Slashdot Mirror

It is actually surprising how much is involved in transporting the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town there was a considerable presence that travelled around with him and Air Force One is only a small part of that traveling circus. While the current VC-25 are starting to show their age, one does wonder just what sort of requirements creep are involved. It used to be that simpleton transport would be acceptable and in actuality, the 737 makes for a wonderful government transport in the C-40 and in fact the current 747 design (though modified since) has been in place since just 1990. In some ways the 747-8 does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as possessing more efficient engines, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need a 747-8 or an A380? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

It is surprising how involved is the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town [utah.edu] there was a presence that travelled around with him and the One is a part of that traveling circus. While the current POTUS is starting to show his age, one does wonder just what sort of creep is involved. It used to be that simple would be acceptable and in actuality, it makes for a wonderful government. In fact the current design (though modified since) has been in place since 1990. In some ways it does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as more efficient, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need POTUS? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

ws

It is actually surprising how much is involved in transporting the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town there was a considerable presence that travelled around with him and Air Force One is only a small part of that traveling circus. While the current VC-25 are starting to show their age, one does wonder just what sort of requirements creep are involved. It used to be that simple transport would be acceptable and in actuality, the 737 makes for a wonderful government transport in the C-40 and in fact the current 747 design (though modified since) has been in place since just 1990. In some ways the 747-8 does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as possessing more efficient engines, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need a 747-8 or an A380? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

It is actually surprising how much is involved in transporting the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town there was a considerable presence that travelled around with him and Air Force One is only a small part of that traveling circus. While the current VC-25 are starting to show their age, one does wonder just what sort of requirements creep are involved. It used to be that simple transport would be acceptable and in actuality, the 737 makes for a wonderful government transport in the C-40 and in fact the current 747 design (though modified since) has been in place since just 1990. In some ways the 747-8 does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as possessing more efficient engines, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need a 747-8 or an A380? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

You didn't expand the entire list there, buddy.

http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone_full.html

A background rumble of magnitude 1-2 quakes is a constant feature of Yellowstone. It is not a sign of imminent eruption.

I checked some of the monitoring stations, http://www.seis.utah.edu/helicorder/heli/yellowstone/Uuss.YTP_EHZ_WY.2008123100.gif for example. The background tremors seem to be picking up, but it might just be wind, as a front recently passed through. I think I'll be watching this one for a few days.

You didn't expand the entire list there, buddy.

http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone_full.html

Seriously Slashdot, you need to work on your reaction time. This was news two days ago.

These earthquake swarms happen frequently in Yellowstone, and this one has already ended. Yellowstone has dropped back to its ordinary low rumble.

Its about time. On my last trip to China just a couple of months ago, I did not even bother trying to get a media visa even though I'd been asked to cover/photograph a story for the military press. I declined that story offer simply because getting the press visa was too much of a hassle and you had to undergo extra hassles for all of the camera equipment. Traveling on a tourist visa through China is much easier and they don't give you any grief for even lots of camera equipment.

In fact, the whole visa issue always is a hassle. If countries wanted to ensure that people come and spend money, then why to they (US included) make getting a visa so difficult? I had to either travel to Washington DC to the Chinese embassy or pay a special travel office $140 to broker the visa on my passport for me.

but my middle school and high school encouraged me plenty with the Utah State Math Contest, which I see is still being held annually. I still have my trophies from that. :-)

The original source

Oh, wait...you meant something else, didn't you?

This is another demo http://www.ece.utah.edu/commlab/Movie.wmv In this demo the occupied frequencies are detected by spectrum sensing, in realtime the system chooses an appropriate band for transmission.

Unlike what Monsanto said, and you fell for

[Citation needed]

• Superweeds fear from GM crops
• Destructive creation: GM superweeds
• Rise of GM superweeds
• RE: Government Study Finds GM 'Superweeds'
• "Cross-Pollination Leads to Triple Herbicide Resistance"

Crops cross pollinate, GE or otherwise. And those who complain about GE crops need to Keep It Real - we've been genetically engineering for thousands of years through cross breeding.

