Slashdot Mirror

that CNN is publishing this story; back in the late 1990s, they stole a frame from one of my computer generated animations of a pulsating star, and put it in a story on their website. They tweaked the colourmap a little, but apart from that the image is identical to my original animations.

They even had the gall to claim the copyright for themselves. Bastards.

There is a simple enough reason for this.

English is taught (at least in English speaking countries) as a language for everyday use. In England I guess it would be something like Estuary English. It's a language where words are slurred together (in a general sense, I'm not implying the English are drunk all the time :), 'slow' letter-groups are lost (what==w'ot, what's up==wass'up, hmm...). What is really being said is obtained mostly from the context and slang is used often.

Foreign languages, in your case, German (I'm assuming here that your first language is English) ,are taught using sentence construction, proper tense usage and correct verb gender. You're taught how to write the sentence before you learn the nouns which are being used.

The only way to correct this (IMHO) would be to have two English subjects, the first is "English as an everyday language"(EEL), the second "English as a foreign language"(EFL). In the EFL class you would English grammer as any non-english speaker would, tense, irregular verbs, pronoun order. The EEL class would be essays, imagination, poetry, discussion, etc.

I doubt it will happen any time soon, nobody wants 3 different English classes (+literature..).

There are also changes that have happened to the English language which didn't happen to the other European languages (German, French, Welsh..). Some of the grammatical constructions are dropped or optional. German has die/der/das/dem, French has le/la/les/l'... to mean 'the'. In English you can often drop the 'the' (e.g. the man's hat='the hat of the man' in [German,French,Welsh,Spanish]). Silly things like not beginning a sentence with 'And' or 'But' and split infinitives also add to the confusion.

Regarding the writing online improving children's English (I just reread the story title, my brain said "the kids have improved, now they are writing online", instead of "...because they are writing"). I think it has something to do with the ability to change sentences as you change your thoughts, on paper you have to form the sentence first, on a computer you can type what you think of first (which is what you see in IRC/IM chat). If you then want to change the structure, you don't have to throw away the entire page. This paragraph has been changed at least 4 times.

BB

That's quite amazing. Now we need a computer to write music and songs.

It's been done. Bach was an early target. Heck, I was writing melody generators and harmonizers 8 years ago (badly, but I was doing it).

Not true. I'm using the open-source ndiswrapper project together with the win32 drivers, and it works, although a bit buggy. See here

In fact, it would be fine by me to have a couple of exemptions for well-known characters - with fees paid to the Treasury rather than influential congressmen. Although I'd really prefer that Mickey not have eternal protection, it would probably be better than letting everything else be dragged down with it.

But it wouldn't work out - They would just take advantage of the cheaper path, which is to give a smaller amount to elected officials than would be reasonable to charge as fees.

We're just going to have to keep agitating for the next twenty years so that the next "copyright extension to keep us competitive/in sync with Europe" is seen for the bald-faced thievery that it is.

Hee hee -- just realized that Disney was recently hoist by their own petard on Peter Pan. The story actually does have an eternal copyright in England, with the caveat that all royalties go to a London children's hospital. Disney wanted to get involved with merchandising for that movie, but had some issue with paying copyright fees. (One story suggests that their problem was "We already pay royalties to the hospital to cover our animated version, why should we pay them again?")

Maybe we should send that story to our elected officials...

TSG

Like this?
Or this?

Google is your friend.

Here an interesting project that uses Bluetooth. Lego Robot.
Also here is a good overview of Bluetooth. Overview.

Naw, the "may contain peanuts" is just a generic CYA. Being one of the Half Percent of the population with this life-threatening allergy, I know that even a dust sized particle could be fatal.

This warning "may contain peanuts" etc is placed on many products that are simply near, or which may have come into contact with, peanuts at the time of manufacture (i.e. Milky Way bars run on the same conveyor belt as Snickers, etc).

