Not air friction, the Sun. And it is not just the flux angle, as the glass reflects less IR at a steep angle. Ever wondered how we lived without air conditioning all those years? It was because of sensible design.
Modern robots can make the easy decisions themselves. And the more difficult ones can tolerate a 3 minute delay.
So Curiosity on Mars can avoid simple obstacles by itself. And take samples etc. The controllers tell it where to go, generally, and what type of sample to take. If Curiosity gets confused, it just stops and asks. But in practice I do not think it spends much time waiting for comms delays.
Looking at the car, it has a fairly blunt windscreen and a pointy back. Which is exactly the opposite of modern fashion in cars with their blunt backs and very flat windscreens that make the car so hot you need air con on even moderately hot days, let alone the desert.
People do not actually use stereo vision for driving, the distances are too great. And we can drive fine with one eye closed. We do really clever processing to extract a 3D model out of one camera.
But computers based stereo vision works much better. The cameras can be further apart, and can be pointed to sub degree accuracy. The tricky part is realizing that a point on one image corresponds to a point on the other, looking in particular for vertical edges. Tricky, but much easier than reconstructing a 3D scene from one camera. Once that is done, simple trig gives you the distances. This tech has been around since the 1980s.
I have never understood the need for Lidar or anything else. Radar could be a good backup, if it sees something close then panic. Ultrasonics do not work in the wind, so hard to see how they could work in a car, other than parking. They are cheap though, I bought one on ebay for $2 the other day.
More importantly, it was filled with air, and the beeps would let people know if it got punctured. There was a real concern that space might be filled with micro-meteors, in which case satellites would not be practical. That there were no micro-meteors was the important discovery.
(These days, we are doing our best to create mico meteors of our own.)
The real reason was simply that the soviet atom bombs were heavier than the US ones, and so they needed bigger rockets to launch them. Those rockets could easily be modified for space. And the US certainly did not wait for Gagarin to launch, they simply did not have any rockets big enough.
NO, it said "The World's Oldest Scientific Satellite is Still in Orbit"
It should have said "The World's Oldest US Scientific Satellite is Still in Orbit". Bit like celebrating the first American in space. Or the first American landing on the moon...
It is purely a technology issue. When battery prices halve again EVs will start to dominate sales.
A decade ago the carbon problem seemed unsolvable. How could we survive without such a basic commodity. It would be massively expensive.
But, just in time (or maybe just too late) the technology of PV solar became practical. It now looks like Trump is right to ignore the Paris accord, because it will simply become irrelevant as people move to renewables for price reasons. (And the Paris accord was a toothless tiger anyway, so toothless that even Australia signed up.)
Smoking is correlated to breast cancer, and people smoke much less now.
It is actually surprising how ineffective medical advances have been over the last 50 years. Despite an enormous improvement in technology people do not live much longer than they used to. And much of the difference is due to reducing smoking.
This is in strong contrast to the understanding of germs as the cause of disease in the late 1800s which had a dramatic effect. Antibiotics in the 1940s were helpful, but not as much. And since them very little indeed. Most people just grow old and die from miscellaneous diseases, maybe modern medicine adds a few years.
Full size gliders. Normally the eagles are friendly enough, and can mark thermals. But sometimes they attack, ignoring the size difference. The go for the leading edge of the wing which would kill another bird. But it is the strongest part of the glider and the Eagles come off second best.
The eagles generally let you know when they are not happy, first making aggressive movements. Maybe the drones need some wide angle cameras to see them.
I personally have not been attacked by an eagle, but have been by a (much smaller) magpie. I was a bit low over its nest on a ridge and it flapped its way all the way up to me and dived at the cockpit (would be the eyes of another bird). I dived after it but of course it was hopeless, and the bird effortlessly got behind me for another go.
If you want you can join the Democrats or Republicans. Just pay your fee. Turn up to meetings. Vote on local issues. If you can convince other grass roots members of a cause you can make changes. No senior member of the party has to approve your membership. You are allowed to disagree.