We have not been inserting fish genes into tomatoes, or any other foreign genes into any other plant or animal life for thousands of years. Horizontal gene transfer happens rarely in nature. Simply selective breeding as is done in agriculture and farming does not introduce genes that do not occur naturally in plants or animals into those plant and animals. All it does is amplify traits that already there. I garden and if I come across a trait say in tomatoes I grow, I currently have four different tomatoes growing in the garden, I can save the seeds from the tomatoes I like and plant them the next year. If next year I do the same and keep doing that year after year I'll eventually create my own cultivar. That's a lot different than introducing foreign genes.

Yes, I know Monsanto are dicks, and I heard about that farmer. What I don't see, however, is how this is Gore's fault

It's not Gore's fault but he supports increasing genetic engineering.

The most a quick Googling brings up is that Clinton's secretary of agriculture was opposed to it while Gore was VP - pretty weak sauce.

Perhaps you searched for the wrong things. From wiki's article on Al Gore:
"Gore was one of the Atari Democrats who were given this name due to their 'passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the "greenhouse effect.'"

• Famed geneticist creating life form that turns CO2 to fuel
• Al Gore's Mealy-Mouth Position on Genetically Engineeered Food

Falcon

Around 35% increase since 1832 from 270ppm to 370ppm

http://www.lib.utah.edu/services/prog/gould/1998/Figure_6.gif

Emission rate of 7 billion tons/year

http://img.tfd.com/wiki/5/56/Global_Carbon_Emission_by_Type.png

if you doubt that humans are having significant impact then take a gander at this graph

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

and no just because i think we're making the planet hotter now doesn't mean i think we were involved in the formation of the Sahara, the two are unrelated. The Sahara is there because of prevailing winds combine with the positions of other nearby land masses, not global average temperature. The Sahara was actually larger than it is now during the last ice age.

Let the people who understand climate science do climate science.

This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing, I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.

So, while this has received some criticism, I visited Creech AFB a little while ago and the missions being flown from there in the Middle East and South America are more taxing and complex than you might expect.

Loiter times and length of engagements for these aircraft are not measured in minutes like with traditional fighter jets or helicopters. Rather they are measured in hours with the Predator A airframes capable of loitering over a combat area for 10-13 hours at a time. The Reaper has a slightly shorter loiter time, but those airframes also carry the same combat load as an F-16 and the missions being carried out are just as complex if not more demanding than with piloted missions.

Because UAV missions can last quite a bit of time, the pilots are expected to multi-task with ground troops for extended periods of time, tracking targets and managing data in a way that traditional piloted aircraft crews are not expected to. I observed a number of missions including missions that involved oversight for ground troops and elimination of targets that were active threats to those soldiers on the ground and even though the missions were being piloted from the other side of the globe, the tension in the "cockpit" was palpable. There is no celebration when a target has been engaged successfully and you are very much an intimate observer of what transpires and able to see more than you might expect.

The final telling statistic in this comment thread anyway, has been that the 432nd wing has become in the last couple of years, the Air Force's number one most requested asset and the toll rapid build ups like that take on any organization can be significant.

Yup. And before performing maintenence, always mount a scratch baby

It's actually quite painless already to install Apache on at least XP. Here's a link to the installer:
http://apache.cs.utah.edu/httpd/binaries/win32/apache_2.2.9-win32-x86-no_ssl-r2.msi

Well, I've got an old HP Pavillion 521n and (until recently) its on-board video didn't work with X11. I spent hours tweaking config files, nada. The semi-good news is that the latest Ubuntu was finally able to auto-config the thing. (And yes, I do know a thing or two about X11.)

Flying into this country is becoming more and more of a hassle and every time that I fly outside the US, it is apparent that the DHS is completely corrupting business and pleasure travel at the expense of our freedoms and economy.

If our government seriously thinks this is a viable option, then we have truly lost and the slide towards a fascist government will be complete. Yeah, go waaaay beyond "papers please" and treat *all* of your citizens as criminals when they travel.