So corporations have [thankfully] started to add this warning to products so that customers will know whether there is a decent chance that the food has contacted peanuts at any time (and of course to cover their own asses from the lawsuits that would follow).

This allergy is becoming more and more common. Learning some of these basic facts could save a life or avoid a new case in a child you know.

-.-- -.-- --..

Naw, the "may contain peanuts" is just a generic CYA. Being one of the Half Percent of the population with this life-threatening allergy, I know that even a dust sized particle could be fatal.

This warning "may contain peanuts" etc is placed on many products that are simply near, or which may have come into contact with, peanuts at the time of manufacture (i.e. Milky Way bars run on the same conveyor belt as Snickers, etc).

So corporations have [thankfully] started to add this warning to products so that customers will know whether there is a decent chance that the food has contacted peanuts at any time (and of course to cover their own asses from the lawsuits that would follow).

This allergy is becoming more and more common. Learning some of these basic facts could save a life or avoid a new case in a child you know.

-.-- -.-- --..

University College London have been developing a number of multimedia applications -- see http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/.

The VIC tool, which provides peer-to-peer video streaming via multicast or unicast can be used to transmit video images to others whilst RAT handles the audio side.

It's free, there's source, and it works. We use it here regularly for conference calls with other institutions in the UK and the US.

Here's the really cool (and tricky) part: then you put the motors inside the platforms themselves. Then you don't need miles long rubber belts that can wear out. Just replace them with concrete floors. And to keep people from falling out, add walls. If you add a roof, you can operate them outside, even when it's raining! And for more capacity (to make up for having the seats in the first place), you can use more than one platform stacked together.

I think it would look something like this.

Here (for free)

Here too (for free)

This one too (for free)

This one also (free)

And don't forget this classic ($30 poster)

-T

Originally I was going to say something along the lines of "interplanetary missions? In a SHUTTLE?", but then I checked out some of the graphics, and came across something amazing.

Anything game that uses this spacecraft in it HAS to be good! Freaking awesome! Too bad it's only an 'add-on'. But _still_. The 2001 add-on is pretty great-looking, too.

There is a stereo camera on Beagle 2. There were also two cameras on Mars Pathfinder which were used to produce stereo panoramas.

Actually it went international long before IP was even in use. University College London joined the ARPAnet back in 1973. TCP and IP were only standardized in 1978.

I'm waiting until this nation (us) abandons coal as it's primary energy source. Driving an electric car is not neccesarily any more eco friendly than driving a combustion powered vehicle unless your energy source is renewable and clean. When you plug your electric car into the grid you're probably burning coal.

Unfortunatly, electric cars will probably not lower our dependance on fossil fuels anytime soon. If anything they may increase them. The important step is the adoption of alternative energy sources.

Until then I'll still rely on human-powered transportation.

Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the day

ascii phonetics, anyone?

Yup. SAMPA is ASCII phonetics.

Before I start I should say that my girlfriend (well, partner, but using the word girlfriend should get a few Slashdotters drooling) is a town planner, a graduate of the internationally reknowned Bartlett School of Planning, and I've learnt a thing or two about urban design, planning and architecture from her along the way.

Modern buildings, with very few exceptions, aren't designed to last for hundreds of years. Architects, developers and builders design and build for the short term, not for the long term. The materials they choose to work with aren't designed to last for centuries simply because cities, and hence buildings, evolve over time - what's needed and what's fashionable today will be useless and outdated in only a couple of decades from now.

The proof of this is around us - buildings erected in the 60s and 70s are being pulled down all the time, to make way for more "modern", "practical" and "aesthetic" developments. This is especially true of commercial buildings but it also applies to residential structures too.

Modern building design is nothing like Victorian building design. The Victorians constructed brick buildings, because brick was the best material available to them. As a result, they couldn't safely build more than four or five storeys - beyond that a building would not be able to support its own weight. They also (for the most part) didn't have any means of transporting goods and people up and down easily - lifts/elevators didn't really take off in a big way until the turn of the 20th century.

