well how would you feel if you got something nasty because the doctor in the village was being creative with sharing needles?

the multi million dollare equipment isn't usually used to "keep healthy", it's used for getting healthy after getting something that would kill you.

you forgot the rough-looking-but-expensive tables to sip coffee on while chatting away on the macbook how you're at the makerspace.

also add to the list to buy expensive equipment that doesn't work well and that you don't understand how it works(makerbot 5th gens fit the bill quite well) and some stuff that's no good for anyone like the rotating table 3d scanners.

seriously though.. they should add a welding machine to the shop, a decent laser cutter, maybe a water jet cutter. a mill possibly. definitely a pcb router.

basically, the kind of stuff the college kids can't have in their college rooms. a simple 3d printer fits into their rooms well and if they have one then it's likely they want to actually have all the other stuff.

if the backups don't go back long enough, it doesn't matter if the backup device fetches the data or if the data is pushed to the device.

besides, all cheap backup hd's etc with a simple button, or cheap nas backup devices, do the pushing in software on the host pc...

It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.

It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).

Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.

If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.

You know what you are doing. Ransomware makers don't prey on the Slashdot crowd. In general, people here are well inoculated from malware, just because we tend not to run files from the Web, our Web browsers are well sandboxed (or run in a VM), and if someone calls up and demands we run software to "fix our Windows box", the response will make the caller's brain ooze out their ears.

However, most people on the Net don't. They go to a pr0n site, and get presented with "you must download this application in order to get past this point"... download it, and get infected. Or, their browser isn't patched and some add-on gets compromised. Or, a phishing E-mail says they have a UPS package, and they need to just open the "foo.pdf .exe" file to see more details. The ones that get nailed by those are the ones that the ransomware guys know are going to pay up.

Those students sounds like perfect management material. Don't fail them, but them on fast-track to vice presidents of fortune 500 companies! They will fit the job perfectly.

It isn't that simple. Some ransomware variants will find the backup device (external hard drive, NAS share, etc.) and zero those out. In fact, if the hard disk is encrypted, malware can just zero out the locations where the volume encryption key is stored, then dismount the drive.

Other variants will encrypt files, but will transparently allow access them until a point and time where it zeroes out the decryption key and puts up the ransom dialog. This makes backup utilities like Mozy and Carbonite ineffective since they may not have a usable copy.

For effective backups, one needs a backup server that pulls backups from clients, so malware cannot tamper with already stored files on the server side. However, outside of larger enterprises that use NetBackup on desktops, this isn't something that is often done. On a small scale, one can use Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, Retrospect, or a file share from all clients which is mounted by the backup server to copy documents off.

One also needs to keep good backups since the scrambled files might be around for a long time without someone knowing that they were tampered with. This requires multiple backup rotations and data lifetimes (again something only really found in enterprise-grade backup programs.)

I have personally found that if you mount normal panels (as opposed to the flexible panels that you tape/glue in place directly on the surface), you create some clearance under the panels that air circulates under, insulating the roof from the sun.

To me, solar is a "why not" item. Not just for saving on electric bills, but providing electricity in areas where it isn't worth the hassle to run code-compliant wiring to, especially if all one is needed is basic lighting or a place to charge cordless drill batteries. For RV-ing, solar goes without saying, because it keeps house batteries topped off and helps minimize engine or generator use. Even for a plain old house, one can use a set of panels, storage battery, and inverter as a UPS so one can move all the parasitic draw devices (set top boxes, consoles, USB chargers) to that circuit, where they get clean power... and are not on the electric bill.

I think the key to that $13k outlay is the life of the batteries. If it is like conventional lithium-whatever technology, the batteries will have to be replaced in 4-5 years, making that $13k a $26k expenditure every decade.

However, if the battery life is like NiFe with an automatic watering system, the batteries could run indefinitely, and 100 years from now, the battery bank would still be useful and relevant.

I'm in agreement with the parent. If cars were like reactors, a lot of the press would be pointing to an old Packard or Studebaker and saying how unsafe it is over 55 mph, so all cars should be banned.

I have looked at off grid in Texas, and unless a house is buried deep within the earth, or can take advantage of some natural feature (a nearby water turbine on a stream), keeping the place cooled in the summer is virtually impossible without mains power.

