An ancillary benefit is that the compost can be used to support and improve agriculture. It may seem like a big black pile of organic matter, but that's gold to anyone that wants plants to thrive. It makes about as much sense to bury it in landfills as it does to bury nearly-pure aluminum and steel cans.
If I take responsibility for my own trash, does that mean that I don't have to pay for pickup? I'm asking because as far as I know, trash pickup is paid by taxes. There is no way to opt-out of taxes.
It varies by municipality: many cities do it as a taxpayer-provided service, for others each homeowner contracts with some private firm, many smaller communities do haul-your-own to a transfer station open during some hours of the week.
And I would argue that, no, if your city has taxpayer-funded trash pickup and you decide to DIY, you can't opt out of paying for it, no more so than you can line-item this or that taxpayer-funded service. You live in the community, you pay for the community services whether you yourself utilize them or not - it's not an a la carte menu. This is true for schools (even those that don't have school-aged children, or those that home-school), emergency services, sewers, homeless shelters, dogcatcher, whatever. Not having the gutters full of rotting trash is a benefit to everyone (i.e., you might haul your trash yourself, but you benefit from not having your deadbeat neighbors' trash floating by).
Don't like it? Run for office and get it changed. Got a gripe with the social contract that we are all in this society together? Move to another country.
Some services are more specialized, and therefore are paid for fees rather than taxes (e.g., automobile registration fees that support road maintenance). Some are a combination: municipal water services often are funded by a mix of taxes and fees. The taxes go largely to the fixed costs of having a water plant and distribution system, while the fees (utility bills) track with usage.
So a newer platform beats out and older one: this is not news. It is likely that whenever the iPad 3 comes out, with whatever processor (some sort of quad core A6? faster-clocked A5? off-die coprocessors?) it will have a slight edge over this Tegra 3 platform. Competing technology companies leapfrog each other (or themselves) for bragging rights (and when comparing two different tablets with two different OSes, running different native apps, that's really all this is). Such has been the march of computing since, well, ever.
Which indicates there is a simple and obvious solution for extinguishing a fire in a spacecraft: just vent it out to space. The astronauts can just hold their breath, right?
Earthquakes propagate in waves much like waves in the ocean. While there may be no net movement between different points of this building after the quake has passed, during the quake there will be relative movement, and that would cause real problems.
Ah - as it turns out, Mexico City is built on an old lakebed. It isn't bedrock at all, but rather poorly drained soil. From one of the articles:
Some facets of the Earthscraper design are so conceptual as to need inventing. One of these would involve finding a way to build so deeply into the water-soaked soil that supports—or fails to support—contemporary Mexico City.
When the Aztecs first built Tenochtitlan in 1325, this area—a valley ringed by mountains and volcanoes that reach heights of over 16,000 feet—was mostly covered by Lake Texcoco, with no natural drainage.
The Aztecs expanded Tenochtitlan’s area by filling the lake immediately around it, and created dam and channel systems to control the lake’s height.
After conquering Tenochtitlan in 1521, Spain established Mexico City atop its ruins. Efforts to drain the lake commenced in the 17th century; today nearly the entire valley is paved over. Pumping out the groundwater has caused parts of Mexico City to sink as much as 30 feet into the soft clay lakebed. The city also struggles with pumping wastewater and runoff out of the valley, as well as flooding.
So, in case of an earthquake, the surrounding soil would indeed liquifact, and the inhabitants would be totally screwed.
Mexico City has been hit by some pretty nasty earthquakesover the years. I don't know if this design would be at all better or worse, but none of the linked-to articles make any mention of it. On the plus side, you don't need to worry about swaying or liquifaction - the structure is supported on all sides by bedrock. On the down side, the structure is supported on all sides by bedrock... bedrock that is likely shifting inexorably around.
