Um, technically, if you restrict yourself to laying fiber across the surface of the planet, it'll still take 70ms or so to get around to the opposite side of the planet. Speed of light and all.
So I don't think your 5ms latency to anywhere wish is going to come true.
I agree that nuclear's been shelved for way too long by eco-freaks. There are existing designs for a rocket of this type that were worked out decades ago, and are just waiting to be used. The materials and the processes to make them have only gotten cheaper.
What'd I'd really like to see is a hybrid air breathing nuclear engine. i.e. the hydrogen is pumped through the reactor core, superheated to several thousand K, and then combined with air sucked in through a ramscoop from the atmosphere for an extra boost to help in getting out of Earth's gravity well. This would allow for smaller engines, and still allow single stage to orbit. And it would be incredibly bad ass.
You don't understand thermodynamics. Of course it takes more energy to produce than we get out of it. 2nd law of thermo. For spacecraft, small and light is better. Antimatter, per joule, is the smallest and lightest allowable by the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
The idea is that we can use wind power, solar power, or crude oil generated power to make the antimatter here on Earth, and then take antimatter into space with us. None of those other types of power exist in space (except solar, which doesn't exist for any practical purposes if you start using antimatter propulsion to go to other stars..which is entirely possible when you have an exhaust velocity equal to the speed of light..well, almost, since matter and antimatter produce neutral and charged pi-mesons when they annihilate. the neutral pi-mesons decay into gamma rays that spray in random directions very quickly, but the charged pi mesons don't. so the idea is to shape the exhaust flow by moving the charged pi mesons when an electrostatic or electromagnetic field before they decay).
You're a victim of the same mistaken thinking that the comments about the hydrogen power generation story a few days ago were saturated with.
I've considered this, but it seems to be that the main advantage of a calculator for medium complexity calculations is having a huge array of specialized buttons that can be memorized -- a user interface that never changes (with the exception of the context buttons just to the bottom of the HP's screen). It would take either a cumbersome menu system or entirely too much screen real estate to do the same thing on a Palm Pilot. A Palm Pilot also isn't a fantastic number cruncher; I don't believe the Moto processors do much floating point.
The new ARM10 core supports a VFP10 floating point coprocessor, as well as having extremely low power sleep modes that would be necessary for use in a calculator. It even has some DSP-like features in its instruction set. Instead of struggling to graph a parabola like current calculators do, it'd be able to do 3d surfaces, FFTs, etc. easily. It would be an obvious extension of that to add an expansion module with high quality ADCs and DACs on it and use it as a realtime DSP control box with a very approachable user interface.
Don't forget that a lot of what's great about HP48s is simply the clicky buttons (the 49 and TIs have mushy buttons that don't give you any tactile sense of when the calc considers it 'pushed'), too.
HP calcs are quite programmable; I've written several such programs myself over the years in UserRPL. Also possible are assembly, SysRPL, Pascal, and C.
With the demise of HP's calc division, and the continual and unparalleled suckage of TI's calculators, has anyone else thought about doing an open hardware/open source calculator design?
It'd be possible to make kits for them, even to the point of doing injection molded plastic, if you were making a few hundred or a few thousand. Circuit boards would be dirt cheap in those quantities. Just use some low power processor with decent floating point and integer performance, and make it readily expandable/hackable.
The ISS is rarely over a particular spot on the Earth. In addition, we want to know the atmospheric properties in the direction of what we're observing. Not only does the ISS make passes every few hours for 2-3 minutes of visible time on the horizon for a particular location, but you'd be limited to observing objects nearly adjacent to the ISS. And because it moves so quickly, the long exposures that deep sky objections need would be impossible.
This technology is attached to the telescope, so it's pointed at the sky with a constant offset from the current point of observation, and it's then monitored with a much smaller (6 inch, instead of 33 feet for a Keck mirror) telescope with adaptive optics, the corrections for which will eventually be mimicked on the full scale mirror, once they get it fully functioning (it's not yet, but they can make the corrections on the 6" scope now).
You're free to shoot lasers at the space station if you want, though.
This is just the kickoff where the until-now secret rules and guidelines for this year's competition are unveiled (they change every year). The competition is held later in the spring at Epcot Center in Florida.
You're thinking of the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest. Our Robot Team at UT Austin competed in it for a few years, but it got too expensive to fly up there and have Fedex destroy our equipment.
s/Neil/Neal.
A lot of people make that mistake. It's also Zodiac, not Zodiak.
