Slashdot Mirror

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/Obsolete/Rayt racer.html

The results are a lot more realistic.

You can even find some nifty animations there:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/Obsolete/Down load.html

Greetings
Sven

There were Southern Lights visible from high latitudes in Australia as well. Here's a 30-sec. exposure from north New South Wales:

http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~gordon/20050515-9.23UT. jpg

The idea, while cool, is not that new (although doing it interactively might be). There's always the Relativistic Raytracer (more movies), which has been available since 1997.

The idea, while cool, is not that new (although doing it interactively might be). There's always the Relativistic Raytracer (more movies), which has been available since 1997.

I have seem something similar to this before. Check out:

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/

and

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Savage/TEE/

I have seem something similar to this before. Check out:

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/

and

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Savage/TEE/

The infamous "Nickelback vs Nickelback" remix going around the net is the perfect example.

For one thing, it's the same band, and it's likely to be the same songwriter. For another, though the bass lines of "How You Remind Me" and "Someday" are similar, bass lines aren't nearly as strongly restricted under copyright law as melodies are, and the melodies in this case aren't even close to the same.

Besides, you can sing any of the lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda".

For one thing, the copyright in "Waltzing Matilda" by Banjo Paterson has expired in almost the whole developed world, except possibly in the European Union, which restored copyright to PD works last time it extended copyright terms. This page claims that the song was written in 1895, meaning that the song was almost certainly first published before 1923 (the U.S. boundary for copyright expiration, which is on hold for 13 years). Banjo Paterson died in 1941, which was before 1955 (the Australian boundary for copyright expiration, which is on hold for 20 years). For another, non-commercial public performances are largely exempt from copyright restrictions.

This is more like Paul Simon taking the music of "If I could..." from Los Incas version of "El Condor Pasa"

Three possibilities:

• The song is based on a folk melody, which has been around for centuries, long enough to put it in the public domain in any country.
• Your Paul Simon quote implies that he might have got permission.
• Even a recording without permission would still fall under the compulsory license for cover songs, whose royalty cap currently stands at about 8.5c per phonorecord.

None of these three possibilities applies to video game music. Few songs from video games are from folk melodies ("Polly Wolly Doodle" in Pokemon is an exception), video games were invented long after 1923, many video game copyright owners don't just hand out permissions like candy, and there's no way to recover 8.5c per download if no charge is made for the downloads.

What's different about rsync is that it does not ordinarily use a single file checksum (and therefore copy whole files if changed). Instead, to save bandwidth, it uses a more sophisticated system to ensure that only changed parts of a file are transmitted - and it detects changed parts by comparing (many) checksums, I believe. The report sums it up like this:

The algorithm identifies parts of the source file which are identical to some part of the destination file, and only sends those parts which cannot be matched in this way. Effectively, the algorithm computes a set of differences without having both files on the same machine.

(Disclaimer, I have only skimmed the rsync report and that was some time ago, but I am a longtime and happy rsync user.)

What's different about rsync is that it does not ordinarily use a single file checksum (and therefore copy whole files if changed). Instead, to save bandwidth, it uses a more sophisticated system to ensure that only changed parts of a file are transmitted - and it detects changed parts by comparing (many) checksums, I believe. The report sums it up like this:

The algorithm identifies parts of the source file which are identical to some part of the destination file, and only sends those parts which cannot be matched in this way. Effectively, the algorithm computes a set of differences without having both files on the same machine.

(Disclaimer, I have only skimmed the rsync report and that was some time ago, but I am a longtime and happy rsync user.)

But let's regain our collective composure and think about the prospect of cars that can't crash. We're now talking about robotics with a degree of intelligence. And assuming this is indeed possible at the level needed to make cars uncrashable, will they conform to Asimov's laws?

http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/SOS/Asim ov.html

Probably not entirely, but there WILL have to be some judgements made as to the lesser risk when there are no optimal solutions to some traffic scenarios. For example, sliding on ice and being unable to entirely avoid impact with objects or humans. Will the software choose to sacrifice the car's occupants in order to save more pedestrians? Vice-versa? (I suppose it depends on who's paying for the software license. Sorry, couldn't help myself)
Will its "judgement" be good enough? How long would it take to develop software to pilot cars in optimal scenarios, let alone crisis scenarios? This will be a monumental task at best.

