I suspect that the hover mechanism could do a fair bit of the work; but I posited additional elements because it would be a bit of a downer if the hover mechanism were tuned too far in the direction of being a good thruster/steering element, since you'd be walking a potentially touchy compromise between being capable of aggressive maneuvers and being inherently stable, rather than liable to assist you in tipping over even faster and harder that gravity would cover if you leaned too far out of the equilibrium position.

Just for the sake of consumer safety and not reducing bystanders to hamburger too often, the preferred arrangement would probably be some sort of EDF/Vectored thrust arrangement: all the advantages of a standard electric propeller (ambient-temp exhaust, none of the noise and fuel-line hassle associated with teeny internal combustion engines, runs on normal batteries rather than some sort of hobby fuel); but no exposed blades to do surprising amounts of damage upon somebody's first mistake.

You'd have to avoid going too deep into propeller-beanie-chic zones of absurdity; but if you could get the actually-hovering bit worked out, I suspect people would overlook that for the chance to zoom around at dubiously sensible speeds.

Well, you could build a thermoelectric shell around the entire earth... Of course, if you can do that, 'stop global warming' is probably something you did in high school as a busy-work lab project at your school for particularly gifted hypersentient disembodied intelligences.

My (admittedly pretty hazy at this point) memory of heat engines is that their theoretical peak efficiency depends on the thermal delta they manage to achieve. Exactly the same resource that thermoelectric materials scavenge (albeit at miserable efficiency) into electricity.

Anybody who actually has some grasp of the matter want to chime in on where and why you would use thermoelectrics (and how efficient they would have to be) rather than simple insulation or one of the various waste-heat-recovery systems that transfer some amount of the heat remaing in outgoing exhaust gases into incoming working fluids?

Is the thermoelectric advantage purely that, assuming material reliability is OK, they are a 100% solid state, trivial to scale from 'handle with tweezers and magnification' to 'pretty large', and their output is easy to transfer and useful for all kinds of things after just a little DC-DC cleanup, or are there actually situations where they might be absolutely more efficient than insulation and heat recovery, rather than just easier to tack in almost anywhere in a design that you have a few extra cubic centimeters and expect a temperature difference?

In space, 'just use rockets' is not the answer people want to hear, because mass is precious.

In an atmosphere, though, all you need is a little extra battery power to shove air in whatever direction you prefer, which works just fine for modifying your path. It wouldn't be much like skateboarding; but I suspect that if you threw some accelerometers, clever math, and a mixture of control surfaces and glorified model airplane thrusters at the problem you could have a system that can be 'steered' by shifting your body weight, as people are accustomed to, with the actual work being handled by the aerodynamic components, since you don't have solid objects to push off of.

Doesn't solve the 'make hoverboard hover' problem; but if you ignore that...

If we could fab them cheaply (and they don't turn out to be as carcinogenic as irradiated super-death-asbestos or anything), we'd probably use carbon nanotubes in everything. All sorts of neat thermal and electrical properties, strong as hell, just replace fiberglass with engineered carbon and feel the strength!

However, (aside from the pure sci-fi value) I think the reason that space elevators get the attention is that, unlike many other things that are entirely doable with lesser carbon fiber, fiberglass, aramid, etc. but would be X% better with nanotubes; the going consensus seems to be "If you want to stretch a rope from earth to orbit, it has to be This Strong, and that really narrows the options down to carbon nanotubes and, um, um...

The question of whether what we build with carbon fiber composites today will be better tomorrow is interesting; but its a 'difference of degree not of kind' sort of thing. 'Space elevator' vs. 'Haha, huddle in your gravity well like pitiful ants!' is a much more dramatic matter.

There's a big difference between 'cautionary tale' and 'impossible' (indeed, 'cautionary tale' is one of the valuable tools that designers can use to make things possible and not fuck them up...); but anytime somebody proposes some arcology-style megastructure, I immediately think of all those (relatively modern, relatively upscale in terms of rent/unit area and clientele, office buildings that can't even maintain comfortable temperatures in many of their rooms, despite being built, by a single entity in the position to dictate the solution used, at a point in history where networked, digital, temperature sensors are nearly free compared to the price of putting up a decent, code-compliant, office building...

