bencompanion

5 ms·

1.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 t
2.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 th
3.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 wou
4.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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.
5.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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.
6.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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&#
7.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 fl
8.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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.
9.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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.
10.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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.
11.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 &
12.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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
13.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 pr
14.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 curr
15.
by bencompanion 8y ago
The poster child for me at the moment is Ghost of Tsushima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSAvzeopPC8 .
16.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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
17.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 sm
18.
by bencompanion 8y ago
The reason you don't like infinite scroll is the exact reason website owners love it.
19.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 'p
20.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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
21.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 d
22.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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 introdu
23.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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
24.
by bencompanion 8y ago
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