cmsmith

Easy. Automatic copyright lasts until 5 years after the creator's death (or 10 years total for works by corporations). You can extend copyright indefinitely, but there is a fee that increases exponentially with time. I'd suggest $100 for years 5 through 10, and $1 billion for years 75 through 80.

Can we get a scale bar? or legend? and what is being plotted here? and where does the data come from? what's the difference between the contours and the dots?

Clicking the big dots just takes me to a completely different page that doesn't have that much more information. I'd expect a popup on the map that tells me what the color/size of the dot means.

As far as I know, the Falcon 9 first stage has never gotten close to orbital velocity. 2km/s is better than 0 km/s, but is a long way from 7 km/s.

Comparing one- and two- stage rockets is a bit of a handicap, since no one (yet) is talking about landing a single-stage-to-orbit rocket.

The best numbers I can find say that the Falcon 9 stage separation is at around 80km and 2km/sec (2.8 MJ/kg of total energy), and the Falcon 9 has so far failed to land under power.

Highest altitude followed by a powered landing by SpaceX: 1,000 m

Highest altitude followed by a powered landing by Blue Origin: 100,500 m

Moreover, SpaceX has gotten close to a powered landing from space a half dozen times, but has mostly failed in the last 100m. You could argue that Blue Origin just did the hard part that SpaceX hasn't been able to do. Obviously the difficulty doesn't really scale linearly like that, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this accomplishment.

GP may have been referring to TFA, which was getting into medium scale hybrid residential-commercial developments.

The parabola is the equilibrium shape of a cable which is supporting an even load per unit horizontal distance. The catenary is the same for an even load per unit cable length.

As for why, it's been a few years since I had to derive this, but it goes something like this:

* The horizontal component of the force in the cable doesn't change along its length

* This leads to the fact that the extra vertical load picked up in the cable, per unit horizontal length as you approach the support, is proportional to the change in slope of the cable per unit length

* The change in slope is the second derivative of the cable height, and since it is a constant the cable shape is parabolic

Fun extra fact - the parabola is the equilibrium shape because the cable can resist tension but not bending. If you reverse the sign on all the equations then they still work, but your parabola is pointing away from the direction of gravity and you have only compression, no bending, in the material. That's why arch bridges are shaped like a parabola too.

Data >> Anecdotes [1]

60% of domestic flights have wifi on them. My apologies if you are flying outside the US or using regional carriers 98% of the time (which might not be included here).

1: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/26/for-onboard-wi-fi-not-all-air...

(this was google result number one for 'percent of flights with wifi')

Not quite true. As long as the frequency of the dynamic load isn't too slow relative to the natural period of the wing, then not all of that force has to be resisted by the wing connection. That's why wings are flexible, why we put shock absorbers in cars, and why flexible buildings can be designed for lower seismic loads.

Structural engineer here: Buildings and bridges do not use 5, give us a little credit

We mostly assume that materials are 90% as strong as they say they are, that the building weighs 1.2 times as much as it really does, and that stuff in the building weighs 1.6 times as much as it really does. The total factor of safety is something like 1.5.

The reason that buildings don't vibrate (noticably under service loads) is that people would get queasy, so we design things for stiffness as well as strength. Aircraft are more space and weight limited, and no one is sitting on the end of the wing, so the engineers mostly just care that everything will stay attached.

On the other hand, I wouldn't pay to build a road 10m long from my front door if I couldn't count on 100,000 of my neighbors to do the same so that I could get to work. And if I work for Ford, I'm not going to buy an iPad if I don't think that Apple engineer is going to turn around and buy a car.

And a reminder that we're not the only ones looking at the website: I found a few ships with the destination listed as 'ARMED GUARDS ONBOARD'

http://imgur.com/CRbS9nD

edit: It looks like the website either hides the locations of ships off the Somalia/Yemen coast, or the ships can choose to turn off their transponders there.

My lab (US Gov.) is the same, except there are is also no title change for the top level. I've been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for two years, and work with people who have been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for 40 years. They get paid a bit more, and have generally put in some time with a 'Group Leader' title, but they don't get saluted in the halls.

The consensus is that this promotes a more egalitarian culture, and prevents people from being locked in to roles they don't prefer. Senior staff are free to spend a few years managing a large project or in a leadership role, then back off to get back into the research.

I recall a talk or possibly HN post I saw once, where they developed some software to warp photos like this to account for camera position and focal length.

I found this webpage with a video of the weld in action:

https://iml.osu.edu/vfa-welding

Very cool stuff - I'd be interested to see some non-theoretical strength test data and more application-ready packaging.

Earlier this week a few hundred police chiefs around the country came out against overly harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug crimes. That leaves the private prison lobby as one of the few organizations campaigning against sensible reform of sentencing laws.

