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The Companies

Tesla

Makes electrical cars, develops technology for same. Loses money hoping for future profits

Loans money to SolarCity via its own stock
Borrowed  $465MM from Gov’t  at 3% and $38MM from Elon Musk at 10% plus stock options

Does not make money


SolarCity

Makes and leases solar panels to homeowners. Loses money hoping for a back-end profit

Borrows money from Tesla
Borrows Money from SpaceX

Does not make money


SpaceX

Will provide future service related to satellite launches. It makes money via prepaying customers

Loans money to SolarCity at approx. 10%
Borrows Money from  Government at approx. 4%
Makes money


Elon Musk now has 2 companies that do not make money. He has 1 that makes money from prepayments for services yet to be given.  All are financed by the US taxpayer at ridiculously below market rates. The table is now set for financing using inflated currency (sound familiar?) in the form of Tesla stock to get real cash in Mr. Musk's pockets.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-06/how-elon-musk-used-broken-marketplace-play-us-all?page=1



Agradeço comentários acerca deste artigo. 

Ultimamente parece estar a ganhar momentum a ideia de que o Elon Musk poderá estar no centro de uma fraude e com a explosão do Falcon 9 a SpaceX pode vir a ter no curto prazo grandes dificuldades.

Será que pode estar perto uma implosão deste magnífico império tecnológico?

Serve este tópico para se abrirem sugestões de especulação em empresas que potencialmente irão ao céu ou colapsar com esta crise.

Sector Medicina,
Equipamentos de protecção pessoal biológica.
Estufas portáteis.

Que tipo de equipamento é vendido, máquinas, medicamentos...

Sugestões para especular.

Eu devo estar a ficar velho e a perder capacidades e paciência...

Estou há 3 horas para instalar o ultimo android e um ROM decente no galaxy i9000 q tenho à uns 3 anos... e ainda nem consegui fazer uma só alteração.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=723596
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2039755
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1837223

dasss... q isto de andar nas sidelines tem q se lhe diga.

acho que à pala disto ainda arranjo desculpa para comprar um nexus e esquecer os hacks. Que sempre os fiz, mas isto chega a um ponto onde já não há paciência.

irra!

Um Rover Chinês na Lua.

Chang'e 3 has successfully landed on the Moon

The official landing time for Chang'e 3 was 13:11:18 UT -- a full half-hour earlier than the time announced yesterday, which meant that I missed the action. Thank goodness for denizens of the Internet making screen caps of the images that the lander returned during its descent to the moon! There was not live video but there were video frames transmitted. According to a member of the mission team interviewed after the landing on Chinese state television (CCTV), they expected 10 frames to be transmitted but actually received 59. Here is an animation of a few of them:

BREAKING: China Successfully Soft-Lands Probe on the Moon 12/14/2013 - Video Watch

Recebi esta hoje.

com morada: Montepio@wpengine.com

e com link na imagem que não vou postar por razões óbvias.

Um projecto para ganhar o concurso do UberGeek:

DukePad by Oracle

The DukePad is a Do-It-Yourself, make-at-home tablet computer based on the Raspberry PI and JavaSE Embedded 8. The plans and instructions for building the DukePad are available here, and we're working with suppliers to make available pre-made kits that can be more easily assembled. The software on the DukePad uses Raspbian Linux as the operating system, and an OSGi-based JavaFX environment. Within this DukePad environment, apps are simple JavaFX OSGi Modules.

The DukePad is not a product, it is an open source, freely available set of plans and software for assembling your own tablet using off the shelf components. As such, the quality of the DukePad software environment is demo-quality (although we did strive to write as much real functionality as we could, the realities of demo presentations requires sacrificing time on parts of the applications that are not going to be shown, in favor of smoothing out those parts that will be shown). The code is hosted in the OpenJFX repositories under apps/experiments/DukePad. We hope to see forks of this code (GitHub, BitBucket, whatever you like best) and lots of experimentation and improvement that can be shared.

This guide assumes that your Raspberry PI has "dukepad" as the host name, although of course you can use anything (including the raw IP address). The real work starts with step 3, building the DukePad software. One thing to keep in mind, is that although the Raspberry PI can run X11, we will not normally use it, since JavaFX is going to take over the entire screen. When downloading software to the PI, you can choose either to start up X (startx), or you can choose to download onto your desktop system and sftp / scp the files over the PI. This guide assumes you know how to get files onto the PI (and if not, a quick lesson on sftp / scp should do the trick).

