assuming you have 240V, which is not the standard voltage in the US, I know
Pretty much every house in the US gets a 240 V from the local utility. It is two 120-V phases, plus ground return. In most breaker panels, the breakers are arranged in two columns, and each is powered by a different phase, or leg. Most houses have at least one circuit, and usually several, where the 240 V is ganged together, either for an electric stove or for an electric clothes dryer.
So, no, you can't just plug a Tesla into a typical wall outlet in the U.S. and get 240 V. Why would you expect to? Planning on plugging your car into the living room outlet? Then again, it is trivial (not to be confused with "cheap") to get a 240-V run to an outlet in, say, your garage or next to the driveway for charging a vehicle. Although frowned upon because of the enormous potential risk, it is a task that a reasonably experienced DIY-er could do.
As for current: older homes typically have a 60 A feed from the utility. Newer construction and many renovated houses have a 100 A feed. So pumping tens of amps into the car at 240 V, particularly at night, isn't so farfetched.
And if you happen to be a person with $100,000 to blow on a car, you probably can afford to have a proper installation for recharging it.
My first reaction is "good riddance." The human race is much better off without him; too bad it couldn't have happened 30 years ago, etc.. It really is a whole lot cleaner for him to be dead than to have him captured and alive, expounding his delusional nonsense to anyone within earshot, and all the messiness of putting him on trial.
On the other hand, his sudden death does mean that the Libyans, and the rest of the world, lose the opportunity to air out the closet (so to speak) and try him for his many crimes. The result would almost certainly have been the same (death), but the process would have been important for Libya: to delegitimize his legacy, to legitimize the rule of law under a new government, to exorcise old demons and grievances so as to move on, and to ferret out his many collaborators. I wouldn't say it was a complete success in Saddam's trial in Iraq. It may not come to pass for Mubarak in Egypt. The international criminal court has mad mixed success with the perpetrators in the former Yugoslavia. Still, I believe these things do matter, and there is merit in attempting it.
BTC is a pretty cruddy monetary system... Its also the best one out there at this time.
A currency system with so much volatility - where the buying power of the currency varies by several hundred percent over a short time - hardly qualifies as "the best one out there at this time."
Would it be such a bad thing to request a little payment for such a useful and important system? GPS has generated tremendous wealth for the whole world, but you can't launch a satellite with a pile of thank-you cards. Perhaps a $1 surcharge on each GPS receiver chip? It would go a long way towards ensuring the constellation is maintained.
Part of how their system works is to have a fairly extensive database of what the local roads look like. Not just GPS and a roadmap, mind you, but actual 3D laser scans of a particular area taken from the ground. The first database was generated with humans behind the wheel of these cars; the autonomous vehicles used that information later for their own driving. That may seem like a big investment - building a detailed 3D map of an area just for a handful of vehicles. But like the web-crawler database that underpins Google's search engine, the same dataset, well distributed, can be used by near infinite clients. And once you have some number of these vehicles out there, they are continuously updating and adding to that database. Think of it like google street view, but where the streets are visible from any car-accessible vantage, and you can get synthesized live views from nearly any vantage. The images of buildings are no longer just images, but rather complete 3D models.
Google's stated motives are vaguely altruistic: reduce traffic and fuel consumption, make the roadways safer and more efficient. That's great and all, but hardly generates direct revenue for Google. But I think that having a very detailed, 3D, realtime map of most of the roads of the US would be a very valuable asset. How you monetize it is, right now anyway, somewhat speculative. On the other hand, I think Google, with tens of billions of dollar cash-on-hand, can sink a lot into this just on speculation without risk or immediate justification. There was a time not too long ago that companies would do that kind of thing: spend money on speculative research without immediate plans for payout. AT&T Bell Labs panned out as a pretty good benefit for the world.
There are, of course, a whole lot of 1984-esque aspects to this project that need to be addressed, too, so I wouldn't say this project is all upside.
Pranav Mistry at MIT Media Lab demonstrated something similar at a TED talk in 2009. His was slung about the neck. He and his advisor, Pattie Maes, called it Sixth Sense.