Re:Still I ask why is it relevant?
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
You should check out Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. The main plot of the article is centered around aggregious PCB pollution in Boston harbor and a conspiracy to genetically engineer bacteria to cover it up.
I have the Discover magazine this guy was on the cover of. I believe it was July of 1998 or so. It was very cool then, it's still very cool, but it's old and I don't know why it was submitted.
Additionally, the submitter severely misinterpreted what Thompson's system does. He has the FPGA programmer connected via serial or parallel (I'm not sure), and he runs a genetic algorithm on his computer, the fitness function (the component of a GA which evaluates offspring) loads each offspring's genome (each genome in this case codes for different gate settings on the FPGA) into the FPGA, and separate data acquisition equipment supplies input to the FPGA, and checks the output, and based on that supplies a fitness value, which the GA uses to breed and kill off children for subsequent generations.
He has *NOT* implemented a GA inside a 1998 era FPGA (120000 gates max or so at the time on a Xilinx, which is what he was using) when he had a perfectly good freaking general purpose computer sitting right next to it.
Well, I don't know about where you live, but shooting the finger at someone here in Texas is a Class B misdemeanor (2yrs in jail, $500 fine). And they do enforce it if someone complains...or if some jackass security guard has it out for you.
Actually, Advantech already makes one. PCM-9370F.
It's a 3.5" form factor, and after talking with one of their reps, the PCM-9370 is $725 and has a 2 week lead time. That's comparable to the Intel and NS Geode boards they have. I'm not sure if it's on their online store yet (that's why I had to ask a rep). They give a typical power consumption of 10.7W @ 533MHz with 64MB of RAM.
That's a commonly held misconception that's almost an outright urban (chemical) myth. I don't know about how many people die because of it, but it doesn't produce Cl2 gas. It produces Hydrazine (N2H2, or H-N=N-H), which mainly used in the space program for short burst maneuvering thrusters on spacecraft, and has been used since the very first US launches at Vandenburg.
It's bad enough stuff that if you're able to smell it, you've already got brain damage, so there aren't too many people who know what it smells like. If I recall, there was a guy at Vandenburg whose job was to sniff for Hydrazine, but that was a classified project and they could get away with that kind of crap.
Actually, this kind of thing could be good. Part of the reason all these stupid 'copyright protection' and 'digital rights management' schemes are being presented, and stupid laws passed, is that technical people produce a workaround usable by anyone in the voting populace in fairly short order.
If they all hold back for fear of the DMCA, then people might actually notice what total crooks their representatives in Congress are, and vote them out. Believe me, when all the people who've gotten accustomed to unhindered downloading of mp3s, TV episodes, movies, pr0n, warez, etc. are no longer able to, they will still feel entitled to it. Whether you think they should be able to do that sort of thing or not, it's better that they do that than the government/corporations try to write laws that make it impossible (insane!).
The current crop of users who are used to this will all be voting in another 5-6 years. Then we'll have our army.
It takes 100mA for a second to stop your heart. 'A few mA' is between enough to notice and verging on pain.
Also, keep in mind that a human has a dry resistance of 500KOhm. Superconductors have a resistance very near zero. A voltage that produces 10^4 Amps in a superconductor won't conduct crap in a human. If you're wet, your resistance is still only 300 Ohms.
I'd worry more about my credit cards and such getting erased.
Also note that there isn't going to be any arcing if all the connectors are firmly connected, and no mechanical switching is used (i.e. a bank of big SCRs, which can switch a lot more current than that). Of course, when they use knife switches to connect battery banks on submarines, sometimes they have their own little private ball lightning show. That's why solid state is good.
The most dangerous part of this machine is probably the cryogenic fluid. And if it's a cryostat like his previous apparatus, then there's a ceramic disk spinning at high speed. If that shattered and it's not properly contained (which it probably is, just to insulate the cryogenic fluid) it could send shrapnel flying at high speed.
You shouldn't, however, be afraid of the electricity. It really does take quite a bit of it to kill a human (50000 Volts at 5000 Watts to get the necessary 100mA to kill a dry human..of course high voltage arcs can blow away dry skin and get right to that juicy 300 Ohm under-tissue, at which point you are fucked, as a 30 Volt, 3 Watt supply can kill you.
The Russian Energya booster, which is about to recomissioned for use on the Buran shuttle, can lift 100 tons. Guess what country is also open to private enterprise space launches?
