Did you not see the part in the summar about "It will be similar to the TV alerts in that the text messages will be geographically targeted"? I suspect that they'll broadcast messages to those phones that are within reception of a given cell tower, not for cell numbers mapped to addresses in a given area.
I was going to toss that one out there, but you beat me to it.
One thing I will mention about it for our friends out there in/. comment-land: in order to film a feature-length film in a single take, they needed to capture it digitally, because the equivalent amount of 35 mm film would have required a truck. They needed to develop some custom equipment (now available as a product, I expect) that would let them hot-swap the camera's hard drives while going a continuous shoot.
Another film that exploits the long-takes example: Irreversible. Like Momento it plays out in reverse-chronological order, and each ~14-minute segment was done as a single take. Why 14 minutes? That's about one reel of 35-mm film.
As one who uses this technology on a daily basis, I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment. 3D printing is not a 1:1 substitute for finished parts made by other, more widely practiced methods. The results from FDM, SLS, SLA, EBM, and other methods can be good, but unless the finished part is meant to be manufactured using those methods, the printed versions are generally inferior by many measures to the real thing made by machining, injection molding, casting, stamping, etc.
Also, as with paper printers, the quality you get from a rapid prototyping machine tends to be directly proportional to the cost of the machine and the materials. Most rapid prototyping technologies can't produce the tight tolerances needed for parts to fit together, or fine features like threads and snap features. In the end, what you get is a rough part that will often need some finish operations. I mean no offense to the team behind the MakerBot and other projects, but the output from those devices is more like a casting than a finished part.
The class of parts for which rapid prototyping is a suitable manufacturing method is very small. Look around you at the stuff you interact with every day: very little of it can be made at any reasonable cost or quality using rapid prototyping.
And even if rapid prototyping, as a technology, could produce quality imitations of common parts, it only becomes an issue when the technology becomes ubiquitous. I don't mean when every half-assed machine shop has one; I mean when every household has one just like they have a inkjet or laser printer. Even then, I doubt that we'll see much impact, because the cost of the materials will still be high (think of the cost of paper and ink), and the production time is still very long, compared to how things are mass produced today. The cost to duplicate and transmit a CAD model may be low, but the costs to create that CAD model and manipulate it are relatively high, and it still costs a lot, in time and material, to produce it in the real world. When it comes to physical parts, there isn't any comparison to an iPod holding 10,000 CDs' worth of music.
Do people think that music piracy would have taken off if everyone still used CD players, blank CD-Rs cost $5/ea, a music ripping computer cost $2,000, and CD-burners were limited to 0.5x speed? The ubiquity of (paper) printers and the easy availability of soft copies of books hasn't meant that book binders are going out of business. The physical book industry is hurting, true, but not because huge numbers of people are printing off their own pirated copy of the latest best-seller.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the cost of these printers and their materials will drop like a stone, just as it did for desktop printers. I really doubt it, however.
I had an apple 12" G4 back in the day, and enjoyed it for many years. My experience with it, however, was that it wasn't terribly stable balanced on just one leg. Or, having it on one leg, I'd usually need to keep one or both hands on it. One-handed typing wasn't terribly effective, either. Perhaps today's 10" notebooks, being smaller and lighter, are more stable.
Despite what may seem obvious, it wasn't so much the heat coming from the computer that was doing it. When you think about it, the hot parts of a laptop are a good distance away from your scrotum (or, at least, they should be if you're not doin' it wrong). The researchers found that it was the leg position used to keep the computer on the lap - i.e., legs closed together - that was the source of the problem. Keeping your legs together while seated was the strongest cause in the rise in scrotal temperature, because you're surrounding your nads with warm parts of the body and covering surface area that would help remove heat. The researchers found that keeping your legs apart would mitigate the problem, but only a little, because then you'd need a large laptop pad bridging the gap, which covers your nethers right back up. Or you could get a humongously wide laptop.
Somehow, I'm thinking that the future of the human race is not imperiled by laptops making men infertile. At least, not in that way.
This was on boing boing a couple days ago. Probably digg, reddit, and who knows where else too
I first read about this in Wired back in June or July. I'm sure it was in some photog publication a while before that, and folks at the George Eastman House have probably been publicizing by word-of-mouth in their circle since they first laid eyes on the plates.
we take digital pictures that don't have the resolution to allow visible-light microscopy
Of course you can't - it's a digital image stored on ethereal media. Were you planning on taking a microscope to the SD card or something?
Get me closer - I can't see the bits yet! Let me tune in the focus better... and... Yes! Oooooh, I think I see a... 1! and that right there is surely a... 0!