It was only when the means to work steel effectively, to shape it as required, was developed that modern building design took off. Steel being lighter and stronger than brick allowed architects to design taller, more spacious buildings and coupled with the use of lifts/elevators, it allowed them to break the ceiling barrier that previously existed. Once they started to work with steel, they quickly were able to go very high, very quickly, hence the rapid development of skyscrapers almost overnight in New York and other cities.

But I'm digressing from my main point: The reason why buildings don't last is because, generally they're designed with the knowledge that they'll be obsolete within their designers' lifetimes.

Unreliable? Hardly. Unless you include the failed first launch of the Ariane 5 EC-A enhanced version, there was 1 failure in 13 launches, the failure being due to the infamous soft-/hardware integration error, which has been fixed.

For anyone interested in a fantastic space simulator (sorry windows based...but free) try this link.

Unless your already a rocket scientist, you are gaurunteed to learn a few things while having a great time.

China is a scientific nation, you can't move at most scientific conferences without bumping into a large contingent who are either directly from China or who are researching in Western Unis.

Yes, but why, if China is so scientific, do they have to come to the West to actually do their research?

I'm not down on the Chinese people, but China as a nation has historically not been a great place to innovate from. Could be down to Communism, could be Confucian tradition, could be simply the sheer size of China made collaboration difficult.

How many people from _your_ alma mater have been published in Nature ?

A search for UCL gives 112 matches on that site. Off the top of my head, UCL ranks second in the world (behind Harvard) for volume of research publications in all fields. You were saying?

While one will indeed find this "fact" listed in many places, including a few physics texts, it may well be a fallacy. I've looked up the frequency absorption spectrum of water, and 2450 MHZ was not a peak. Unfortunately my "classic" paper link is now dead (I'd really appreciate a currently active and stable link even if it supercedes the paper I had and proves me wrong)

The best I can do right now is " Absorption Spectrum of H2 18O in the Range 12 400...14 520 cm-1 [Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy 216, 77-80 (2002)]

Moreover, anyone with equipment to measure the relevant range can see that microwaves are not tuned to a tight band. The frequency of any one oven varies far more than any the reasonable expectation for an absorption band in that range (depending on temperature, use, etc.) and the variance between ovens is greater still.

That's actually one specific reason why a resonance frequency is not used: the increase in efficiency that would result from picking an absorption peak (vs. simply reflecting the microwaves around inside the cavity 10-1000 times until a significant fraction is absorbed) simply wouldn't have been worth the effort and cost of precisely tuning each unit (at the time when microwaves first came out) Further, we are all aware of the accounts (admittedly potentially apocryphal) that relate the discovery of microwave cookery to an accidental exposure to a military radar dish. Military radars (excluding weather radars) generally avoid the water bands, because water vapor in the air would limit range.

I don't mean to criticize the Original Poster, since that "information" can indeed be found in reputable sources. I'd simply rather not see it repeated if it obscures and incorrectly explains the operation of microwave ovens and EM radiation.

Finally, even if the microwave radiation from a oven *did* operate on a resonance absorption band for water, the total power of a cell phone is tiny (mW-W). One would get orders of magnitude more tissue heating by stepping out into the sun or even another person (both things some techie types seem to avoid). In the absence of any specific epidemiological or other significant evidence of specific tissue or cellular disorders caused by the specific frequency bands used by cellular phones, their radiation can *only* be expected to produce nonspecific tissue heating.

Before you worry about microwaves, worry about other sources of energy like sunlight. Microwaves onlt *seem* "spookier" to certain people, while sunlight is far stronger in many, many specific bands than celphones over their entire range.

It might be wise to say say IANAMD, but I *am* an MD (with a degree in molecular biology). That doesn't make me an authority on epidemiology or molecular properties, but I like to think it does give me a small edge.

Ha! Raelians can't read biology and think p53 is a new gene (first published 1984) that makes evolution impossible, cos its a DNA repair enzyme, which makes mutation and hence evolution impossible (1).

