Slashdot Mirror

In Myanmar "General Ne Win helped speed his own downfall ... by suddenly declaring much of the Burmese currency worthless and replacing it with bank notes in denominations divisible by his lucky number, nine. Riots followed."
___

I think you're right. Here's an article from the same edition of the NT Times that adds some worthwhile info.

"The NYT article tells us that the dominant dietary religion of the last twenty years is cracking -- that the weight of evidence against the fat-is-evil/carbs-are-good theory is no longer supportable. Well and good -- but it won't necessarily do us a lot of good to discard this religion only to get stuck with another one."

"A recent report issued by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan, but it said most sexual assaults went unreported because of the social stigma attached to such charges and the difficulty in proving them. In Punjab a woman is raped every six hours and a woman is gang-raped every four days, yet only 321 rape cases were reported to the police last year, the report said."

source

I don't see how they could be gay seeing as the tribal juries often hand down gang rape as a punishment. Oh well, they're just savages anyways i guess thats to be expected, but it's not gay.

Who are they expecting needs to be faught against, anyway?

U.S. Plan Calls for Massive Attack on Iraq - Report
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A draft U.S. military plan for an invasion of Iraq envisions a multi-pronged attack with tens of thousands of Marines and soldiers probably invading from Kuwait, The New York Times reported on Friday.

I prefer this one :

143-Year-Old Problem Still Has Mathematicians Guessing
By BRUCE SCHECHTER

n the early years of the 20th century, the great British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy used to take out a peculiar form of travel insurance before boarding a boat to cross the North Sea. If the weather looked threatening he would send a postcard on which he announced the solution of the Riemann hypothesis. Hardy, wrote his biographer, Constance Reid, was convinced "that God - with whom he waged a very personal war - would not let Hardy die with such glory."

The Riemann hypothesis, first tossed off by Bernhard Riemann in 1859 in a paper about the distribution of prime numbers, is still widely considered to be one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics, sure to wreath its conqueror with glory - and, incidentally, lots of cash. Two years ago, to celebrate the millennium, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced an award of a million dollars for a proof (or refutation) of the hypothesis.

Whether in pursuit of glory, cash ("prizes attract cranks," one mathematician sniffed) or pure mental satisfaction, more than a hundred of the world's leading mathematicians came to New York City recently to attend an unusual conference at New York University's Courant Institute. While most math conferences are devoted to presenting completed work, this one was held for mathematicians to swap hunches, warn of dead ends and get new ideas that could ultimately lead to a solution.

"One of the things we hope to do is to consolidate the approaches," said Dr. Brian Conrey, a professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University and executive director of the American Institute of Mathematics, a private group that organized the meeting with support from the Courant Institute and the National Science Foundation. "We're looking for brand-new ideas with which to open the door."

There was a guarded optimism among the mathematicians that promising new ideas were being put forward, but in mathematics prognostication is a dangerous game. Hardy, for example, rated the Riemann hypothesis less difficult than Fermat's conjecture, which Dr. Andrew Wiles of Princeton solved in 1993, after working for seven years in secrecy. Dr. Wiles, as it happens, dropped in on the conference, but when asked if this meant he was now attacking the hypothesis he shrugged and said, "Well, it's a spectator sport, you know."

As in all sports, it helps to know the rules of the game. Riemann made his hypothesis in the course of a 10-page paper he wrote on the distribution of prime numbers that is considered to be one of the most important papers in the history of number theory, a history that stretches back more than 2,500 years.

Prime numbers are numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves - they are the atoms of arithmetic, for any number is either a prime or a product of primes. The first few primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 - but despite their simple definition the prime numbers appear to be scattered randomly amid the integers.

There is no simple way to tell if a number is prime, and that is the basis for most modern encryption schemes. Solving the hypothesis could lead to new encryption schemes and possibly provide tools that would make existing schemes, which depend on the properties of prime numbers, more vulnerable.

Despite the random occurrence of individual primes, the primes themselves were found to follow a remarkably simple distribution. In 1792, when he was 15, Karl Friedrich Gauss decided to examine the number of primes less than a given number. He discovered that the primes became, on average, sparser the further out he looked and that this dwindling obeyed a simple, logarithmic law. He had no idea why this was so, but it was intriguing.

In 1859, Riemann, who had been a student of Gauss, took up the question of the distribution of primes in his only paper on number theory. With that paper he revolutionized the field, as he had the fields of geometry (his math became the basis for Einstein's theory of gravitation) and several other branches of mathematics. What Riemann discovered was a way of using the properties of a relatively simple function to count the primes.

What was so remarkable about Riemann's zeta function was that it somehow took a question about prime numbers - those discrete atoms of simple arithmetic, things easy to imagine - and put it in terms of a far larger and more esoteric class of numbers known as complex numbers. Complex numbers are a generalization of the familiar decimal numbers that mathematicians call the real numbers.

While the real numbers can be thought of as points on an infinite line, the complex numbers are points on a plane. One axis of this complex plane corresponds to the real numbers, and the other corresponds to the "imaginary" numbers - which were introduced so that negative numbers could have square roots, and are no more imaginary than real numbers. A function like Riemann's zeta function is simply a rule that takes a point on this plane and sends it to some other point.

By moving the problem to the complex plane Riemann had access to a whole new set of powerful mathematical tools, many of which he had developed himself. What was going on with the primes turned out to be a shadow of what was going on in this more general world.