Er, OK, I'm stupid.

http://ash.anu.edu.au/tmp/larry_page.mp3.torrent

Go all you want. Mirror

Here's a movie of the crash: eth_airline_crash.mpeg [MPEG 1.01 MB]

Many birds do have the ability to mimic sounds - The Australian Lyrebird is one - it's been known to mimic everything from steam whistles to typewriters (complete with the little bell at the end of a line and the sound of the returning carriage) and chainsaws.

I once visited a wildlife park that had a group of aviaries where were kept larger predator-type birds like Kookaburras, Magpies and Butcherbirds. The Butcherbirds and the Magpies could both laugh like the Kookaburras. They would start laughing back whenever the Kookaburras started doing their schtick.

I had a really incredible experience with birds mimicking different sounds, in a geeky kind of way - it all started when I was playing with VirtualDub for the first time. I was mucking about trying all the different compression types, filters and everything and the video I had chosen to play with was a clip of the opening titles of Doctor Who.

The title sequence was from the middle years of Tom Baker's stint as the Doctor. There's a clip of it here.

So, with all fiddling about I was doing, the music for the titles got played a lot that afternoon. I mean a lot. Try one set of filters, with one particular type of compression, process it, play it several times examining the results, change the filters/compressor, process, play another several times, over and over again.

The thing was, when I was playing the results, I tended not to play the whole clip, but just the first 13 seconds or thereabouts. That much of the clip includes the first measure of the melody line - the first four notes.

Some time later, I realised that I could hear what sounded like the music from the clip coming from the garden outside the window. I discovered that two different species of birds had copied different parts of the theme and now my front garden was echoing with the sounds of Doctor Who!

There was a songbird of some sort out there that was repeating the first four notes of the melody line, while a family of Indian Mynas gathered in a grove of trees were mimicking what I can only describe as the the "sparkly" bits - not the bass riff, but the ascending scale of sort of tinkly sounds.

It was really, really cool.

Many birds do have the ability to mimic sounds - The Australian Lyrebird is one - it's been known to mimic everything from steam whistles to typewriters (complete with the little bell at the end of a line and the sound of the returning carriage) and chainsaws.

I once visited a wildlife park that had a group of aviaries where were kept larger predator-type birds like Kookaburras, Magpies and Butcherbirds. The Butcherbirds and the Magpies could both laugh like the Kookaburras. They would start laughing back whenever the Kookaburras started doing their schtick.

I had a really incredible experience with birds mimicking different sounds, in a geeky kind of way - it all started when I was playing with VirtualDub for the first time. I was mucking about trying all the different compression types, filters and everything and the video I had chosen to play with was a clip of the opening titles of Doctor Who.

The title sequence was from the middle years of Tom Baker's stint as the Doctor. There's a clip of it here.

So, with all fiddling about I was doing, the music for the titles got played a lot that afternoon. I mean a lot. Try one set of filters, with one particular type of compression, process it, play it several times examining the results, change the filters/compressor, process, play another several times, over and over again.

The thing was, when I was playing the results, I tended not to play the whole clip, but just the first 13 seconds or thereabouts. That much of the clip includes the first measure of the melody line - the first four notes.

Some time later, I realised that I could hear what sounded like the music from the clip coming from the garden outside the window. I discovered that two different species of birds had copied different parts of the theme and now my front garden was echoing with the sounds of Doctor Who!

There was a songbird out there that was repeating the first four notes of the melody line, while a family of Indian Mynas gathered in a grove of trees were mimicking what I can only describe as the the "sparkly" bits - not the bass riff, but the ascending scale of sort of tinkly sounds.

It was really, really cool.

Now I use SyncBack [2brightsparks.com] which is a freeware program with all these features that I need (and more! like FTP and compression to Zip, etc.). QED.

rsync is an open source program that can do all that, and is smart about the way it syncs files. It only syncs the actual changes in the file, and doesn't copy the whole file from scratch. So if you changed 100 bytes of a 50MB document, it will only write the 100 bytes of changes. Really an amazing program written by some of the samba guys.

While DNA may provide a much more accessible accurate trace than the fossil record of the details of the HSS diaspora, the method used to extrapolate dates from the genetic data is much less precise than geological techinques.

So it should be a fairly safe assumption that the bottleneck around the time of y-Adam was due to Toba and that date should be -74K rather than -60K.

This is pretty much consistent with the correction needed to match their -40K "out of Africa" date with recent best estimates of earlier than -50K for Australian megafaunal extinction, though those dates have more margin for error than the Toba date.

