) They love finding people who will be likely to both pay a bunch of money and then default, giving them the title to the house as well.
You don't have to eat ramen to survive: you just need to minimize your fixed costs (aside from the mortgage) very aggressively. No cable, no cellphones, no cars that require monthly payments, nothing other than what you absolutely need. (Mortgage, utilities, food.) It's not a huge amount of fun, but it's manageable. We do have computers -- 10 year old stuff -- because people give them to you for free if you look around, and they work fine. We did splurge on $20/month internet along with the POTS service. It's not extreme poverty, it's just being careful.
I almost bought a Waterford when I upgraded my racing bike last year. (Instead I got a carbon fiber Bianchi, 16.2 pounds. Dunno if this is a good idea but it's fun.) They're absolutely beautiful bikes.
I've gotten better wear out of Continentals than Michelins, but Michelins generally do better for puncture resistance, and I'm told the Krylions will last as long as Conti's. I'd like to find some manufacturer that actually makes tubes in the US or Europe -- even the Conti's I get are made in Taiwan, so if the Michelin tubes say they're made in the US I'd love to hear about it.
I've another coworker who is a walmart enthusiast. He bought a walmart pump, which promptly split from pressure in use. Then when his pedals were getting old he bought some walmart pedals and one fell out while he was riding, destroying the crank. (This could have been installation error, not manufacture error.) THEN he bought a pair of panniers -- cargo carriers that strap on the rear rack of the bike) again at walmart. They're designed with straight sides, so they occupy the space his heels need when he's pedalling, so he's kicking them constantly and they keep falling off. And guess what? he keeps buying stuff at walmart. I've started just giving him my old stuff so he'll have quality equipment with some wear rather than brand-new walmart crap. But all he can ever see is the price tag. This isn't the same guy who buys the cheap tubes, either: I work in a building full of price-is-the-only-purchase-metric-that-matters people.
I'm a bit biased since I was somewhat involved in designing the first dimmable LED bulbs -- but quality matters with LED bulbs, as much as it does with CFL's. Philips bulbs are great (again, maybe a little bit of bias here, but I've torn apart a dozen or so makes/manufacturers of other LED bulbs and Philips *are* good-quality) and there are other excellent LED bulbs out there. Most all the ones at Home Depot are quite good.
China got into LED bulbs in a huge way, like they're buying/installing two orders of magnitude more LED lighting than the rest of the world combined. They were doing all their streetlighting with LED bulbs because replacing streetlights is *such* a pain. But they went with local low-cost manufacturers, who thought they could save some money but didn't do their research on die packaging and thermal bonding to the heatsink, and the bulbs did not give them anywhere *near* the claimed lifetime (and the experience has created a big backlash against LED streetlighting.)
With that said, the best LED dimmable bulbs dim better than incandescents, unless you're using really high-end dimmers, and even then they're at least as good as incandescents, and they should last longer than you're likely to live in the house. I love them.
>How Many Times Have You said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
*I* say that. You say that. But I work in a building full of engineers who shop at walmart and get irritated when the cheap walmart stuff breaks, so they wait until there's a 25% off sale and buy the exact same thing again, only this time they get two of them so it'll last twice as long. I'm totally not joking. Case in point: coworker buys cheap Walmart bicycle inner tubes. They fail. In the last week he's gotten four flat tires, and three of them were the tubes just coming apart: no puncture, just tearing at a mold seam line. So he bought the *same* tubes in bulk because then they only cost 50% as much, rather than going and paying 2x as much for some Continental tubes that don't fail until they're actually punctured.
Given the number of cars parked in the Walmart lot -- it's jammed -- compared to the number of cars parked at, say, Sears, I'm thinking we're vastly outnumbered. The market is demanding cheap. Those of us who feel otherwise are voices in the wilderness.
And yet even with all those roadblocks you're likely getting more money by staying independent than by selling yourself to the labels and living in slavery. Only the overproduced stars that are pretty much a disposable cog in the music industry and chosen to be advertised big get big money to keep the dream of being a rock star alive and musicians willing to sign up despite getting screwed.
Another consideration is that when you have a contract you have a budget, even if you're not taking home a hefty salary. I have one friend who is a genuine rock star, and another who is independent (and really good: he's won Guitar Magazine's 'best guitarist in the world' annual competition once.) They both make about the same amount of money from playing music, which is to say not very much, at all. However, the genuine rock star gets flown to Europe to perform, and their band travels around the US in enormous comfortable buses and has hotels everywhere they stay, whereas the independent guy drives around the US in an old beat-up van and stays in my basement for all the gigs he does in this state. Comfortably poor beats uncomfortably poor, and the record companies are willing to keep you in comfortable servitude to keep you making music for them.