I don't recall the details, but there's a company out there -- somewhere -- that offers, or offered at one time, to take your minecraft "thing" and give you a 3D print of it. Make it real, sort of.

It's be interesting to see the same thing with the lego software. An opportunity, perhaps.

I wonder if they've weighed the sponges. One possibility is that the sponges are deteriorating in a particular direction, thus engaging in conventional "stuff out one end makes you go the other way" propulsion. And also becoming traditional "will get used up" style fuel in the process. :)

Though it'd be all kinds of awesome if it was creating coherent motion out of energy delivered by photons without wearing out. Now *that* could be a space drive.

Not to worry, he had religion to take care of that for him.

Depends on your definition of market value. If they went to multiple companies I'd say CMU was paying below, but the fact they all went to Uber suggests that Uber paid well above market value to make sure they accepted the offers.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing but it's different from how we usually evaluate market value for employees.

The vast majority of switch mode converters are RFI nightmares. Just FYI. It can be a problem in some installations.

The fact they were working at CMU suggests they were already paying them market value.

What I think actually happened is that Uber treated the Robotics Engineering Center as a startup with a set of internal working relationships and expertise that they wanted. Since they couldn't actually buy the Center they just hired away all the researchers.

Partially.

Tesla costs too much because the tech is new and somewhat experimental, but if rich people keep buying them the tech will mature and costs will come down until it's mass market.

Ferrari is different in that it's a luxury brand, so it will always be good quality but more expensive. I'm sure it drives technology forward as well, particularly is design and manufacturing, but maybe not to the extent of a Tesla.

So it goes for virtually any new product.

That's one thing the rich are actually good for, buying the sometimes dubious new inventions and supporting product development until things are mature enough for mass market.

I think it's a bit of both.

There are wildly delusional advocates for almost any position, I don't see why Russian foreign policy would be any different. Especially when you consider that Russia does have some legitimate grievances against the West (I get why people wanted the NATO expansion, but expanding an anti-Russia alliance into the former USSR was more than a bit provocative).

At the end of the day Russians are just like anyone else, and they'll be willing to swallow a boat-load of BS so they can cheer for Russia. Some of them will go online and undergo crazy rationalizations on comment boards to convince people why Russia is in the right. They're largely following the same pool of newspapers, blogs, and pundits, so they'll all repeat the same arguments and crazy theories.

I have no idea how to differentiate these people from the actual trolls.

Maybe, though I'm guessing a lot of people only watch shows from 3-4 channels on a regular basis and watch only a very small amount of programming for the rest. HBO is a very exclusive channel, but even if you did that for all those 3-4 channels you'd pay $45-$60 for almost all the programming you get currently, but commercial free and on-demand with a back catalog.

To avoid the 20% to 40% power loss when converting from DC to AC

...they're doing it wrong. DC to AC conversion is easily achieved in the high 90% range. For instance, a typical solar inverter is around 95% efficient. And you can do better, it just gets more expensive (although that's a one-time cost, whereas energy loss is a constant concern.)

Someone is pushing some other agenda here.

Sure. Did it to myself decades ago. Offspring of my genetic line aren't of the least bit of interest to me; perfectly happy raising kids of other birth who needed parents (5 so far, mostly excellent results.) Plus that whole "all the bareback sex with my SO we want, any time" thing is awesome.

Which, again, is just how I approach feline guardianship. Don't need new kittens from them. Plenty of kittens out there that need to own their own human.

10 quid says the next mass extinction is the 1% purposefully "culling" the heard

So... if you stay quiet, you should be okay.

Heh, what I really l hope for in the long run is that us Europeans start talking about a sovereign European nation.
We should all keep our regional differences and be proud of them but start to feel like what we are, members of the great European nation.
Be proud of what we share, cherish what makes us unique.

I look across that ocean and like what I see.
At least, I hope we aren't going with brain dead American schemes like 'Companies are Persons' :).

With nations as with companies, larger scale is often synonymous with greater efficiency and thus savings.
Yes there are policies that are best tackled on a local or regional level but things like fiscal and safety legislation are together with defence best done on a EU-wide scale.

It's that old 'Level Playing Field' that will enable greater prosperity for all without hurting the few.