Comment: Re:Wait for the retraction (Score 1) 202
Rubbish. Gravity is not FTL, and your argument is BS.
I suspect a whoosh might be in order here... "The Sun is of course moving" should have been a dead giveaway.
Comment: Re:Science (Score 1) 202
At some point, science just got too weird. We had this nice model of the universe with atoms, some laws of motion and thermodynamics. The universe was basically a giant billiards match. It made sense. It was easy to explain. Then we get into quantum mechanics and everything is crap shoot. Multiple universes. Particles that behave differently when being observed. Spooky action at a distance.
Douglas Adams had some very wise words on this subject, the implied conclusion being that scientists studying the universe are making it more complicated.
Let's all pretend the last 80+ years of science didn't happen and we live under Newton's ideas of how everything behaved. Who's in?
Maybe you could go all the way back to when the universe began, 6000 years ago? But don't look back or you might get turned into a pillar of salt or something like that.
Comment: Re:Clever guy (Score 4, Funny) 104
Probably the tried and true method of 7 proxies
The FBI has just cracked 7 proxies. You have to use 8 now.
Comment: Re:supercapacitors are cool (Score 1) 295
Maybe the super capacitor won't explode, but you still have to consider the amount of energy they can hold, and what the result might be if all that energy discharges instantly into the phone if some fault arises. I bet it could generate a loud enough pop to damage your hearing.
Comment: Re:little light on the science details. (Score 4, Insightful) 295
did she have some new angle to the tech?
you can buy capacitor based battery replacements for cars.
The only new thing in there was "holds its charge for a long time", which I thought was the only real barrier to supercapacitors replacing batteries. I suspect that "a long time" isn't quite correct for useful values of "long".
Safety is obviously a concern too, but industry doesn't really need to worry about that until the first cell phone blows someone's ear off or laptop blows someone's crotch apart.
Comment: supercapacitors are cool (Score 5, Insightful) 295
The one thing I like about supercapacitors (and non-super capacitors) is how quickly they can release all their energy. I can't wait to hold one up to my ear when it's embedded inside a device whose manufacture was outsourced to the lowest bidder!
Comment: Re:An arm is what I'd be hoping for. (Score 1) 24
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . .
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
I'm making assumptions about your gender here, but please watch this public service video on the dangers of robot arms when used for massage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-VJLz65QhM
Comment: Re:Oh shut up you elitist prick (Score 3, Insightful) 24
So basically this slashvertisement is for a childrens toy of absolutely no interest to geeks. I'm still waiting for an affordable, programmable, personal robot to replace the Sony AIBO.
It may be of interest to future geeks. When I was a kid with an 8 bit computer (Amstrad CPC 664), there was almost zero barrier to entry to start coding. The book that came with it contained all the info you needed to write programs. 10 print "hello world!" [ENTER] run [ENTER]. Hey look at what I made the computer do! You'd have to write the programs in basic, but it was enough to get started. At somewhere between 8-10 years old I opened up the book and went for it. My social life evaporated and i've been coding in one way or another ever since.
These days you buy a computer and it comes with Windows. If you want to code you have to do a reasonable amount of work (30 minutes of googling and downloading is a lot for a young kid with no patience who doesn't even know where to start) before you can even think about it. Or maybe you'd install linux. If you're lucky you might stumble across scratch. Mostly it's much easier to say screw it and just load a game. It's a different ballgame if your parents are geeks too, but a lot of people my age still don't know much beyond facebook.
Anything that someone can get their hands on that might unleash their inner geek is a good thing even if it seems childish to you. I assume that's where the elitist comments came from.
Comment: Run hotter (Score 2) 198
I read that google did some experiments a while back and found that running the datacenter hotter saved more $$$ in cooling than the cost of the increased failure rate of hardware. That's fine for some computing workloads, but what are the obstacles to making computers that can run with an acceptable failure rate in an ambient temperature of (say) 50C (~120F)? I assume there are some major obstacles, i'm just curious as to what they are.
Even if you could run the solid state hardware at 50C and the disks in a separate storage room at 22C, that would still be a win right?
Comment: Re:C'mon NASA, get your act together on units (Score 2) 66
Where's the kaboom? You call that an earth shattering kaboom?
Oh. Wait.
I
It's on the moon, silly. That should be a "moon shattering kaboom". And it seems on-one has ever heard one of those, so we don't know how they sound like.
I was thinking about this. On the next trip to the moon they should stick a few seismic monitoring devices around the place. From that they could synthesize some audio which would make that youtube video a bit more exciting, and start a few flame wars on why there is audio at all from people who don't read tfs.
Comment: Re:C'mon NASA, get your act together on units (Score 4, Interesting) 66
"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
"size of a small boulder"? This has to be one of the most useless size descriptions possible (I suppose they could have said "the size of a random rock"). Given that they later indicate
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide
it's not as if they shouldn't have been able to come up with a more descriptive metaphor.
That bothered me less than the fact that in the same sentence they describe its size and mass in metric units but its speed in imperial units.
Comment: Re:More than 150? Seriously? (Score 1) 217
what about Cowboy Neal, you Insensitive Clod!
he's had his day
Comment: Extrapolation (Score 3, Funny) 202
if 1 milliamp produces a 6 month increase in maths performance, then logically, 1 ampere should produce a 6000 month increase in maths performance. Your genius would be smokin'!
Comment: Re:mA=volts?? (Score 5, Funny) 202
from the article...
"The electrical current slowly ramped up to about 1 milliamp—a tiny fraction of the voltage of an AA battery—"
Perhaps the article writer could benefit from this electroshock therapy as well....
Perhaps they could benefit from this http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/05/15/dictionary-of-numbers/
"1 milliamp [~ the amount of current applied to the brain to boost math performance for 6 months]"
Comment: Re:Another job is lost. (Score 1) 138
Well, I for one, do NOT welcome our robotic bartender overlords.
I like a real human bartender. One that I get to know, that knows me....at bars I'm a regular at, I like to have them set my usual drink in front of me when I sit down. I like that since I'm a good tipper...I get pretty heavily poured drinks.
I don't want anyone counting my drinks either.
There will be enough people like this that your needs will be accommodated. Instead of drinking at your local "hipster & automaton" you'll be drinking at the "luddite & technophobe".