Given the accumulation evidence that much of the diaspora was likely coastal with short sea legs and the suggestion that most of the modern population of Africa was reseeded by returnees from the Indian Ocean basin, Tim Flannery's hypothesis in The Future Eaters that the opportunity the first arrivals in Australia found to overexploit the megafauna had a species-wide cultural impact.

Find all about Hot Dry Rock geothermal energy here.

In the past, I've used the HOL Theorem Prover. It's a nice toy to play with if want to get started in this area.

Cool. We're doing the same with our old Kombi van. The past six months have been getting the engine going and the paintwork up to scratch. Now we've birthed a whole new field: kombionics! We want a mean onboard network with flat screens, games, and GPS logging. We're also going to add an SMS module so the van can send us updates on its position, or we can unlock it or tell it to play our favourite MP3 before we get to it in the carpark.

We're writing the whole lot up here:

http://ash.anu.edu.au/kombi/

Let us know what you all think, what we should do and how we can make it better.

Everyone's going to make arse and anal probe jokes on this one, but, when I'm inside my Kombi I feel like I'm a probe floating inside a cell.

http://ash.anu.edu.au/kombi/

Offtopic? Blah, of course it's not, I mentioned probes didn't I? Consider it more of an opinion piece :).

And to make matters worse, we're studying the Personal Software Process in software engineering this semester.

You mean something like this?

Maybe it isn't a concern for whatever personal data you are accumulating and backing up once a week, but for me, losing any of the photos I shot with my digital camera is usually an irrecoverable loss. That's why I back them up on a second hard drive on another computer after every dump from my camera's memory card. Now that I think about it though, I've been lax in off-site backups. Time to warm up that CDR drive.

See here and here.

http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/

I was just reading this paper. Towards the end of the paper they apply their kernel methods to clustering video clips from the movie "Kill Bill". The technique directly works with the video data.

Simon.

When I was getting ready to go to ANU recently, I had the choice of using the Sun machines at ANU or lugging a (heavy) Linux laptop from my department through the airports (4 flights each way).
Which did I choose?
The laptop, of course. I had enough trouble with Suns at the Max Planck Institute in the summer of 2003. I got a static IP from the ANU IT people, bypassed the ANU system and everything worked fine. I sshed into my office computer and used my U.S. email (kmail) instead of getting an ANU email account. I gave my "big" lecture using the laptop - I wrote my lecture in latex, created figures using xfig, "compiled" and obtained a postscript file and ported the screen output from gv to the data projector. If I had needed anything from my U.S. computer, I was sshed into it and could have viewed a ps file (e.g. of an older paper) if I had wanted or needed to do so. (I believe my lecture was well received; at least this is what everyone told me.)

(begin rant) By the way, Australian universities have been getting screwed by the government since 1975 and they could use all the political support possible. ANU is probably the best supported university and by U.S. standards the support is not good. The other universities are in trouble. The people at ANU were really great; if I were younger and a student, I would consider going to ANU. As a professor, you have to make a financial sacrifice to stay in Australia; many really good ones do stay but approximately 35% of mathematicians in OZ have left over the last 10 or 15 years. If you are "Howard", feel free to spend more on higher education; this "let each university do what it is best at" stuff is a (sad) joke. (Who needs anything more than biochem. and a medical school to be a university? English? History? Geology? What are they?) (end rant)

I am really impressed with the knowledge which /. moderators bring to the table. The parent of this post corresponds to the opinion of the majority of mathematicians, which is that Mandelbrot has done some good work but is a self-promoter, does not always acknowledge the work of others and probably is not considered a Math Legend by most mathematician. I am a peon with a Ph.D. in math who has been doing research for less than 30 years; I have only one paper which received a Featured Review and I consider myself to be a fairly ordinary person with three kids.
Slashdot moderators know much more than do I about contributions to geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measures, self-similar sets, fractals, etc. and I accept that my previous post was flamebait since I am ignorant. However, lots of other people deserve credit for their work on fractals. I will just mention two, John Hutchinson and Michael Barnsley. I just met John when I visited ANU recently; I believe I also saw Michael. I do not think they invented fractals or claim to be the smartest people in the world but they did some interesting work. Since our slashdot moderators are so smart, they can even tell you about this research. (Just in case they are too busy, here are some recent papers.)

