Recent Comments

I'm not sure I get the distinction between protecting forest ecosystems and desert ecosystems.

Compare the density of plant and animal life in a desert, with a forest. Deserts are necessarily sparse, and so you can develop far more desert land while doing much less damage. Since development isn't going to stop, the LESS destructive method is preferable.

I can tell you there are lots and lots of plants in the "mostly-empty" desert.

We won't run out of creosote bushes.

The whole idea of protecting individual animals and plants is that all species play a role in the ecosystem

Actually the popularity of the endangered species act is all about people wanting to preserve their childhood, and the animals they remember. The smaller and less significant the animal, the less public interest in protecting them. In truth, many species go extinct all the time, their impact on the ecosystem is low, and nearly nobody cares when it happens. It's only when large animals disappear that people bat an eyelash.

taking one species out threatens others in ways that are often unpredictable.

That sounds a little too much like the fear-mongering mantra of anti-chemical/vaccine/GMO/nuclear groups to me. The ecosystem of Arizona didn't collapse when the Santa Cruz Pupfish (Cyprinodon arcuatus) went extinct. In fact, can you point to ANY ecosystems that collapsed as the result of a few minor plants or animals going extinct? Particularly when we're talking about one endangered minor sub-species of an animal that's otherwise doing fine, it's hard to justify all the expensive efforts to preserve it. And in the deserts, too, there are state and federal parks and preserves which will provide sanctuary for endemic species.

I'm not sure I get the distinction between protecting forest ecosystems and desert ecosystems. As someone who lives in the west I can tell you there are lots and lots of plants in the "mostly-empty" desert. Very few parts of the vast expanse between the continental divide in Colorado and the Sierra Nevadas in California are not filled with sage brush, juniper trees, pinyon pines, etc. Just because it's not an old-growth forest doesn't mean it isn't worth protecting. The whole "it's just the desert" mentality is why there are hundreds of threatened, endangered, and critically endangered species in the west. The whole idea of protecting individual animals and plants is that all species play a role in the ecosystem, and taking one species out threatens others in ways that are often unpredictable.

I also don't get the distinction between "free" and shared wifi. If they have trouble tracking people using shared wifi, then does it really matter if they pay or not?

I mean if France's favorite restaurant included wifi access with their Royale with Cheese, it wouldn't help anything.

I remember a documentary type show on the rise of petrol and how urban sprawl started where they claimed that the original suburban blocks were an illusion. Just ripping off the idea of having house and land in the country while stacking more people closer together. There comes a point where neighbours are too close and then blood is shed. There are few things worse than living too close to other people.

The amount of profit a corporation claims in tax benefits?

Highly doubtful that any law could actually do this. The enforcement would be highly costly, time consuming and have low impact. Unless they can walk around and then shoot people who violate the law.

Never underestimate hackers. There was a suggestion for using lasers for transmittting data in the office to reduce cabling. Lasers. Across the office ceilings. Carrying corporate data. Think about that for a moment.

DOH!
https://youtu.be/KYpJDdj_SZ0
bg

1. He returned to the show in May of 1989: https://youtu.be/BWE1B_L0wiQ
2. It's not the Canadian Mike McDonald. It's the American Mike: http://www.comedianmikemcdonald.com/

Bill Gonzalez
http://thebillgonzalez.com

Of course this isn't the first time light has been used for computer communications. IrDA was the wireless communications protocol of choice before WiFi ever appeared, with IrLAN access point-type devices allowing rooms full of PDAs to connect to the local network, and the internet, wirelessly.

While WiFi is relatively slow, much faster WiDi/Miracast/WiGig has been around in niche applications for a few years. The high frequencies used have some of the same limitations as visible light communications, which has limited adoption thus far. Since people will continue to want WiFi, WiGig will integrate much better with it.

Li-Fi has some serious limitation... Significant expense to upgrade your lights, or at least their controllers. And only one-way communications at those speeds... Your computers, laptops and smartphones will need some way to send information back. That would mean lights in your devices, and optical pickups all over the building.

Building cities outwards necessarily either requires removing farmland or destroying ecosystems, which is far and wide the largest contributor to extinctions. Since a significant goal of lower emissions is to save the environment and all its inhabitants, urban sprawl goes directly against this.