Riemann showed that if he knew where the value of his zeta function went to zero he would be able to predict the distribution of the primes. He was able to prove that aside from some "trivial" zeros - located at -2, -4, -6, and so on and thus easily included in his equations - the zeros of the zeta function all lay within a strip one unit wide running along the imaginary axis.

Somehow the distribution of these zeros mirrored or encoded the distribution of the prime numbers. Riemann guessed that all of the zeros ran along the middle of the critical strip like the dotted line on a highway. Nobody is sure why he made this guess, but it has proven to be inspired. Over the past few decades billions of zeros of the zeta function have been calculated by computer, and every one of them obeys Riemann's hypothesis.

Most of the conference attendees would be shocked if a stray zero were found and Riemann was proven wrong. They would agree with John Frye, the chief executive of Frye's Electronics and a math major who used his fortune to found the mathematics institute. "I think we would have a better chance of finding life on Mars than finding a counter-example," he said.

But the field is rife with examples of hypotheses that seem to be true but are subsequently proven to fail at numbers beyond the reach of any conceivable computer. Only a mathematical proof, based on logic, can handle questions of the infinite.

Still, calculating the zeros of zeta is not an idle pursuit. In 1972, Hugh Montgomery, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, investigated the statistical distribution of the zeros. He found that they were scattered randomly but seemed to repel each other slightly - they did not clump together. On a trip to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton he showed his result to the physicist Freeman Dyson.

By sheer luck, Dr. Dyson was one of the few people in the world who would have recognized that the Montgomery results looked just like recent calculations on the energy levels of large atoms. The coincidence was so striking that it forged a new and still mysterious bridge between quantum physics and number theory. The connection was one of many pursued at the conference, though Dr. Montgomery does not think this work will lead directly to a solution. "It only gives us clues," he said.

Other clues abounded at the conference, some tantalizing, such as possible linkages to the theories Dr. Wiles developed to solve the Fermat conjecture. But mathematical proofs are extremely delicate structures that can vanish at the merest touch.

Dr. Peter Sarnak, from the Institute for Advanced Study, spoke to the meeting about a promising approach that he and his colleagues have been pursuing. Just as Riemann attacked the problem of the primes by generalizing the zeta function to the complex plane, Dr. Sarnak and many others have been looking at families of functions of which Riemann's zeta function is just one relative. Each of these functions has its own Riemann hypothesis. "Of course," Dr. Sarnak acknowledged, "often the reason you generalize is that you're stuck."

But generalization also has its rewards. While the Riemann hypothesis does not have very many applications, the generalized version, if true, would solve hundreds of important mathematical problems.

When Dr. Wiles sat down in his attack to solve Fermat's conjecture, his path, though it would require genius to traverse, was clear: recent results had indicated the most promising direction to travel. Mathematicians at the conference agreed that there was no such clear evidence of a trail head for the Riemann hypothesis, a challenge they called both frustrating and exhilarating.

"The Riemann hypothesis is not the last word about things," Dr. Montgomery said. "It should be the first fundamental theorem. We're in a kind of logjam right now because we can't prove the fundamental theorem."

if their platters can only store one image:

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2002/07/01/bus iness/01KOMA.1.jpg

here it is, for all of you too lazy to copy and paste.

Fixed link

For those too lazy to cut and paste

Advances Nip at Its Heels, but Disk Maker Moves Forward

Link

Note that the original poster mentioned tinfoil, which is a reasonable shield against microwaves. If he had intended to imply ionizing radiation (other than alpha particles), lead (as you stated) would make a much better shield.

If he'd meant NON-ionizing radiation, he wouldn't have advised protecting the testicles. Please read the article I linked to previously, as it contains actual facts about microwaves vs. testicles. As for his choice of aluminum foil instead of lead, this fits nicely with my theory that he is ill-informed. If he thinks microwaves can hurt your nuts without you knowing it, it seems reasonable to expect him to think .001" aluminum will protect him from ionizing radiation (tin foil hat crowd). HE is the worst sort of fool: one who knows nothing but thinks he knows everything.

anyways, i was just letting the less informed know about this; but since you're so gung-ho about these things, make sure you wrap your fucking balls in tin-foil, because these things can give off a dangerous amount of radiation also. but you already knew that, didn't you.

When someone claims to be "letting the less informed know", but doesn't know there's a difference between ionizing (cancer causing, e.g. X-rays) radiation and non-ionizing radiation, I find it hard to take anything they say seriously. Do people get cancer from steam radiators in old apartment buildings? They radiate heat, so I guess I'd better wrap my family jewels in lead to be safe. Moron.

No obligatory link to NY Times? People are starting to get lazy ;)

Speaking of WiFi, since Slashdot seems to think this story is interesting (*yawn*) and a much more interesting story doesn't seem to be able to make it to the front page, I recommend checking this story out. Bottom line, a couple of garage tinkerers have managed to extend 802.11b's range to about 20 miles. Big deal, right? We hear about this all the time. The kicker is that they are actually deploying it in some neighborhoods, so it appears to be something real rather than something "we hope to deploy 5 years from now".

We might actually see universal broadband in our lifetimes! (Not that I don't already have a l33t 3 megabit cable modem, but...)

What I especially like about this is that true broadcast broadband would allow a lot of competing providers in each area, instead of needing massive investment in running wires.