What I suspect will happen is that this is a trial idea floated to the media and will be explained away as saying "Oh, well.... we intended this to be used for transporting criminals" or some such nonsense like that. This idea is one of the most absurd and dangerous ideas I've heard from my government in a long time and it moves us dangerously close to a threshold that will destabilize this country.

I prefer the 3 world theory of Popper. Materialism has been pretty much thoroughly discredited outside of some stubborn old timers who still are preaching it from their decade long tenures in Academia.

I don't know which cities are listed as the Popsci servers seem to be down, but a couple of weeks ago flying out of Los Angeles, the pollution seemed pretty bad as can be seen in this picture of the afternoon sun over the San Gabriel Mountains.

From some of my other travels throughout the world, I am guessing that L.A. is not even close to how dirty some cities can get particularly in Russia. If the air is worse than it is in L.A., then it should really, really make you worry.

While unmanned aerial vehicles are the future of the military, there are some serious concerns in the defense industry about the company Frontline Aerospace that is making noise about this particular drone. Specifically, the CEO appears to be all over the place in terms of his interests and talents as well as some of his claims and there are some substantial criticisms of the packaging and design.

Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.

I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.

Bah! Get your coffee and an old school French press to brew the tastiest coffee. Put your hacking efforts into the roasting, selection and cultivation of your beans and leave the time and resource wasting, lame Windows controlled coffee makers to the junk heap of history.

All things biotech are becoming like technology in general: more accessible and cheaper.

Let's say if I have some near-future technology or perhaps today a biochemist friend or two, would the law keep me from running a genetic test on myself?

Really, how long before a home test becomes viable? After all, one can already do this at home.

Jeez... if only Americans would have done the same thing in response to this guys efforts in his administration to do the same thing.

Seriously, where has the outrage been in the US? Did not George Orwell warn us? The number of Constitutional rights we've lost under the current administration is truly stunning and if we do not stand up and resist, this sort of thing will continue to spread throughout the world as it has in the UK, Japan, the US and many other European countries.

I think you should take in a few of the "innocents"

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7010883859
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-06-27-russia-gitmo_N.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4033420
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/03/fbc50158-46a9-4921-80db-195b1fe720b8.html
http://www.france24.com/en/20080508-suicide-bomber-former-guantanamo-detainee-usa-iraq-mosul-kuwaiti
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/cubanews/2007w46/msg00251.htm

So once you've got Omar Bin Whackjob and a few of his friends settled into your home, why not pick up a few 100lbs of Fertalizer and leave him your credit card so he can rent a truck?

Why not use Metafont? Vastly more powerful, and available for free on any platform TeX is.

Actually, it's not that easy. If a company trades with Cuba and the US, then they can be fined in the US. For instance, Iberia was fined by the US in 2004. Some even think, that the embargo has a completely different side effect

This is going to become more critical not just in terms of servers and informational or command based attacks, but also in terms of actual combat systems as we start to integrate more robots and remote networked combat platforms. For instance, my last visit to Creech AFB was very informative, but also illustrated a number of potential weaknesses in the system that controls remotely operated unmanned aerial vehicles actively engaging in combat.

Exercises such as these are critically important to war-game any networked system, particularly when that system is using commercial off the shelf solutions and commodity hardware that is accessible and easy to explore outside the realm of cyber warfare. i.e. war-gaming your attacks before going live...

It's a Roland the Plogger story, so you know there has to be something wrong with it.

There have been a few previous attempts at 2D treadmills. They're usually just a big endless chain of belt-type treadmills, like this one. The problem is that the things are big, heavy, expensive, and may have pinch points.

Here's a paper which lists most of the previous omnidirectional treadmills. The Darken Omnidirectional Treadmill (1997) was a belt made of rollers. The Torus Treadmill was an array of 12 small treadmills on an endless chain. This new treadmill looks like a bigger version of the Torus Treadmill.