LEO is the region where the shuttle and ISS are. It's 150-250 miles up, compared to geosynchronous communications satellites, which are 20000 miles away. So LEO should have 2 orders of magnitude lower latency. Not that I know whether timothy was talking out of his ass regarding LEO high bandwidth unmetered Internet access. In LEO you're moving at a pretty good clip, and typically traverse the full span of the sky in a minute or two. At any reasonably useful frequency, the beam pattern would be so narrow you'd end up spending all your money on equipment just to track the damn satellite. I've tracked the ISS across the sky with a telescope before, and it's a little hard to read email while doing it:P
Re:That's still retarded.
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 3
They allow autonomous bots, just none of the autonomous robots choose to compete against the human controlled robots. It's my understanding that there are certain exhibitions fights (such as Mark Setrakian's Mechadon, Snake, etc.) for robots that fall outside the rules but are still entertaining for the audience, so autonomous bots tend to fight there, but I believe they're few and far between.
I'm into autonomous robots myself, and am considering getting into BattleBots, but at least with some fly-by-wire intelligence on board, perhaps with some sensors as well.
I think your assertion about 'the current state of AI' is a little misguided. When was the last time you sat down with a compiler and tried to write something to make a robot do anything, much less be intelligent, or engage targets with deadly force at its own discretion? Don't you think there's a reason the military still mostly has 'dumb' weaponry..aside from being guided by GPS and recognizing its target optically in a highly preprogrammed manner, it's still dumb.
Another thing is..the more intelligent a robot is, the less likely you are to want to see it destroyed. What would it say about humans if we took intelligent, thinking beings and threw them in a pit to fight to the death just because they were machines? I think it's better left as an extension of the phallus (not that Battlebots isn't fun:).
Just a nitpick, but those aren't terrorists. Randy Weaver was a right wing nut who had guns the government didn't want him having, so they sniped his wife unprovoked, and threw him in jail. The Waco cult was..well, a cult that was centered around the wholesome value of 35 year old white male rejects getting their jollies from brainwashed 13 year olds.
I had the opportunity to talk to one of the original Mosaic/Netscape developers once, and I asked him about . He said it had been put in by one of his colleagues as a joke, as in 'Haha, how could anyone ever be so stupid as to use this tag?'. Can't say I'm surprised.:)
Actually, that first story is right here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/09/165220 8&mode=thread
You *do* have a Science slashbox set up, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, technically, if you restrict yourself to laying fiber across the surface of the planet, it'll still take 70ms or so to get around to the opposite side of the planet. Speed of light and all.
So I don't think your 5ms latency to anywhere wish is going to come true.
I agree that nuclear's been shelved for way too long by eco-freaks. There are existing designs for a rocket of this type that were worked out decades ago, and are just waiting to be used. The materials and the processes to make them have only gotten cheaper.
What'd I'd really like to see is a hybrid air breathing nuclear engine. i.e. the hydrogen is pumped through the reactor core, superheated to several thousand K, and then combined with air sucked in through a ramscoop from the atmosphere for an extra boost to help in getting out of Earth's gravity well. This would allow for smaller engines, and still allow single stage to orbit. And it would be incredibly bad ass.
The US considered this as well, during Project Orion. They even did some tests with high explosives and small scale devices.
You don't understand thermodynamics. Of course it takes more energy to produce than we get out of it. 2nd law of thermo. For spacecraft, small and light is better. Antimatter, per joule, is the smallest and lightest allowable by the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
The idea is that we can use wind power, solar power, or crude oil generated power to make the antimatter here on Earth, and then take antimatter into space with us. None of those other types of power exist in space (except solar, which doesn't exist for any practical purposes if you start using antimatter propulsion to go to other stars..which is entirely possible when you have an exhaust velocity equal to the speed of light..well, almost, since matter and antimatter produce neutral and charged pi-mesons when they annihilate. the neutral pi-mesons decay into gamma rays that spray in random directions very quickly, but the charged pi mesons don't. so the idea is to shape the exhaust flow by moving the charged pi mesons when an electrostatic or electromagnetic field before they decay).
You're a victim of the same mistaken thinking that the comments about the hydrogen power generation story a few days ago were saturated with.
I've considered this, but it seems to be that the main advantage of a calculator for medium complexity calculations is having a huge array of specialized buttons that can be memorized -- a user interface that never changes (with the exception of the context buttons just to the bottom of the HP's screen). It would take either a cumbersome menu system or entirely too much screen real estate to do the same thing on a Palm Pilot. A Palm Pilot also isn't a fantastic number cruncher; I don't believe the Moto processors do much floating point.