Meanwhile, where is the left-wing Jewish media machine? Nowhere to be found. Actually they are putting up stories with headlines like, Judges Ban Pledge of Allegiance From Schools, Citing 'Under God'

While so-called "fair and balanced" news outlets are running headlines like,
What, in God's Name, Is Going On!?!?!? and 'Under God' Under Fire.

Which is more "fair and balanced" to you?

Those aren't pirates.

These are pirates.

Free registration required, except of course for pirates. Yarr!

Calling these land lubbers pirates gives the real pirates a serious reputation problem.

We in the redzones are biding our time, ya'all blue zone folks had your turn, and guess what?

I've got a "guess what" for you. Guess what? The red zones are the parasites. Suckers 'pon the public teat. Ticks. Tapeworms. Leeches. Remoras. IOW, those in NY/LA/SF/DC are underwriting your indignation, Einstein. Never mind the fact that DC has no representation even though they pay taxes. "Coolville" is sponsoring your ass, whether you understand it or not. Get your fucking shit together and quit living off of welfare from them thar blue zones, and then we'll talk.

www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/business/27DIES.html
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle / rchive/2001/05/23/MN110637.DTL
journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html
www.greasecar.com
www.lupo80days.com/route_en.html
www.a-car.com/index.html
www.biodiesel.org/
lowtech.bigstep.com/
www.veggievan.com
www.americanbiodiesel.com/
www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm
news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1309000/ 1309201.stm
www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282,31920,00.html

Not that you need much convincing, but this article over at the NYTimes is rather interesting, considering recent events. It talks about the extremely rough times that telecom companies are going through, and leaves open the possibility of a complete meltdown of that market. Scary, because as you said this affects everyone in the tech industry.

You mean this one? Telecom Outlook: First the Bad News, Then the Bad News

Fighter jets are far more stable than helicopters.

I propose that our slashdot user settings have a box we can check not to see "(Registration required, blah blah)", which is otherwise inserted after every New York Times hyperlink (Registration required, blah blah).

Or if you already gave up a registered with NY Times here's their coverage

And what has Moby done to take advantage of this new type of customer demand? Evidently shrugged his shoulders, and decided that the status quo is good enough.

I feel much better when I see other artists (like David Bowie) see that the way the music customer demands the music product is changing, and instead of complaining, actually charges forward and embraces the newness.

I wish there were more stories about the innovative new ways people are trying to take command of this new Internet-driven world, instead of just the "oh woe is me" stories.

Very likely

As for Stephen King, if he's dead, the NY Times, CNN, and www.stephenking.com don't know about it yet.

This is simply retarded... All because of a few morons who couldn't count.

the overwhelming majority of reporters identify themselves as liberals, and they tend to hire people who agree with them. In their limited world of Georgetown cocktail parties and Manhattan soirees, they see their views not as `left of center' (which they are by any comparison with the US population as a whole), but as `reasonable'...

I'm afraid you've got your facts mixed up. Those Washington journalists of whom you speak - employed by megacorps, and having incomes well over the American median - are in fact farther to the right (i.e., more conservative on economic issues) than the average American.

As for the bestseller status of Mr. Goldberg's work, it suggests that his thesis has struck a chord with the general public

For the Spy in the Sky, New Eyes

By IAN AUSTEN

FLYING in his helicopter, Sgt. Frank Sheer of the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California can be literally miles from the action. But that does not mean that he and his co-pilot do not know what's going on. In fact, Sergeant Sheer says they often have a clearer picture of a crime scene than the officers who are there.

Advertisement

"We'll be tracking a suspect on a hillside from the helicopter," said Sergeant

Sheer, the chief pilot in the Orange County force, "and the deputies climbing up it will be saying to us, `There's nobody here.' We've actually had them step on a guy who pulled up a bush for cover."

It's not just having a bird's-eye view that gives Sergeant Sheer and many other airborne police officers, rescue workers, military personnel, and television news and movie crews almost paranormal vision. Nor is it simply advances in optics and cameras. Ultimately they all rely on complex camera stabilization systems that mix mechanical and electronic technologies to produce steady images, even at high magnification, from inherently unsteady craft like helicopters and boats.

When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods. But most helicopter surveillance is not that dramatic. If the Orange County Sheriff's Department needs a car discreetly followed, Sergeant Sheer can keep tabs on it from 3,000 feet up and a considerable distance behind -- a position that would leave most motorists unaware there was a helicopter around, let alone watching them.

New systems built around all-electronic motion-sensing technologies are so stable that only the horizon and haze limit how far away observers can be.

The use of airborne stabilized cameras to create films or follow athletes in action attracts little controversy. Nor does anyone dispute that the systems allow police officers to capture criminals or rescue people. Some privacy advocates, however, are concerned that the recent proliferation of airborne cameras and the growing capabilities of new systems may mean that anyone who steps outside may unknowingly be a target of an aerial eye. Outdoors, there may no longer be any place to hide.

"Because technology affords police what amounts to superhuman vision, that doesn't mean we lose all expectations of privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. "There are lots of innocent people who are going to have their privacy invaded -- observed naked in their backyard sunbathing from far away."

There is a long history of efforts to produce steady airborne pictures. But in the early years, the results were for the most part dismal.

Steven Poster, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers, recalls his first attempt at photography from a helicopter, in the late 1960's. "It was an Illinois State Fair, and the stabilization came from a rope tied around me to the helicopter," Mr. Poster recalled. "I quickly realized that this was not a very good system."

While more sophisticated systems existed back then, they did not differ much from Mr. Poster's rope. Known as side mounts, they generally relied on bungee cords and the user's body to isolate the camera.

