A big challenge for water landing will be wind during the descent of the rocket. If the wind is blowing 100 miles an hour for a minute as the rocket is falling, then it's going to be dragged a mile from the ballistic landing point. (When things move quickly through the air, the lift generated by wind is extremely high; bullets move with the wind.) I don't believe that the booster will have the capacity to fly horizontally too far, and it won't be firing at all for the bulk of the descent.
If the wind could be predicted accurately, it would be easy enough to steer the rocket to the right place -- or move the landing platform to the right place.
If you're landing back at the launch pad; there will have been a rocket that could have sampled the wind speed just a few minutes previously, so you could have very precise wind speed vs. altitude data.
It's harder than you think, unfortunately. Nuclear weapons have a few kilograms of radioactive material, reactors have more than a few tons. The Yucca Mountain repository, the best that nuclear engineers could come up with, had to be certified to be safe for 10,000 years...but literally after 10,000 years things could have gotten out of control. It's a tough problem.
That said, it means that we have to try harder. The problem is not going to go away; we have to pursue better approaches.
It turns out that the software used in VFX rendering is pretty darn expensive. Licenses of RenderMan, for example, were several thousand dollars a node (RenderMan just lowered their prices, it's true). Nuke, Maya, and other tools were similarly expensive.
The companies that created the software typically wouldn't consider licensing on shorter terms than six months; which made scaling up for a big movie very expensive. Zync managed to negotiate deals that would allow them to license software on an hourly basis. That is their real innovation.
Curious. Back in the stone ages (12 years ago) we had a 53 GB 12-platter drive (The box said "Solve your disk space storage problems forever!") that had a head fail. I was able to recover 22/23rds of the data, but it was clear that the data was recorded from one platter to the next all the way through the stack, and then the heads moved. Back in that day (I don't know if it's still true) one side of one of the platters just contained alignment information.
We have two ears, but you might notice that the ears have fairly complicated geometry. Why would that be? Well, it turns out that the various parts of the ear bounce sound, and sound coming from different directions, both azimuth and elevation, bounces differently. Your brain is very good at figuring this out. This wikipedia page on Sound Localization is quite informative.
It turns out that humans have among the best direction-sensing hearing of any animal.
[disclaimer -- I work for Dolby, but in their imaging group]
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
Bill, this advice "make the ad as incipid[sic] and vapid as possible, to save on non-converting clicks." makes so much sense, and is so obvious, that it must be happening already. This was pioneered by the the Nigerian scammers (originally snail-mail, now mostly email.)
It does make me disheartened about the future of the ad-supported internet.
*sigh* that's a Suzuki DL-650 Vstrom, not a Honda. The new one does get about 60mpg, my 2009 only about 55.
I agree with those that say that, unfortunately, this is not going to be a successful bike. I really like the idea of an electric motorcycle, but it should come from a company that does exactly that. H-D fans aren't going to want it, and the insane high price that they will charge for the nameplate will keep others from buying it. I'd love a 60 mile-range electric bike that cost $10,000. I'd buy it tomorrow, but this isn't that.
Yes, one can often patent a drug for a new purpose. You probably can't charge $1,000/dose for a repurposing, but it can be done.
The absolutely shocking prevalence of autism today (currently estimated at 1 in 68 births, probably 1 in 40 boys) will make any drug that has a good effect profitable.
As the parent of an autistic teenager, I'm hoping for the best. It does appear that, like Tolstoy said, all autistic kids are autistic in their own way; so I'm not holding out a lot of hope. Some, though...
Seriously, this makes a lot of sense. At the low altitudes that these will fly, the power necessary to reach the satellites will be much lower than geosynchronous or even Iridium satellites. Mass producing small satellites probably is cheaper than building a few big ones, as well.
Hm. Failed to enable. Is this a new feature? Indeed, you can have iMessage send as SMS -- I didn't have that set up. It's in Settings->Messages->Send_as_SMS
Just not true, or at least it wasn't a few months ago. My daughter switched to Android and I couldn't text her until she finally remembered her Apple ID and we could log into their servers and disable her account. We used the Samsung page for guidance, and it worked just fine. But by itself, my phone kept silently failing to send her messages.
In fact, it's pretty clear that 4. is incorrect. There was a fascinating recent study.
There is a drug that you can give somebody (or in this experiment, a rat) that will prevent it from creating new memories. They trained the rat to solve a maze, and it did it just fine. They gave the rat the drug, and it solved the maze perfectly. Once. After that, it couldn't do it again.
Implying that when you remember something, that very process of remembering removes the original memory,and it has to be created again. It will be different the second time; colored by your current experience. The more times you remember something, the more you are remembering the previous memory, not the original event.
The FA says that Blu-ray disc sales are increasing, but overall disk sales are slowing because DVDs are contracting so quickly.