The new ARM10 core supports a VFP10 floating point coprocessor, as well as having extremely low power sleep modes that would be necessary for use in a calculator. It even has some DSP-like features in its instruction set. Instead of struggling to graph a parabola like current calculators do, it'd be able to do 3d surfaces, FFTs, etc. easily. It would be an obvious extension of that to add an expansion module with high quality ADCs and DACs on it and use it as a realtime DSP control box with a very approachable user interface.
Don't forget that a lot of what's great about HP48s is simply the clicky buttons (the 49 and TIs have mushy buttons that don't give you any tactile sense of when the calc considers it 'pushed'), too.
HP calcs are quite programmable; I've written several such programs myself over the years in UserRPL. Also possible are assembly, SysRPL, Pascal, and C.
With the demise of HP's calc division, and the continual and unparalleled suckage of TI's calculators, has anyone else thought about doing an open hardware/open source calculator design?
It'd be possible to make kits for them, even to the point of doing injection molded plastic, if you were making a few hundred or a few thousand. Circuit boards would be dirt cheap in those quantities. Just use some low power processor with decent floating point and integer performance, and make it readily expandable/hackable.
Anyone?
The ISS is rarely over a particular spot on the Earth. In addition, we want to know the atmospheric properties in the direction of what we're observing. Not only does the ISS make passes every few hours for 2-3 minutes of visible time on the horizon for a particular location, but you'd be limited to observing objects nearly adjacent to the ISS. And because it moves so quickly, the long exposures that deep sky objections need would be impossible.
This technology is attached to the telescope, so it's pointed at the sky with a constant offset from the current point of observation, and it's then monitored with a much smaller (6 inch, instead of 33 feet for a Keck mirror) telescope with adaptive optics, the corrections for which will eventually be mimicked on the full scale mirror, once they get it fully functioning (it's not yet, but they can make the corrections on the 6" scope now).
You're free to shoot lasers at the space station if you want, though.
This is just the kickoff where the until-now secret rules and guidelines for this year's competition are unveiled (they change every year). The competition is held later in the spring at Epcot Center in Florida.
You're thinking of the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest. Our Robot Team at UT Austin competed in it for a few years, but it got too expensive to fly up there and have Fedex destroy our equipment.
s/Neil/Neal.
A lot of people make that mistake. It's also Zodiac, not Zodiak.
You should check out Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. The main plot of the article is centered around aggregious PCB pollution in Boston harbor and a conspiracy to genetically engineer bacteria to cover it up.
I have the Discover magazine this guy was on the cover of. I believe it was July of 1998 or so. It was very cool then, it's still very cool, but it's old and I don't know why it was submitted.
Additionally, the submitter severely misinterpreted what Thompson's system does. He has the FPGA programmer connected via serial or parallel (I'm not sure), and he runs a genetic algorithm on his computer, the fitness function (the component of a GA which evaluates offspring) loads each offspring's genome (each genome in this case codes for different gate settings on the FPGA) into the FPGA, and separate data acquisition equipment supplies input to the FPGA, and checks the output, and based on that supplies a fitness value, which the GA uses to breed and kill off children for subsequent generations.
He has *NOT* implemented a GA inside a 1998 era FPGA (120000 gates max or so at the time on a Xilinx, which is what he was using) when he had a perfectly good freaking general purpose computer sitting right next to it.
Well, I don't know about where you live, but shooting the finger at someone here in Texas is a Class B misdemeanor (2yrs in jail, $500 fine). And they do enforce it if someone complains...or if some jackass security guard has it out for you.
-RevRigel
That's a commonly held misconception that's almost an outright urban (chemical) myth. I don't know about how many people die because of it, but it doesn't produce Cl2 gas. It produces Hydrazine (N2H2, or H-N=N-H), which mainly used in the space program for short burst maneuvering thrusters on spacecraft, and has been used since the very first US launches at Vandenburg.
It's bad enough stuff that if you're able to smell it, you've already got brain damage, so there aren't too many people who know what it smells like. If I recall, there was a guy at Vandenburg whose job was to sniff for Hydrazine, but that was a classified project and they could get away with that kind of crap.
Actually, this kind of thing could be good. Part of the reason all these stupid 'copyright protection' and 'digital rights management' schemes are being presented, and stupid laws passed, is that technical people produce a workaround usable by anyone in the voting populace in fairly short order.