By the 1980's Mr. Poster was a director of photography for feature films and television advertisements, and he had found an answer to his aerial photography problems with a system made by Wescam, a company now based in Burlington, Ontario.

"It's the best way to stabilize a camera," said Mr. Poster, who has used the system in films like "Stuart Little 2," which is to be released this summer.

The Wescam system used by Mr. Poster's film crews is remarkably similar to the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military. (Wescam is short for Westinghouse camera.)

Eliminating the vibration from the helicopter was the first step and the easy part. The Wescam ball is attached to a helicopter or airplane through a shock absorber that uses springs and other damping materials. "It is tuned for the natural frequencies of helicopters," said Mark Chamberlain, a mechanical engineer who is president and chief executive of Wescam.

But eliminating the vibration does nothing to limit three other kinds of movement by the camera: pitch (plunging up and down), yaw (rotating around a vertical axis) and roll (the side-to-side rotation that creates a moving horizon).

To deal with these kinds of movements, inventors of the original Wescam turned to large gyroscopes, which create inertia. It is like strapping a large boulder to the camera to stabilize it, yet without all the weight that a boulder would add.

Inside the camera ball are three gyros oriented to offset each of the three types of unwanted motion. Motors attached to the camera mount allow an operator within the helicopter to view images from the camera on a video monitor and point the camera as needed.

The gyro stabilization system proved so steady that it has not significantly changed over the last three decades. But the system has one significant drawback: the gyros require frequent maintenance.

That is not a problem for the movie industry, which rents the camera systems for short periods. (Other companies, including Gyron Systems International, Tyler Camera Systems and Spacecam Systems, also offer stabilized motion picture cameras.) But the need for maintenance made the systems largely impractical for full-time use by police, the military and television stations.

After Mr. Chamberlain led a management buyout in 1987 of the engineering company that had come to control the Wescam technology, he turned its attention to introducing a technology that was more robust.

Instead of providing stability, its three gyros wobble slightly when the rig changes directions. Sensors measure the wobbling and feed the data to microprocessors that in turn use high-speed electric motors to move the camera and offset the unwanted motion.

he second-generation technology -- what Mr. Chamberlain calls a sense- and-react system -- has only about half the stability of the original Wescam, so it cannot be used with lenses with very high magnification. But for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it is unquestionably an improvement over using hand-held binoculars from a helicopter.

"At 1,500 feet we're not reading license plates, but we can tell if it's a man or a woman on the ground," Sergeant Sheer said.

Advertisement

Like many systems used by police forces, one of the two Wescam systems

owned by Orange County has a night vision camera that creates images by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects, including people.

But a United States Supreme Court ruling last June has forced the Orange County Sheriff's Department and other police forces to change the way they use those thermal imaging cameras. The court said that the police could not train thermal imaging cameras on private homes without a warrant.

Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. said he would like to see legislators, rather than the courts, come up with specific rules for police use of helicopter camera systems. The A.C.L.U. does not oppose the use of cameras "under the rare circumstance that the police might be legitimately in pursuit of a hot suspect," he said.

"But in the end, that's not how it's going to be used," he added. "It's going to be used in ordinary law enforcement, and that's very different."

It is also being used from ever greater distances. Four years ago Wescam introduced a third stabilization system that combines the reliability of cameras like those used by the Orange County Sheriff's Department while offering even greater stability than the original system. It replaces the spinning mechanical gyroscopes with fiber-optic gyros, which use bursts of laser light to calculate movements by the camera system in each direction.

Once measured, the movement is also offset with a new technology known as magnetic torque motors that can apply a force in a specific direction but allow free movement in all other directions.

Not only is the new system much faster, said Steven Tritchew, Wescam's chief technology officer, but it will also provide a steady image with the magnification of "any lens being made." Practically speaking, atmospheric haze and, ultimately, the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon are the only limits on how far it can see. "We call it the ground-based Hubbell -- we can see a long way," Mr. Chamberlain said.

Certainly Lt. Keith Howland, a mission commander and tactical coordinatorbased at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Me., noticed a big difference after an old system in his P-3 Orion surveillance airplane was replaced by a turret with Wescam's new technology about a year ago. "You wouldn't even place them in the same universe," he said.

While on patrol, Lieutenant Howland said, he can watch events on the ground "well outside of visible range."

Like many civilian cameras, the Wescam on the P-3 can be aimed by punching in Global Positioning System coordinates. Software allows it to track moving objects on the ground more or less automatically.

While his aircraft's camera system cannot match the broad sweep of surveillance satellites, Lieutenant Howland said that it had many other advantages. "Basically we can be in real time on a target, see things at the moment they happen, and report it," he said. "It's live video versus a picture."

The systems can be costly, with the most advanced models costing as much as $650,000. But Wescam plans gradually to introduce variations on the new technology into all its markets, potentially giving police departments the same farsightedness. (The Raytheon Company recently introduced a fiber-optic gyro-stabilization system of its own. FLIR Systems of Portland, Ore., is also among the companies that make stabilization systems for police and military use.)

Mr. Chamberlain suggested that the most advanced technology might next go to an even more demanding customer than a police department chasing criminals or a military unit tracking terrorists: the broadcast news industry.

"From a pure image point of view, the military want uninterrupted imagery," he said, "but if it bounces a little bit once in a while or there's a little bit of fuzz on it from interference for a second or two, that's O.K. In the broadcast industry, if it jiggles a little bit or has a bit of fuzz when someone's crossing the finish line, well, you might not get invited back."

