Now, for electric cars to put them out of business, they'd have to be a relevant percentage of total vehicles - and overall, that will certainly take time. But the case becomes different in specialty markets. Different states and localities will (and already do) offer different EV incentives, and the natural use case for EVs varies between locations (urban/suburban/rural, mild vs. hot vs. cold climate, terrain, geography (isolated islands or areas without good road connects to the outside world, for example), areas with different driver profiles, and so forth). So an overall EV adoption rate of 1% might actually be 10%, 20% or more in certain areas. That could well be enough to start driving gas stations out of business in such areas, creating a potential contageon effect.

That said, business owners aren't stupid, and one expects them to adapt. For example, where appropriate one would expect gas stations to respond to increasing EV penetration by adding rapid charge stations. Electricity is cheap, but if someone needs a rapid charge (for a road trip or whatnot), they'll pay the going rate, even if it's similar to the cost of gasoline per unit distance traveled. They're not just going to say "meh, I'll just plug into a wall socket and wait overnight". So if you have an existing gas station with all of its capital costs of installing tanks and pumps already paid for, one would expect them to keep selling gasoline even as an increasing percentage of their customers switch over to electricity. Maybe they'll find it cheaper to remove broken pumps than fix them. Maybe they'll eventually hit a point where it's no longer cost effective to maintain their fuel tanks and have to stop selling gasoline altogether. But neither of these things are a "suddenly going out of business because EVs just showed up" scenario.

(Of course, there's a counter to what I just wrote, which is that - given that only a small percentage of EV charging will ever be fast charging - you're looking at a smaller potential market)

Well given that on his news website he says:

In fact if you go right to stallman.org it's current front and center at the top.

Time and time again I see news articles that seem to herald the idea that users are willing to sacrifice something like privacy for the use of software. Take Facebook for an example. You get a robust and snappy storage and website for communication at the cost of control over your life and privacy. And as I try to explain to people the tradeoffs most of them seem to be complacent. Even I myself use GMail, there's just no better mail service. Even if there were, I'd have to run the server from my home to be sure that I'm in control in it and it's truly free (by your definition). So given that much of the populace isn't even prepared technologically to harness truly free software, don't you think they have slowly accepted the trade offs and that the pros of your arguments -- though sound -- are only possibly realized by those skilled enough to edit source code or host their own mail server from their home?

I found your piece on selling free software to be pretty logical on paper. However, has it ever worked in the wild? Can you name companies or revenues that currently operate on this idea (and I'm not talking about services or support of the software)? I simply can't come up with a widely used monetized piece of software licensed under the GNU GPL whereby the original software was sold at a single price and shipped with the source code -- free for the original purchaser to distribute by the license's clauses. Can you list any revenue generation from that? I must admit I'm not exactly enamored with paying for free software (as in your definition of free) before it's written yet I cannot think of any other way this would fairly compensate the developer.

You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com

I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)

Um... read the paper, page 10.....

Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...

Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.

Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)

127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.

That actually doesn't sound that bad:

"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.

"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)

That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.

I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.

And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.

I've cut a plastic binding with a sharp rock. I didn't knap it myself, it was naturally sharp, but... I don't think it gets much more old school than that ;) Unless there's someone here who made productive use of throwing their own excrement in a production environment.

Combining multiple high res adjacent pictures here.

This is magnificent - I count at least ten different types of terrain in just this tiny part of Pluto. What a world.

And IMHO it looks even more like subglacial liquids at play now.

I agree with most of what you wrote. But I have the most interest in sample returns because we have such vastly greater analysis capabilities here on Earth than we could ever send on a mission - especially a lower budget mission. And by leaving off surface science hardware, you save development costs and a significant amount of spacecraft mass.

Also, capturing samples, you don't have to land to have a low impact velocity. If you reach Saturn via ion propulsion then you could at little cost enter a Molniya-like orbit over the plumes so that the spacecraft would be nearly stationary relative to the particles during collection. Enceladus orbits are slow to begin with due to the low gravity (0,114m/s versus Earth's 9,81), and by positioning a high apogee or near-apogee over the plumes it might even be possible to collect jet material at lower impact velocity than one could from the ground. Enceladus's gravity would contribute to decelerating the particles and, if desired, one could have the probe's ascent phase over the plumes (rather than the apogee) for further relative velocity reduction. Impact velocity would be not much more than the random variation between the particles' individual trajectories, and some would impact with near-zero velocity. Combined with a carbon aerogel collector (much less dense than the silica aerogel used by Stardust), I seriously doubt you'd do any damage at all to what's collected - most particles shouldn't even melt.

Every added system is added mass and development cost; landers don't usually come cheap, even on a low-gravity body like Enceladus. And dropping a lander near potentially unpredictable fissure geysers carries a risk. So I personally tend to favor spaceborne collection. That said, one would probably learn more from the surface, and you'd be able to sample surface ices as well, not just plumes.