To join the Chinese Communist Party you have to be selected by the committee. Only one in ten applicants are accepted. They want to see that you are a hard worker and fairly smart, but also that you will do what you are told and not cause trouble. But if you are admitted, then that goes on your CV and makes it much easier to get good jobs. If you do not get in you will soon hit a glass ceiling and be excluded from any senior role.
So, imagine what would happen in the US if there were no elections at all. The senior politicians got to choose who the junior ones would be. Of course they would all look after each other's interests.
You cannot freely express any opinion in the Communist party if you want to stay. And I do not even think you can join it without sponsorship. It is totally hierarchical, everybody needs approval from above. Sure there are factions, but it is not in the least bit free or fair. And Xi is actively purging members that have liberal views.
Cherish and protect our open, democratic values. They will be even more important as computers become ever more powerful, and capable of concentrating power.
The fight against corruption is largely a fight against Xis enemies. Most of the princelings are corrupt to various degrees. The ones that get prosecuted are the ones that could threaten Xi.
For all its many faults, democracy does get rid of bad governments peacefully. It is a serious error to underestimate its importance.
I get sick of people whingeing saying that we are just as bad as the totalitarian regime like China (or N Korea!). There is no comparison.
Sure, we only get the politicians we deserve. But we get to vote them out when they run too far off the rails. We get liberties unknown to the Chinese.
Our system is far from perfect. But at least we can all help to improve it.
He has been suppressing all forms of criticism and descent, of which this is just a small part. He is aggressively using technology to control people. And they even recently released a document recently denouncing civil society and democratic values.
The US fears them because the US owes China too much money. (Clinton talked about upsetting one's banker. Trump just doesn't know where China is.)
The Australians fear China because China owes Australia too much money. They are by far our largest trading partner.
The Europeans are incapable of any action at all without the US leading the way.
The North Korea crisis (I use the word carefully) is all about China. Yet nobody dares to say so. That could end very badly.
But the real fear is that China now has a large middle class. They cannot go back to the cultural revolution of th 1960s. When their economy stops growing at a fantastic rate (which it must) people will demand reform. Totalitarianism results in incompetence, nepotism and corruption. If Xi et. al. push back, there will eventually be trouble. Big trouble. By which time it will be too late for us to have any influence.
Incidentally, Chinese students are a major Australian export to China. But the Chinese recently warned that those undertaking an Australian education would become "incompatible with Chinese values". Chilling stuff.
The big one is tractors and farm machinery. Farmers get screwed, and that matters in the mid west where many of these bills are coming from. Who cares about a $600 iphone when your $600,000 tractor is dead during harvest while only the authorized rep makes their way out to plug in their special computer for a very large fee.
Apple will ultimately lose by being so closed. They could have owned the entire mobile phone market, plus tablets, plus ultimately desktops. All they needed to do was make iOS available for a small fee to all the other manufacturers. Apple would still make a premiumly priced product with the very latest iOS. But there would be no Android nipping at their heels. The would own he App Store for everything. They would own software.
But they were born a greedy hardware oriented company, and that is how they will (eventually) die.
Way, way back in the 1980s as an Honors CS student I wrote some code on an old DG Nova to analyze cosmic ray bursts for the Physics Dept (Uni Adelaide). They had several detectors, hooked into a CAMAC crate, and could measure the time difference between the receptors, and thus the direction of the burst, or at least where the cosmic ray hit the atmosphere, and by also looking at distributions work out roughly which direction the original ray came from.
Some of them are charged particles and so do not travel in straight lines, which complicates it. I just did the programming, not much to do with the physics, but I would have thought this would be old news.
Slashdot Mirror
Promise.
Would just cool down by emitting IR. Hot gas needs something to keep it hot, like a nearby star.
The article does not make sense.
Not air friction, the Sun. And it is not just the flux angle, as the glass reflects less IR at a steep angle. Ever wondered how we lived without air conditioning all those years? It was because of sensible design.
Modern robots can make the easy decisions themselves. And the more difficult ones can tolerate a 3 minute delay.
So Curiosity on Mars can avoid simple obstacles by itself. And take samples etc. The controllers tell it where to go, generally, and what type of sample to take. If Curiosity gets confused, it just stops and asks. But in practice I do not think it spends much time waiting for comms delays.