Look at smartphones, Windows Mobile phones were around way before the iPhone, but they were never popular in the mainstream because they didn't have the "cool factor"
They were never popular in the mainstream because they were clunky, non-intuitive, power-hogs, with a UI completely unsuited to a tiny screen, prone to freezing or crashing, and thus practically useless; not merely because they lacked the cool factor (which they did).
A lot of the trees were not simply burned: they were used as lumber. Remember that by this point there was practically no virgin forest left in all of Europe, so finding a 20-50 m tall tree to use as the mainmast of a ship was difficult. And once you'd found the main mast, you still needed tremendous amounts of lumber for the rest of the ship. Mahogany and other tropical woods were highly valued for furniture; temperate hardwoods like oak and maple had uses for barrels, crates, and floors. (It is telling that, despite huge amounts of such woods in New England, the typical home was constructed and clad with conifers - spruce, pine, and cedar - because the hardwoods were in such demand and thus expensive.)
The general effect of this activity is to consume the forests, but not in a way that released a whole lot of carbon. Some of that carbon was eventually released (fires on ships was quite common) but plenty of it was sequestered at the bottom of the ocean (sinkings were also quite common).
The problem with the horizon was one of defective government not technology. No X prize is going to improve that
I'd say that, in the process of damning the government, you have glossed over a couple of points:
* BP and Halliburton, between their greed, speed, hubris, laziness, and incompetence, drilled a dangerous and defective well
* The US oil industry's ability to properly assess risk and prepare for and react to disaster is practically zero. [and yet were the US to, say, mandate a ready fleet of cleanup vessels, as the EU does, the same ones carping about the government response would also carp on about overbearing government regulation]
* Despite the world being thrown at it from both government and industry, the Macondo well spewed for months
* Even if the EU cleanup teams were allowed to assist, there was still 5 million barrels of crude released, which dispersed over tens of thousands of square kilometers.
So, yes, overly tight regulations may have made perfect the enemy of good, but those were not the proximate cause of the disaster.
Not just politicians that need science education, it's the citizens who seem to thrive on junk science and present it as fact. Citizens across the globe are dangerously uneducated, which makes them dangerous when electing politicians.
I wouldn't argue that a dedicated array is better for the application. The grid is going to need huge amounts of storage capacity; batteries are an efficient way to do that at any scale; and there will be large numbers of otherwise idle batteries in the vehicle fleet in the coming decades. If you've got a parking lot of EVs or plug-in hybrids, why not make use of the hundreds of kWh of available storage, in addition to your installed battery arrays? I am sure there are scenarios where a mix will make the financial sense.
I suspect that, to get around the scenario you describe about grid storage leading to a car with a dead battery, the use case would be to allocate a certain amount of the car's storage capacity in exchange for a certain amount of money (e.g., an agreement for X kWh of capacity for Y hours in exchange for Z dollars, payable monthly). Most users would allocate only a portion of their car's capacity; not the entire amount. Want to opt out on Thursday because you want a full pack? Click this check box on your account page. Feel OK contributing to the grid during the day, but want a guaranteed 85% full battery by 5 p.m.? Fill in your weekly schedule here.
It is not entirely the case that cars would only give, give, give. The best near-term use for grid storage isn't storage exactly (getting the sun to shine at night, so to speak), but rather peak shaving, load matching, frequency stabilization, surge buffering, etc. Those are uses for which the battery, on average, gets as much as it gives.
IKEA furniture uses almost no chipboard. This is one of the reasons why I have some of it: the parts that look like real wood are, well, real wood. It is birch and fir for the most part - not maple, walnut, and mahogany - but real wood nonetheless. Aside from metal components, the only non-wood portions are some panels of thin MDF, for instance forming the back wall of a dresser. People might give IKEA shit for producing what seems to be cheap crap, but it is of much higher quality in materials, durability, and design than the majority of "some assembly required" furniture pushed by big box stores.