For the Spy in the Sky, New Eyes

By IAN AUSTEN

FLYING in his helicopter, Sgt. Frank Sheer of the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California can be literally miles from the action. But that does not mean that he and his co-pilot do not know what's going on. In fact, Sergeant Sheer says they often have a clearer picture of a crime scene than the officers who are there.

Advertisement

"We'll be tracking a suspect on a hillside from the helicopter," said Sergeant

Sheer, the chief pilot in the Orange County force, "and the deputies climbing up it will be saying to us, `There's nobody here.' We've actually had them step on a guy who pulled up a bush for cover."

It's not just having a bird's-eye view that gives Sergeant Sheer and many other airborne police officers, rescue workers, military personnel, and television news and movie crews almost paranormal vision. Nor is it simply advances in optics and cameras. Ultimately they all rely on complex camera stabilization systems that mix mechanical and electronic technologies to produce steady images, even at high magnification, from inherently unsteady craft like helicopters and boats.

When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods. But most helicopter surveillance is not that dramatic. If the Orange County Sheriff's Department needs a car discreetly followed, Sergeant Sheer can keep tabs on it from 3,000 feet up and a considerable distance behind -- a position that would leave most motorists unaware there was a helicopter around, let alone watching them.

New systems built around all-electronic motion-sensing technologies are so stable that only the horizon and haze limit how far away observers can be.

The use of airborne stabilized cameras to create films or follow athletes in action attracts little controversy. Nor does anyone dispute that the systems allow police officers to capture criminals or rescue people. Some privacy advocates, however, are concerned that the recent proliferation of airborne cameras and the growing capabilities of new systems may mean that anyone who steps outside may unknowingly be a target of an aerial eye. Outdoors, there may no longer be any place to hide.

"Because technology affords police what amounts to superhuman vision, that doesn't mean we lose all expectations of privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. "There are lots of innocent people who are going to have their privacy invaded -- observed naked in their backyard sunbathing from far away."

There is a long history of efforts to produce steady airborne pictures. But in the early years, the results were for the most part dismal.

Steven Poster, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers, recalls his first attempt at photography from a helicopter, in the late 1960's. "It was an Illinois State Fair, and the stabilization came from a rope tied around me to the helicopter," Mr. Poster recalled. "I quickly realized that this was not a very good system."

While more sophisticated systems existed back then, they did not differ much from Mr. Poster's rope. Known as side mounts, they generally relied on bungee cords and the user's body to isolate the camera.

By the 1980's Mr. Poster was a director of photography for feature films and television advertisements, and he had found an answer to his aerial photography problems with a system made by Wescam, a company now based in Burlington, Ontario.

"It's the best way to stabilize a camera," said Mr. Poster, who has used the system in films like "Stuart Little 2," which is to be released this summer.

The Wescam system used by Mr. Poster's film crews is remarkably similar to the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military. (Wescam is short for Westinghouse camera.)

Eliminating the vibration from the helicopter was the first step and the easy part. The Wescam ball is attached to a helicopter or airplane through a shock absorber that uses springs and other damping materials. "It is tuned for the natural frequencies of helicopters," said Mark Chamberlain, a mechanical engineer who is president and chief executive of Wescam.

But eliminating the vibration does nothing to limit three other kinds of movement by the camera: pitch (plunging up and down), yaw (rotating around a vertical axis) and roll (the side-to-side rotation that creates a moving horizon).

To deal with these kinds of movements, inventors of the original Wescam turned to large gyroscopes, which create inertia. It is like strapping a large boulder to the camera to stabilize it, yet without all the weight that a boulder would add.

Inside the camera ball are three gyros oriented to offset each of the three types of unwanted motion. Motors attached to the camera mount allow an operator within the helicopter to view images from the camera on a video monitor and point the camera as needed.

The gyro stabilization system proved so steady that it has not significantly changed over the last three decades. But the system has one significant drawback: the gyros require frequent maintenance.

That is not a problem for the movie industry, which rents the camera systems for short periods. (Other companies, including Gyron Systems International, Tyler Camera Systems and Spacecam Systems, also offer stabilized motion picture cameras.) But the need for maintenance made the systems largely impractical for full-time use by police, the military and television stations.

After Mr. Chamberlain led a management buyout in 1987 of the engineering company that had come to control the Wescam technology, he turned its attention to introducing a technology that was more robust.

Instead of providing stability, its three gyros wobble slightly when the rig changes directions. Sensors measure the wobbling and feed the data to microprocessors that in turn use high-speed electric motors to move the camera and offset the unwanted motion.

he second-generation technology -- what Mr. Chamberlain calls a sense- and-react system -- has only about half the stability of the original Wescam, so it cannot be used with lenses with very high magnification. But for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it is unquestionably an improvement over using hand-held binoculars from a helicopter.

"At 1,500 feet we're not reading license plates, but we can tell if it's a man or a woman on the ground," Sergeant Sheer said.

Advertisement

Like many systems used by police forces, one of the two Wescam systems

owned by Orange County has a night vision camera that creates images by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects, including people.

But a United States Supreme Court ruling last June has forced the Orange County Sheriff's Department and other police forces to change the way they use those thermal imaging cameras. The court said that the police could not train thermal imaging cameras on private homes without a warrant.

Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. said he would like to see legislators, rather than the courts, come up with specific rules for police use of helicopter camera systems. The A.C.L.U. does not oppose the use of cameras "under the rare circumstance that the police might be legitimately in pursuit of a hot suspect," he said.

"But in the end, that's not how it's going to be used," he added. "It's going to be used in ordinary law enforcement, and that's very different."

It is also being used from ever greater distances. Four years ago Wescam introduced a third stabilization system that combines the reliability of cameras like those used by the Orange County Sheriff's Department while offering even greater stability than the original system. It replaces the spinning mechanical gyroscopes with fiber-optic gyros, which use bursts of laser light to calculate movements by the camera system in each direction.

Once measured, the movement is also offset with a new technology known as magnetic torque motors that can apply a force in a specific direction but allow free movement in all other directions.

Not only is the new system much faster, said Steven Tritchew, Wescam's chief technology officer, but it will also provide a steady image with the magnification of "any lens being made." Practically speaking, atmospheric haze and, ultimately, the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon are the only limits on how far it can see. "We call it the ground-based Hubbell -- we can see a long way," Mr. Chamberlain said.

Certainly Lt. Keith Howland, a mission commander and tactical coordinatorbased at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Me., noticed a big difference after an old system in his P-3 Orion surveillance airplane was replaced by a turret with Wescam's new technology about a year ago. "You wouldn't even place them in the same universe," he said.

While on patrol, Lieutenant Howland said, he can watch events on the ground "well outside of visible range."

Like many civilian cameras, the Wescam on the P-3 can be aimed by punching in Global Positioning System coordinates. Software allows it to track moving objects on the ground more or less automatically.

While his aircraft's camera system cannot match the broad sweep of surveillance satellites, Lieutenant Howland said that it had many other advantages. "Basically we can be in real time on a target, see things at the moment they happen, and report it," he said. "It's live video versus a picture."

The systems can be costly, with the most advanced models costing as much as $650,000. But Wescam plans gradually to introduce variations on the new technology into all its markets, potentially giving police departments the same farsightedness. (The Raytheon Company recently introduced a fiber-optic gyro-stabilization system of its own. FLIR Systems of Portland, Ore., is also among the companies that make stabilization systems for police and military use.)

Mr. Chamberlain suggested that the most advanced technology might next go to an even more demanding customer than a police department chasing criminals or a military unit tracking terrorists: the broadcast news industry.

"From a pure image point of view, the military want uninterrupted imagery," he said, "but if it bounces a little bit once in a while or there's a little bit of fuzz on it from interference for a second or two, that's O.K. In the broadcast industry, if it jiggles a little bit or has a bit of fuzz when someone's crossing the finish line, well, you might not get invited back."

For the Spy in the Sky, New Eyes

By IAN AUSTEN

FLYING in his helicopter, Sgt. Frank Sheer of the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California can be literally miles from the action. But that does not mean that he and his co-pilot do not know what's going on. In fact, Sergeant Sheer says they often have a clearer picture of a crime scene than the officers who are there.

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"We'll be tracking a suspect on a hillside from the helicopter," said Sergeant

Sheer, the chief pilot in the Orange County force, "and the deputies climbing up it will be saying to us, `There's nobody here.' We've actually had them step on a guy who pulled up a bush for cover."

It's not just having a bird's-eye view that gives Sergeant Sheer and many other airborne police officers, rescue workers, military personnel, and television news and movie crews almost paranormal vision. Nor is it simply advances in optics and cameras. Ultimately they all rely on complex camera stabilization systems that mix mechanical and electronic technologies to produce steady images, even at high magnification, from inherently unsteady craft like helicopters and boats.

When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods. But most helicopter surveillance is not that dramatic. If the Orange County Sheriff's Department needs a car discreetly followed, Sergeant Sheer can keep tabs on it from 3,000 feet up and a considerable distance behind -- a position that would leave most motorists unaware there was a helicopter around, let alone watching them.

New systems built around all-electronic motion-sensing technologies are so stable that only the horizon and haze limit how far away observers can be.

The use of airborne stabilized cameras to create films or follow athletes in action attracts little controversy. Nor does anyone dispute that the systems allow police officers to capture criminals or rescue people. Some privacy advocates, however, are concerned that the recent proliferation of airborne cameras and the growing capabilities of new systems may mean that anyone who steps outside may unknowingly be a target of an aerial eye. Outdoors, there may no longer be any place to hide.

"Because technology affords police what amounts to superhuman vision, that doesn't mean we lose all expectations of privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. "There are lots of innocent people who are going to have their privacy invaded -- observed naked in their backyard sunbathing from far away."

There is a long history of efforts to produce steady airborne pictures. But in the early years, the results were for the most part dismal.

Steven Poster, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers, recalls his first attempt at photography from a helicopter, in the late 1960's. "It was an Illinois State Fair, and the stabilization came from a rope tied around me to the helicopter," Mr. Poster recalled. "I quickly realized that this was not a very good system."

While more sophisticated systems existed back then, they did not differ much from Mr. Poster's rope. Known as side mounts, they generally relied on bungee cords and the user's body to isolate the camera.

By the 1980's Mr. Poster was a director of photography for feature films and television advertisements, and he had found an answer to his aerial photography problems with a system made by Wescam, a company now based in Burlington, Ontario.

"It's the best way to stabilize a camera," said Mr. Poster, who has used the system in films like "Stuart Little 2," which is to be released this summer.

