Can we please start calling the practice of periodically “tar”ing up the hard drive and copying the resulting tarball to a cloud server “tarring and feathering”? The community has been slow on the uptake of that phrase and the resulting lack of goose-based memes is driving me nuts.
Upon reading this article:
http://www.gizmag.com/tin-whisker-battery-anode/22905/
One of the first thoughts which struck me was “a conductive aerogel (e.g. carbon aerogel) would likely extend life even further”. Aerogels ordinarily have very high electrical resistance (because they’re mostly air), but certain types can be made to conduct, and they seem like the perfect material for creating compact supercapacitors.
A cart with an LCD display which uses NFC or RFID to sense which items are placed in it and automatically displays a running total. Checking out is as simple as swiping a credit card. No need for cashiers.
If you run into a problem with sending encrypted email via the Motorola Droid Bionic, you are probably running into an issue with Motorola’s replacement for the default mail app: it does not support STARTTLS, only SSL/TLS connections which are encrypted from the beginning. The solution if you own the server is to enable an additional port in master.cf with the smtpd_tls_wrappermode option set.
Or grab K-9 mail.
We need Nickelodeon-style political debates: every time the politicians say something fallacious or logically inconsistent, they get slimed.
Note that people are still referring to “The Recession” to push their agendas. This recession began in 2008. If it is still ongoing, it is more accurately a depression. At some point people will need to accept the fact that we are in one.
In that we are taking techniques which were developed to accommodate our human desire to deal with problems by looking at them, then trying to train computers, which have no innate sense of vision and which could be using any type of sensor imaginable, to understand visual data designed for human use.
…Just a thought.
If my diagnostic company succeeds, I do plan to pursue research into new non-visual sensing technology which is more appropriate for computerized detection. The future of diagnostics is digital.
Anecdotal, but this is something I’ve seen for years. As an added piece of totally non-rigorous evidence (especially because including Australia throws all of my northern hemisphere seasonal biases off), Google seems to agree:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22runny+nose%22+%22sore+throat%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2010&sort=0
Though restoring control of every muscle in the body to patients with ALS is far too invasive for current technology to suffice, electrodes on the motor strip and pons, connected to receivers in the lungs and diaphragm seem like they would suffice to prevent further deaths from the disease. And perhaps even tracheotomies.
Is there some reason I’m missing that this wouldn’t work? Because if I can’t find one, I may very well partner with a neurologist and pursue it. I certainly have the neuroinformatics and signal processing backgrounds; I know that this scope and granularity of FES is currently well within the range of what is technologically possible.
You can actually make a keyboard which returns power to the computer when a key is hit, making it a generator rather than consumer of electricity. Wired only.