That's obviously exactly the sort of problem that 'big data' people probably love, just throw a few more sensors in there, let us crunch the numbers and build an expert system to control the heating ducts, etc; but it's also an example of how even people who should know better, and who can afford to buy what they need to do better, fuck up so often it isn't even a surprise anymore. On an arcology scale, that sort of incompetence starts to edge into 'life-support failure' territory.

You don't know. That's why we have researchers to handle that part of the job.

They also just don't have much in the way of resources, so even things that are doable from a software engineering standpoint may well be impractical from an available man-hours standpoint, and pretty much anything is probably taking time away from some other aspect of OpenBSD development.

I agree that ripping out platforms they don't care about is not the maximally altruistic path; but is the delta between the altruistic path and the more altruistic path really 'selfishness'? That just seems to strain the definition a bit...

Really, netflix, congratulations. Very disruptive of you and all that. And the transition from a primarily USPS model to a substantially streaming service (barring that one really embarrassing fuckup that you could hardly have handled worse, oh how we chuckled over here...) Really sticking it to the stogy incumbents.

Now, it would be a pity if your customers were to... experience service disruptions... would it not?

I think I chose 'Tax Act' based on price to e-file federal and state; but I was very displeased. Not so much by 'Tax Act', or even by the taxation(I, um, did my best to refrain from calculating how many years I'd need to buy Uncle Sam another slipped F-35 deadline, or a Literal Coffin Ship); but by the fact that I was, largely because of lobbying by Intuit and friends, paying to re-type numbers from a variety of forms the IRS already has. Seriously?

Yeah, sure, if you have some sort of complex arrangement get thee to a tax accountant, maybe even a suitable lawyer; but this was just redundancy for its own sake: I took a W-2 and a bunch of 1099s and a few other bits and pieces, all provided by various institutions to both me and the feds, and then retyped them into another form so that they could be submitted to the feds. WTF? That wouldn't even make sense for free, much less paying.

C'mon, IRS, just let me see what you think my return should be(you have to calculate it anyway when deciding who to audit) and I'll tell you if I have any changes or disputes. We'll both save time and trouble. How about it?

It beats the alternative of providing the upgrades for free to the people who can most easily afford them, in the service of maintaining a good, solid, hierarchy.

Doesn't 'cheapskate' have a somewhat perjorative connotation, either edging into 'stingy' (if talking about spending on socially normative things) or 'penny wise, pound foolish' (if talking about good sense in short and long term cost/benefit thinking)?

From what the article decribes, Amazon isn't so much 'cheapskate' as operating perfectly sensibly given their scale, cutting unnecessary (but usually bundled) components, and not giving in to poorly justified; but commonly assumed, habits like sending Important Employees to fly business class.

I can understand why they would be scaring their competitors pretty seriously; but I'm not sure that I see the 'cheapskate' bit.

You don't bring in machines for their imagination, you bring them in for their repeatability and speed on something the imagination person has already worked out. At least for the moment, this means that automating-out all your skilled workers is probably a bad strategy, similar to eliminating all entry level positions and then wondering where the talented internal hiring options went.

(It also seems to be the case that, for all the advances in fancy-CAD and haptic feedback immersive somethingsomething, it's still pretty hard to beat having access to some actual materials and machine tools for the designing process. Sure, it all has to get CADed out in the end; but humans have a lot of experience manipulating objects. Somewhat less with observing 3d renders of objects floating in virtual space behind their monitor as they click at them.)

My judgement is probably biased, because I loath my phone and its interruptions; but 'smart watches' appear to be devices that you attach to your wrist because your phone is configured to bother you so often that you need a second, more easily accessible, device to provide a summary of the incoming demand on your time and attention in order to see if you should follow through with taking your phone out of your pocket.

Maybe I'm just getting bitter in my old age and shouting at those damn smartphones to get off my lawn; but if something isn't important enough to take my phone out of my pocket for, the fact that I'm being alerted to it is a software configuration defect that should be solved by my phone shutting the hell up, not by it phoning my watch to demand attention.