The Sarcos Treadport is a more aggressive approach to the problem. It's only a 1D treadmill, but it's on a tilt base, so it can simulate hills. The user is in a suspended harness which can yank the user around to simulate collision with an obstacle. (Now there's force feedback.)

So this isn't that novel; it's just a bit bigger. Typical Roland the Plogger; press release goes in, blogspam comes out.

"In the U.S. for 2001, there were 29,573 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 16,869; Homicide 11,348; Accident 802; Legal Intervention 323; Undetermined 231.(CDC, 2004) This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S."

I used to do cosmic ray research, specifically ultra high energy cosmic ray research. We observed particles 7-8 factors of 10 times more energetic than the LHC will *ever* produce. Those particles however are quite rare. Here's a plot showing the general population of cosmic rays. Those ones on the bottom right are those that only hit every few months or less within our few hundreds of cubic kilometers of detectable atmosphere. I don't know how well this distribution of equivalent CR's in the CERN range can help to compare against their nebulous 'coalesce' argument. It almost sounds like they want the LHC to destroy the world. :-)

Since pi should really be what we know as 2pi, Pi Day should not be until June.

Last time I was in Japan, (scroll down for the robot) progress in the Toyota Partner Robot development was truly impressive. They have amazingly smooth, articulated motions, can walk with close to natural gaits and can climb stairs. Robots, whether fully autonomous or semi-autonomous are here to stay in rolls from support like the ones being developed in Japan or for defense/warfare applications like I saw on my recent visit to Creech AFB. I gotta say though, that this robot has got to be one of my favorites and this robot has got to be one of the creepiest.

Last time I was in Japan, (scroll down for the robot) progress in the Toyota Partner Robot development was truly impressive. They have amazingly smooth, articulated motions, can walk with close to natural gaits and can climb stairs. Robots, whether fully autonomous or semi-autonomous are here to stay in rolls from support like the ones being developed in Japan or for defense/warfare applications like I saw on my recent visit to Creech AFB. I gotta say though, that this robot has got to be one of my favorites and this robot has got to be one of the creepiest.

Bruce is a fellow satellite spotter also with some degree of background and in the subject matter and has good coverage here.

GIYF (it's a pdf). And fuck the ill-informed idiots who modded you up.

While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).

Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.

Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute football program, nor is the majority coming from private/alumni donations... them thar's your tuition (and tax) monies at work. This is the same UofU that has one hell of a large business and IP incubation program, and a 300+ acre, 37-building complex referred to as Research Park. Note that I'm not picking on the UofU per se, but it is a place that I am highly familiar with, as it is a fellow BoR member as my former employer's of long ago.

(by the by, the UofU is also incidentally one of the very first nodes on what eventually became the Internet - the other node was at UC Berkeley).

/P

While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).

Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.

Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute football program, nor is the majority coming from private/alumni donations... them thar's your tuition (and tax) monies at work. This is the same UofU that has one hell of a large business and IP incubation program, and a 300+ acre, 37-building complex referred to as Research Park. Note that I'm not picking on the UofU per se, but it is a place that I am highly familiar with, as it is a fellow BoR member as my former employer's of long ago.

(by the by, the UofU is also incidentally one of the very first nodes on what eventually became the Internet - the other node was at UC Berkeley).

/P

It is actually getting harder to identify satellites due to the efforts that certain governments are taking, including building in additional propulsion and stealth features built into the latest launches to alter and conceal orbits from those that might be predicted from launch. This is to prevent not only the ability to track orbits and know when a particular platform may be overhead, but it also prevents many of the current technologies like adaptive optics from being able to identify features of orbiting satellites as shown here .

Physics essentially defines how big an object is that can be resolved from space which is (until recently) about 10cm optimal given the best altitude, angle of the sun and angle of captured image with perfect atmospheric conditions. Currently most satellite in orbit are using standard optics. However, using a newer technology called adaptive optics, images can be obtained that allow for much higher resolution. Some examples of ground based adaptive optics imaging of satellites can be seen here , but space based adaptive optics work is an area of very active interest in a variety of fields from science to intelligence.

