Re: It's an awkward shape
I think it will be programmed to crawl up there by itself.
145 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2012
Unless this is NASA's way of saying that building things in space is next to impossible. They have had the Space station up there for years doing 'experiments' but they haven't managed to build much while up there. This may be NASA saying the only way we will get a rocket ship to mars is if we build all of it on earth in one go.
I think the pivot point may be correct as it looks like it is just forward of the centre of lift, which will provide better control stability. Air pressure will sort out the canard travel problem (i.e. it will be easy at high altitudes giving full swing, and reduced at low altitude by drag). The bearings do look a bit weak though but I assume you are not going to try and pull some high G acrobatics while flying it so it should stand it for one flight.
I am surprised you didn't get to see a simulated flight envelope from the Southampton boys. You could always get an estimate of the flight characteristics by making a quick balsa wood scale model and chucking it down a hill (slope soaring). After a bit of fiddling around with the CofG you might have enough confidence to do the same with the rocket provided you find a slope with the same glide angle.
Alternatively you could ask Burt Rutan's mob over at Scaled Composites if they could wrangle some flight data as they have lots of experience with canard designed craft. They should have something similar sitting around somewhere.
Can't climb stairs eh. Well that didn't stop the Daleks from ruling over half the galaxy. Luckily it only RECOGNISES emotions, it doesn't actually have emotions as that would imply intentionality and self awareness. It can only emulates emotional responses, pretty much the same way a puppet can. So why the big hoo-har about this plastic pal that's fun to be with.
Emulating an emotional response will seem like total insincerity by the observer, leading to annoyance and eventually violence, when the perceived response is seen as some kind of robot sarcasm. "please ignore that I am pointing this gun at you and look at the sad expression on my face. That shows how much I regret having to kill you".
I think there has been a lot of overreaction about this, considering it is a fairly mild joke that could just easily have been applied to any significant other (especially if the word beautiful had been replaced with lovely). However, the twitter-sphere is merely a reflection of the zeitgeist prevalent among the intellectuals in that everyone must be seen to react strongly to any slight in order to prove that they are so cool. I suspect most of the tweeters and re-tweeters don't give a damn whether anyone was insulted just as long as they can be seen to be in with the in crowd (the 'me-too' syndrome).
Humans tend to conform to certain stereotypes and those stereotypes can be used as metaphors for illustration. Comedians have long picked up on stereotypical behaviour as source material (think of all those old mother-in-law jokes that are now passé). Using a bit of humour to brighten up a dull talk can't be a bad thing, surely, especially if it illustrates a point. And the bullets referred to his specific mythical girlfriend, not all girlfriends and certainly not all women. Finally, if a woman had stood up there and put up the same slide but with the word boyfriend would anyone have complained about men being insulted. I think not.
Any development tool is useless and pointlessly expensive if you don't have any developers using it. This freebie allows more animators to get skilled with the tool (much like learning to use a pencil or paintbrush) so that Pixar have a bigger pool of ready to go resources when the next film comes along. Shaving even a day or two off the start up time is worth the price of a seat.
For 10 million quid you could:-
convert old petrol tankers into solar furnaces that boil water to generate electricity with the residual steam condensed into pure drinking water. The electricity can be used to power refrigeration and other useful products like computers. This enables better education in remote villages and better health care and better agriculture. Also improves communications and trade. By reducing poverty you free up more resources for research into things like paralysis and dementia. It also reduces pollution and increases habitable land.
Surely what he is trying to say is that we might as well try and get rich people to pay for balloons on Venus as try to get them to part with their cash in a bid to solve the crisis in capitalism. That crisis being, as it as has happened before, that the poor are now so poor that nothing can make a profit for the rich. This is usually resolved by the banks collapsing or the stock exchanges failing so that the rich get financially slaughtered, but this time the banks and exchanges got propped up by governments so now the Fat Cats are now even more fatter and harder to support, while at the same time even more reluctant to allow their wealth to be used to support the economy they feed off.
Basically the only solution is for them to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes! Don't believe the propaganda put out by the wealthy that redistribution of wealth stifles investment and closes factories. It does exactly the opposite. A prosperous middle class is more likely to invest, save and purchase goods than the impoverished masses we have today. Small businesses flourish when they don't have huge multinationals undercutting them, doing backdoor trade deals and dragging them through the courts to protect their profit margins. Small local businesses also PAY TAXES unlike some companies I could mention. We need to stop listening to the threats made by the rich and bite the bullet with radical tax reforms. With over 50% of the country's wealth held by only 10% of the population there has to be a point where the system will collapse, either in revolution or anarchy. The alternative is to wage a war on your neighbours, just look at what Putin is doing!
Sorry to sound cynical over such a cool gadget but exactly what would this be useful for, except some 3D doodling. The filaments are too thin and weak to make anything useful and you need a very steady hand to make anything that looks good. I think even kids would get bored with this pretty quickly (like the old etch-a-sketches) as it is so limited and slow. It's basically a boy's toy for geeks.
I can't believe they spaffed £200K to produce such a crappy website. Not only does it look cheap they have no idea when it comes to usability. Where are the directions, where is the message or goal. They should at least have splashed some of that cash on designing a decent logo or banner.
At 12 year old child could have come up with a better website than this.
Americans have always been an optimistic people. Plus software developers really are appreciated in a lot of big American multinationals (just look at the effort that is made to improve their work environment). Try doing this survey over here in the UK and see what answers you get to things like job satisfaction, pay levels and the prospects of becoming millionaires. Over here software developers are seen as an unnecessary evil to be paid as little as possible by threatening to outsource their jobs overseas.
