Slashdot Mirror


User: impossiblefork

impossiblefork's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
80
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 80

  1. Re:Not surprising on A Study Finds Half of Jobs Are Vulnerable To Automation (economist.com) · · Score: 1

    People have already done that. There's a company called Modern Meadow that seems to be experimenting with collagen-based materials. There are also people who manufacture leather-like materials by hot-compaction of mycelium. One manufacturer, Mycoworks, claims that they can make it as strong as deer leather.

  2. Re:Vantablack on Super-Black Is the New Black (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Also, you wouldn't want to wear Vantablack clothes due to the danger of breathing in the carbon nanotubes.

  3. Terrible article on Samsung Patent Describes Holographic TV Technology (consumerist.com) · · Score: 2

    A system of this type has already been built by the German development company Seereal. Fraunhofer developed special anti-reflection coatings that allowed the construction of laser beam expansion systems for that display. Their system also used eye tracking.

    I haven't seen the patent claims, but from what I see in the article I can't say that there's anything novel there. The article is absolutely terrible as a report on a patent, with it being obvious that the author knows nothing about what he writes, either about patents or technology. For example, there is no mention of the patent claims, no mention of similar technology and an unsupported claim that the device is revolutionary.

  4. Re:Good, then we can scrap that stupid f-35 on Air Force Says F-35 Glitches Mean the A-10 Will Keep Flying 'Indefinitely' (jalopnik.com) · · Score: 1

    The Saab JAS 39 Gripen is a single-engine fighter and has had no crashes in the Swedish air force since we introduced it and no crashes of any kind have been due to engine problems.

    Twin-engined fighters can also have weird stall conditions, for example, the first female carrier-based fighter pilot Kara Spears Hultgren crashed and died due to a where the nose also affected over the wing over one of the engine intakes leading to a compressor stall.

  5. Re:No. on Is Microsoft Mainstreaming Machine Learning? (networkworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes. I have been using tensorflow using something called 'bash on ubuntu on windows' which is a bit like Wine. The whole thing was very convenient and everything that I needed could be installed with apt-get.

  6. Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue on Transistors Will Stop Shrinking in 2021, Moore's Law Roadmap Predicts (ieee.org) · · Score: 0

    Sorry, I accidentally moderated you offtopic, so I'm posting this to undo it.

  7. Re:Except at night. on New Record Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Now Undercutting Coal (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Though, think of like this: all the food we grow is made with solar power. Imagine making the energy to produce the food we need with nuclear power, gas turbines or coal. Even with the most efficient diodes that would require tremendous amounts of energy.

    Meanwhile insolation in the absence of clouds is about a horsepower per square meter even in the high latitudes we are at here in Sweden. This will likely transform energy generation and electricity costs worldwide and may in the medium turn well even impact European manufacturing.

  8. Re:Trump just says stuff on Trump Says He'd Make Apple Build Computers In the US (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    I think that it's very unlikely that people would choose such topics for their degrees.

    Entrance to these universities, like ours, would likely be quite competitive and I have a hard time imaging that people who in high-school obtained mostly A's would not seek to obtain a degree that is well-regarded and brings them as great benefit as possible. If students went for degrees with a less commercial focus I suspect that they would be going for subjects like theoretical physics, whereas they now that they are getting loans, might choose something more applied.

  9. Re:Trump just says stuff on Trump Says He'd Make Apple Build Computers In the US (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't agree, especially with regard to Sanders.

    To have university education at the existing public universities be publicly funded and free to the students is perfectly feasible. This is how it works here in Sweden as well as in numerous other countries, so it's quite likely to work well. I'm less certain when it comes to publicly funded healthcare since I feel that the way to do it in that case is to have government owned hospitals, which I suspect don't exist in the US, why have some doubts that its introduction would be entirely simple-- but there aren't any problems with it in the longer run.

    People need to have visions for the future and move towards things that they after careful evaluation believe are better and I don't think that an aspiration to build a more social-democratic society can be dismissed as a dream, especially since it's been demonstrated to function elsewhere.