(I understand and sympathize with your point, but the opportunity was too good to let slide)
The FDIC is not the US Monetary system. They are not the US Treasury; they do not set monetary policy; they do not set tax policy; they do not set federal budget policy; they do not regulate Wall Street. If you don't know the difference, or why the difference matters, then I suggest you keep your sarcasm in check and educate yourself.
An important difference with the FDIC, however, is their track record. Since going into effect during the great depression, no depositor in a failed bank has ever lost money (within the FDIC limit). And if the FDIC ever didn't have enough funds to cover depositors, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would believe that the US Treasury wouldn't step in and provide the necessary funds.
It is not unreasonable to have faith in a system that has demonstrated it is worthy of trust. Electronic voting, so far, hasn't earned anyone's trust. On the contrary, it seems the more anyone hears about it, the less faith they have in that system.
In other words: "Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity" And, in this case, I'd say that the stupidity lies with the machine vendor, not with the people using it. For voting machines, I'd say they need to be built to many of the same standards as medical devices. In medical devices, you need to build as many mitigations as possible into a device to guard against "reasonably foreseeable misuse." Relying on instructions and warnings in the user's manual is an unreliable mitigation.
If the jurisdiction and the vendor want people to use and accept their machines, they need to cater to the lowest common denominator.
In college especially, I went through some (what seemed to me) very long periods without sleep. Not sleeping one or two nights made me a little punch drunk, to say the least. As my awake time prolonged past the 24-hour mark, I would start having waking dreams and seeing strange stuff. Maybe you get over a hump after the first few days, but I suspect that soon thereafter you start getting into some serious delirium. Maybe we should hand the guy a paint brush and see what he comes up with. Or, perhaps we should keep any conceivably pointy object well away from him - you never know when he might start stabbing his arm to make the spiders go away!
Medical devices must pass extremely rigorous tests of their susceptibility to electromagnetic radiation. The equipment gets put into a test chamber (and RF anechoic chamber) with a barrage of antennae pointed straight at it, and blasted with radiation from ~10 Hz to 10 GHz. It's not just RF, they'll subject more purely electric and magnetic fields, too.
During these tests, the device is not permitted to act anomalously. Depending on how critical to life the device is or isn't, it may be permitted to lock up temporarily under such conditions; other devices must continue to work perfectly throughout.
That a myoelectric-driven prosthesis, with input signals measuring maybe a few millivolts, can continue operating in such an environment is both a marvel and a tremendous challenge.
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.
I agree. They certainly didn't get those large expanses of plate glass from a 747. You could do something interesting with the passenger windows, building up a large window from many smaller panes, but they clearly didn't do that here. Might actually be pretty well insulated - airplane windows are multi-layered.
How 'bout building in some place has already been graded, attached to the utilities, and has road access? Like, say, the endless horizons of unfinished subdivisions, abandoned buildings, and decayed urban centers in the world?
Better yet, buy and existing structure and renovate it, which is far greener than most new construction.
Any random creek has a flow of at least 1 L/s, which is more than what this unit can provide. Just sit next to one with a paper cup and you're all set.
If you've got a creek handy that isn't filled with serious pollutants, human waste, decomposing bodies, and loads of pathogens, then yeah, you're idea of relying on random creeks sounds good.
Oh, and be sure to have some cups for the million or so other people who might also want to have a drink.
For most of human history homeopathy and prayer were about as effective as it got in medicine. Then medicine started getting better and more effective. Where's the proof? Look at life expectancy and compare where we are now to a few centuries ago. There are many contributing factors in life expectancy other than medicine (wars, accidents, nutrition, etc). But if you look at the things we're not dying of today that we were dying of back then, there are a great many that are medical in nature. For instance: no one dies of smallpox today, and its elimination is a direct result of medicine.
But whereas laser is in common speech, used by just about everybody (whether or not they know it's an acronym, whether or not they know what a laser is (and isn't)), DotA is a name only known to those people who sink hours of their time into computer games, which is a minority of the population. Even here on Slashdot, there are plenty who eschew the black hole of computer gaming, hoping to put their time to more productive uses.
Solar and wind power have long been two of the main contenders in the race to find the next big renewable energy resource. Rather than choosing between the two, scientists at Washington State University have instead combined them.
Dammit, what is wrong with these reporters? Do they really feel they need to so grossly oversimplify and misstate what's really going on? Do they really have such a low opinion of the intelligence of their readers? Or are they themselves really that idiotic? Harvesting the solar wind has nothing to do with solar power in the conventional sense, nor does it have anything to do with wind power. About the only connections I can see is that a) the Sun is the ultimate driver in all cases and b) the words "solar" and "wind" show up in both places.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I never said I liked it. I'd be just fine never seeing it again. But, it seemed worth adding to the discussion. Kindly keep your pox to yourself.