Which is true in that DNA repair exists and p53 is involved in it (although its more involved in getting cells to commit suicide if there feeling a bit precancerous), but it won't stop genes mutating as all it does is checks/corrects DNA base pairing sometimes correcting it the wrong way creating a new mutation

(1) under Evidence -> Science & Future -> Alt theorys of Evolution.... (F***ing frames)

PS Being involved in human gene nomenclature I feel duty bound to mention p53 approved symbol is TP53.

ARIANE 5 Failure - Full Report

"The reason why the active SRI 2 did not send correct attitude data
was that the unit had declared a failure due to a software
exception."

"The OBC could not switch to the back-up SRI 1 because that unit had
already ceased to function during the previous data cycle (72
milliseconds period) for the same reason as SRI 2."

"The internal SRI software exception was caused during execution of
a data conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed
integer value. The floating point number which was converted had a
value greater than what could be represented by a 16-bit signed
integer. This resulted in an Operand Error. The data conversion
instructions (in Ada code) were not protected from causing an
Operand Error, although other conversions of comparable variables in
the same place in the code were protected."

"The error occurred in a part of the software that only performs
alignment of the strap-down inertial platform. This software module
computes meaningful results only before lift-off. As soon as the
launcher lifts off, this function serves no purpose."

"It has been stated to the Board that not all the conversions were
protected because a maximum workload target of 80% had been set for
the SRI computer. To determine the vulnerability of unprotected
code, an analysis was performed on every operation which could give
rise to an exception, including an Operand Error. In particular, the
conversion of floating point values to integers was analysed and
operations involving seven variables were at risk of leading to an
Operand Error. This led to protection being added to four of the
variables, evidence of which appears in the Ada code. However, three
of the variables were left unprotected. No reference to
justification of this decision was found directly in the source
code. Given the large amount of documentation associated with any
industrial application, the assumption, although agreed, was
essentially obscured, though not deliberately, from any external
review."

http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_plasma/missions/clus ter/about_cluster/cluster1/ariane5rep.html

Of course, nobody likes the French and the acronym was ultimately changed to Global System for Mobile [Communication]. And yes, there should be an accent over the e in Groupe but /.'s ampersand character thing is broken.

a bit of history behind that.
</pedantic>

It was a new financial system, and it was a real mess - something like £9m initial cost and £20m due to its flaws. According to Anthony Finkelstein, who's written a very detailed report on the fiasco:

• Significantly more costly than had been anticipated (worse than it appears because of hidden costs)
• Substantial disruption to working of the University
• Placed staff under undue pressure
• Placed the finance of the University at risk and may have prevented the University and its staff from fulfilling their legal responsibilities

You can read his full report here (pdf) or here (google html version). There are also news reports on the system here and here.

Basically, it was bad management throughout... a classic case of a big software project gone wrong.

No, it isn't.

there is nothing worse than taking a year out because you can't think what else to do - it will send the signal to universities and employers that you don't really know what your goals are, that you are likely to drift through university the same way, directionless and underachieving.

however, if you plan it thoroughly and take a year out for a positive purpose, like voluntary work, employers in particular will love it. seriously, it has helped me enormously in interviews. i spent a gap year abroad after A Levels (i live in the UK), working with the homeless and mentally ill. all interviewers touched on this when i was applying for jobs last year, and all said it impressed them. they believe that an experience like that implies a broader worldview, adaptibility, and perhaps a measure of maturity, all things that employers prize. i got a number of good offers in a depressed job market. the voluntary work i did in my gap year helped make me stand out.

as for my university, they were quite happy to let me defer entry once they were satisfied that i was taking a year out for the right reasons (i studied astrophysics at University College London). i applied with all my friends, with the guarantee of a place when i got back from my year abroad. interestingly, universities themselves have found that people who take purposeful gap years like this actually score higher than those who are content to remain on the endless birth-education-job-mortgage-pension-death conveyor belt.

you don't get many opportunities in life to do something as unique as what you could do in a year out. later on you are tied in to job security, mortgage perhaps, children, etc. i did voluntary work in africa, work with the homeless in a ghetto district in DC, and it is something that i will be forever grateful i did... if you are going to do it for the right reasons, and plan it properly, then i strongly encourage you to go for it!!