Professer Philipp Slusallek of the University of Saarbruecken demonstrated a dedicated raytracer in 2005, using a 66 MHz Xilinx FPGA with about 6 million gates. The latest ATI and nVidia GPUs have 100 times as many transistors and run at 6-8 times the clock with hundreds of times the memory bandwidth. Raytracing is completely parallelizable, and scales up almost linearly with processors, so it's not at all unlikely that if those kinds of resources were applied to raytracing instead of vectorizing you'd be able to add a raytracer capable of rendering 60+ FPS at the level of detail of the very latest games into the transistor budget of the chips they're designing now without even noticing.

Here's a debate between Professer Slusallek and chief scientist David Kirk of nVidia: http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/raytracing-vs-rasterization.html .

Here's the SIGGRAPH 2005 paper, on a prototype running at 66 MHz: http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs7940-010-rajeev/sum06/papers/siggraph05.pdf

Here's their hardware page: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/

As already mentioned, openrt is not open source. A good open source RTRT I've looked at is Manta. http://code.sci.utah.edu/Manta/index.php/Main_Page

And to the (+5 Insightful) naysayer who says that the future of games will be in shaders not in RT ... what are you comparing there? You're almost comparing a technology with an implementation.

You can implement a ray tracer on the gpu. I.e. through the use of shaders.

For all of your cynics posting in reply, all I have to say is that these documents (the Constitution, its amendments and the Declaration of Independence) have shaped who we are as a country. The last time I visited them was an intensely powerful experience, and I suggest if you are ever in the area, do stop by and reflect on the history of these documents and what is, what was and what is to become.

True, in the past there have been many examples of companies spinning off from universities and leaving them with nothing. My sense is that universities are getting wise to this - or just more greedy, depending on which side you take.

I have really been impressed with the level of commitment to science, research and education outside of the US right now and efforts like HECToR only consolidate that impression. While we here in the US have essentially dropped the ball on education and science funding for the past oh, six or seven years, the rest of the world is really stepping up. Of course I have mixed feelings about this as I am a US citizen who works in science and education, but it is also good to see other countries stepping up. For instance, a few months ago, I visited the University of Leicester and was truly impressed with the focus and quality of the research going on in the UK. Their commitment to bioscience funding is something that the US government should be very careful about as we stand to lose some valuable talent overseas if we are not careful...

My initial thoughts on this were "bah, people spend too much time online", then I caught myself realizing that in the aggregate, I have resources spread all over a number of services from the personal personal to the professional with various sites from scientific ones to educational ones to time wasters like Slashdot ;-)

I even started exploring a couple of social aggregators last year to explore options for consolidating effort and one of the most promising I've seen is Lijit. The premise behind their product is that people tend to look for answers from others they know or trust, yet current search engines (even the almighty Google) do not provide any sort of framework for trust inside social networks you are familiar with. Lijit provides for this intimacy of information allowing you and others to search not only information in your blog, but also information from posts that colleagues, friends and family have perhaps written when you are looking for information from sources that *you* know and trust. It is an approach that certainly has benefits in the social networking arenas, but I also find the potential for business and academics to be very exciting. The only question in my mind is how to exploit different services hosted on a variety of platforms to make the content indexable, but since text strings lend themselves to this quite nicely, the next problem is alternative data sources like image data, sound data, video, etc...etc...etc...

I don't think you can render that directly so easily and if you want to work with that dataset it will cause even more trouble. I would try to change it to something simpler to work with. First create a height map which only covers the lowest parts of the model. Then extract all geometry that resides atop of it. That should result in a big height map and geometry which has a lot of disjoint parts. So next I would try to segment the geometry into disjunct objects so you can use level of detail on them, using it on one object is very hard to keep continuous. Without description of what you want to do with the model it is hard to say, if that would do or not.

There are renderers which can handle those datasets, but I don't know if they are available. Ingo Wald has done realtime raytracing of a Boing 777 with 350 million triangles.