If they do manage to get a mind controlled exoskeleton working then these guys could be called on to control robots that go into hazardous areas (like Fukishima) as the ultimate in telepresence. Could even be used in space for extravehicular work instead of risking going out in a spacesuit.
I can't feeling that Hawkins is simply rehashing previous research in the hope that something will work if you build it big enough. Hierarchical learning ideas have been around a long time ( I did my degree paper on hierarchical learning in rule acquisition using a Pole and Cart simulator) and much of what he is proposing can be equated to the ART algorithms of the 1970s. I am also surprised that he considers the use of binary inputs into neural networks to be effective unless he is using his 'data streaming' approach to replace 'weightings'. Personally I think that AI should be looking at harmonic resonances in neural 'circuits' as an approach to recognition and temporal processing but sadly my mathematics is insufficient to the task of writing a paper on it.
Paris? well we are talking about an artificial intelligence here..
If it represents your input and effort for a company and your reputation as a coder stands on that input then, yes its your code (that's why there are comments at the top saying who wrote it). You, as the coder, are responsible for it and your professional standing is judged by it. The fact that someone else can use that code does not give them the right to remove it from the company's stock of software, only to stop their personal use of it. If her code had already been peer reviewed and accepted by the company then there was no reason to remove it from the code base.
Have they considered that instead of a multiverse, the 'missing' energy is simply the dimension of duration; such that the total energy of the system defines how long the universe will exist before it winks out of existence. With a bit of clever maths they might be able to predict how many billions of years we have left before it all collapses to a dot and the next Big Bang occurs.
If you consider that energy devolves into the triumvirate of observable dimensions of reality, space/time/matter, the universe is a whole singularity of energy split (or observed) through these three dimensions.
In fact this could rank as the ultimate in shiny toys for the rich boys looking to splash the cash. Why go to all this expense and technical jiggery-pokery when compost heaps have been happily digesting waste, often creating enough heat to actually burn, quite naturally. It's a huge sledge hammer of an idea to crack a relatively simple nut. Humanity has been disposing of sh1t for centuries, with or without water, so why the need for this hi-tech monstrosity. Again all I can think of is this need for rich guys to have the biggest shiniest technology they can point to and say 'I did that'.
Education about treatment and dispersal of sewage and simple sanitation techniques would solve this problem much more easily and cheaply, but then there would be no big hi-tech toy to play with.
Why would someone do a difficult, mentally tiring job all day for the same wage as a person who can stare vacantly out of a shop window and pretend to know something about phones. The wage differentials these days are ridiculous; I have seen software jobs being offered at the same rate as admin staff or labourers. Maybe the job shortage is due to so many people leaving the technically arduous engineering world to become plasterers or plumbers, where they can earn much more and worry less.
Why do these rich biz kids always have to go for the big , shiny and hugely expensive solutions to solve 3rd world problems. Most of Africa doesn't need BB coverage, just the towns and villages in areas that has access to electricity. It would be simpler and cheaper to have small drones flying at say 200 ft with wifi connectivity such that they form a peer to peer network (think of it as a flying internet). Each little drone would provide coverage for say up to twenty connections (a bit like a mobile telephone mast does) and the density of the drones would match the density of the population. With redundancy and gap filling it should be easy to set up a tailored network much more cheaply than building huge, technically difficult, mega-stations pumping out unwanted radiation. Or isn't that solution shiny enough for Zuk's ego.
It's a bit like the power companies insisting that only huge and expensive centralised power stations can be used to supply power to homes and businesses, when what they really mean is that it allows them to control the price of the supply and ensure big profits.
Artist's eh! don't you just love em? You can always rely on a sculptor to be so arrogantly fixated on their own idea of 'Art' that the subject matter gets completely ignored. I'm surprised he managed to remember to put Job's head on the top of it; which probably explains why it looks like it has been stuck on at the last minute just before the approval committee arrived.
I can sum it up with two words "bloody dreadful".
Instead of allowing you to fill out the form online, like so many other things can be done, they really are trying to put people off opting out. First you have to print out the form (or write your own version from scratch if you don't have a printer) then fill in the details remembering to tick both opt out boxes but worst of all is you have to get your doctor to action it. How many people believe their overworked GP is going to spend their precious time entering all these requests from patients. As others have said 'they haven't had any confirmation of it being done'. This is the escape clause for the government. By the time you have found out that your opt out request "hasn't been actioned", it will be too late to object. The information will have been uploaded and no amount of whinging (to who?) will get it removed again.
Surely is API can only be of interest to comic book collectors/readers, and only ones that know enough software to be able to query the database. Apart from allowing someone to be even more nerdy by giving them instant access to every detail (which most comic book fanbois already know), how would this information be used. To avoid legal litigation perhaps? To prevent plagiarism maybe?
There is one climate policy that no MP will openly discuss, that would actually work, as most of climate change is down to their being far too many people in the world. No one wants to propose that a cull on humantiy would solve so many problems we have. They are all just hoping for some natural disaster, like a global plague, to happen because big world wars are now too dangerous to contemplate. The alternative is a dystopian future where we fight each other for fewer and fewer resources until total anarchy reigns.
I have noticed that the frequency of posting has slowed down considerably over the last few years. And most of the posts are just shares of other people's postings. There is little social interaction going on now. I guess Twitter has soaked up that form of commentary. So I can easily see FB sinking into the mud of internet history as it falls out of fashion.