If they all hold back for fear of the DMCA, then people might actually notice what total crooks their representatives in Congress are, and vote them out. Believe me, when all the people who've gotten accustomed to unhindered downloading of mp3s, TV episodes, movies, pr0n, warez, etc. are no longer able to, they will still feel entitled to it. Whether you think they should be able to do that sort of thing or not, it's better that they do that than the government/corporations try to write laws that make it impossible (insane!).
The current crop of users who are used to this will all be voting in another 5-6 years. Then we'll have our army.
It takes 100mA for a second to stop your heart. 'A few mA' is between enough to notice and verging on pain.
Also, keep in mind that a human has a dry resistance of 500KOhm. Superconductors have a resistance very near zero. A voltage that produces 10^4 Amps in a superconductor won't conduct crap in a human. If you're wet, your resistance is still only 300 Ohms.
I'd worry more about my credit cards and such getting erased.
Also note that there isn't going to be any arcing if all the connectors are firmly connected, and no mechanical switching is used (i.e. a bank of big SCRs, which can switch a lot more current than that). Of course, when they use knife switches to connect battery banks on submarines, sometimes they have their own little private ball lightning show. That's why solid state is good.
The most dangerous part of this machine is probably the cryogenic fluid. And if it's a cryostat like his previous apparatus, then there's a ceramic disk spinning at high speed. If that shattered and it's not properly contained (which it probably is, just to insulate the cryogenic fluid) it could send shrapnel flying at high speed.
You shouldn't, however, be afraid of the electricity. It really does take quite a bit of it to kill a human (50000 Volts at 5000 Watts to get the necessary 100mA to kill a dry human..of course high voltage arcs can blow away dry skin and get right to that juicy 300 Ohm under-tissue, at which point you are fucked, as a 30 Volt, 3 Watt supply can kill you.
-RevRigel
The Russian Energya booster, which is about to recomissioned for use on the Buran shuttle, can lift 100 tons. Guess what country is also open to private enterprise space launches?
LEO is the region where the shuttle and ISS are. It's 150-250 miles up, compared to geosynchronous communications satellites, which are 20000 miles away. So LEO should have 2 orders of magnitude lower latency. Not that I know whether timothy was talking out of his ass regarding LEO high bandwidth unmetered Internet access. In LEO you're moving at a pretty good clip, and typically traverse the full span of the sky in a minute or two. At any reasonably useful frequency, the beam pattern would be so narrow you'd end up spending all your money on equipment just to track the damn satellite. I've tracked the ISS across the sky with a telescope before, and it's a little hard to read email while doing it :P
They allow autonomous bots, just none of the autonomous robots choose to compete against the human controlled robots. It's my understanding that there are certain exhibitions fights (such as Mark Setrakian's Mechadon, Snake, etc.) for robots that fall outside the rules but are still entertaining for the audience, so autonomous bots tend to fight there, but I believe they're few and far between. :).
I'm into autonomous robots myself, and am considering getting into BattleBots, but at least with some fly-by-wire intelligence on board, perhaps with some sensors as well.
I think your assertion about 'the current state of AI' is a little misguided. When was the last time you sat down with a compiler and tried to write something to make a robot do anything, much less be intelligent, or engage targets with deadly force at its own discretion? Don't you think there's a reason the military still mostly has 'dumb' weaponry..aside from being guided by GPS and recognizing its target optically in a highly preprogrammed manner, it's still dumb.
Another thing is..the more intelligent a robot is, the less likely you are to want to see it destroyed. What would it say about humans if we took intelligent, thinking beings and threw them in a pit to fight to the death just because they were machines? I think it's better left as an extension of the phallus (not that Battlebots isn't fun
Well, technically the second amendment is another good check on corrupt cops, but they've eliminated that in Massachusetts too.
Just a nitpick, but those aren't terrorists. Randy Weaver was a right wing nut who had guns the government didn't want him having, so they sniped his wife unprovoked, and threw him in jail. The Waco cult was..well, a cult that was centered around the wholesome value of 35 year old white male rejects getting their jollies from brainwashed 13 year olds.
I had the opportunity to talk to one of the original Mosaic/Netscape developers once, and I asked him about . He said it had been put in by one of his colleagues as a joke, as in 'Haha, how could anyone ever be so stupid as to use this tag?'. Can't say I'm surprised. :)
Actually, that first story is right here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/09/165220 8&mode=thread
You *do* have a Science slashbox set up, don't you?