I think it is the aerodynamics that count.
Looking at the car, it has a fairly blunt windscreen and a pointy back. Which is exactly the opposite of modern fashion in cars with their blunt backs and very flat windscreens that make the car so hot you need air con on even moderately hot days, let alone the desert.
Not hard to produce gravity. And you can still have a weightless bit in the middle for fun.
That said, astronauts are obsolete technology. Robots can do it cheaper and better.
People do not actually use stereo vision for driving, the distances are too great. And we can drive fine with one eye closed. We do really clever processing to extract a 3D model out of one camera.
But computers based stereo vision works much better. The cameras can be further apart, and can be pointed to sub degree accuracy. The tricky part is realizing that a point on one image corresponds to a point on the other, looking in particular for vertical edges. Tricky, but much easier than reconstructing a 3D scene from one camera. Once that is done, simple trig gives you the distances. This tech has been around since the 1980s.
I have never understood the need for Lidar or anything else. Radar could be a good backup, if it sees something close then panic. Ultrasonics do not work in the wind, so hard to see how they could work in a car, other than parking. They are cheap though, I bought one on ebay for $2 the other day.
More importantly, it was filled with air, and the beeps would let people know if it got punctured. There was a real concern that space might be filled with micro-meteors, in which case satellites would not be practical. That there were no micro-meteors was the important discovery.
(These days, we are doing our best to create mico meteors of our own.)
True about airspace, but not the real reason.
The real reason was simply that the soviet atom bombs were heavier than the US ones, and so they needed bigger rockets to launch them. Those rockets could easily be modified for space. And the US certainly did not wait for Gagarin to launch, they simply did not have any rockets big enough.
NO, it said "The World's Oldest Scientific Satellite is Still in Orbit"
It should have said "The World's Oldest US Scientific Satellite is Still in Orbit". Bit like celebrating the first American in space. Or the first American landing on the moon...
It is purely a technology issue. When battery prices halve again EVs will start to dominate sales.
A decade ago the carbon problem seemed unsolvable. How could we survive without such a basic commodity. It would be massively expensive.
But, just in time (or maybe just too late) the technology of PV solar became practical. It now looks like Trump is right to ignore the Paris accord, because it will simply become irrelevant as people move to renewables for price reasons. (And the Paris accord was a toothless tiger anyway, so toothless that even Australia signed up.)
Smoking is correlated to breast cancer, and people smoke much less now.
It is actually surprising how ineffective medical advances have been over the last 50 years. Despite an enormous improvement in technology people do not live much longer than they used to. And much of the difference is due to reducing smoking.
This is in strong contrast to the understanding of germs as the cause of disease in the late 1800s which had a dramatic effect. Antibiotics in the 1940s were helpful, but not as much. And since them very little indeed. Most people just grow old and die from miscellaneous diseases, maybe modern medicine adds a few years.
Full size gliders. Normally the eagles are friendly enough, and can mark thermals. But sometimes they attack, ignoring the size difference. The go for the leading edge of the wing which would kill another bird. But it is the strongest part of the glider and the Eagles come off second best.
The eagles generally let you know when they are not happy, first making aggressive movements. Maybe the drones need some wide angle cameras to see them.
I personally have not been attacked by an eagle, but have been by a (much smaller) magpie. I was a bit low over its nest on a ridge and it flapped its way all the way up to me and dived at the cockpit (would be the eyes of another bird). I dived after it but of course it was hopeless, and the bird effortlessly got behind me for another go.
The poor do not matter. Let them ride bicycles...
Unless...
Those Mexicans can no longer come and do all the menial work. So maybe we do need to give them transport.
Um, places like Beijing have a pollution problem incomparibly worse than California.
CA will not actually ban ICEs because it is a dumb idea that will not bear scruiteny. Maybe a petrol tax though.
I should add that of course in China there are factions and court intrigue. But it is within a closed, secretive, group.