I am really impressed with the knowledge which /. moderators bring to the table. The parent of this post corresponds to the opinion of the majority of mathematicians, which is that Mandelbrot has done some good work but is a self-promoter, does not always acknowledge the work of others and probably is not considered a Math Legend by most mathematician. I am a peon with a Ph.D. in math who has been doing research for less than 30 years; I have only one paper which received a Featured Review and I consider myself to be a fairly ordinary person with three kids.
Slashdot moderators know much more than do I about contributions to geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measures, self-similar sets, fractals, etc. and I accept that my previous post was flamebait since I am ignorant. However, lots of other people deserve credit for their work on fractals. I will just mention two, John Hutchinson and Michael Barnsley. I just met John when I visited ANU recently; I believe I also saw Michael. I do not think they invented fractals or claim to be the smartest people in the world but they did some interesting work. Since our slashdot moderators are so smart, they can even tell you about this research. (Just in case they are too busy, here are some recent papers.)

I am really impressed with the knowledge which /. moderators bring to the table. The parent of this post corresponds to the opinion of the majority of mathematicians, which is that Mandelbrot has done some good work but is a self-promoter, does not always acknowledge the work of others and probably is not considered a Math Legend by most mathematician. I am a peon with a Ph.D. in math who has been doing research for less than 30 years; I have only one paper which received a Featured Review and I consider myself to be a fairly ordinary person with three kids.
Slashdot moderators know much more than do I about contributions to geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measures, self-similar sets, fractals, etc. and I accept that my previous post was flamebait since I am ignorant. However, lots of other people deserve credit for their work on fractals. I will just mention two, John Hutchinson and Michael Barnsley. I just met John when I visited ANU recently; I believe I also saw Michael. I do not think they invented fractals or claim to be the smartest people in the world but they did some interesting work. Since our slashdot moderators are so smart, they can even tell you about this research. (Just in case they are too busy, here are some recent papers.)

• The rsync protocol makes sure that only changed data is transferred, so the entire process is quite fast.
• Backed up files are on a normal volume, no compression/packaging, easy to access
• The backed up volume can be periodically zipped up to form a permanent back-archive
• NO media to swap around

...that any man-made alteration of the ecosystem is necessarily bad?
Ok, it's not necessarily bad but can you point some examples when it's good, please? There's plenty of counter examples. For instance you might want to ask them Aussies what do they think about rabbits and toads, those cute creatures loved by all.

Possibly like what some guys at the ANU are doing?

http://syseng.anu.edu.au/Projects/Serafina/

Australian National University press release.

It all depends on what you use as a yardstick. Compared to mainland China or Taiwan, we're almost identical. I did read what you wrote, and I agree with your list of differences, but I don't think those differences are very significant, in comparison to the similarities.

The differences between us that you point out are differences in how we implement our socialism. The U.S. is striving to provide universal healthcare via universal employment with welfare as a backup, while Canada is striving to provide universal healthcare via welfare, with employment as a backup. The identical goal is for the government to ensure, somehow, universal healthcare. A very different society might place the responsibility elsewhere.

Both countries are socialist, and happy that way. Both countries have willingly implemented most of the ten steps to destroy a free society which Marx laid out in his Manifesto (steps 2, 5 and 10 almost completely implemented, 3,4,7 and 8 at least partially). Same language, same legal system (British common law), same cultural heritage.

Remember, too, that they're both big, diverse countries. Compared to the difference between Quebec and Nevada, Minnesota and Manitoba are almost identical (people, not climate). Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Scandinavians, who brought with them the culture that made Scandinavia socialist. They are still significantly different from the rest of the U.S., but it's equally reasonable to say that they are almost identical to the rest, despite being more like the Canadians than the Kentuckians.

Canadians and Americans are more similar than Canadians would like to think, and less similar than Americans would like to think

It's all a question of which side of the binoculars you look through, isn't it?

Yes, I can think of several things which would be worse. Syphilis, for example. Or phosphoric acid on one's testicles. So far I've been lucky to avoid both afflictions, but I'm using phoshporic acid to treat some rust (http://ash.anu.edu.au/kombi/) at the moment, so it's just a matter of time on the latter.

Well, does this site count as a photoblog?

I didn't set it up with that label in mind but I suppose that's what it is. It's only natural to want to put photos to words or words to photos, the two mediums coexist quite nicely.

Since storage and dare I say it bandwidth are cheap these days there's no reason (well apart from all the obvious ones, laziness :) etc... ) why not to have hundereds of photos a day!

"there's not much." Unfortunately, the best university in Australia is there. A friend (& coauthor) is driving from Melbourne to meet me in Canberra and she might be willing to take me around to see some of the sights. She would be my ride to Wollongong if I go there; I plan to meet an old "friend" (i.e. correspondent) I have never met but he may want to get out of Wollongong for a few days. I may end up in Canberra for all three weeks.