  10. Already Achieved on Spider Silk Finally Ready For Commercialization · · Score: 3, Informative

    To my knowledge this has already been achieved. Specifically, a Japanese company called Spiber spin synthetic spider silk manufactured by this kind of process. They've made enough to weave a dress out of it as a demonstration and have some kind of project to build a factory, which should produce some hundred kilograms per year of it sometime during 2015. However, their website isn't full of updates and much of the material is in Japanese.

    There's also a Swedish biomedicine company called Spiber Technologies that makes this kind of stuff to grow cells on. Reading wikipedia also gives a couple of examples

    Still, if they achieve really large scale production that may be nice even if they aren't first. The focus on textile applications might also be indicative of being able to make large amounts of fiber.

  11. Re:I'm a bit conflicted on Bill To Require Vaccination of Children Advances In California · · Score: 1

    I've argued before in a related discussion elsewhere that people, if they have a right to refuse vaccines shouldn't be deprived of an education, or something else that they are recognized as having a right to, for exercising that right and that the acceptable policy space consists of making vaccination either mandatory or not mandatory.

    While measles vaccines are undoubtedly safe, I am not so opposed to the anti-vaccine people as you are, in part because some novel vaccines have caused injuries; for example, when it was used here in Sweden it was found that the Pandemrix vaccine caused narcolepsy in children and youths (according to wikipedia the increase in incidence was 6.6 times, although it of course still very rare, but it is no longer recommended for children (adults are unaffected)). Considering things like this I think that it reasonable that a paranoid parent who perhaps doesn't weigh risks optimally may be afraid of other vaccines as well, or that someone a bit more sensible than that may be uncertain whether a particular vaccine is acceptable.

    I think that a reasonable policy is to take care that vaccines that are recommended are as safe as they can be, to make them demonstrably so (i.e. no mercury compounds that are scary enough that one might want to see whether or not they are safe), to ensure careful testing, to ensure that the testing can be trusted and to ensure that there is as little profit motive to get around and, if one genuinely believes that it is necessary, to consider mandatory vaccinations.However I suspect that an initiative like this is being considered because it is felt to be less imposing than that.

  12. Re: Does it really matter now? on Fields Medal Winner Manjul Bhargava On the Pythagorean Theorem Controversy · · Score: 1

    But the Greeks do speak Greek which is mutually comprehensible with Ancient Greek. To claim that the modern Greek identity is a fantasy is therefore necessarily disingenuous.

  13. Insulation + modern ventillation systems on Ask Slashdot: Minimizing Oil and Gas Dependency In a Central European City? · · Score: 1

    I've given some thought to this and believe that insulation, modern well-designed heat and ventilation systems, perhaps incorporating heat exchangers for heat-recovery from the air leaving the house, systems to heat the water with sunlight hitting the roof or heat storage using a borehole heat exchanger are the right solution.

  14. Re:Helium? on WD Announces 8TB, 10TB Helium Hard Drives · · Score: 1

    It would probably work quite well, but it might impose additional constraints on how the hard drives could be built since hydrogen can enter metals. There's of course no risk of explosions (after all, these things exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...), but it could certainly be interesting.

  15. Re:And low-emission transport trucks, too on To Really Cut Emissions, We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Actually they probably do. They use huge low-speed engines with extraordinarily high thermal efficiencies, like the Wärtisilä-Sulzer. There are also good reasons for ships to make use of efficient engines, since this saves fuel.

  16. Re:Would it really be worse without patents? on SpaceX Challenges Blue Origin Patents Over Sea-Landing Rocket Tech · · Score: 1

    I've heard this kind of argument on Slashdot, where it is claimed that patents aren't for small inventors or as in your case, that they small inventors do not use them, and attempted to counter it then, that time with examples of small inventors. I believe that it is quite false. I will now engage in some self-plagiarism and list those same inventors again, since their inventions are still among those which capture the mechanically oriented parts of my imagination the most and because I've already committed this self-plagiarism this morning in Swedish.

