bencompanion

I don't see why it's a death knell - as the linked article says, 97% of free users have less than 1000 pictures, and so won't see any difference. Your specific use-case would only be affected if the users you rely on happen to be mostly that 3%.

There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been working on stabilising the plasma inside tokamaks, and have had pretty good success by the sounds of things.

Getting from GEO back down to LEO would require pretty serious energy to reduce your altitude. You could possibly get off the elevator early, but you would need to then get up to orbital speed for whatever altitude you're at, which would be non-trivial for LEO.

The ISS will almost certainly be decommissioned by 2030 anyway, and we're not going to have a space elevator by then. There'll still be other stuff in LEO that we want to get to though.

Some proposals include spacing charges along the cable to break it into small sections and enable it to come down more safely. Of course, this means lining your vulnerable cable with explosives, which seems like a bit of a design smell.

Pretty much all approaches I've read about involve building 'top-down' from orbit, often with the earth end meeting an ocean going platform which would allow for a bit of movement in the cable.

The end of this cable would be 36000km up, compared to the ISS's 400km. The first space elevator would primarily be used to shift stuff, rather than people at first - there's no point having convenient transit for people if they've got nowhere to go at the other end.

In their FAQ they say they're working on MTB wheels, but that the challenge is the (lack of) lateral stiffness in a bigger wheel, which makes sense. The larger the diameter the spring needs to cross, the harder it is to have it only flex in one dimension.

Most things like rigid metals or strong plastics, sure. Things like hair-thin strands of carbon fibre mesh and thin plastic films? Not so much.

I'm building a kids playhouse at the moment and I feel the exact same way. I'm in here working at the computer just enough that I can bail to the backyard for the day and cut timber.

There's zero chance that it's truly been deleted - it's just not available to users anymore. Facebook wants that data with its associated discussions and interactions just as much or more than the person posting it does.

Is that right? I assumed a railgun's acceleration would be about as high as we can go. Huh! In any case, anything that we accelerate like that is highly durable and rigid - you can imagine what happens if you accelerate one part of a 'soft projectile' at 60,000g and another part at 59995g.

On your other point - would we have a chance to detect something that small? No, absolutely no way, even considering that there would be a continuous 'stream' of these things spread out like beads on a string.

Say each one weighs a gram, and is 1m across - that's just impossibly small. The Hubble ST's resolving power means that it can resolve a 1m object (ie, make one pixel = 1m²) at something like 4000km away. In space terms, that is practically touching. In interstellar terms, that might as well be inside the planet!

Any transmitting that it might be doing would necessarily be very low power, which means it would need to be highly directional and pointed back the way it had come, behind what must be a reflector more reflective by far than anything we know how to build. Unless you managed to get its transmission pointed directly at you by being behind it, there'd be no way to see it.

After decades or more in the interstellar void, it would be about as equal to the ambient temperature as it's possible to be, and in any case, it's not made of very much 'stuff', so it would have no heat signature to detect.

Lastly, at 20% light speed, they would cover the average distance from Pluto to Earth in something like 36 hours. That's not a lot of time to search!

The only possible method I can think of would be to detect the results of these things crashing into dust within the solar system. How much of a 'puff' a gram of diffuse something travelling at 0.2c hitting a speck of rock makes I don't know. Still way too small to spot, I'm sure.

ʻOumuamua is fascinating, I agree - but the most remarkable thing about it is that it's the first object like it we've seen, followed closely by the fact that it's taken us so long to see one. Most models predict these are pretty common - it's just our lack of spotting capacity that's stopping us seeing more.

As far as collecting, I remember reading a back-of-the-envelope analysis that suggested that we might be able to catch it if we made a really concerted effort. We might then be able to hit it with an impactor (or just smack the probe into it) and do some spectroscopy on the resulting dust cloud, but it's going way too fast in an inconvenient direction for us to be able to collect anything, slow down and return it.