The US population keeps moving south and west... The Southwestern US is not farms or forests (except in small spots), but mostly-empty desert. While there are some endangered species there, it's a very small number. Maybe it's just me, but I can't get myself worked-up that development of thousands of square miles of desert land might eventually endanger a couple bird sub-species. Particularly in the light of so much more damage being caused if that land development was done outside the sparsely populated desert. Several (certainly not all) desert animals do much better in suburbs, anyhow.

Besides, whatever may be theoretically best, the economics show sprawl, even with commuting, is still massively more affordable than high-demand city living. People will continue to want to live without neighbors above and below them, and will want decent-sized yards that they don't have to share. Cutting-out the energy wasted by daily commuting is a net-positive result, regardless.

Building out fiber to remote areas doesn't help either as jobs continue to demand the worker be there during work hours. Look at what Yahoo did for an example.

The fact that Yahoo discontinued telecommuting, is not evidence that telecommuting doesn't work... Your link turns up opinion pieces on both sides, some saying it was a good idea, others saying it was a mistake, and most saying the number of companies who allow telecommuting keeps increasing. For Yahoo, I think it was just a tool to cut employees without as much downside as firings or layoffs.

If you exclude visible light, you are left with the sides of this, which are awful.

Your graph shows a tremendous amount of power available in the infrared. I don't see a problem.

In addition, HEAT reduces panel efficiency. So allowing lots of unused light right through will offer a small improvement in efficiency, by itself.

Why would you use solar panels at high latitude? That's another intentional handicap. Put them where the sun actually shines, maybe?

Because billions of people live at high latitudes. They need energy, too. Power lines over running thousands of kilometers have huge losses. We haven't gotten superconductors to work quite yet, and even if we did, the up-front construction costs would be huge.

there's casing and transformers and grid connections and mechanical mounts, all of which break and need maintenance. If you are on a roof, that's fine. If you are on the side of a skyscraper, it's more expensive.

The "transformers and grid connections" wouldn't be located on the sides of the skyscraper (perhaps in the dropped-ceilings), so no additional maintenance burden there. The "mounts" already exist to hold windows in place, and window washers are already routine, so no additional expenses there. There will be just a little more expense in routing electrical lines from the panels, which wouldn't be required with plain windows.

There are plenty of southern population centers to supply with cheap, dumb, efficient, boring solar panels.

Nothing wrong with that, but it's not as if these efforts will somehow slow or stop the production of traditional PV panels. People in less-than-ideal conditions for existing solar panels would like to get some of the benefits, too, and there's no reason to stop them.

Common solar panels are 20% efficient because we have tuned the bandgap to about 1.1-1.4 eV, which is the right spot to catch as much energy from solar radiation as possible for a single-junction cell. If you exclude visible light, you are left with the sides of this, which are awful.
"Doesn't convert or even block the peak of the spectrum" is a massive handicap for a solar panel. The panels designed without that restriction will always be vastly cheaper per watt.

Why would you use solar panels at high latitude? That's another intentional handicap. Put them where the sun actually shines, maybe?

The panels themselves might last for a long time, although we don't exactly have the manufacturing data to back that up. But even if they do, there's casing and transformers and grid connections and mechanical mounts, all of which break and need maintenance. If you are on a roof, that's fine. If you are on the side of a skyscraper, it's more expensive.

There are plenty of southern population centers to supply with cheap, dumb, efficient, boring solar panels. Let's do that

Like the spinning color wheel in DLP projectors that causes a noticeable and intolerably distracting "screen door effect" in a sizable minority of people?

Never underestimate the brain.

/have no idea of the science on this

Common solar panels are only 20% efficient, anyhow.

I remember, around 1990, one of my high school science teachers telling the class that once we reached 15% efficiency we would need no other power generation systems. Mind you, this was a long time ago. I imagine that - as a species - our power requirements have increased dramatically since then.

Not using SD is hardly a fault.

It is if you want more than those 4GB of storage... or to easily exchange files.

HDMI on something like this would be just brain dead. You debug something like this over a serial wire.