It sometimes still amazes me when I meet liberals who don't understand that many people who "make $1M" actually don't keep most of it even before taxes because they run sole proprietorships or partnerships
If they don't keep it (i.e., plow it back into their business - and more power to them!), then they shouldn't be taking it out as income, but should instead structure their business accounting differently.
The main reason that Warren Buffer, hedge fund managers, and many of the rest of the ultra-wealthy pay so little in income taxes is that most of their "income" is in the form of long-term capital gains: the appreciation of and sale of investments. On that money, they don't pay the maximum income tax rate of 35%, but rather the maximum long-term capital gains tax rate of 15%. (The situation is different for short-term cap gains, which are generally taxed at the ordinary income tax rate.) This is also the case for many CEOs who have compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars: much of that value is in the form of stock and stock options, not outright salary.
In that light, creating a new, higher income tax bracket is unlikely to have quite the intended impact that many would like to see: having the ultra-wealthy pay at least as great a percentage of their annual income as taxes as their secretaries, minions, and housekeepers. Much as I prefer a simplified tax code, it seems to me that we may want to instead add this provision: If more than 50% of your adjusted gross income comes from long-term capital gains, then count it as ordinary income, because that's what it is to them.
Yes, some will find ways around that (and goodness knows the ultra-wealthy have tax planners aplenty), but it seems more equitable than what we have currently. Please don't trouble us with the strawman argument of "If the ultra-wealthy have their investments taxed so heavily, then they won't invest." What else are they going to do with all their extra money? Save it at ~0% interest?
I recall in college being given a problem set on optics, which considered whether it was possible for the US Government to actually read license plates from space. This question asked us to consider the Hubble Space Telescope and its diffraction limit (setting aside atmospheric disturbance), and compare that to the angular size of the letters on a license plate when viewed from low Earth orbit. Why consider the question using the Hubble, and not some hypothetical spy satellite? Well, the size of the Hubble's mirror was well known, whereas the size and configuration of spy satellites was still classified. "But," said the professor with a wink, "the sizing of Hubble was based in part on what was already known to be possible." The graphic accompanying the article shows a KH-9 that looks a whole lot like a Hubble.
All the points you raise are worth looking into. But at the same time, I am pretty sure that these have all been looked into over the last half century, and continue to be researched today. If there was something there to outweigh the epidemiologic benefits, I'm pretty sure we would have discovered it by now. The benefits of vaccinating a population are clear and dramatic. If there were equally dramatic downsides, they would have been seen by now. Perhaps I am simply being naive, but I accept the opinion of the entire public health and medical community when they say that the overall benefits of widespread childhood vaccination vastly outweigh the risks.
Agreed - without any details, it's all just the same "Gosh, nuclear on the Moon has some adsvantages" speculation that's been bandied around since the 1960s.
The ACS article mentions that the team would be working on a small electric pump for the liquid metal-cooled system. So we know at least that it is not a purely solid state RTG like we've been using for satellites all these years. That implies that there might, might be some innovation taking place here. The power plant could still be using the thermoelectric effect, but use pumps and forced convection to get greater power output. Or it could be some kind of nuclear-heated stirling engine - those have been tried before, but never deployed.
Neither article is specific about fuel, either. Is it using enriched uranium like conventional nuclear power plants? Pu-238 Oxide like conventional RTGs? Some sort of breed-and-burn thorium cycle?
Not to knock on how cool this thing is, but the article and Raytheon's previous press releases have been a little vague on what the power supply for this thing is. The actuators are high pressure hydraulics, meaning there must be a hefty compressor hanging around somewhere. How is it powered? In some of the videos you can see a pretty thick (5-10 cm dia) umbilical coming from the suit. Some of that is surely for telemetry, but I'm guessing a decent amount is power, either electrical or from a compressor. Do they plan on replacing that will a small combustion-engine-powered compressor in the backpack? Or is this going to just be for tethered operation at rollout?
To head off the peanut gallery: appealing to a fictional arc reactor is not an acceptable answer.