Did you not see the part in the summar about "It will be similar to the TV alerts in that the text messages will be geographically targeted"? I suspect that they'll broadcast messages to those phones that are within reception of a given cell tower, not for cell numbers mapped to addresses in a given area.
I was going to toss that one out there, but you beat me to it.
/. comment-land: in order to film a feature-length film in a single take, they needed to capture it digitally, because the equivalent amount of 35 mm film would have required a truck. They needed to develop some custom equipment (now available as a product, I expect) that would let them hot-swap the camera's hard drives while going a continuous shoot.
One thing I will mention about it for our friends out there in
Another film that exploits the long-takes example: Irreversible . Like Momento it plays out in reverse-chronological order, and each ~14-minute segment was done as a single take. Why 14 minutes? That's about one reel of 35-mm film.
As one who uses this technology on a daily basis, I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment. 3D printing is not a 1:1 substitute for finished parts made by other, more widely practiced methods. The results from FDM, SLS, SLA, EBM, and other methods can be good, but unless the finished part is meant to be manufactured using those methods, the printed versions are generally inferior by many measures to the real thing made by machining, injection molding, casting, stamping, etc.
Also, as with paper printers, the quality you get from a rapid prototyping machine tends to be directly proportional to the cost of the machine and the materials. Most rapid prototyping technologies can't produce the tight tolerances needed for parts to fit together, or fine features like threads and snap features. In the end, what you get is a rough part that will often need some finish operations. I mean no offense to the team behind the MakerBot and other projects, but the output from those devices is more like a casting than a finished part.
The class of parts for which rapid prototyping is a suitable manufacturing method is very small. Look around you at the stuff you interact with every day: very little of it can be made at any reasonable cost or quality using rapid prototyping.
And even if rapid prototyping, as a technology, could produce quality imitations of common parts, it only becomes an issue when the technology becomes ubiquitous. I don't mean when every half-assed machine shop has one; I mean when every household has one just like they have a inkjet or laser printer. Even then, I doubt that we'll see much impact, because the cost of the materials will still be high (think of the cost of paper and ink), and the production time is still very long, compared to how things are mass produced today. The cost to duplicate and transmit a CAD model may be low, but the costs to create that CAD model and manipulate it are relatively high, and it still costs a lot, in time and material, to produce it in the real world. When it comes to physical parts, there isn't any comparison to an iPod holding 10,000 CDs' worth of music.
Do people think that music piracy would have taken off if everyone still used CD players, blank CD-Rs cost $5/ea, a music ripping computer cost $2,000, and CD-burners were limited to 0.5x speed? The ubiquity of (paper) printers and the easy availability of soft copies of books hasn't meant that book binders are going out of business. The physical book industry is hurting, true, but not because huge numbers of people are printing off their own pirated copy of the latest best-seller.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the cost of these printers and their materials will drop like a stone, just as it did for desktop printers. I really doubt it, however.
I had an apple 12" G4 back in the day, and enjoyed it for many years. My experience with it, however, was that it wasn't terribly stable balanced on just one leg. Or, having it on one leg, I'd usually need to keep one or both hands on it. One-handed typing wasn't terribly effective, either. Perhaps today's 10" notebooks, being smaller and lighter, are more stable.
Despite what may seem obvious, it wasn't so much the heat coming from the computer that was doing it. When you think about it, the hot parts of a laptop are a good distance away from your scrotum (or, at least, they should be if you're not doin' it wrong). The researchers found that it was the leg position used to keep the computer on the lap - i.e., legs closed together - that was the source of the problem. Keeping your legs together while seated was the strongest cause in the rise in scrotal temperature, because you're surrounding your nads with warm parts of the body and covering surface area that would help remove heat. The researchers found that keeping your legs apart would mitigate the problem, but only a little, because then you'd need a large laptop pad bridging the gap, which covers your nethers right back up. Or you could get a humongously wide laptop.
Somehow, I'm thinking that the future of the human race is not imperiled by laptops making men infertile. At least, not in that way.
An important corollary: nothing was created, either.
I first read about this in Wired back in June or July. I'm sure it was in some photog publication a while before that, and folks at the George Eastman House have probably been publicizing by word-of-mouth in their circle since they first laid eyes on the plates.
Of course you can't - it's a digital image stored on ethereal media. Were you planning on taking a microscope to the SD card or something?
... and ... Yes! Oooooh, I think I see a ... 1! and that right there is surely a ... 0!