    The first one is a English professor, Kais Atallah, whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he got he obtained a patent, enabling the production to be funded. The second Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing. He had worked in industry, both, I believe, on different kinds of magnetic bearings and on other advanced electrical machines, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic bearings, wrote a PhD dissertation on it, patented it before publishing and presently manufactures it, after having gotten funding.

    You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now," "having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.

    If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringement. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.

    As stated in the introduction I've essentially varied a previous post, but since what you wrote is so similar to what I responded to I felt that this was acceptable.

  17. Re:Delayed action on Climate Damage 'Irreversible' According Leaked Climate Report · · Score: 1

    One can't make that kind of choice unilaterally when competing against others. The companies can't either.

    Even if their founders have initially good intentions those good intentions will, when there are externalities, ultimately harm their business. This applies to everything from worker welfare or unsafe factories to harm to the environment.

  18. Re:Global warming is causing bad grades now on Temporary Classrooms Are Bad For the Environment, and Worse For Kids · · Score: 1

    Yes. Performance was also degraded as classroom temperatures reached 30 degrees Celsius. I didn't listen to the full presentation, although there probably wasn't enough in it to ascertain whether they had succeded in separating the effect of CO2 and temperature, but it probably wasn't treated, as the presentation was intended for people who designed ventillation systems.

  19. Re:Global warming is causing bad grades now on Temporary Classrooms Are Bad For the Environment, and Worse For Kids · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it's actually quite right.

    Just yesterday I happened upon a presentation by a company called Swegon, which designs and manufactures ventillation system equipment, in which they showed a material from a British researcher who (I believe on their proposal) had arranged measurements of student performance as a function of class CO2 levels and classroom temperature and the effect on the speed with which students performed diverse simple tasks, like adding numbers, multiplication, etc. and overall it turned out to drop by 30% as CO2 reached the worst levels.

    In some schools the CO2 levels reached about 2000 ppm. The idea that this doesn't affect people is ridiculous and properly designed ventillation systems are important.

  20. Re:Half the vehicle weight = twice the range on Is Carbon Fiber Going Mainstream? · · Score: 1

    Same grip to mass ratio though and for the same speeds, the same grip to momentum ratio and grip to energy ratio.

  21. Re:Not the way we have carbs now on Gaining On the US: Most Europeans To Be Overweight By 2030 · · Score: 1

    But calories in and calories burned aren't independent variables.

    You can cause health problems that make eating less impossible by eating less sooner than you would cause healthy weight loss. There's an old story that I found in an old fechtbuch. An english fencing master complained of a spanish argument that you if you always held your point as far towards your opponent as possible would strike him first, and he compared this argument an old story of how a man goes to woman for a cure against seasickness who is to have told him to "Take this rock. As long as you have it in your mouth you will not throw up" and as he went to sea and eventually threw up he realized the precise way in which the woman's statement was true. I feel that your argument involving this accounting inequality has the same character.

  22. Re: Sponsor? on Tesla Logged $713 Million In Revenue In Q1 and Built 7,535 Cars · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Computer holography, Path-tracing, the fast-multiple methods for radiosity-- and if it has to be automotive related: alternative thermodynamic cycles for engines, field modulated magnetic couplings (like the ones magnomatics are making as gearboxes/electric drive systems for cars) or mass-production of parts from fibre reinforced plastic.

    All of these are nerdier, but perhaps not as easily digested.

  23. Re:Screw other people on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    Then pretty much every human would have no business driving. The way to ensure this is to greatly honor whoever acts correctly and to ensure that there will be more of them. That is of course society's prerogative however and in a bad society where this is not rewarded the cost is paid in lives instead.

  24. Re:Screw other people on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    You don't. You precommit and most respectable people have precommitted to not running over pedestrians and motorcyclists almost from birtth.

  25. Re:Screw other people on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    Your first duty is always to the other road users.

    Therefore, in a crash the first thing that you avoid are unprotected trafficants, first pedestians and then motorcyclists and by analogy it is reasonably to then avoid such cars as have the least protection. To drive into a pedestrian to reduce harm to oneself in a crash is not acceptable.