A difficulty with pneumatic actuators like this is that, even at the 50-60 psi they are using, they aren't terribly stiff (i.e., force vs displacement, like Hooke's Law) in the same way that motors and geartrains are in conventional prosthetics. A little compliance is good when we're talking about prosthetics, but I think users would find this unacceptably spongey. The problem is that you have a compressible fluid in a compliant envelope. They can provide force, certainly, but to hold position in the face of a dynamic load requires pretty sophistocated controls. Hydraulics, by using incompressible fluids, do better, but can be messy (messier than, say, electrical connectors for assembly, maintenance, and repair). Air compressors and solenoid valves can be loud, and aren't particularly battery-efficient compared to motors (electrical energy in versus mechanical work out).
These aren't insurmountable obstacles, though. These guys are still learning, developing, and prototyping. I wouldn't write it off just yet, but they've got some huge hurdles if they want a workable prosthesis.
It's entirely probable that the terms of the contract contain an escape clause if the platform is discontinued
When the world's largest computer manufacturer pays Intel to make a particular product, it cannot in any sense be considered discontinued. So what if Intel decided that Itanium was a dead end - they'll continue to develop and make them for years because they have a major customer for them.
And it wouldn't have gotten us 1/10th the science or technical R&D. And it wouldn't have gotten even 1/1000th the way to Mars. And after two weeks of flying in LEO, it would be right back where it started.
The AC beat me to it. I was going to post that this stuff should float in a normal Earth atmosphere. If true, this would be an amazing breakthrough, but my skeptic's glasses are on right now.
Well, no: the material itself if still made of metal, and the metal has a density greater than atmosphere, and the atmosphere pervades through it (it's an open cell lattice). In order for it to float in air, you would need to enclose it (i.e., put a skin around it) and remove the air from the interior volume. The material needs to displace the air. The same could be said for boats: they float on water only when the hull has the water removed. Once the water gets inside the hull, you face the fact that the boat is made of metal and will sink. The buoyancy in air or water is based on displacing the fluid by something of lesser density. For a floating boat, replacing water with air. For a chunk of this foam, replacing air with helium, vacuum, etc.
First off - If someone's only interest is programming, why the hell would they care about social skills? Why "should" they try to improve them?
Because despite the stereotype of the uberprogrammer sitting in a dark room twenty hours a day downing mountain dew and cheese puffs, everyone has to actually live in the world. That means, yes, interacting with other people in social ways. Want to get a good job, be valued in the workplace, have a friend of two? Then you need some modicum of sociability. As an employer, I could be accepting of quirks in order to get good technical skills, but if the guy can't communicate (or worse, is an antisocial asshole) then I won't hire him or her over someone more likeable who has less skill.
There have always been people willing to die spectacularly for their cause, and to take as many down with them as possible. (I won't call them martyrs, because the definition of martyrdom does not include wantonly slaying the innocent.) To say that the creation of Israel led to invention of the suicide bomber is disingenuous and ignores, well, all of humanity's bloody history.
From a practical standpoint, the reason you don't hear many stories of suicide bombers, say, 200 years ago, was due in no small part to the fact that the technology for an effective suicide vest (compact high explosives, small triggers, understanding of shrapnel for maximum carnage) didn't exist until the turn of the century. One could perhaps have fashioned a suicide vest from sticks of dynamite in the late 1800s, but it would have been bulky and obtrusive, and not nearly as effective as the flack jackets of C4 and ball bearings that people worry about today.
I like the idea but it makes you dependent on them plus you need to live/work at driving distance of one of their station
A similar argument could be made against internal-combustion automobiles: you are dependent on oil companies and you need to live/work at driving distance to a filling station. I know these are facile comparisons, but I hardly think that these limitations make Better Place an impossible or useless proposition. There are lots of people that live/work in an urban area that could have a sprinkling of such stations. You can recharge the battery at home or work like a typical EV. Being able to swap it out is a way to reduce capital cost/risk in owning a battery outright, and allows you to get a full charge in a few minutes when you need.
Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.
On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.
Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.
Dude, even if you are too tone deaf to notice the difference, I totally sample my music at 740 kHz - it's the only way to go in order to get clean sound. 16b / 44.1 kHz is for the poor soiled masses, and 24b / 96 kHz is for studio jerk-offs.
