My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within a month, he was robbed again—this time they broke in through the roof door. And my TV-less buddy spent the next 11 months going up and down six flights of stairs every day. Six storeys (some say seven) was the maximum height they’d build residential buildings in New York, prior to the elevator. No resident was willing to climb more stairs than that. After Otis’ perfection of the elevator, that height limitation was gone, and within a century we had skyscrapers. Then the new height limitation was building technology. Advanced construction techniques have since skyrocketed, if you’ll pardon the pun; as the World’s Tallest Building peeing contest continues, it is rumored that Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower will be a kilometer high . But the new height limitation is the thing that smashed the old one: Elevators. Steel cable is so heavy that at its maximum elevator height of 500 meters, the cables themselves make up 3/4s of the moving mass. You can stagger elevator banks to go higher, but the heaviness of steel cable makes long-haul elevators prohibitively expensive to run. Finnish elevator manufacturer Kone believes they have the answer. After ten years of development they’ve just announced the debut of UltraRope , a carbon-fiber cable that’s stronger than steel, lasts twice as long, and weighs a fraction of the older stuff: (more…)
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Elevator Rope Breakthrough Means Mile-High Buildings Possible
On the Guardian right now NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is answering live questions from the world at large. 1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it. Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is meaningless. The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history will be live online at 11am ET/4pm BST to answer your questions about the NSA surveillance revelations 
That’s the claim from TechCrunch, which says that Facebook’s special press event on June 20 will be focused in part on video and Instagram. [Read more] 