Mais detalhes em: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/DukePad


este é um exemplo de um excelente projecto de oficina para estudantes de electrónica.

Desde há um mês que comecei a utilizar este método de correcção da córnea e estou satisfeito. Não há operação e riscos associados e deixa-se de utilizar lentes de contacto ou óculos durante o dia.

Excelente.

Colocam-se as lentes de contacto durante a noite, que corrigem a córnea, para que de manhã se retirem as lentes e se desfrute de uma visão corrigida.

O meu principal e grande problema é a miopia, mas por arrasto fiquei com o astigmatismo corrigido também e quem as utiliza também deixa de ter hipermatropia.

What is Orthokeratology?

Como a meditação e diferentes técnicas têm sido discutidas ao longo do tempo e ao longo de vários tópicos, crio assim um onde se pode centralizar informação e discussão do tema.

Como primeiro post coloco um artigo recente do blog Buffer, que explica o que é a meditação e quais os seus benefícios.

What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate (And How it Benefits You)

Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me. More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness.

As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minutes per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the first step to consistently achieving it. So even thought two minutes won’t make much difference, that’s where I started. Whether you’re as skeptical as I used to be, or you’re well ahead of me with a meditation habit of several hours, I think it’s always interesting to find out how new habits affect our brains. I had a look into meditation to see what’s going on inside our brains when we do this, and what I found is pretty interesting.

What is Meditation?

There are different ways to meditate, and since it’s such a personal practice there are probably more than any of us know about. There are a couple that are usually focused on heavily in scientific research, though. These are focused-attention, or mindful meditation, which is where you focus on one specific thing—it could be your breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when it wanders.

The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of the things happening around you—you simply notice everything without reacting.

What Happens in Your Brain When You Meditate

This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology like fMRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate. The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves, which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.

In the image below you can see how the beta waves (shown in bright colors on the left) are dramatically reduced during meditation (on the right).



Below is the best explanation I found of what happens in each part of the brain during meditation:

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Frontal lobe
This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.

Parietal lobe
This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.

Thalamus
The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.

Reticular formation
As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.

How Meditation Affects You

Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look at the research into the ways it affects our health.

Better Focus

Because meditation is a practice in focusing our attention and being aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular bouts of meditation.

Less Anxiety

This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because we're actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.

What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.

When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here’s a good example:

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For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.

More Creativity

As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to study, but there is some research into how meditation can affect our creativity.

Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.

More Compassion

Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images.

Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people.

Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate.

Better Memory

One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain “their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.

Less Stress

Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, which one third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.

More Gray Matter

Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability, and heightened focus during daily life.

Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.



A Note on Getting Started

One of the best (free!) apps I’ve come across to help you get started with meditation is called Headspace. Invented by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, this is meditation geared towards busy people like you and me. Andy guides you through 10 minutes of simple meditation every day. You don’t have to do anything—just sit down and turn on the app and let Andy’s calm voice (his voice is truly amazing–the app is worth trying just for that!) explain how to approach meditation.

Here’s a great infographic that gives an overview of the different kinds of meditation and some tips for fitting in meditation at work.

INTERVIEW WITH RAY KURZWEIL ON FUTURE AI PROJECT AT GOOGLE

In an exclusive with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil gave one of his first interviews since the December announcement that he joined Google full time as Director of Engineering. Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray discusses his new role, how his research interests connect with his latest book How To Create A Mind (which Keith recently interviewed Ray about here), and how technology will advance to produce a “cybernetic friend”

“The project we plan to do is focused on natural language understanding,” said Kurzweil. “We want to give computers the ability to understand the language that they’re reading.”

Regarding the specific kind of artificial intelligence that a Kurzweil-led project will aim to do, he said, “It will know at a semantically deep level what you’re interested in, not just the topic…[but] the specific questions and concerns you have.” He added, “I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.” While it may be take some years to develop this technology, Kurzweil added that he personally thinks it will be embedded into what Google offers currently, rather than as a stand-alone product necessarily.

Now if you’ve been following Singularity Hub’s coverage of personal assistants like Siri, Evi, and the latest, Maluuba, as well as Google Voice Search, then you know that natural language recognition is one of the highest priorities for tech companies today. That’s exciting because it means that holding sophisticated conversations with computers — in much the same way that Dave Bowman does with HAL 9000 in the movie 2001 – is going to become a reality very soon.