These are high-end devices, which are quite capable of decoding HD video, and that's been a very common use of RPi hardware. You may not be interested in that use, but clearly many people are. If everything but a serial port is unnecessary, why does CHIP include composite video output?

Well, yes confinement is a huge issue, and obviously all other tokamaks have used superconducting magnets, this uses high temp ( well liquid nitrogen is considered high temp) ones that reduced the energy needed to keep them cool. Less input energy should mean that getting to a point where they put out more energy than they take in should be easier. I thinkthat's the significance here.

But yeah, huge problems like confinement remain. I'm so disappointed that NIF didn't work. Although, in retrospect, I wonder if it was ever supposed to work for non weapons reasons.

Building cities outwards necessarily either requires removing farmland or destroying ecosystems, which is far and wide the largest contributor to extinctions. Since a significant goal of lower emissions is to save the environment and all its inhabitants, urban sprawl goes directly against this.

Building out fiber to remote areas doesn't help either as jobs continue to demand the worker be there during work hours. Look at what Yahoo did for an example.

I'm not saying building up is the answer either, as skyscrapers aren't exactly environmentally friendly either. If the answer were to be to retrofit existing buildings, and the process to build the transparent solar cells was sustainable and economical, then I'm all for it. Unfortunately, we've all heard the spiel before, and yet years have gone by and no one is building buildings with integrated solar windows. I'm not holding my breath that it starts now.

Just keep in mind that the 2 B is armv7 while the zero is only armv6

Is your Chinese tablet 65x30mm? No? Then stop comparing apples to oranges.

Not using SD is hardly a fault. It uses built-in eMMC flash, just like every cellphone and tablet.

HDMI on something like this would be just brain dead. You debug something like this over a serial wire. I always thought micro HDMI on the Beaglebone was a crazy waste. Thankfully they have corrected that on the Beaglebone Green. In the case of something as powerful as the Beaglebone, you just run SSH over ethernet for debugging, and it has a header to attach an FTDI cable if you want to go lower than that.

If you want HDMI for some project, you just use a Raspberry Pi 2 B. That one is already almost free, and not much bigger.

As far as I know, the reason Tokamaks have consistently failed for over 50 years has nothing to do with them being too large and expensive. Dozens of them have been tried, many very extensively. In all cases, nobody has figured out how to solve the exceedingly difficult problem of maintaining stable confinement for more than milliseconds. Confinement takes more than just a simple toroidal magnetic field.

There are other problems, huge ones, but until some progress is made on this overriding one, we are just stumbling helplessly in the dark.

I assume that many if not all Tokamaks have used superconducting magnets. You don't run currents of millions of amperes through copper. Not for long (more than milliseconds). Even if you had enough copper to carry it and enough refrigeration to keep the copper from melting, losses would be collossal.

Putting them on the wall! You no longer need to purposely cripple your panel by making it transparent to 70% of the energy in solar spectrum!

Common solar panels are only 20% efficient, anyhow. If these will work, and can be made at reasonable prices, they're not crippled at all. Things like skyscrapers, which need as much electricity as they can get, don't have any "wall" space that isn't transparent.

You know what's even better than putting solar panels on the wall? Putting them on the roof! That way you can lay them flat to catch the sun better.

Only at near the equator do solar panels laying flat "catch the sun better." The further away from the equator you go, the steeper the angle you need and the more efficient vertical mounting will be.

Putting them on the ground! That way you can put them on sun-tracking mounts, and easily walk around and make repairs/replacements as needed.

Rooftop is far better, as you're utilizing otherwise wasted and nearly-free real-estate. They should last for 30+ years before needing "repairs/replacements" and going up to a roof doesn't add much expense.

You know what's even better than putting them on the ground? Putting them on the ground in the desert! That way you don't need to pay for expensive city real-estate.

Except the city real-estate was provided free by the property owner, while the desert real estate had to be purchased, environmental studies done, endangered animal habitat relocated/mitigated, etc.

And even in the US, transmission from the deserts up to northern population centers is far too inefficient and wasteful, not to mention requiring huge up-front costs to build it out. The use case is even worse for other countries, who may not have any big empty deserts.

What the difference between bio-manufacturing and 3-D printing artificial organic matter?

Putting them on the wall! You no longer need to purposely cripple your panel by making it transparent to 70% of the energy in solar spectrum!