Is it really all that different to the implicit arrangement we have now: credit card companies and banks mining our purchasing habits to sell to advertisers? Or what facebook, advertisers, and every online presence with a "Like" button does? If anyone is worried about vendor lock in, they should have already abandoned Facebook and the like. Uprooting and changing banks is not nearly as difficult as, say, migrating email addresses, let alone going to a different social network (even if such a thing were possible).
Oh, and while they have it all, I must trust Apple now that they are not gonna mine this data and send it backdoor to advertisers and other interests
Dude, if you're that bugged by it, then by all means don't use it. Right now you have to go out of your way (i.e., buy a new phone) to get it. Even then, it can easily be disabled in the settings.
It is widelyrumored that siri's speech-to-text is performed by Nuance's Dragon Dictation, which has been available (for free) on iOS for a few years now. That, plus Dragon's presence on the market for over a decade, would have provided a substantial database of colloquial english (and other languages) to get started. Plus, Siri was available as its own standalone app for a while on iOS before Apple bought the company. The technology behind Siri has been in development for quite a few years and had,DARPA backing. Siri didn't just spring out of nothing in Cupertino. I think they've got enough of a database of colloquial english to get going with.
No, I think limiting it to the iPhone 4S is mostly to drive sales to the new device. Limiting the rollout to avoid crushing their servers, as you suggest, is another very plausible reason. I don't buy the argument that Siri requires the extra processing power of the 4S.
The applications that I use day in and day out for my work (electronic and mechanical CAD) are only available on Windows. What is more, the back-end server stuff for configuration management (e.g., parts databases) are Windows-based. Some of the other technical software I use (e.g., Matlab, ANSYS) is cross-platform, or there are alternatives on other platforms (e.g., Octave). But since I already have a Windows machine for CAD, it makes sense to use the Windows variants of the other programs. IT at my office would have some issues keeping a Mac or Linux box properly configured, firewalled, protected, etc.
That hasn't, of course, kept me from having a mac for my home computer for the last decade.
Science requires lots of hard work to make major discoveries.
Not only that, but many of the major discoveries of the past few decades require sophistocated equipment - some of which simply doesn't exist when a particular project gets started. I'm thinking here of spacecraft, large experiments like particle accelerators, envelope-pushing lasers, sensitive assay equipment useful for DNA sequencing or trace element detection, and tremendous computing power. It takes a long time to design, build, and test this equipment - all of which happens before you even begin to gather data or analyze results. What is more, this equipment and accompanying experiments require a lot of inter-disciplinary expertise, which either must be learned by the PI (even more time in their education) or assembled ina large team (even more time in getting a project started) - usually both.
By contrast: Einstein's major discoveries in 1905 were produced in large part from thought experiments, straightforward algebra and statistics, and a small amount of experimental evidence that already existed and came from relatively simple apparatus
Slashdot Mirror
An ancillary benefit is that the compost can be used to support and improve agriculture. It may seem like a big black pile of organic matter, but that's gold to anyone that wants plants to thrive. It makes about as much sense to bury it in landfills as it does to bury nearly-pure aluminum and steel cans.
It varies by municipality: many cities do it as a taxpayer-provided service, for others each homeowner contracts with some private firm, many smaller communities do haul-your-own to a transfer station open during some hours of the week.
And I would argue that, no, if your city has taxpayer-funded trash pickup and you decide to DIY, you can't opt out of paying for it, no more so than you can line-item this or that taxpayer-funded service. You live in the community, you pay for the community services whether you yourself utilize them or not - it's not an a la carte menu. This is true for schools (even those that don't have school-aged children, or those that home-school), emergency services, sewers, homeless shelters, dogcatcher, whatever. Not having the gutters full of rotting trash is a benefit to everyone (i.e., you might haul your trash yourself, but you benefit from not having your deadbeat neighbors' trash floating by).
Don't like it? Run for office and get it changed. Got a gripe with the social contract that we are all in this society together? Move to another country. Some services are more specialized, and therefore are paid for fees rather than taxes (e.g., automobile registration fees that support road maintenance). Some are a combination: municipal water services often are funded by a mix of taxes and fees. The taxes go largely to the fixed costs of having a water plant and distribution system, while the fees (utility bills) track with usage.