As Kurzweil points out, the hurdle currently is that language is hierarchical, and the human brain processes language in a hierarchical way, depending on what stimuli it receives during key stages of development. Computers like IBM’s Watson are just now being programmed to process human information in a related way. Inevitably, the sophistication of this software will grow — slowly, at first, but in all likelihood become exponential, as with many other technological trends that Kurzweil himself has identified.

Though the video is only 10 minutes, it’s great to hear Ray download some more tidbits about what he’ll be doing once he enters Google’s doors. Odds are that when he reemerges, the ability of our computers to understand us is going to take a quantum leap.

http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/10/exclusive-interview-with-ray-kurzweil-on-future-ai-project-at-google/

Com tristeza soube desta notícia: Joel Costa foi afastado da Antena 2 e com ele o Questões de Moral.
A justificação? Joel Costa reformou-se pela SS e como a reforma é bastante superior ao salário, optou por deixar a Antena 2. Isto é a história oficial...

Em:

A Nossa Rádio...

«E para terminar, e a talhe de foice ou não, registe-se que foi Pio XII que fundou o Instituto para as Obras Religiosas, a tal designação que vem a ser a do Banco do Vaticano, de que tão abundantemente falei nestes últimos programas. Últimos, disse bem, últimos programas originais de "Questões de Moral". E se eu soubesse que eram estes os últimos não me despediria assim com estes assuntos, mas enfim...
Ana Almeida Dias e Cristina do Carmo, obrigado por tudo. Adeus, minhas amigas, até ao meu improvável regresso!»

...

Os muitos e indefectíveis ouvintes do "Questões de Moral", ao contrário dos sujeitos que se encontram aos comandos da Antena 2, não são desprovidos da capacidade e da sensibilidade de reconhecerem ao programa o valor e o indiscutível interesse cultural que efectivamente tem. Na verdade, trata-se de um programa singular, de altíssimo carisma e de todo insubstituível. Um programa sempre em busca da "nudez forte da verdade escondida sob o manto pouco diáfano da fantasia", feito de maneira desempoeirada e descomplexada, sem recurso ao jargão doutoral/académico próprio de muitos "bem-pensantes" da nossa praça, o que lhe granjeou a admiração incondicional de uma legião de ouvintes.

Em:

Rádio Crítica

A verdade de um homem é em primeiro lugar aquilo que ele esconde
André Malraux

Caído em cheio na era do progresso tecnológico, da política-espectáculo, da informação, do economicismo, do consumismo, da compulsiva formatação dos espíritos e da degradação da ideia ancestral de cultura, o cidadão comum continua a interrogar-se quanto à circunstância histórica e moral que lhe cabe viver.

Joel Costa, agent provocateur. Ele corta a direito e não tem papas na língua. Questões tão diferentes e tão igualmente importantes da humanidade foram e são tratadas por ele com o acre da crueza de quem nada teme. Religião, trabalho, direitos, patronato, sociedade, exploração, personagens (Cristo), polémicas várias (Código Da Vinci). O lançador das farpas no fio da navalha que “sofre” de lucidez aguda e que tem força no movimento da denúncia, argúcia no discurso e coragem para chamar «os bois pelos nomes». É assim “Questões de Moral”. É assim Joel Costa, um provocador no que isso tem de melhor. Ou se gosta muito ou se detesta bastante. Se a justiça é cega, então não é justa. “Questões de Moral” não pretende ser moralista ou Joel Costa um qualquer arauto da pureza que ninguém tem. Apenas desmascarar ou desmistificar algumas das inúmeras ilusões negativas que nos poluem a cada momento. Arredam-se cortinas. Faz-se um pouco de luz onde predomina a escuridão. E já não é tarefa pouca.
Quem gosta, sente-se compreendido e aprecia devidamente. Quem não gosta, coma menos! Neste programa não há meias tintas.
Como sou adepto da verdade, sou declaradamente fã deste homem. E você?

O programa Questões de Moral não passa da interrogação (nem sempre ligeira, nem sempre pretenciosa), ditada por uma consciência de cidadão comum em busca do nexo moral escondido no tempo das suas novas angústias, nas instituições, nas pessoas, nas coisas, no presente, no passado – e até na música.
Pode não se gostar. Pode não se concordar. Pode não se aplaudir. Mas pode-se pensar.

Ainda se pode apanhar alguns destes excelentes programas em:

QUESTÕES DE MORAL

Até que sejam removidas por "falta de orçamento no servidor"...