Cybernetics is a very particular term whose true meaning is far removed from its popular meaning. The technical meaning of the term describes a system in terms of its sensors, feedback mechanisms, the interaction of autonomous actors, failure modes in complex systems, etc. The popular meaning is simply anything vaguely having to do with robotics and humans, and generally conflated with cyborg. By either meaning of the term, though, I don't think it really applies in this case.
Pistorius' running prostheses are, essentially, arches of carbon fiber with rubber and track spikes at the "feet". They are fancy prostheses, but they are purely mechanical; no moving parts, even. There are no electronics, no control systems, no software. What is more, they are not even permanent attachments to his body (i.e., osseointegrated). He straps them on for training and racing, and the rest of the time wears conventional prostheses or nothing.
It is worth noting that an advanced prosthetic hand has more going for it: motors, feedback mechanisms to the user, muscle sensors providing inputs, control electronics and software. But I'm not sure that most people would look at such a person and say, "Yes, this person is a cybernetic organism," even in the popular meaning of the term. Such people are no more cybernetic (in the popular sense) than the person constantly punching away at their iPhone. There is a degree to which this artificial electromechanical computing device augments the user and allows them to interact with the world in ways they could not otherwise, but I think that we need a more stringent definition - a higher bar - otherwise the word started losing meaning the moment proto-humans picked up a bone and used it as a tool.
One key part about it is that Facebook, and particularly Zuckerberg, is convinced that privacy is an illusory notion at best in today's world. Privacy was all some strange social construct that is now, or soon will be, thoroughly antiquated. It's an impediment to the future; a mental hangup. It's right up there with believing the Earth is flat and the sun revolves around us. The sooner we all realize this the better off we'll be.
Within this philosophy each move that Facebook makes isn't some sort of violation or theft. You can't steal what someone doesn't have. Instead, it is an object lesson to the unenlightened. I, for one, believe this is total bullshit. Then again, I'm also not on Facebook. The movers and shakers in technology have been all about this for a long time: dragging the masses kicking and screaming to that future only he has the genius to see. Usually, they have limited it to technical or economic matters, a'la Bill Gates. Or, like Steve Jobs, they have an overt social vision behind their technological heavy-handedness, but folks generally haven't been too offended by it. Zuckerberg is upping the ante in a dramatic way.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much every house in the US gets a 240 V from the local utility. It is two 120-V phases, plus ground return. In most breaker panels, the breakers are arranged in two columns, and each is powered by a different phase, or leg. Most houses have at least one circuit, and usually several, where the 240 V is ganged together, either for an electric stove or for an electric clothes dryer.
So, no, you can't just plug a Tesla into a typical wall outlet in the U.S. and get 240 V. Why would you expect to? Planning on plugging your car into the living room outlet? Then again, it is trivial (not to be confused with "cheap") to get a 240-V run to an outlet in, say, your garage or next to the driveway for charging a vehicle. Although frowned upon because of the enormous potential risk, it is a task that a reasonably experienced DIY-er could do.
As for current: older homes typically have a 60 A feed from the utility. Newer construction and many renovated houses have a 100 A feed. So pumping tens of amps into the car at 240 V, particularly at night, isn't so farfetched.
And if you happen to be a person with $100,000 to blow on a car, you probably can afford to have a proper installation for recharging it.
My first reaction is "good riddance." The human race is much better off without him; too bad it couldn't have happened 30 years ago, etc.. It really is a whole lot cleaner for him to be dead than to have him captured and alive, expounding his delusional nonsense to anyone within earshot, and all the messiness of putting him on trial.
On the other hand, his sudden death does mean that the Libyans, and the rest of the world, lose the opportunity to air out the closet (so to speak) and try him for his many crimes. The result would almost certainly have been the same (death), but the process would have been important for Libya: to delegitimize his legacy, to legitimize the rule of law under a new government, to exorcise old demons and grievances so as to move on, and to ferret out his many collaborators. I wouldn't say it was a complete success in Saddam's trial in Iraq. It may not come to pass for Mubarak in Egypt. The international criminal court has mad mixed success with the perpetrators in the former Yugoslavia. Still, I believe these things do matter, and there is merit in attempting it.