While I appreciate your thorough analysis of my proposed solution, please keep in mind: I was joking!
So a newer platform beats out and older one: this is not news. It is likely that whenever the iPad 3 comes out, with whatever processor (some sort of quad core A6? faster-clocked A5? off-die coprocessors?) it will have a slight edge over this Tegra 3 platform. Competing technology companies leapfrog each other (or themselves) for bragging rights (and when comparing two different tablets with two different OSes, running different native apps, that's really all this is). Such has been the march of computing since, well, ever.
Which indicates there is a simple and obvious solution for extinguishing a fire in a spacecraft: just vent it out to space. The astronauts can just hold their breath, right?
Earthquakes propagate in waves much like waves in the ocean. While there may be no net movement between different points of this building after the quake has passed, during the quake there will be relative movement, and that would cause real problems.
So, in case of an earthquake, the surrounding soil would indeed liquifact, and the inhabitants would be totally screwed.
Mexico City has been hit by some pretty nasty earthquakes over the years. I don't know if this design would be at all better or worse, but none of the linked-to articles make any mention of it. On the plus side, you don't need to worry about swaying or liquifaction - the structure is supported on all sides by bedrock. On the down side, the structure is supported on all sides by bedrock ... bedrock that is likely shifting inexorably around.
A difficulty with pneumatic actuators like this is that, even at the 50-60 psi they are using, they aren't terribly stiff (i.e., force vs displacement, like Hooke's Law) in the same way that motors and geartrains are in conventional prosthetics. A little compliance is good when we're talking about prosthetics, but I think users would find this unacceptably spongey. The problem is that you have a compressible fluid in a compliant envelope. They can provide force, certainly, but to hold position in the face of a dynamic load requires pretty sophistocated controls. Hydraulics, by using incompressible fluids, do better, but can be messy (messier than, say, electrical connectors for assembly, maintenance, and repair). Air compressors and solenoid valves can be loud, and aren't particularly battery-efficient compared to motors (electrical energy in versus mechanical work out).
These aren't insurmountable obstacles, though. These guys are still learning, developing, and prototyping. I wouldn't write it off just yet, but they've got some huge hurdles if they want a workable prosthesis.
When the world's largest computer manufacturer pays Intel to make a particular product, it cannot in any sense be considered discontinued. So what if Intel decided that Itanium was a dead end - they'll continue to develop and make them for years because they have a major customer for them.
And it wouldn't have gotten us 1/10th the science or technical R&D. And it wouldn't have gotten even 1/1000th the way to Mars. And after two weeks of flying in LEO, it would be right back where it started.
Well, no: the material itself if still made of metal, and the metal has a density greater than atmosphere, and the atmosphere pervades through it (it's an open cell lattice). In order for it to float in air, you would need to enclose it (i.e., put a skin around it) and remove the air from the interior volume. The material needs to displace the air. The same could be said for boats: they float on water only when the hull has the water removed. Once the water gets inside the hull, you face the fact that the boat is made of metal and will sink. The buoyancy in air or water is based on displacing the fluid by something of lesser density. For a floating boat, replacing water with air. For a chunk of this foam, replacing air with helium, vacuum, etc.
At first I thought they were seeking to allow people to throw lightning bolts. Dark side of the force, anyone?
Because despite the stereotype of the uberprogrammer sitting in a dark room twenty hours a day downing mountain dew and cheese puffs, everyone has to actually live in the world. That means, yes, interacting with other people in social ways. Want to get a good job, be valued in the workplace, have a friend of two? Then you need some modicum of sociability. As an employer, I could be accepting of quirks in order to get good technical skills, but if the guy can't communicate (or worse, is an antisocial asshole) then I won't hire him or her over someone more likeable who has less skill.
There have always been people willing to die spectacularly for their cause, and to take as many down with them as possible. (I won't call them martyrs, because the definition of martyrdom does not include wantonly slaying the innocent.) To say that the creation of Israel led to invention of the suicide bomber is disingenuous and ignores, well, all of humanity's bloody history.