Thank you - this article is interesting meat wrapped in lie-pastry.

The "will" in the title is just flat wrong. "Might possibly" is a stretch, even. People are sketching out the idea, enough that there are known but currently insurmountable problems in doing it. It's an interesting and promising approach in general though.

Some additional highlights:

> accelerate the nanocraft with a 60,000-G force

We're going to make a package of sensors, transmitters, power source and sail that weighs one gram and can also survive 60,000g's of acceleration for multiple minutes? For comparison, the US Navy's ship mounted railguns accelerate projectiles at something like 15,000-20,000g, and those are 10kg of high-precision tungsten, and need to do nothing except not disintegrate.

> The combined laser power needs to be something close to 100 gigawatts

If my maths are right, that's nearly the generation capacity of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...). Granted, it wouldn't be required for long, but recruiting (or alternatively, storing) a whole-extra-Japan's worth of energy for even a few seconds is just completely ridiculous. We would need large-scale orbiting solar or commodity fusion power before we could even dream of anything like that.

The poster child for me at the moment is Ghost of Tsushima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSAvzeopPC8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar production is one approach to this that is low-tech and doesn't require organism engineering. It's kinda counter intuitive that burning a rich source of carbon would keep it out of the atmosphere, but turning organic material into charcoal stabilises it and renders it inedible and insoluble, and it's really useful as a soil amendment in a lot of places, and it's very likely safe to dump in deep ocean if we ever run short of places to put it.

Farmed seaweed and algae > biochar is a very promising sequestration approach, I think.

Flickr has been seemingly starved of resources since Yahoo purchased it - development definitely slowed down and the performance of the service got noticeably worse. It was looking grim for a while there, so it's really hopeful that smugmug have bought it.

The reason you don't like infinite scroll is the exact reason website owners love it.

One possible hole based on interpretation is that the language refers to the "creation of a film meant for public exhibition". You could argue that uploading to Facebook with some restriction on privacy settings is not for 'public' exhibition, even if the group that it is meant for exhibition to is very large.

The document shown also doesn't specify that the actual exhibition is a problem. So, if I create a film intended for private exhibition and then later exhibit it publicly, is that okay?

It's not slavery. As the sub-contractor, it's your responsibility to contract to provide services under conditions that are safe and sustainable. In the restaurant example, don't offer a 30 minute service guarantee if you can't achieve it safely, or, know that on occasion you're going to have to pay out when you fail.

The sucky bit is being the employee of the scummy sub-contractor who promises more than they can deliver, and expects their staff to do bullshit like this to make it up.

Agreed.

> the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying.

That wasn't ever a promise, or rather, it wasn't "the web's" promise to make. It might have been the ad-hoc default for a while, but it turns out that it's not sustainable or scalable, no matter how much we'd like it to be.

Absolutely. The potential power is _water mass/sec * head height * g_ - more water volume is just as valuable as more head height.

Actually, looking at that calculation, I wonder how much the fact that this turbine doesn't introduce cavitation (bubbles) affects the efficiency. The water would be more dense, which would theoretically improve output... no idea if enough to worry about, though.

A well designed waterwheel could be pretty efficient in these cases, too. Waterwheels tend to lose out when hydraulic head (water drop distance) is too big to construct a practical wheel.

As other people have said, the advantage here seems to be that you get a high rotation speed out of a low hydraulic head. A waterwheel in this case would have lower RPMs, and so require more gearing etc. to be efficient for power production.

In general, turbines are preferred because the moving parts are smaller - rather than having a massive spinning wheel, you just let gravity provide the water pressure, and have a much smaller turbine blade do the spinning.

I'm not really clear on what position she was applying for, but given that the article is engineering focused, the fact that the whole page is just a massive mosaic of image tiles would be an instant deal-breaker for me.

I mean, I get the whole 'not everyone designs', but anyone wanting to work at that level should at least know 'text-as-images = bad'.