A currency system with so much volatility - where the buying power of the currency varies by several hundred percent over a short time - hardly qualifies as "the best one out there at this time."
Would it be such a bad thing to request a little payment for such a useful and important system? GPS has generated tremendous wealth for the whole world, but you can't launch a satellite with a pile of thank-you cards. Perhaps a $1 surcharge on each GPS receiver chip? It would go a long way towards ensuring the constellation is maintained.
Part of how their system works is to have a fairly extensive database of what the local roads look like. Not just GPS and a roadmap, mind you, but actual 3D laser scans of a particular area taken from the ground. The first database was generated with humans behind the wheel of these cars; the autonomous vehicles used that information later for their own driving. That may seem like a big investment - building a detailed 3D map of an area just for a handful of vehicles. But like the web-crawler database that underpins Google's search engine, the same dataset, well distributed, can be used by near infinite clients. And once you have some number of these vehicles out there, they are continuously updating and adding to that database. Think of it like google street view, but where the streets are visible from any car-accessible vantage, and you can get synthesized live views from nearly any vantage. The images of buildings are no longer just images, but rather complete 3D models.
Google's stated motives are vaguely altruistic: reduce traffic and fuel consumption, make the roadways safer and more efficient. That's great and all, but hardly generates direct revenue for Google. But I think that having a very detailed, 3D, realtime map of most of the roads of the US would be a very valuable asset. How you monetize it is, right now anyway, somewhat speculative. On the other hand, I think Google, with tens of billions of dollar cash-on-hand, can sink a lot into this just on speculation without risk or immediate justification. There was a time not too long ago that companies would do that kind of thing: spend money on speculative research without immediate plans for payout. AT&T Bell Labs panned out as a pretty good benefit for the world.
There are, of course, a whole lot of 1984-esque aspects to this project that need to be addressed, too, so I wouldn't say this project is all upside.
Pranav Mistry at MIT Media Lab demonstrated something similar at a TED talk in 2009. His was slung about the neck. He and his advisor, Pattie Maes, called it Sixth Sense.
They were never popular in the mainstream because they were clunky, non-intuitive, power-hogs, with a UI completely unsuited to a tiny screen, prone to freezing or crashing, and thus practically useless; not merely because they lacked the cool factor (which they did).
A lot of the trees were not simply burned: they were used as lumber. Remember that by this point there was practically no virgin forest left in all of Europe, so finding a 20-50 m tall tree to use as the mainmast of a ship was difficult. And once you'd found the main mast, you still needed tremendous amounts of lumber for the rest of the ship. Mahogany and other tropical woods were highly valued for furniture; temperate hardwoods like oak and maple had uses for barrels, crates, and floors. (It is telling that, despite huge amounts of such woods in New England, the typical home was constructed and clad with conifers - spruce, pine, and cedar - because the hardwoods were in such demand and thus expensive.)
The general effect of this activity is to consume the forests, but not in a way that released a whole lot of carbon. Some of that carbon was eventually released (fires on ships was quite common) but plenty of it was sequestered at the bottom of the ocean (sinkings were also quite common).
I'd say that, in the process of damning the government, you have glossed over a couple of points:
So, yes, overly tight regulations may have made perfect the enemy of good, but those were not the proximate cause of the disaster.
Unfortunately, the irony was just too good to pass up.
But that is not to say that it couldn't be done, given enough thrust:
Ares martian rocket glider, as presented by Joel Levine.
Not just politicians that need science education, it's the citizens who seem to thrive on junk science and present it as fact. Citizens across the globe are dangerously uneducated, which makes them dangerous when electing politicians.
It's turtles all the way down!