For everything else, a house can run from propane for heating, the gas dryer, water heater, and even the refrigerator. Electric for the smaller appliances can easily be handled by a set of panels, battery bank, inverter, and charge controller. However, HVAC needs will tie a residence to the grid.

I wonder if someone can scale the mechanism up for an RV fridge and make a propane based water chiller. This way, power needs would be a lot less (mainly to move air through a heat exchanger), as the propane would be the energy source for the refrigerator. Bonus points in using the Einstein cycle where that uses ammonia, butane, and water.

If HVAC needs can be moved from the grid, that will help immensely, especially in warmer states.

There are always flywheels. If those are good enough for IBM UPS systems in the days of mainframes, they are good enough for local electricity storage. I don't know how they compare for energy density compared to batteries, but they are a lot less toxic to the environment than all but NiFe batteries, catastrophic failure of a flywheel is a solved problem, and "recharging" a flywheel is all mechanical, so it is relatively quick. Plus, there is no memory effect, or damage done if a flywheel is drawn to a 0% SoC... it just stops.

Everything else in KSP has had months of testing (perhaps even years) and they change fundamental things like the aerodynamics model without letting it be tested by the established community?

But isn't that so in the Kerbal spirit? ;) Hmm, what's the coding equivalent of forgetting a ladder? :)

Yeah, the old aerodynamics was pretty horrible. Add a nosecone to your blunt-tipped rocket and it increases the drag? What kind of logic is that? It needed to be fixed.

There's a couple balance issues I'd like to see fixed, mind you. For example, it's possible to make small solar ion-powered aircraft in Kerbal. But only small ones, because all of the ion engines available are tiny, and all of the fixed solar panels are tiny, so while technically it's possible to make bigger craft, the necessary part spam makes the game unplayable. Fuel for ion engines is also absurdly and unrealistically expensive for no obvious reason. Yet solar panels and RTGs produce orders of magnitude more power than they should for a given size, if ion engine power to thrust ratios for a given ISP are used as the baseline.

Drop xenon costs, tweak power production / consumption for existing hardware, and add in nuclear reactor power sources (after all, they have nuclear rockets, we know kerbals understand nuclear physics), and and you could balance that out pretty well in terms of both gameplay and at least slightly more approaching realism.

(Note that one may be tempted to say that the ion thrusters are far too high power, but at least that's plausible if we assume that they're MPD thrusters with some type of advanced cooling system - you can get crazy power to weight ratios (by ion standards) out of MPD thrusters if you could somehow supply them many megawatts of power and dissipate all the waste heat - they manage it in pulsed mode, at least. But Kerbal's solar panel area-to-thrust ratios at the given ISP are not even close to being compliant with the laws of physics)

I love how true that all is. You have Musk making Kerbal references in his tweets. I've seen engineers from SpaceX doing likewise. I was once chatting with a researcher working on a Titan probe concept and he responded at one point with something like, "Well, like what one experiences on Eve in Kerbal Space Program...."

The development team really should be proud.

Thank you, but I said nothing about calories. Did I? I don't see it anywhere. I commented that a sugar SUBSTITUTE actually has more sugar than substitute in it.

By mass only, but thats a complete red herring since you use far less of it than you would of actual sugar.

Nobody is ever going to make a mass-market pure Stevia product because it's way too hard to use - it's just way too concentrated of a sweetener. Trust me, I've used it, I usually have to resort to weighting it out on a jewler's scale. It's silly to point out small amounts of sugar filler; for a given amount of sweetness you'll never consume a significant amount.

They could use something else that wasn't a digestable carb instead.

No, people like you and "food babe" would freak out at the names of indigestible carbs far worse than you do with dextrose. And dextrose won't alter the texture or flavor of the food product like many indigestible carbohydrates such as resistant starches would.

I was talking about ingredients in Stevia products; she has the documentation.

She has a page full of claims, half of which are laughable BS that she just made up, as is her typical modus operandi.

Right. Ok. Whatever. I don't think I told you to believe everything she's ever said, did I?

You're the one who linked to a running joke, its your problem.