Just curious - what does autopilot do when it approaches a school bus with the lights flashing? In most (all?) jurisdictions in North America, a car must stop (a certain distance away from the bus).
There are exceptions: I believe that in most (all?) jurisdictions, the car does not have to stop if the road is divided or has a median. (Not all divided roads are highways.) I can imagine that caveat being a bitch to get an AI system to understand.
Lockheed Martin has produced an animation of the entry descent and landing. Go ahead and watch it, once, then forget about it. It unfortunately is not nearly as informative as, say, the 7 Minutes of Terror video from Curiosity, or the whimsical bounce landing from Spirit and Opportunity.
At that time the path to high efficiency wasn't clear. There are two ways of upping the efficiency of the engines, higher pressure ratios and higher bypass
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that "bypass" is a concept that doesn't really apply to a jet engine that has to operate supersonically. And, as time has gone on subsonic, high-bypass ratio engines have seen drastically more efficiency improvements than supersonic jet engines.
The thing that I find coolest about the Electron rocket is that the turbopumps, which feed fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber, are powered by electric motors, rather than burning some of that fuel/oxygen mix in a staged combustion cycle.
On the plus side: you avoid a huge amount of complexity by ditching the preburner (and its part count, weight, fuel-oxidizer separation issues, temperature extremes). You also have very precise and immediate throttle control. On the downside, you have to carry a sizable battery pack, which has much lower energy density.
I don't know if their approach will scale up particularly well, but at this scale it certainly seems like a win. And, if nothing else, it is encouraging to see companies trying new approaches.
On a side note I always wondered if the feds tracked where all the mail was going
The USPS has been taking a picture of every piece of mail that passes through it for a decades. In some ways this should not be surprising - most mail sorting is automated, using machine vision to read the address labels (either hand-written, or barcode). In fact, the USPS was a strong investor in optical character recognition decades ago, because they recognized they could get much greater throughput this way. Previously, each letter would go past a human worker that would read the address and type in the ZIP code with a specialized keyboard.
More recently, the USPS has started retaining these images for a period of time. This has, for instance, been helpful in law enforcement - see the recent case of Cesar Sayoc. But I don't know how long the images are kept for, or what other legitimate uses there may be for it.
True, but if we have sufficient carbon neutral power we can run energy intensive carbon capture methods. I'm not sure there'll be the public will to spend the money on such a thing
Altruistically? No, there will never be public will for the billions (trillions?) of dollars per year necessary for that. On the other hand, if there is a price on carbon emissions (either a direct tax, or some indirect mechanism that puts a clear price on it), then there could eventually be profit-making companies that perform that role. As an example: Waste Management does't haul away your trash out of the goodness of their heart - they're gettin' paid to do it.
The capacity of renewable energy has overtaken that of fossil fuels in the UK for the first time, in a milestone that experts said would have been unthinkable a few years ago
Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention. True: past performance is no indication of future results; but the trend has been clear for quite a few years now.
Carbon, like any number of other alloying elements, can be added to the mix after the iron has been purified. In conventional steels, carbon accounts for 2%wt or less, so it's not like much needs to be added. (In alloy steels, the %carbon is much lower.) That is much, much less than the carbon used to reduce the iron oxides in the original ore. For instance, 2(Fe2O3) + 3(C) --> 4(Fe) + 3(CO2). In that case, it's 1.5 C for every 2 Fe on an atomic basis, or a mass ratio of 18:112, or about 1:6.
The process sounds a lot like how aluminum gets refined. Aluminum doesn't exist in nature as a pure metal - the ores (primarily bauxite) are mostly aluminum oxides. To break apart (reduce) the oxides, huge electric currents are used: a battery in reverse. (This is why a lot of aluminum refining happens in places with lots of cheap electricity - Canada, Iceland, etc.)
In traditional iron smelting, the oxides are reduced by the addition of carbon in a blast furnace, producing CO and CO2 as a waste product. Replacing the chemical, carbon-based process with an electrical process would indeed be beneficial.
It does not matter if it uses more energy. It matters if the cost is worthwhile. Look at e.g. aluminium. That uses a shitload of electricity to to turn Bauxite into aluminium. Yet people still make money of it.
It is worth pointing out that aluminum is eminently recyclable, too. In fact, it takes only 5% as much energy to recycle existing aluminum than to refine new aluminum from ore. Because of this, most of the aluminum produced in the history of humanity is still in use. One could think of that energy as a one-time cost, unlike cryptocurrencies, where there is no end in sight.