I abhor the creation of laws that violate my rights in any way shape or form. It is not the purpose of government to pick and choose winners by passing favorable laws it is the purpose of government to protect my rights.

Laws can not violate your rights, though they can violate what is right (or what one believes to be right). A right is something that is granted by law, and can taken away by law. The notion that one has rights other than those granted by law is known as the theory of natural rights which Bentham described, as "nonsense upon stilts."

Any appeal to natural rights takes one of to forms. Either it can be a childish cry of 'I want,' or it can be an attemt to indicate something to be ethically right without reasoning why it is right. Consider the abortion debate at one extreme there is the childish 'my right to with my body what I want', at the other extreme is the 'right to life of the unborn child' based on nothing more than religous dogma. It isn't a question of which right trumps the other, there are no easy answers to the rights and wrongs of abortion.

When you say that you "abhor the creation of laws that violate my rights" all you are saying is that you don't like laws that prevent you doing what you want to do. Well tough shit, that is what laws are meant to do. Ideally laws should be for the greater good rather than just to protect a narrow sectional interest.

I don't like the current copyright laws because they tend to work against my interests. I would be prepared to accept them if it could be shown that they benefited the greater good, i.e. promoted the spread dissemination of knowledge and art, however I beliieve they do the opposite and so feel that a can argue for (rather than just demand) the reform of such laws.

Uh, www.orbitersim.com is no longer. Perhaps you wanna go back to the original site which a quick google search found.

Here is some more potential software for it. Here is even more.

from the original analysis by David Moore:

UK Mirror
UK FTP
AU Mirror
Flipbook animation (207k .FLI)
Quicktime animation of growth by geographic breakdown (200K .mov {requires QuickTime v3 or newer} )
original www.caida.org gif animation

A format, language, or protocol that has become a standard not because it has been approved by a standards organization but because it is widely used and recognized by the industry as being standard.

The Guardian carried this story. It began with the astonishing statement: "The internet in Europe is facing its first major test today..." -- so evidently, we've somehow survived over here since 1970 without any kind of a "major test".

In other words we're a long way from reaching the limit to life span - which is important for policy makers and actuaries. But, this does not mean that there is no limit to life span, in the absence of other interventions. In fact, life span has a significant genetic component which has been studied in a lot of different organsms, like fruit files and worms where lifespan is controlled by the daf gene family.

In the worm case, it's not the accumulated insults of living that cause death, instead it's like throwing a switch. Alter the switch and you alter life span without changing quality of life. What causes the daf genes to get activated is still not well understood, but it might relate to the timing of having progeny ... after the worms reproduce they tend to die off, while mutant long lived worms tend to put off reproduction. Here are some labs working in aging research)

I've searched around and found one app for Linux that does about what Speak Freely does: RAT.

Anyone know of other apps that can do this sort of thing for Linux or other Free Unix-like systems?

These meat cubes would be called "Spoo".

If you have never heard the term MBONE check out this page for an introduction. There are also a slew of useful docs here. North Carolina State University has done some really inovative things with distance learning, Linux, and MBone. Here is a link to their Distance Education Teaching Assistant Page, which should be able to get you started. I know that the Linux Journal also ran an article on distance education back in October of 2000 and it may be at their web site.

I used to use VIC at work for simple "are you in" multicast office monitoring using webcams, we just turned the bandwidth and frame rate controls down low and put the cameras somewhere so you could see people where in but not what they were doing :)

It worked great for us, you can have several streams in view at once, then click on one for a larger picture. It is only a video tool, so needs to be used in conjunction with something else for audio needs.

