Who cares about the efficiency when solar panels weigh over 50 kg per kW? Even at SpaceX prices, the cost of launching a solar panel into space is hundreds of times the cost of the panel. If your alternatives are "buy 500 panels and put them on the ground" and "buy one panel and put it in space," why the hell is anyone even remotely considering the second option?
Wasn't the original concept for SPSS (at least in O'Neils The High Frontier) to build them out of mined asteroid materials? At that point the cost of the proposal is disconnected from the cost of launching the panels. I've heard many analyses of that which do suggest the economics of it is inevitably atrocious for ground-launched SPSS. Cost numbers for asteroid mining vary by a couple orders of magnitude though, which mitigates the above...
So now instead of launching panels, you're launching a panel factory. Actually you're launching their entire supply factories too (mining, high-purity silicon boule manufacturing, wafer cutting, smelting metals for busbars and backing, etc). None of this has been done in microgravity before. Everything will need mass optimization, and you need provisions for maintenance and repair on all these systems.
Doable? Sure. But you have to make a lot of panels before it pays off.
Did they? It sounds like they had access to confidential Apple documents, which allowed them to rewrite their patent in a way to make it look like Apple infringed on technology they invented. Remember, the point of a patent is to disclose new inventions.
Yes, but how are they going to do that if they can't see the drone? How will they know when they have succeeded? Are they just going to continue driving recklessly until they run out of gas?
Driving evasively seems like a very good way to attract the attention of other officers who might not recognize the suspects' car. Once the cruiser is out of sight, the suspects' best bet would be to "act casual." If the drone can see the suspects then it doesn't matter how they drive, and if it can't see them then driving like a maniac only makes it easier to be found.
Really, to "act casual" in areas with lots of tunnels and trees and other cars of similar make and model and color. Or to get off the road quickly somewhere underground (parking garage?) and leave the vehicle, though that has difficulties as well long term (CCTV being a major one).
Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion: Without children's entertainment, kids would be forced to read free books from the library or go play outside. The horror!
Look, shared cultural nostalgia is great, and all, but I'm not sure that makes for a good reason to allow advertizing to kids.
Doppler shift due to observer speed will almost always (i.e. for anything other than an actual ballistic missile, and even then only a missile traveling west) be less than the doppler shift due to satellite speed for a stationary observer. So, artificially restricting the doppler spread isn't an effective method of implementing the COCOM restrictions. It would also make PLL lock-up more difficult.
Concorde is old enough that its operators probably never went to the trouble of doing the paperwork to have a GPS integrated with the rest of the NAV system. For its (relatively) short flights, an internal navigation system plus VHF or LF radionav works adequately (and there were very few, if any, GPS/WAAS approaches certified by the time of its retirement).
Small generators rarely have emissions control systems anywhere near as good as the main engine (and it most cases, far worse). They usually have a completely open-loop fuel mixture control: a carburetor set to provide an adequate air/fuel ratio when the fuel tank is half full.
So, saying that only the generator is running isn't a very effective way to argue that these trucks are low-polluting.
While sometimes true, have you looked at some of the more modern portable and inverter generators lately? A Honda EU2000i can run the electrical needs of a typical food truck for an entire shift (~5 hours) on 1 gallon of gas.
Actually, Steve Mann was doing this fifteen years ago. There are web pages describing his wearables that literally haven't been updated for a decade. Think about that for a second. Bill Clinton was president when this was cutting edge stuff. And the Glass hardware looks just as stupid and dorky as the hardware Mann built himself.
It puzzles me I don't see much mention that Steve Mann was physically assaulted because of his glass hardware and discuss the reasons for it in relation to Google Glass.
No. This is wrong. First, sampling need not imply quantization[1]. Second, the signal to noise ratio of the continuous signal source is important. With sufficiently many bits and sufficiently many samples, you can exactly reproduce any band-limited continuous signal above the noise floor[2]. Those last four words are important. Analog data never comes without noise, and a "sufficient number of bits" is nowhere near as high as you think (particularly with noise-shaping techniques like dithering).
Now, it is the case, as user rayiner mentioned, that there can be advantages to using more than the required number of bits and samples (though not quite for the reasons he mentioned). For starters, you do need an anti-aliasing filter between the signal source and your ADC. Increasing the sample rate reduces the complexity of the AA filter, and digital-domain math can make up for it (and increase the effective number of bits, to boot!). But when you go to reproduce the signal, there's no good reason to use more samples and bits than necessary. That was the whole point of the "Niel Young paper" that has been linked to so many times.
Vinyl does not come close to the limits of consumer-grade recording devices (except maaaaaybe in certain bands, but that can be dealt with by using noise-shaping techniques). Does that make those who like the sound of vinyl bad people? No. Just like those who enjoy sitting in front of a wood fireplace are not bad people. Gas fireplaces have a lot of advantages, but some people like the crackling of the wood and the smell it produces.
[1] Tektronix made a very nice set of (entirely analog) sampling oscilloscopes in the 1960's which used sampling techniques to measure high frequency signals (on the order of 1GHz when contemporary continuous-signal CROs could barely reach 100MHz). These oscilloscopes displayed discrete-time, continuous-amplitude signals, and deliberately excluded the anti-aliasing filter I mentioned above (though it wasn't true heterodyning as most RF people would think of it, because samples were taken based a delay from a trigger recognizer, and thus not necessarily equally spaced in time).
[2] Signals below the noise floor are outside the scope of this discussion and usually require some form of synchronous detection (like a lock-in amplifier) or frequency-spreading / -despreading (like GPS).
Are you sure it wasn't the other way around? People were building huge libraries of music that only worked on Apple products (iPods and iTunes) around the time the labels allowed Amazon to start selling DRM-free MP3s. Apple would have gained an enormous amount of leverage if the labels had allowed that to continue: "Oh, you won't accept our terms? Well, then your product won't be playable on 90% [0] of portable music devices [1] and won't be available in the largest online music store (and your competitors' will be)! I hope not all your artists have left by next fiscal quarter." For all he talked amount it, I'm not convinced that Steve Jobs ever wanted to see the iTunes Music Store go DRM-free.
The market penetration of iPods meant that only path forward for the labels was one that allowed people to listen to music on their iPods. The only way to do that was selling DRM-free MP3s or protected AAC files. As a bonus, DRM-free MP3s worked on all the cheap flash-based players (which always had greater deployment than any of the DRM-compatible players from Sony and Microsoft).
[0] A number generated by my PRNG (posterior random number generator). But the iPod Classic really does have an absurd share of the >64GB market (probably declining now that you can get tablets and phones with 128GB of flash).
[1] Don't forget that Apple has only ever supported their own DRM. Protected AAC files play on Apple devices and only Apple devices. Apple devices support only protected AAC and DRM-free formats.
> Also - does he really have so much experience with that tech?
Well, I, for one, was fascinated with wearable computers for a time after reading an article about Steve Mann (in MIT Technology Review, IIRC). That was about fifteen years ago. Based on my memory of that article, I'd say that 20 years is a bit of an understatement.