Most of the energy cost of refining aluminum comes from the fact that aluminum, unlike gold, is bound up in various oxides. To break the oxides and purify aluminum metal requires massive amounts of electricity - it's a lot like a battery in reverse. Until we had access to large amounts of electricity, the alternative means of purifying aluminum were so costly and time consuming that aluminum was treated like a precious metal. Napoleon III had aluminum tableware to flaunt his wealth and power (which is just laughable today, especially when you consider how soft pure aluminum is). The tip of the Washington Monument in D.C. is aluminum. At the time (1884), it was the largest chunk of aluminum in existence.
When a person looks at a photograph or hears a piece of music, her brain responds in ways that researchers or medical professionals can measure with electrical sensors placed on her scalp
Headline: "Reporter, Posing as Sketchy PR, Asked 28 Media Outlets If They'd Take Money To Publish Content Without Disclosing it Was Advertising. More Than Half Said Yes"
Summary: "Next we compiled a list of blockchain media sites. This was by no means exhaustive, but to have a sense of the scale of the problem, we needed numbers. All in all, we reached out to 28 sites"
I know it's trendy to accuse any news organization, publisher, studio, website, crazy-uncle's blog, or AM radio shack broadcaster as shady, untrustworthy, or otherwise peddling falsehoods.
On the other hand, there's a BIG difference between "media outlets" and "blockchain media sites," (whatever the hell those are). The headline implies that some number of the big and names that one encounters on a day-to-day basis (the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, CBS/NBC/ABC, WSJ, etc.) may be publishing paid content as their own. The reality of this news item is...far more underwhelming.
Honestly, Slashdot Editor, this is sloppy work even by the usual low standards.
Trump called the Times report incorrect on Thursday, and dismissed it as "long and boring." "I only use Government Phones, and have only one seldom used government cell phone. Story is soooo wrong!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
I could write a long screed about Trump's short attention span (probably he got bored with the article because it didn't have enough pictures). But instead, I will point out that he wrote his comeback on Twitter. Trump doesn't have a desktop computer - he does his tweeting from a phone. Soooooo, he shot off this tweet from his Government Phone? I'm guessing that his government phone has been modified so that it can't have twitter (or most anything else) installed on it.
A phone is ~3000mAH. Even if you charged a phone once a day on an inductive charger at 10% efficiency, that would be (rounding up) ~1KWH = (3000mAH * 10x loss * 30 days/month)
Do be careful: 3000 mAh is not a measure of total energy; it is a measure of electric charge (coulombs, if you want to get technical about it). To convert to energy, multiply by the nominal voltage of the battery you are talking about: 3.7 V for a typical Li-Ion. By that measure, the battery's energy capacity is about 11 Wh. Charging every day for a month at 10% outlet-to-battery efficiency yields 3.3 kWh.
Finally, your claim about the power bill going up is absolutely absurd because devices are basically zero fraction of anyone's electricity bill
I'll grant you that's still small compared to a typical household's total usage. (Your 900 kWh figure is the average for a U.S. household. But that's not the median, nor is it typical for Japan or the EU, which are substantially lower.) It still strikes me as a lot for the "convenience" of not having to plus in a USB cable. It's the equivalent of leaving a microwave running for about 3 hours.
I haven't looked at it recently, but my previous experience with inductive charging mats is that they had substantially higher quiescent draw than just an AC/DC converter. It'd be on the order of 5-10 W draw from the outlet, 24/7. At a typical residential electric rate of $.15/kWh, that'll cost you about $6-13/yr. A decent USB charger brick might be on the order of 0.5 W. Yes, you can cut that quiescent draw to zero by unplugging the mat, but that kind of defeats the purpose, no? (At least with the example of your car, I expect the mat is only powered when the car is on.)
Actually, the quiescent draw ends up being about the same monthly energy consumption as the actual energy for charging the battery. So perhaps I should have clarified: your water bill would go up, not just because most of the spray goes down the drain, but because the showerhead leaks all the rest of the time.
There are surprisingly few phones that are certified for > 5w Qi charging
Having worked with wireless charging technology, I am not surprised. Despite a certain subset of consumers and manufacturers being in love with it, it's actually a pretty shitty way of delivering power. The limitations are mostly thermal. Sure: you can get do >5W charging, but all the other metal content of the phone is heating up, too, including the battery. Batteries charging while hot will have reduced lifespan or, at worse, a higher chance of catastrophic failure (read: fire).
The analogy I use is trying to fill a water bottle in the shower. It's really slow, much slower than sticking the same bottle under the tap, and you're going to get soaked in the process. You might be able to speed things along by holding the bottle closer to the spray, or using a funnel to capture more water, but you're still getting wet. Oh, and your water bill goes up, because most of it just goes down the drain.
Oh great, just what civilization needed: Uber drones dropping burritos from the sky!