You know what's even better than putting solar panels on the wall? Putting them on the roof! That way you can lay them flat to catch the sun better.

You know what's even better than putting them on the roof? Putting them on the ground! That way you can put them on sun-tracking mounts, and easily walk around and make repairs/replacements as needed.

You know what's even better than putting them on the ground? Putting them on the ground in the desert! That way you don't need to pay for expensive city real-estate.

But that's what all the BIG BORING companies keep trying. Let's do the window thing! That sounds fun!

Build fibre out to remote cities, stop the current waste of petrol and other resources used for people to all commute to a central location, build cities outwards and remove the need for more ckyscrapers. We have high speed net now. Do we all need to work in the city?

I think you posted in the wrong story ...

I'm still waiting for the cheaper solar cells they've been talking about for the last 15 years....but never, ever materialize for the consumer. Last time I checked the breakeven for solar was 15-25 years and the expected useful lifetime of the system was around 20 years which is absolutely pitiful.

It kind of seems odd to me to miniaturize a design that hasn't worked well enough even at large scales. But maybe the physics works out like semiconducters where efficiency is gained with smaller size ( possibly less energy input needed? ).

As an alternative, I'd like to see more research put into Stellarators. Take these super conductors and put them into both, see which works better with them. Oh and we'll need twice the research money for that. But we'll get more than two results!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator

Spoken like a true engineer

Just because your date is deflatable and punctures easily does mean l.. no.. wait.. mine is too :-(

Because VPN users are so untrustworthy

"Trust us!"

"If you want to make a secure payment, pleaee have your credit card ready and turn off your VPN"

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34942685

because watching youtube on mobile is something to be avoided

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/494474/oil-droplets-turn-cells-tiny.html

Would it kill you to post an article link?

http://bcs.mit.edu/news-events/news/protein-imaging-reveals-detailed-brain-architecture

Please stop posting youtube links.

http://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-launches-optimized-web-browser-for-gear-vr

Please stop posting youtube links.

I wonder if this is more an attempt to curb the misuse of DMCA takedowns by individuals with no real claim other than they want a video taken down. i.e. Try to scare off people from filing false claims because someone said mean things about them in a video.

It's sad that the little guy needs these protections. If there were built into the law disincentives for the abusers, say, a million dollar fine, paid to the defendant, per faulty claim, then there wouldn't be the need for this.

I'm glad it's there, but I'm also sad that it is.

i just want something 100% open hardware and software.

is that too much to ask?

While I'm sure that these things have their use cases, I don't think they make much sense for most of my projects. When you add the power supply, the display, touchscreen, storage, wi-fi and a custom case your cost comes out already greater than a $50 Chinese tablet, which also has battery backup to boot.

These tablets also come with all the necessary drivers. You just wipe out the Android and install a minimal Linux userland. GPIO is quite easy to do with $5 worth of parts. Install some tinyusb on an atmega and you're done. This type of GPIO is much better in fact. You can do bit banging or real time control all you like without being worried about the general purpose OS scheduling you out. Plus, with the USB or serial interface you can test the electronicky parts using a regular desktop and then build the control tablet when you get it right.

I used to tinker with bananas and raspberries, now I don't really bother. This new part may come handy though, due to its size. If you don't need many peripherals and need to fit in a small space, it could be useful.

What would you guys use it for?

At least it's not just a race to the bottom in wages, any more.

Where is this going? The summery could be more informative

The school I am teaching in is considering getting Raspberry Pi computers. As programming will get bundled into all school subjects, there is a need for small programmable computers with GPIO in order to boost the pupils creativity.

I am going to suggest to get Raspberry Pi 2 B for development of a product. Once the development is ready, one can make it into a ready product by replacing Pi 2 B with Pi Zero, and it is something cheap enough that the pupils could even get it home.

For example, if one wants to make an "extension cord" with a box turning on and off the current when you clap your hands, the Pi Zero would get mounted inside of that box, making the product cheaper. The development itself would be on a Pi 2 B as it is strong enough to keep both an IDE and a browser open for reading documentation, allowing the pupil to do the whole development directly on a real Pi.

You mean the void that binds.