Old-style tough-on-crime rhetoric from voters and politicians isn't working as much anymore, because people realize that it doesn't work and are less worried about crime than they were 20 years ago.

[1] Anecdote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

[2] Data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...

A couple things:

If WD were to start buying sandisk share-by-share, then the price would go up. By the time they owned 50+% their average share price would be a lot more than $86.

Owning 100% of sandisk is more than 100 times as valuable as owning 1%. With 100%, WD can tell sandisk what to do, has access to their IP, can merge steps in the production process, etc.

Did you take the photo to remember your tag # for parking purposes?

That's what it would have been for me.

I have done one or two books using the glass plate + camera method: camera mounted on a tripod, book opened up halfway, and a glass plate to hold the pages flat while taking the pictures. I think my workflow was 5ish seconds per page.

If I were to do more and had the space, I would have gone the diybookscanner.org route to improve the quality and processing rate. At one point I belonged to a hackerspace in Oakland that had one available.

Post-processing workflow was much easier, and involved using scantailor (awesome free software to batch align, crop, white balance, etc the pages) and then Acrobat for OCR.

Thanks, I'll forward this the next time they ask for money. A shotgun approach to investing other people's money in tech startups is fine, but drawing down the $__B endowment in 2008-2009 to avoid salary freezes was too risky.

I work at a US government research agency and am in the process of applying for a couple of patents, so might be able to provide some insight.

We do not patent things to make money. The most profitable patent that my organization (NIST) has makes in the low six figures of royalties per year. If we started pulling in real money, I suspect congress would shut that down.

The stated mission of our tech transfer office (and the whole organization) is to make US businesses more successful and competitive. The unstated mission of researchers is to figure out interesting things and to get our ideas into practice. Fulfilling both of those missions, we might patent something for a few reasons:

- So that we can license it to US companies and not German or Chinese companies. Not unreasonable, considering the US taxpayers paid for the work.

- So that we can offer an exclusive license to one company in exchange for commercializing the invention. Many inventions require more investment to be commercially useful, and corporations are more likely to put up the money if they can't get copied by a competitor.

- So that we can offer the invention royalty-free (or at least below market rates) to anyone who wants to use it. Sometimes this is easier and more reliable than trying to get the invention into the public domain via a journal publication.

- So that we can get the lawyers to do the writing for us instead of having to write a paper.

>The lab studies found that Samsung’s ‘motion lighting’ feature reduced the TV sets’ brightness – and power consumption – under international electrotechnical commission (IEC) test conditions. These involve the playback of fast sequences of varied material, such as recorded TV shows, DVDs and live broadcasts.

The simplest answer is probably that we stopped spending 90% of our effort as a species on feeding ourselves. And sure, a lot of that freed up labor went to people becoming car salesmen or yoga instructors, but a lot of it also went to people becoming scientists and engineers.

For any other type of loan, if you have more current/future income, you can get a larger loan. For student loans, you get a larger loan for having LESS current income. This is reasonable since the loans are government-subsidized, but it might help to have some correlation between the loan and your ability to pay it off (i.e. future expected earnings due to your education).

Base hardware is fine.

But the iPhone has shipped with 16GB minimum storage ever since the 4s four years ago. Since then the speed, resolution, and camera have all increased by at least one factor of two. All of these things also increase the storage requirements for photos and apps.

If I was the type of user who was satisfied with the base model of my old phone, and I buy the new base model and am not satisfied, then I am not going to be happy. I use my phone the same way I did four years ago. If I wasn't a 'pro' user then, why am I now?

You probably know this, but given the context (GP was talking about measuring cups) it's important to know that ounces can refer to a unit of volume (1/128th of a gallon) or a unit of weight (1/16th of a pound). They are equivalent for water, almost equivalent for most liquids, and not equivalent for most solids. It's just like if we had one word that meant both liters and kilograms.

The analogy could go from car:bike:bus to another photo of [miles of single family houses]:[a handful of apartment buildings]:[one high rise apartment with a park around it]. Perhaps in an ad campaign for SF redevelopment?

kevin_pet's coin would still be biased if it were caught. The article contends that you can bias the bouncing part of a coin flip, but not the falling part - GP proposes a coin with a biased falling motion.

If we're willing to invest in engineered solutions like hydroponics and vertical farms, then there is no need to be growing crops in California in the first place. The advantage of California agriculture is that you can grow crops outside year round. If you're growing inside, then you might as well grow where the water/people are.

You can do that in the USA too. Generally, the cab will arrive - but in many cases it is not profitable for the driver to come out of their way to pick you up so sometimes they will not. The problem being that cab drivers are mostly independent contractors, and the cab dispatcher and government regulators don't have much ability to force them to do things that will lose money.