If I sneak down (up ?) to Sydney, would this be worthwhile? (E.G. Can one get opera tickets? Reasonable price?)

We in Australia have no active plate margins so we are sitting in the middle as our plate "rushes" ever-northward. This means we have no extant vulcanism (recent hot spot activity ceased a few thousand years ago) and no major earthquake zones on the continent. We do have some earthquakes with Newcastle being our biggest disaster - Richter 5.4?. Building codes have been tightened since then. Weatherwise, we are a tad dry(driest continent next to Antarctica). We have drought and bushfires. Bushfires would be our most common natural disaster with the recent bushfires in 2003 notably burning over 500 houses in my city, Canberra. Drought is a little harder to quantify as it can be argued to be often an economic, not a natural disaster. The counter to that is of couse episodic floods. Bot then again, flood zones are well known. Cyclones [Hurricanes] ravage our northern coast, but we have low populations. The destruction of Darwin in 1974 being the major disaster there. With the low rainfall and low relief, landlides are relatively rare, with a recent landslide in Thredbo being the exception. This was found to be caused by a broken water pipe, poor road construction, and uder-managed groundwater above the village.

I learnt all this and more at http://ems.anu.edu.au/student/ug/index.php?unit=ge ol1002

we should change the National Anthem to Waltzing Matlida?

Asimov came up with this long ago.

according to the Mayans and some of that funky ELS code stuff those uncanny guys get out of the old testament... oh, and Moby Dick... So a typical day in 2014 might be, sort of dull.

As far as I know the Austalian eVACS systems was not "open development"; it was developed internally by enterprises under contract and fragments of the system sources were released for the purposes of public scrutiny, and it is in this sense the source code was "open", i.e. it was publicly available. The vote collecting and vote counting system runs as a closed system, making potential security threats very difficult with just the knowledge of the code. Surely not making the code public can be seen as hedging ones bets against problems with the overall security model, e.g. the "trusted path": Is this a good thing? Should we be satisfied with a security model in which we need to hedge our bets and be forced to sacrifice transparency? By making code public it is far more likely that problems with the system would be found, as we did as part of an investigation into the formalisation of vote counting mechanisms: http://web.rsise.anu.edu.au/~rpg/EVoting/.

It is my opinion that government processes, especially the democratic process of voting, should be as accessible and transparent as possible. The proposed "controlled open source" system, though I am not completely familiar with it, appears as if it would hinder or exclude public access to a public process, and would deny independent attempts of testing or machine based verification.

a

I've had fairly good experiences with the Unison product. It works similarly to rsync but with a few enhanced features. And I quote...

• Unison runs on both Windows (95, 98, NT, and 2k) and Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example.
• Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program: there is no need to hack (or own!) the kernel, or to have superuser privileges on either host.
• Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. Conflicting updates are detected and displayed.
• Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the internet, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling over an rsh or an encrypted ssh connection. It is careful with network bandwidth, and runs well over slow links such as PPP connections. Transfers of small updates to large files are optimized using a compression protocol similar to rsync.
• Unison has a clear and precise specification.
• Unison is resilient to failure. It is careful to leave the replicas and its own private structures in a sensible state at all times, even in case of abnormal termination or communication failures.
• Unison is free; full source code is available under the GNU Public License.

Anyway, you might give it a look...

Cygwin and rsync. That should do it.

-molo

In fact, the guy was quite right, but you won't see it in his post...
But if you go on the official website you'll see that the autonomy for "permanent manoeuvring" is only two hours.
Hence the problem.

The solution would be to use weights or ballasts.
But that's a different question.

Being able to perform descents and ascents without running the maneuvering motors would allow access to the full depth capability of the hull. You would have to add hardware to extract power from the slipstream during buoyant maneuvers; given that this would probably not extend the time-at-depth by a huge amount (and might decrease powered speed and range), it might not be worth it.

Here is the main site...

There is more on the Serafina home page.

Getting to 5000m should not be a problem of time, at 1 m/s, even though I wander whether that speed is possible vertically? Probably a bigger problem is communicating over 5km - maybe you need "relays" at intermediate depths. It seems that groups of them can act as a sort of network. I didnt see a lot of details on such things as coms distance, etc, tho I didnt dig very deep.

As a toy for $700, I would even consider buying one.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could mount a laser.. What do you mean, why?