Quoting the article. "Last year, about 124 million Blu-ray discs were sold in the U.S., a 4.2% increase over 2012, according to IHS Technology. Even so, because of reduced pricing for the format, revenue only increased 2.6%. DVD sales, which have been plummeting for years, dropped 13.6% last year."
Blu-ray data rates are far higher than anything you can stream today, and people who care about that (not many of the commenters apparently:) ) apparently are still buying discs.
I do come from the movie business, so I surely have a different perspective; but to filmmakers quality is paramount.
For a three-body slingshot to work, the object would have to get pretty close to one or both of the black holes -- considerably closer than the size of a globular cluster. At that distance, the tidal forces around the black holes would rip the cluster apart. I just can't see this happening.
The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?
And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.
They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they are digitizing that signal and encoding it onto the internet. That's what I don't think they are allowed to do, and that's why I believe they'll be shut down.
For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.
On the other hand, for movies shot using large-format sensors, focus is a huge issue. The amount of work spent following focus on a movie is significant, and it fails more often than you might think. Modern lenses are incredibly sharp, but they have such a tiny range that is in perfect focus that they are hard to use. Admittedly, the people who use these cameras and lenses are professionals with years or decades of experience, and they do well......But -- if we could focus our shots after the fact, it would be a true game changer for movie making. We could chose just what part of the scene should be in focus, and change that throughout the shot easily. Yes, this moves yet another part of the movie making process into post, but that's not a bad thing. As other people have suggested at other fora, editing/coloring/framing and visual effects are all done in post, and it helps make better movies. This would help too. Having the depth maps automatically generated would make visual effects easier and better as well.
I recognize that the amount of processing that goes on to make these images makes a motion picture camera a challenge, and the number of high-end motion picture cameras is probably a tenth of a percent of the DSLRs that are made, at most. Still, we could just capture the 40 MRays and do the processing later; storage and networks are getting faster and larger all the time.
At the time, one of the most popular magazines was "Reader's Digest", which edited long articles into short three-page summaries. They did a pretty good job of it. They would often have a "condensed book" as well.
After reading the Reader's Digest versions of articles, though, it was difficult to go back to long-form reading. There's really nothing new here!
It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.
Slashdot Mirror
He meant 10 thousand CNC machines...not that they were $10K. That's an almost unbelievable number; and array of 100 x 100 CNC machines.
I had forgotten about the gridded fins...you're right, that should provide substantial cross-range capability.
A big challenge for water landing will be wind during the descent of the rocket. If the wind is blowing 100 miles an hour for a minute as the rocket is falling, then it's going to be dragged a mile from the ballistic landing point. (When things move quickly through the air, the lift generated by wind is extremely high; bullets move with the wind.) I don't believe that the booster will have the capacity to fly horizontally too far, and it won't be firing at all for the bulk of the descent.
If the wind could be predicted accurately, it would be easy enough to steer the rocket to the right place -- or move the landing platform to the right place.
If you're landing back at the launch pad; there will have been a rocket that could have sampled the wind speed just a few minutes previously, so you could have very precise wind speed vs. altitude data.
It's harder than you think, unfortunately. Nuclear weapons have a few kilograms of radioactive material, reactors have more than a few tons. The Yucca Mountain repository, the best that nuclear engineers could come up with, had to be certified to be safe for 10,000 years...but literally after 10,000 years things could have gotten out of control. It's a tough problem.
That said, it means that we have to try harder. The problem is not going to go away; we have to pursue better approaches.
It turns out that the software used in VFX rendering is pretty darn expensive. Licenses of RenderMan, for example, were several thousand dollars a node (RenderMan just lowered their prices, it's true). Nuke, Maya, and other tools were similarly expensive.
The companies that created the software typically wouldn't consider licensing on shorter terms than six months; which made scaling up for a big movie very expensive. Zync managed to negotiate deals that would allow them to license software on an hourly basis. That is their real innovation.
Curious. Back in the stone ages (12 years ago) we had a 53 GB 12-platter drive (The box said "Solve your disk space storage problems forever!") that had a head fail. I was able to recover 22/23rds of the data, but it was clear that the data was recorded from one platter to the next all the way through the stack, and then the heads moved. Back in that day (I don't know if it's still true) one side of one of the platters just contained alignment information.
We have two ears, but you might notice that the ears have fairly complicated geometry. Why would that be? Well, it turns out that the various parts of the ear bounce sound, and sound coming from different directions, both azimuth and elevation, bounces differently. Your brain is very good at figuring this out. This wikipedia page on Sound Localization is quite informative.
It turns out that humans have among the best direction-sensing hearing of any animal.
[disclaimer -- I work for Dolby, but in their imaging group]
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
Bill, this advice "make the ad as incipid[sic] and vapid as possible, to save on non-converting clicks." makes so much sense, and is so obvious, that it must be happening already. This was pioneered by the the Nigerian scammers (originally snail-mail, now mostly email.)
It does make me disheartened about the future of the ad-supported internet.