Crap! I meant to say "I wouldn't argue that a dedicated array isn't better for the application"
I wouldn't argue that a dedicated array is better for the application. The grid is going to need huge amounts of storage capacity; batteries are an efficient way to do that at any scale; and there will be large numbers of otherwise idle batteries in the vehicle fleet in the coming decades. If you've got a parking lot of EVs or plug-in hybrids, why not make use of the hundreds of kWh of available storage, in addition to your installed battery arrays? I am sure there are scenarios where a mix will make the financial sense.
I suspect that, to get around the scenario you describe about grid storage leading to a car with a dead battery, the use case would be to allocate a certain amount of the car's storage capacity in exchange for a certain amount of money (e.g., an agreement for X kWh of capacity for Y hours in exchange for Z dollars, payable monthly). Most users would allocate only a portion of their car's capacity; not the entire amount. Want to opt out on Thursday because you want a full pack? Click this check box on your account page. Feel OK contributing to the grid during the day, but want a guaranteed 85% full battery by 5 p.m.? Fill in your weekly schedule here.
It is not entirely the case that cars would only give, give, give. The best near-term use for grid storage isn't storage exactly (getting the sun to shine at night, so to speak), but rather peak shaving, load matching, frequency stabilization, surge buffering, etc. Those are uses for which the battery, on average, gets as much as it gives.
How is a parking lot full of EVs not exactly that?
IKEA furniture uses almost no chipboard. This is one of the reasons why I have some of it: the parts that look like real wood are, well, real wood. It is birch and fir for the most part - not maple, walnut, and mahogany - but real wood nonetheless. Aside from metal components, the only non-wood portions are some panels of thin MDF, for instance forming the back wall of a dresser. People might give IKEA shit for producing what seems to be cheap crap, but it is of much higher quality in materials, durability, and design than the majority of "some assembly required" furniture pushed by big box stores.
If they don't keep it (i.e., plow it back into their business - and more power to them!), then they shouldn't be taking it out as income, but should instead structure their business accounting differently.
The main reason that Warren Buffer, hedge fund managers, and many of the rest of the ultra-wealthy pay so little in income taxes is that most of their "income" is in the form of long-term capital gains: the appreciation of and sale of investments. On that money, they don't pay the maximum income tax rate of 35%, but rather the maximum long-term capital gains tax rate of 15%. (The situation is different for short-term cap gains, which are generally taxed at the ordinary income tax rate.) This is also the case for many CEOs who have compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars: much of that value is in the form of stock and stock options, not outright salary.
In that light, creating a new, higher income tax bracket is unlikely to have quite the intended impact that many would like to see: having the ultra-wealthy pay at least as great a percentage of their annual income as taxes as their secretaries, minions, and housekeepers. Much as I prefer a simplified tax code, it seems to me that we may want to instead add this provision: If more than 50% of your adjusted gross income comes from long-term capital gains, then count it as ordinary income, because that's what it is to them.
Yes, some will find ways around that (and goodness knows the ultra-wealthy have tax planners aplenty), but it seems more equitable than what we have currently. Please don't trouble us with the strawman argument of "If the ultra-wealthy have their investments taxed so heavily, then they won't invest." What else are they going to do with all their extra money? Save it at ~0% interest?
I recall in college being given a problem set on optics, which considered whether it was possible for the US Government to actually read license plates from space. This question asked us to consider the Hubble Space Telescope and its diffraction limit (setting aside atmospheric disturbance), and compare that to the angular size of the letters on a license plate when viewed from low Earth orbit. Why consider the question using the Hubble, and not some hypothetical spy satellite? Well, the size of the Hubble's mirror was well known, whereas the size and configuration of spy satellites was still classified. "But," said the professor with a wink, "the sizing of Hubble was based in part on what was already known to be possible." The graphic accompanying the article shows a KH-9 that looks a whole lot like a Hubble.
All the points you raise are worth looking into. But at the same time, I am pretty sure that these have all been looked into over the last half century, and continue to be researched today. If there was something there to outweigh the epidemiologic benefits, I'm pretty sure we would have discovered it by now. The benefits of vaccinating a population are clear and dramatic. If there were equally dramatic downsides, they would have been seen by now. Perhaps I am simply being naive, but I accept the opinion of the entire public health and medical community when they say that the overall benefits of widespread childhood vaccination vastly outweigh the risks.