Get me closer - I can't see the bits yet! Let me tune in the focus better
(I understand and sympathize with your point, but the opportunity was too good to let slide)
The FDIC is not the US Monetary system. They are not the US Treasury; they do not set monetary policy; they do not set tax policy; they do not set federal budget policy; they do not regulate Wall Street. If you don't know the difference, or why the difference matters, then I suggest you keep your sarcasm in check and educate yourself.
An important difference with the FDIC, however, is their track record. Since going into effect during the great depression, no depositor in a failed bank has ever lost money (within the FDIC limit). And if the FDIC ever didn't have enough funds to cover depositors, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would believe that the US Treasury wouldn't step in and provide the necessary funds.
It is not unreasonable to have faith in a system that has demonstrated it is worthy of trust. Electronic voting, so far, hasn't earned anyone's trust. On the contrary, it seems the more anyone hears about it, the less faith they have in that system.
In other words: "Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity" And, in this case, I'd say that the stupidity lies with the machine vendor, not with the people using it. For voting machines, I'd say they need to be built to many of the same standards as medical devices. In medical devices, you need to build as many mitigations as possible into a device to guard against "reasonably foreseeable misuse." Relying on instructions and warnings in the user's manual is an unreliable mitigation.
If the jurisdiction and the vendor want people to use and accept their machines, they need to cater to the lowest common denominator.
As long as the robot doesn't start brewing its hand to make my cup of coffee, I can be flexible.
In college especially, I went through some (what seemed to me) very long periods without sleep. Not sleeping one or two nights made me a little punch drunk, to say the least. As my awake time prolonged past the 24-hour mark, I would start having waking dreams and seeing strange stuff. Maybe you get over a hump after the first few days, but I suspect that soon thereafter you start getting into some serious delirium. Maybe we should hand the guy a paint brush and see what he comes up with. Or, perhaps we should keep any conceivably pointy object well away from him - you never know when he might start stabbing his arm to make the spiders go away!
Medical devices must pass extremely rigorous tests of their susceptibility to electromagnetic radiation. The equipment gets put into a test chamber (and RF anechoic chamber) with a barrage of antennae pointed straight at it, and blasted with radiation from ~10 Hz to 10 GHz. It's not just RF, they'll subject more purely electric and magnetic fields, too.
During these tests, the device is not permitted to act anomalously. Depending on how critical to life the device is or isn't, it may be permitted to lock up temporarily under such conditions; other devices must continue to work perfectly throughout.
That a myoelectric-driven prosthesis, with input signals measuring maybe a few millivolts, can continue operating in such an environment is both a marvel and a tremendous challenge.
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.
That noise you just heard was my mind a'sploding.
You may, but it's a bit disingenuous to then go prancing around about how "green" it is, no matter how many repurposed wings you stick on it.
I agree. They certainly didn't get those large expanses of plate glass from a 747. You could do something interesting with the passenger windows, building up a large window from many smaller panes, but they clearly didn't do that here. Might actually be pretty well insulated - airplane windows are multi-layered.
How 'bout building in some place has already been graded, attached to the utilities, and has road access? Like, say, the endless horizons of unfinished subdivisions, abandoned buildings, and decayed urban centers in the world?
Better yet, buy and existing structure and renovate it, which is far greener than most new construction.
Well, so long as they send back my Creedence 8-tracks, I'll abide.
-The Dude
If you've got a creek handy that isn't filled with serious pollutants, human waste, decomposing bodies, and loads of pathogens, then yeah, you're idea of relying on random creeks sounds good.
Oh, and be sure to have some cups for the million or so other people who might also want to have a drink.
For most of human history homeopathy and prayer were about as effective as it got in medicine. Then medicine started getting better and more effective. Where's the proof? Look at life expectancy and compare where we are now to a few centuries ago. There are many contributing factors in life expectancy other than medicine (wars, accidents, nutrition, etc). But if you look at the things we're not dying of today that we were dying of back then, there are a great many that are medical in nature. For instance: no one dies of smallpox today, and its elimination is a direct result of medicine.
But whereas laser is in common speech, used by just about everybody (whether or not they know it's an acronym, whether or not they know what a laser is (and isn't)), DotA is a name only known to those people who sink hours of their time into computer games, which is a minority of the population. Even here on Slashdot, there are plenty who eschew the black hole of computer gaming, hoping to put their time to more productive uses.
Dammit, what is wrong with these reporters? Do they really feel they need to so grossly oversimplify and misstate what's really going on? Do they really have such a low opinion of the intelligence of their readers? Or are they themselves really that idiotic? Harvesting the solar wind has nothing to do with solar power in the conventional sense, nor does it have anything to do with wind power. About the only connections I can see is that a) the Sun is the ultimate driver in all cases and b) the words "solar" and "wind" show up in both places.