*sigh* that's a Suzuki DL-650 Vstrom, not a Honda. The new one does get about 60mpg, my 2009 only about 55.
I agree with those that say that, unfortunately, this is not going to be a successful bike. I really like the idea of an electric motorcycle, but it should come from a company that does exactly that. H-D fans aren't going to want it, and the insane high price that they will charge for the nameplate will keep others from buying it. I'd love a 60 mile-range electric bike that cost $10,000. I'd buy it tomorrow, but this isn't that.
Yes, one can often patent a drug for a new purpose. You probably can't charge $1,000/dose for a repurposing, but it can be done.
The absolutely shocking prevalence of autism today (currently estimated at 1 in 68 births, probably 1 in 40 boys) will make any drug that has a good effect profitable.
As the parent of an autistic teenager, I'm hoping for the best. It does appear that, like Tolstoy said, all autistic kids are autistic in their own way; so I'm not holding out a lot of hope. Some, though...
Certainly not. These are very small satellites, probably will be launched something like 20 at a time. Maybe 9 orbital planes with 20 satellites each?
Kind of like a social network of satellites :)
Seriously, this makes a lot of sense. At the low altitudes that these will fly, the power necessary to reach the satellites will be much lower than geosynchronous or even Iridium satellites. Mass producing small satellites probably is cheaper than building a few big ones, as well.
After all, the first stage could land safely in the uninhabited steppe to the east.
Yeah, if you just replace the back seat occupant with an equivalent mass of batteries, you could get twice the range.
Hm. Failed to enable. Is this a new feature? Indeed, you can have iMessage send as SMS -- I didn't have that set up. It's in Settings->Messages->Send_as_SMS
Just not true, or at least it wasn't a few months ago. My daughter switched to Android and I couldn't text her until she finally remembered her Apple ID and we could log into their servers and disable her account. We used the Samsung page for guidance, and it worked just fine. But by itself, my phone kept silently failing to send her messages.
Actually, yours is by far the most insightful comment. Please mod up!
In fact, it's pretty clear that 4. is incorrect. There was a fascinating recent study.
There is a drug that you can give somebody (or in this experiment, a rat) that will prevent it from creating new memories. They trained the rat to solve a maze, and it did it just fine. They gave the rat the drug, and it solved the maze perfectly. Once. After that, it couldn't do it again.
Implying that when you remember something, that very process of remembering removes the original memory,and it has to be created again. It will be different the second time; colored by your current experience. The more times you remember something, the more you are remembering the previous memory, not the original event.
A reference is
The FA says that Blu-ray disc sales are increasing, but overall disk sales are slowing because DVDs are contracting so quickly.
Quoting the article. "Last year, about 124 million Blu-ray discs were sold in the U.S., a 4.2% increase over 2012, according to IHS Technology. Even so, because of reduced pricing for the format, revenue only increased 2.6%. DVD sales, which have been plummeting for years, dropped 13.6% last year."
Blu-ray data rates are far higher than anything you can stream today, and people who care about that (not many of the commenters apparently :) ) apparently are still buying discs.
I do come from the movie business, so I surely have a different perspective; but to filmmakers quality is paramount.
For a three-body slingshot to work, the object would have to get pretty close to one or both of the black holes -- considerably closer than the size of a globular cluster. At that distance, the tidal forces around the black holes would rip the cluster apart. I just can't see this happening.
I suppose it's time to do some simulations :)
The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?
And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.
They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they are digitizing that signal and encoding it onto the internet. That's what I don't think they are allowed to do, and that's why I believe they'll be shut down.
For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.
On the other hand, for movies shot using large-format sensors, focus is a huge issue. The amount of work spent following focus on a movie is significant, and it fails more often than you might think. Modern lenses are incredibly sharp, but they have such a tiny range that is in perfect focus that they are hard to use. Admittedly, the people who use these cameras and lenses are professionals with years or decades of experience, and they do well... ...But -- if we could focus our shots after the fact, it would be a true game changer for movie making. We could chose just what part of the scene should be in focus, and change that throughout the shot easily. Yes, this moves yet another part of the movie making process into post, but that's not a bad thing. As other people have suggested at other fora, editing/coloring/framing and visual effects are all done in post, and it helps make better movies. This would help too. Having the depth maps automatically generated would make visual effects easier and better as well.
I recognize that the amount of processing that goes on to make these images makes a motion picture camera a challenge, and the number of high-end motion picture cameras is probably a tenth of a percent of the DSLRs that are made, at most. Still, we could just capture the 40 MRays and do the processing later; storage and networks are getting faster and larger all the time.
Come on, Lytro! Make it happen!
At the time, one of the most popular magazines was "Reader's Digest", which edited long articles into short three-page summaries. They did a pretty good job of it. They would often have a "condensed book" as well.
After reading the Reader's Digest versions of articles, though, it was difficult to go back to long-form reading. There's really nothing new here!
It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.