If nothing else, it will give Peter Thiel a new way to lament the state of technological progress: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got parachute pizzas"
I'm cheap, and inhate big phones....I would likely use it as my main phone
Yeeah, this new thing is an accessory for your existing (presumably large) phone. It shares the mobile number of your primary phone (but, for an extra fee, of course).
If this was available on T-Mobile, and I could SIM swap rather than pay extra for it, I'd almost certainly buy one
As far as I can tell, there is no physical SIM for your to swap. That is, there appears to be no user-accessible SIM tray. Given that it's meant to be a secondary device, then it probably uses an eSIM like the Apple Watch. So, good luck doing a SIM swap.
Slashdot Mirror
There are exceptions: I believe that in most (all?) jurisdictions, the car does not have to stop if the road is divided or has a median. (Not all divided roads are highways.) I can imagine that caveat being a bitch to get an AI system to understand.
For more background on the "chicken tax" and how it relates to the paucity of Japanese-made trucks in the US, see Planet Money podcast episode 632
Here is a corrected link without the garbage: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-introduces-custom-designed-arm-server-processor-promises-45-percent-lower-costs-workloads/
It took some more searching, but here's an InSight EDL video from JPL
Lockheed Martin has produced an animation of the entry descent and landing. Go ahead and watch it, once, then forget about it. It unfortunately is not nearly as informative as, say, the 7 Minutes of Terror video from Curiosity, or the whimsical bounce landing from Spirit and Opportunity.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that "bypass" is a concept that doesn't really apply to a jet engine that has to operate supersonically. And, as time has gone on subsonic, high-bypass ratio engines have seen drastically more efficiency improvements than supersonic jet engines.
The thing that I find coolest about the Electron rocket is that the turbopumps, which feed fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber, are powered by electric motors, rather than burning some of that fuel/oxygen mix in a staged combustion cycle.
On the plus side: you avoid a huge amount of complexity by ditching the preburner (and its part count, weight, fuel-oxidizer separation issues, temperature extremes). You also have very precise and immediate throttle control. On the downside, you have to carry a sizable battery pack, which has much lower energy density.
I don't know if their approach will scale up particularly well, but at this scale it certainly seems like a win. And, if nothing else, it is encouraging to see companies trying new approaches.
The USPS has been taking a picture of every piece of mail that passes through it for a decades. In some ways this should not be surprising - most mail sorting is automated, using machine vision to read the address labels (either hand-written, or barcode). In fact, the USPS was a strong investor in optical character recognition decades ago, because they recognized they could get much greater throughput this way. Previously, each letter would go past a human worker that would read the address and type in the ZIP code with a specialized keyboard.
More recently, the USPS has started retaining these images for a period of time. This has, for instance, been helpful in law enforcement - see the recent case of Cesar Sayoc. But I don't know how long the images are kept for, or what other legitimate uses there may be for it.
Groundskeeper Willie says "I warned ya!"
True: capacity != generation. Is that a reason to not take note of the milestone?
Altruistically? No, there will never be public will for the billions (trillions?) of dollars per year necessary for that. On the other hand, if there is a price on carbon emissions (either a direct tax, or some indirect mechanism that puts a clear price on it), then there could eventually be profit-making companies that perform that role. As an example: Waste Management does't haul away your trash out of the goodness of their heart - they're gettin' paid to do it.
Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention. True: past performance is no indication of future results; but the trend has been clear for quite a few years now.
Carbon, like any number of other alloying elements, can be added to the mix after the iron has been purified. In conventional steels, carbon accounts for 2%wt or less, so it's not like much needs to be added. (In alloy steels, the %carbon is much lower.) That is much, much less than the carbon used to reduce the iron oxides in the original ore. For instance, 2(Fe2O3) + 3(C) --> 4(Fe) + 3(CO2). In that case, it's 1.5 C for every 2 Fe on an atomic basis, or a mass ratio of 18:112, or about 1:6.
The process sounds a lot like how aluminum gets refined. Aluminum doesn't exist in nature as a pure metal - the ores (primarily bauxite) are mostly aluminum oxides. To break apart (reduce) the oxides, huge electric currents are used: a battery in reverse. (This is why a lot of aluminum refining happens in places with lots of cheap electricity - Canada, Iceland, etc.)
In traditional iron smelting, the oxides are reduced by the addition of carbon in a blast furnace, producing CO and CO2 as a waste product. Replacing the chemical, carbon-based process with an electrical process would indeed be beneficial.
American components, Russian components; all made in Taiwan!
It is worth pointing out that aluminum is eminently recyclable, too. In fact, it takes only 5% as much energy to recycle existing aluminum than to refine new aluminum from ore. Because of this, most of the aluminum produced in the history of humanity is still in use. One could think of that energy as a one-time cost, unlike cryptocurrencies, where there is no end in sight.
