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Power

Power Beaming For UAVs and Space Elevators 137

An anonymous reader writes "The idea of power beaming — using lasers or microwaves to transmit usable energy over great distances — has been around for decades. But recent advances in cheaper, more energy-efficient diode lasers have made power beaming commercially viable. LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA, is best known for winning the Level 1 prize of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge at the Space Elevator Games last November. In a new interview with Xconomy, LaserMotive co-founder Tom Nugent, who previously worked on the 'photonic fence' mosquito-zapping project at Intellectual Ventures, talks about gearing up for Level 2 of the NASA competition, slated for later this year. What's more, LaserMotive is trying to build a real business around beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles, remote sensors and military bases, and other locations where it's impractical to run a wire, change batteries, or truck in fuel. The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth."

Comment Re:Four Kinds (Score 3, Informative) 211

proprietary connectors make it a non-usb cable in my book.

the different possibilities for ends should be limited to:

A = type A (std) male
a = type A (std)female
B = type B (D) male
b = type B (D) female
mA = mini A male
ma = mini A female
mB = mini B male
mb = mini B female
uA = micro A male
ua = micro A female
uB = micro B male
ub = micro B female

my collection includes:

A - A
A - a
A - B
A - mA
A - mB
A - uA

i am very suspicious of voters with more than 15 types.

Comment Re:No way. (Score 1) 979

The soulless zombie (wikipedia: lacks a soul but is otherwise indistinguishable from a human; this concept is used to inquire to what, if anything, the soul might amount) is useful in that it illustrates the beliefs of many people. it symbolizes romantic/religious/human intuitions about consciousness. i don't think it's especially relevant to the philosophy of consciousness, but it is a useful construct.

Slashdotters would love the challenge of a neurological zombie: Could you invent a beautiful machine that has a living human brain driving it? And if you could, would there be a way it could not have consciousness? I think this zombie supports functionalism, and so do I.

The role of the behavioral zombie (wp: behaviorally indistinguishable from a human and yet has no conscious experience) is again as a useful construct that's not that philosophically relevant. Most nerds don't have much trouble imagining a replicant of their own demising that would be very hard to distinguish from a human, but wouldn't have free will or self-awareness.

The white elephant in the philosopher's office is that the study of consciousness will eventually become more of an empirical discipline and rely less on the linguistic false-distinction or the unrealistic thought experiment.

Comment Re:Nonsense (Score 3, Insightful) 675

Not to mention USB/PCI and AGP implementations are all hardware devices, presumably to be sold. Your comparison is horrible.

The day Firefox is "taken" by commercial software will be a sad day indeed. The Mozilla Foundation could probably get a reduced price on a license easily enough, but that's not the point.

Comment Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score 1) 181

HELL NO! And furthermore, even if Flash penetration were 100% and they fixed the bug where the player captures my Firefox url and search bar shortcut keystrokes, I wouldn't develop for it. In my 14 years of web development, the only Flash I've ever created was a hidden music player on my otherwise-DHTML animated personal homepage. As soon as HTML5 embedded sound supports multiple simultaneous audio streams, you can bet I'm turfing that bullshit. Long live the open web.

Comment Re:big deal? (Score 1) 131

If you mean an App Store SDK, not sure what that is, but I'd bet MS will host 3rd-party apps soon.

If you mean a development SDK, they've already released one:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2009/09/15/xna-game-studio-3-1-zune-extensions.aspx

Look for SDK support for NVidia graphics soon.

I agree with this guy, Zune game programming could be a great educational platform:

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/09/16/zune-hd-as-a-programming-teaching-platform.aspx.

If you teach kids to write Zune games, you're teaching them how to write xbox and windows games too.

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