The whole thing worked great with creative USB web cams and ran on windows and linux machines just fine. I expect a MacOS X port wouldn't be to hard, plus it uses the standard communication protocols so I should hook up with other packages just fine.

Look here for tools for Windows/Linux and just about every other Unix variant. No Mac support, but the freeware packages you've found that run on Windows/Mac should suffice as long as they adhere to the standard protocols supported by the UCL tools.

I tried it on a computationally intensive program I use in my work (PAML) - plain C (not C++), on my PIII 1GHz Linux it runs about 35% faster compiled with icc with all the optimizations turned on than the gcc code (-O3 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686). This is a significant gain when my typical run of the program takes ~2 days at 90% CPU usage.

The UCL - Space Sciences posting linked to above is an excellent introduction to both the technical capability and the commercail terms that most of the major earth imaging satellite systems work to. It also has some good descriptions on the legal restrictions on imaging specific areas of the globe and the impact on the aerial photography market. The document starts with a clear copyright statement and a very limited distribution list, so it may not be there for too long!.

The University College London Geography Department hosts an excellent web site for those interested in remote sensing but also produce some excellent visualisations of the internet and world wide web, the site can be found at http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/.

Orbital was working on the quickbird and earlybird satellites (the names got changed around as schedules, ahem, moved). At the same time I was also working on our tractor-trailer tracking system. I figured that if we could save a lot of money if just ditch our GPS/cellular tracking hardware and put giant bar codes on the trailers, and track them visually with the satellites. But, alas, we only had 1 meter resolution and even with a 53' trailer, there wasn't enough room for a suitable bar code. But, with this better resolution, my plan's now feasable!!

Fun fact: giant shipping companies lose one or two trailers a year each because they don't know where they left them.

p.s. patent pending. Ok, not really, but if anyone tries this, please let this post serve as evidence of prior art.

Sigh.

As I said, "There is a field know as Genetic Programming where the defining feature is that the programs do evolve" and as I also said, I have DONE genetic programming and other genetic algorithms myself. It has NOTHING to do with viruses.

So before you go telling me what it isn't, maybe you should find out what you are talking about:

Genetic Programming FAQ
or
news:comp.ai.genetic
or
The Genetic Algorithms Archive is a repository for information related to research in genetic algorithms and other forms of evolutionary computation.
or
Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection" - by John R. Koza, MIT Press 1992
or
Evolutionary Programming Society (professional/research level link)

Uh, not quite. Single electrons have half-integer spin and thus obey the pauli exclusion principle, while photons (spin zero) obey bose-einstein statistics. This makes electrons "avoid" each other while photons "congrigate" (condense). But both may be viewed as either waves or as particles, and the WP duality per se has no effect on their behaviour.

-- MarkusQ

Uh, not quite. Single electrons have half-integer spin and thus obey the pauli exclusion principle, while photons (spin zero) obey bose-einstein statistics. This makes electrons "avoid" each other while photons "congrigate" (condense). But both may be viewed as either waves or as particles, and the WP duality per se has no effect on their behaviour.

-- MarkusQ

X-Plane costs less $60 US... it's right there on the web-site.

However, if your are interested in accurate physics (at least in space), you ought to try Orbiter. I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet.

The physics there are the most accurate I've seen for a PC space game. The graphics are spectacular, and accurate (at least for those space bodies where such data exists). For some bodies there are 8192*8192 bitmaps (heh, you'll _need_ a good graphics card if you choose that option!). Best of all, it's free.

The only downside is it is not open source, nor does it run in anything but Windows.

I really recommend it to anyone who likes all the nice physics stuff, and the eyecandy, but isn't scared off by a _steep_ learning curve. At least go take a look at the purty screenshots.

I have put a mirror over here in the UK.

This is just some random text to try and circumvernt the silly filter.

Upon consideration, I can thing of exactly one case in which I would accept TimeTraveling Baddies From An Alternate Universe® in the Star Trek Universe.

However, this is somewhat unlikely to happen until CGI gets much better at rendering teeth and curls....