Most of the energy cost of refining aluminum comes from the fact that aluminum, unlike gold, is bound up in various oxides. To break the oxides and purify aluminum metal requires massive amounts of electricity - it's a lot like a battery in reverse. Until we had access to large amounts of electricity, the alternative means of purifying aluminum were so costly and time consuming that aluminum was treated like a precious metal. Napoleon III had aluminum tableware to flaunt his wealth and power (which is just laughable today, especially when you consider how soft pure aluminum is). The tip of the Washington Monument in D.C. is aluminum. At the time (1884), it was the largest chunk of aluminum in existence.
But remember, you must think in Russian.
Headline: "Reporter, Posing as Sketchy PR, Asked 28 Media Outlets If They'd Take Money To Publish Content Without Disclosing it Was Advertising. More Than Half Said Yes"
Summary: "Next we compiled a list of blockchain media sites. This was by no means exhaustive, but to have a sense of the scale of the problem, we needed numbers. All in all, we reached out to 28 sites"
I know it's trendy to accuse any news organization, publisher, studio, website, crazy-uncle's blog, or AM radio shack broadcaster as shady, untrustworthy, or otherwise peddling falsehoods.
On the other hand, there's a BIG difference between "media outlets" and "blockchain media sites," (whatever the hell those are). The headline implies that some number of the big and names that one encounters on a day-to-day basis (the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, CBS/NBC/ABC, WSJ, etc.) may be publishing paid content as their own. The reality of this news item is...far more underwhelming.
Honestly, Slashdot Editor, this is sloppy work even by the usual low standards.
I could write a long screed about Trump's short attention span (probably he got bored with the article because it didn't have enough pictures). But instead, I will point out that he wrote his comeback on Twitter. Trump doesn't have a desktop computer - he does his tweeting from a phone. Soooooo, he shot off this tweet from his Government Phone? I'm guessing that his government phone has been modified so that it can't have twitter (or most anything else) installed on it.
And me without mod points. Bravo!
I love the powerglove...it's so bad. [link]
Do be careful: 3000 mAh is not a measure of total energy; it is a measure of electric charge (coulombs, if you want to get technical about it). To convert to energy, multiply by the nominal voltage of the battery you are talking about: 3.7 V for a typical Li-Ion. By that measure, the battery's energy capacity is about 11 Wh. Charging every day for a month at 10% outlet-to-battery efficiency yields 3.3 kWh.
I'll grant you that's still small compared to a typical household's total usage. (Your 900 kWh figure is the average for a U.S. household. But that's not the median, nor is it typical for Japan or the EU, which are substantially lower.) It still strikes me as a lot for the "convenience" of not having to plus in a USB cable. It's the equivalent of leaving a microwave running for about 3 hours.
I haven't looked at it recently, but my previous experience with inductive charging mats is that they had substantially higher quiescent draw than just an AC/DC converter. It'd be on the order of 5-10 W draw from the outlet, 24/7. At a typical residential electric rate of $.15/kWh, that'll cost you about $6-13/yr. A decent USB charger brick might be on the order of 0.5 W. Yes, you can cut that quiescent draw to zero by unplugging the mat, but that kind of defeats the purpose, no? (At least with the example of your car, I expect the mat is only powered when the car is on.)
Actually, the quiescent draw ends up being about the same monthly energy consumption as the actual energy for charging the battery. So perhaps I should have clarified: your water bill would go up, not just because most of the spray goes down the drain, but because the showerhead leaks all the rest of the time.
Having worked with wireless charging technology, I am not surprised. Despite a certain subset of consumers and manufacturers being in love with it, it's actually a pretty shitty way of delivering power. The limitations are mostly thermal. Sure: you can get do >5W charging, but all the other metal content of the phone is heating up, too, including the battery. Batteries charging while hot will have reduced lifespan or, at worse, a higher chance of catastrophic failure (read: fire).
The analogy I use is trying to fill a water bottle in the shower. It's really slow, much slower than sticking the same bottle under the tap, and you're going to get soaked in the process. You might be able to speed things along by holding the bottle closer to the spray, or using a funnel to capture more water, but you're still getting wet. Oh, and your water bill goes up, because most of it just goes down the drain.
Oh great, just what civilization needed: Uber drones dropping burritos from the sky!
If nothing else, it will give Peter Thiel a new way to lament the state of technological progress: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got parachute pizzas"
Yeeah, this new thing is an accessory for your existing (presumably large) phone. It shares the mobile number of your primary phone (but, for an extra fee, of course).
As far as I can tell, there is no physical SIM for your to swap. That is, there appears to be no user-accessible SIM tray. Given that it's meant to be a secondary device, then it probably uses an eSIM like the Apple Watch. So, good luck doing a SIM swap.