Agreed - without any details, it's all just the same "Gosh, nuclear on the Moon has some adsvantages" speculation that's been bandied around since the 1960s.
The ACS article mentions that the team would be working on a small electric pump for the liquid metal-cooled system. So we know at least that it is not a purely solid state RTG like we've been using for satellites all these years. That implies that there might, might be some innovation taking place here. The power plant could still be using the thermoelectric effect, but use pumps and forced convection to get greater power output. Or it could be some kind of nuclear-heated stirling engine - those have been tried before, but never deployed.
Neither article is specific about fuel, either. Is it using enriched uranium like conventional nuclear power plants? Pu-238 Oxide like conventional RTGs? Some sort of breed-and-burn thorium cycle?
"I choose to fly tourist class, but they say I'm cargo. No movie, no magazine, no bag of peanuts."
/obscure reference?
Not to knock on how cool this thing is, but the article and Raytheon's previous press releases have been a little vague on what the power supply for this thing is. The actuators are high pressure hydraulics, meaning there must be a hefty compressor hanging around somewhere. How is it powered? In some of the videos you can see a pretty thick (5-10 cm dia) umbilical coming from the suit. Some of that is surely for telemetry, but I'm guessing a decent amount is power, either electrical or from a compressor. Do they plan on replacing that will a small combustion-engine-powered compressor in the backpack? Or is this going to just be for tethered operation at rollout?
To head off the peanut gallery: appealing to a fictional arc reactor is not an acceptable answer.
Cybernetics is a very particular term whose true meaning is far removed from its popular meaning. The technical meaning of the term describes a system in terms of its sensors, feedback mechanisms, the interaction of autonomous actors, failure modes in complex systems, etc. The popular meaning is simply anything vaguely having to do with robotics and humans, and generally conflated with cyborg. By either meaning of the term, though, I don't think it really applies in this case.
Pistorius' running prostheses are, essentially, arches of carbon fiber with rubber and track spikes at the "feet". They are fancy prostheses, but they are purely mechanical; no moving parts, even. There are no electronics, no control systems, no software. What is more, they are not even permanent attachments to his body (i.e., osseointegrated). He straps them on for training and racing, and the rest of the time wears conventional prostheses or nothing.
It is worth noting that an advanced prosthetic hand has more going for it: motors, feedback mechanisms to the user, muscle sensors providing inputs, control electronics and software. But I'm not sure that most people would look at such a person and say, "Yes, this person is a cybernetic organism," even in the popular meaning of the term. Such people are no more cybernetic (in the popular sense) than the person constantly punching away at their iPhone. There is a degree to which this artificial electromechanical computing device augments the user and allows them to interact with the world in ways they could not otherwise, but I think that we need a more stringent definition - a higher bar - otherwise the word started losing meaning the moment proto-humans picked up a bone and used it as a tool.
to quote myself:
One key part about it is that Facebook, and particularly Zuckerberg, is convinced that privacy is an illusory notion at best in today's world. Privacy was all some strange social construct that is now, or soon will be, thoroughly antiquated. It's an impediment to the future; a mental hangup. It's right up there with believing the Earth is flat and the sun revolves around us. The sooner we all realize this the better off we'll be.
Within this philosophy each move that Facebook makes isn't some sort of violation or theft. You can't steal what someone doesn't have. Instead, it is an object lesson to the unenlightened. I, for one, believe this is total bullshit. Then again, I'm also not on Facebook. The movers and shakers in technology have been all about this for a long time: dragging the masses kicking and screaming to that future only he has the genius to see. Usually, they have limited it to technical or economic matters, a'la Bill Gates. Or, like Steve Jobs, they have an overt social vision behind their technological heavy-handedness, but folks generally haven't been too offended by it. Zuckerberg is upping the ante in a dramatic way.