The Wescam system used by Mr. Poster's film crews is remarkably similar to the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military. (Wescam is short for Westinghouse camera.)

Eliminating the vibration from the helicopter was the first step and the easy part. The Wescam ball is attached to a helicopter or airplane through a shock absorber that uses springs and other damping materials. "It is tuned for the natural frequencies of helicopters," said Mark Chamberlain, a mechanical engineer who is president and chief executive of Wescam.

But eliminating the vibration does nothing to limit three other kinds of movement by the camera: pitch (plunging up and down), yaw (rotating around a vertical axis) and roll (the side-to-side rotation that creates a moving horizon).

To deal with these kinds of movements, inventors of the original Wescam turned to large gyroscopes, which create inertia. It is like strapping a large boulder to the camera to stabilize it, yet without all the weight that a boulder would add.

Inside the camera ball are three gyros oriented to offset each of the three types of unwanted motion. Motors attached to the camera mount allow an operator within the helicopter to view images from the camera on a video monitor and point the camera as needed.

The gyro stabilization system proved so steady that it has not significantly changed over the last three decades. But the system has one significant drawback: the gyros require frequent maintenance.

That is not a problem for the movie industry, which rents the camera systems for short periods. (Other companies, including Gyron Systems International, Tyler Camera Systems and Spacecam Systems, also offer stabilized motion picture cameras.) But the need for maintenance made the systems largely impractical for full-time use by police, the military and television stations.

After Mr. Chamberlain led a management buyout in 1987 of the engineering company that had come to control the Wescam technology, he turned its attention to introducing a technology that was more robust.

Instead of providing stability, its three gyros wobble slightly when the rig changes directions. Sensors measure the wobbling and feed the data to microprocessors that in turn use high-speed electric motors to move the camera and offset the unwanted motion.

he second-generation technology -- what Mr. Chamberlain calls a sense- and-react system -- has only about half the stability of the original Wescam, so it cannot be used with lenses with very high magnification. But for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it is unquestionably an improvement over using hand-held binoculars from a helicopter.

"At 1,500 feet we're not reading license plates, but we can tell if it's a man or a woman on the ground," Sergeant Sheer said.

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Like many systems used by police forces, one of the two Wescam systems

owned by Orange County has a night vision camera that creates images by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects, including people.

But a United States Supreme Court ruling last June has forced the Orange County Sheriff's Department and other police forces to change the way they use those thermal imaging cameras. The court said that the police could not train thermal imaging cameras on private homes without a warrant.

Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. said he would like to see legislators, rather than the courts, come up with specific rules for police use of helicopter camera systems. The A.C.L.U. does not oppose the use of cameras "under the rare circumstance that the police might be legitimately in pursuit of a hot suspect," he said.

"But in the end, that's not how it's going to be used," he added. "It's going to be used in ordinary law enforcement, and that's very different."

It is also being used from ever greater distances. Four years ago Wescam introduced a third stabilization system that combines the reliability of cameras like those used by the Orange County Sheriff's Department while offering even greater stability than the original system. It replaces the spinning mechanical gyroscopes with fiber-optic gyros, which use bursts of laser light to calculate movements by the camera system in each direction.

Once measured, the movement is also offset with a new technology known as magnetic torque motors that can apply a force in a specific direction but allow free movement in all other directions.

Not only is the new system much faster, said Steven Tritchew, Wescam's chief technology officer, but it will also provide a steady image with the magnification of "any lens being made." Practically speaking, atmospheric haze and, ultimately, the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon are the only limits on how far it can see. "We call it the ground-based Hubbell -- we can see a long way," Mr. Chamberlain said.

Certainly Lt. Keith Howland, a mission commander and tactical coordinatorbased at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Me., noticed a big difference after an old system in his P-3 Orion surveillance airplane was replaced by a turret with Wescam's new technology about a year ago. "You wouldn't even place them in the same universe," he said.

While on patrol, Lieutenant Howland said, he can watch events on the ground "well outside of visible range."

Like many civilian cameras, the Wescam on the P-3 can be aimed by punching in Global Positioning System coordinates. Software allows it to track moving objects on the ground more or less automatically.

While his aircraft's camera system cannot match the broad sweep of surveillance satellites, Lieutenant Howland said that it had many other advantages. "Basically we can be in real time on a target, see things at the moment they happen, and report it," he said. "It's live video versus a picture."

The systems can be costly, with the most advanced models costing as much as $650,000. But Wescam plans gradually to introduce variations on the new technology into all its markets, potentially giving police departments the same farsightedness. (The Raytheon Company recently introduced a fiber-optic gyro-stabilization system of its own. FLIR Systems of Portland, Ore., is also among the companies that make stabilization systems for police and military use.)

Mr. Chamberlain suggested that the most advanced technology might next go to an even more demanding customer than a police department chasing criminals or a military unit tracking terrorists: the broadcast news industry.

"From a pure image point of view, the military want uninterrupted imagery," he said, "but if it bounces a little bit once in a while or there's a little bit of fuzz on it from interference for a second or two, that's O.K. In the broadcast industry, if it jiggles a little bit or has a bit of fuzz when someone's crossing the finish line, well, you might not get invited back."

A report in the NYTimes earlier this week said that six former DOJ Antitrust officials chimed in on the proposed remedies. I've looked in several places, but haven't found a copy of the brief. Does anyone know where it can be found?