If you want you can join the Democrats or Republicans. Just pay your fee. Turn up to meetings. Vote on local issues. If you can convince other grass roots members of a cause you can make changes. No senior member of the party has to approve your membership. You are allowed to disagree.
To join the Chinese Communist Party you have to be selected by the committee. Only one in ten applicants are accepted. They want to see that you are a hard worker and fairly smart, but also that you will do what you are told and not cause trouble. But if you are admitted, then that goes on your CV and makes it much easier to get good jobs. If you do not get in you will soon hit a glass ceiling and be excluded from any senior role.
Completely different from western countries.
Here is a nice article on some personal experiences of joining the party.
https://daily.jstor.org/commun...
So, imagine what would happen in the US if there were no elections at all. The senior politicians got to choose who the junior ones would be. Of course they would all look after each other's interests.
You cannot freely express any opinion in the Communist party if you want to stay. And I do not even think you can join it without sponsorship. It is totally hierarchical, everybody needs approval from above. Sure there are factions, but it is not in the least bit free or fair. And Xi is actively purging members that have liberal views.
Cherish and protect our open, democratic values. They will be even more important as computers become ever more powerful, and capable of concentrating power.
The fight against corruption is largely a fight against Xis enemies. Most of the princelings are corrupt to various degrees. The ones that get prosecuted are the ones that could threaten Xi.
For all its many faults, democracy does get rid of bad governments peacefully. It is a serious error to underestimate its importance.
I get sick of people whingeing saying that we are just as bad as the totalitarian regime like China (or N Korea!). There is no comparison.
Sure, we only get the politicians we deserve. But we get to vote them out when they run too far off the rails. We get liberties unknown to the Chinese.
Our system is far from perfect. But at least we can all help to improve it.
He has been suppressing all forms of criticism and descent, of which this is just a small part. He is aggressively using technology to control people. And they even recently released a document recently denouncing civil society and democratic values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US fears them because the US owes China too much money. (Clinton talked about upsetting one's banker. Trump just doesn't know where China is.)
The Australians fear China because China owes Australia too much money. They are by far our largest trading partner.
The Europeans are incapable of any action at all without the US leading the way.
The North Korea crisis (I use the word carefully) is all about China. Yet nobody dares to say so. That could end very badly.
But the real fear is that China now has a large middle class. They cannot go back to the cultural revolution of th 1960s. When their economy stops growing at a fantastic rate (which it must) people will demand reform. Totalitarianism results in incompetence, nepotism and corruption. If Xi et. al. push back, there will eventually be trouble. Big trouble. By which time it will be too late for us to have any influence.
Incidentally, Chinese students are a major Australian export to China. But the Chinese recently warned that those undertaking an Australian education would become "incompatible with Chinese values". Chilling stuff.
I think that is our proposed launch technology.
The big one is tractors and farm machinery. Farmers get screwed, and that matters in the mid west where many of these bills are coming from. Who cares about a $600 iphone when your $600,000 tractor is dead during harvest while only the authorized rep makes their way out to plug in their special computer for a very large fee.
Apple will ultimately lose by being so closed. They could have owned the entire mobile phone market, plus tablets, plus ultimately desktops. All they needed to do was make iOS available for a small fee to all the other manufacturers. Apple would still make a premiumly priced product with the very latest iOS. But there would be no Android nipping at their heels. The would own he App Store for everything. They would own software.
But they were born a greedy hardware oriented company, and that is how they will (eventually) die.
Way, way back in the 1980s as an Honors CS student I wrote some code on an old DG Nova to analyze cosmic ray bursts for the Physics Dept (Uni Adelaide). They had several detectors, hooked into a CAMAC crate, and could measure the time difference between the receptors, and thus the direction of the burst, or at least where the cosmic ray hit the atmosphere, and by also looking at distributions work out roughly which direction the original ray came from.
Some of them are charged particles and so do not travel in straight lines, which complicates it. I just did the programming, not much to do with the physics, but I would have thought this would be old news.
They give the illusion of security behind the wall.
If everything was exposed naked to the internet, it would have to be designed properly to be secure in the first place.
"Sneaking behind a corporate firewall" only works if the machines behind that wall are not properly protected from each other.