From a practical standpoint, the reason you don't hear many stories of suicide bombers, say, 200 years ago, was due in no small part to the fact that the technology for an effective suicide vest (compact high explosives, small triggers, understanding of shrapnel for maximum carnage) didn't exist until the turn of the century. One could perhaps have fashioned a suicide vest from sticks of dynamite in the late 1800s, but it would have been bulky and obtrusive, and not nearly as effective as the flack jackets of C4 and ball bearings that people worry about today.
A similar argument could be made against internal-combustion automobiles: you are dependent on oil companies and you need to live/work at driving distance to a filling station. I know these are facile comparisons, but I hardly think that these limitations make Better Place an impossible or useless proposition. There are lots of people that live/work in an urban area that could have a sprinkling of such stations. You can recharge the battery at home or work like a typical EV. Being able to swap it out is a way to reduce capital cost/risk in owning a battery outright, and allows you to get a full charge in a few minutes when you need.
Rather than make an assumption and start a flame war, I'll just ask: what part of an electric car do you find inefficient?
Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.
On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.
Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.
Dude, even if you are too tone deaf to notice the difference, I totally sample my music at 740 kHz - it's the only way to go in order to get clean sound. 16b / 44.1 kHz is for the poor soiled masses, and 24b / 96 kHz is for studio jerk-offs.
Is it really all that different to the implicit arrangement we have now: credit card companies and banks mining our purchasing habits to sell to advertisers? Or what facebook, advertisers, and every online presence with a "Like" button does? If anyone is worried about vendor lock in, they should have already abandoned Facebook and the like. Uprooting and changing banks is not nearly as difficult as, say, migrating email addresses, let alone going to a different social network (even if such a thing were possible).
Dude, if you're that bugged by it, then by all means don't use it. Right now you have to go out of your way (i.e., buy a new phone) to get it. Even then, it can easily be disabled in the settings.
It is widely rumored that siri's speech-to-text is performed by Nuance's Dragon Dictation, which has been available (for free) on iOS for a few years now. That, plus Dragon's presence on the market for over a decade, would have provided a substantial database of colloquial english (and other languages) to get started. Plus, Siri was available as its own standalone app for a while on iOS before Apple bought the company. The technology behind Siri has been in development for quite a few years and had ,DARPA backing. Siri didn't just spring out of nothing in Cupertino. I think they've got enough of a database of colloquial english to get going with.
No, I think limiting it to the iPhone 4S is mostly to drive sales to the new device. Limiting the rollout to avoid crushing their servers, as you suggest, is another very plausible reason. I don't buy the argument that Siri requires the extra processing power of the 4S.
Please, let's not bring Amazon into this.
The applications that I use day in and day out for my work (electronic and mechanical CAD) are only available on Windows. What is more, the back-end server stuff for configuration management (e.g., parts databases) are Windows-based. Some of the other technical software I use (e.g., Matlab, ANSYS) is cross-platform, or there are alternatives on other platforms (e.g., Octave). But since I already have a Windows machine for CAD, it makes sense to use the Windows variants of the other programs. IT at my office would have some issues keeping a Mac or Linux box properly configured, firewalled, protected, etc.
That hasn't, of course, kept me from having a mac for my home computer for the last decade.
Not only that, but many of the major discoveries of the past few decades require sophistocated equipment - some of which simply doesn't exist when a particular project gets started. I'm thinking here of spacecraft, large experiments like particle accelerators, envelope-pushing lasers, sensitive assay equipment useful for DNA sequencing or trace element detection, and tremendous computing power. It takes a long time to design, build, and test this equipment - all of which happens before you even begin to gather data or analyze results. What is more, this equipment and accompanying experiments require a lot of inter-disciplinary expertise, which either must be learned by the PI (even more time in their education) or assembled ina large team (even more time in getting a project started) - usually both.
By contrast: Einstein's major discoveries in 1905 were produced in large part from thought experiments, straightforward algebra and statistics, and a small amount of experimental evidence that already existed and came from relatively simple apparatus