• 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence - The article even has a quote from an FBI spokesman admitting to arresting and trying to prosecute people knowing that it would never go through.
• Village Voice Analysis - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. (I'm just adding it to this list because it is quite insightful.
• Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights
• NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant
• Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech - "But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.
• Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws
• Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh
• Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens

• 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence - The article even has a quote from an FBI spokesman admitting to arresting and trying to prosecute people knowing that it would never go through.
• Village Voice Analysis - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. (I'm just adding it to this list because it is quite insightful.
• Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights
• NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant
• Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech - "But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.
• Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws
• Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh
• Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens

Why, you ask? "The decision to remove Microsoft's Java implementation was made because of Sun's strategy of using the legal system to compete with Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan said in a statement. Cullinan said the company will temporarily support Java "to minimize any potential disruption among our customers."

But is Microsoft admitting that they are punitively trying to harm Java and Sun? No, of course not. Microsoft claims that the settlement they signed when they were found to have created Java tools to intentionally fool programmers into writing incompatible code forces them to drop Java support.

How, you ask? "The settlement agreement between the companies prevents Microsoft from making any changes -- including any security fixes -- to our Java implementation after January 1, 2004," Cullinan said. "We will not put our customers or Windows at risk so you can anticipate that there will be no Java in Windows from that point forward."

One of the antitrust penalties proposed by the states would force Microsoft to carry support for Java. Now why do you suppose they would have suggested that?

Read all about it here (free registration required).

Actually, it's generally the opposite. You're not likely to want to read or trust any Phil Krugman if your a Limbaugh-ite, but he wrote a rather interesting editorial contrasting Republican and Democrat billionaires.*

The upshot was that Democrat billionaires, like Ted Turner, throw a lot of cash at things like the United Nations, world hunger, etc.. Whereas Republican billionaires, such as Rev Sun Myung Moon and Richard Mellon Scaife, use their power and money to run big-time smear campaigns.

While it sounds like a slanted view, there does seem to be a lot of evidence to back it up. There's actually a lot more evidence of Republican-run smear campaigns than anything about a "liberal media". Can you imagine what kind of right-wing furor and media buzz you'd be getting if it was Gore instead of Cheney who refused to give up records he'd been ordered to turn over? If it was Clinton's dad getting the fat defense contracts, and his buddies dictating policy that led to their enrichment and Enron's collapse?

Maybe most journalists have liberal leanings, but it doesn't have nearly the impact of a well-run smear organization. The liberals are horrible at media control, and have been for some time. They need to learn to play hardball, or they'll keep getting smacked around in the papers like they have been for decades. Clinton survived on his skill and charisma, but the rest of the liberal media-feeding organization doesn't have his talent.

* I don't have the article, and it costs money. But here's a link to the summary, I hope it works; it's a funky link.

St.Croix agreed to let me visit him, but because of security concerns, I was told to come to his house, not the office.... He gave me precise instructions for the cabby. I was told to get out at the end of a certain cul-de-sac. "Then wait for the cab to leave," he said. "I'm serious. And after you're sure the cab's gone, walk down the driveway to the left. Don't come to the front door. Just keep walking. You'll set off the lasers in my woods. I'll know you're coming and come out to meet you."

Interesting guy. Here's a link to his company's webpage.

This won't happen in the near or far future because there is no money left in the telecom's or equipment manufacturers accounts to fund this sort of thing. Wall $treet won't either because they got burned in the last internet/telecom bust. Since there hasn't been a link to the NY Times yet today, let me be the first. Telecom Outlook: First the Bad News, Then the Bad News

I knew that someone would finally get the sack to do this. The DMCA is in direct violation of space-shifting and fair use (anyone remember the Betamax case??), which have both been declared constitutional by the supreme court. Why can't people see that you can't (or at least shouldn't be able to) pass laws that are in direct opposition with existing laws without strinking the earlier ones down?

It's like passing a law saying that you can't kill people, then passing one that says you can 20 years down the road!

Then, we've got to have class action lawsuits like the one in court now to clear it up..

Why is this allowed to happen?

We might as well go over some of the other cool Nytimes articles not mentioned yet on slashdot: ... Review of a new book about the rise of eBay

Maybe you should spend less time on NYTimes and more on /.

:)

Slashdot; who needs other sites?

• Cool Surfing Machine
• Review of a new book about the rise of eBay
• Maybe online gaming isn't as safe as we thought

• Cool Surfing Machine
• Review of a new book about the rise of eBay
• Maybe online gaming isn't as safe as we thought

• Cool Surfing Machine
• Review of a new book about the rise of eBay
• Maybe online gaming isn't as safe as we thought

• Cool Surfing Machine
• Review of a new book about the rise of eBay
• Maybe online gaming isn't as safe as we thought

Well I wouldn't be moving my hardware up there anytime soon, Alaska is seven degrees warmer on average than it was 30 years ago.

Alaska might not be as cold as you think.

Registration required.

http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/ (The .org story can be found through the Technology link on the left).

Works for me under IE 4.0 and Moz. Doe it work for anyone else?

The point is that Bush's administration is much less friendly to free trade than Clinton's. This isn't a matter of exchanging favors for money or votes, but of principled belief in following the best course for the country economically. Bush, much more than Clinton, doesn't care about the country's long-term economic viability because no matter how bad it gets people of his class will have fine lives. That's why he does nothing about global warming - his friends can just buy new ranches in Canada. And that's why he can't be counted on not to sell out to MS - his friends consider Gates a sterling member of their private club.
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