1 When we designed our software that did this we didn't wait for the hardware to come along. I'm sure it will one day.
2 Even though I said 3D, it doesn't have to be normal 3D. The inside of your filing cabinet can be an entire room or library you can move around in. Think Tardis from Dr. Who. Of course you can teleport to many virtual places, your virtual office can be whatever you want, organised how you want it. Virtual agents can still search through files, files can still live in folders. But real folders..
3 In our software you could do that, like get lists of file names in directories. We had it written on the side of the 3D file directory the mini-app ran to display you directories. And you could always get a search agent to look for something if you lost it or left it somewhere and bring it back to you.
4 Whats hard?? We did it because we forget to ask anyone if it was impossible and didn't start it with any sort of 2D idea. The basic idea was to make a VR world but in the end , people who saw it thought it was really more of an OS.
Re:OT: What I want from a 3D GUI project
on
Sphere XP Makes GUI 3D
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Problems with 2D paradigm. 1 The real world isn't 2D. People have to learn that icons mean things and all about clicking and double clicking to make it do stuff (i.e. run) So there is this whole training thing. Those who have helped show the older generation how to use PC's know all about this.
2 2D is really limited space. You have a 15"->20" display that has borders.Unless windows go wrong you can't put things off screen. The real world is not like this, I can turn around and put stuff on the table behind me, or on the floor, or on the shelf. I don't have a tiny little workspace, no-one does. Yes , Linux, Irix can have multiple "windows", but the whole thing doesn't scroll, you just choose another rectangle to look at. Although we accept this , take some time to look around your cube, office or kitchen. The real world is not so constrained, why should the virtual one??? 3 In the real world I like piling things so I put related things together. This requires 3D. Try this on 2D and you either get a mess or require "folders" to put things in. These folders are just more 2D.. 4 Relationships between objects. Our whole brain has evolved to handle 3D relationships. e.g. the files are on the table, the calender is near the phone, the phone is near the window. Our brains thrive on this and it works really well because our brains are good at 3D mapping. Living in a 2D icon based world is mentally crippling. We have to label things with words to know what they are, we need folders and tree structures for directories. These might have seemed a good idea at the time but did anyone ever do some testing to see how effective these paradigms were? Anyone?? Of course we (and in particular younger people) take this all for granted but who says it is any good? Think outside the square people. Icons, folders, windows??? Come on!!
What do people think about having a UI which is a window into a 3D world. It looks 3D because it really is. The calender looks like a calender and is where you would expect it. The Inbox looks like an inbox and is on your table. Your diary is on the table and open to today. You software manuals are on the shelf and look like books, when you move closer you can read the spines.No training required.When you move an cursor (think focus of gaze) over what you want to do icons appear near the object with a list of tasks it can do appear. Move your icon/point of interest away and they go away. Walk down the hall and there is Fred's office , there's Freds stuff. Fred might let you borrow his stuff or he might not. Walk out of that door over there and anything and everything changes and your in the middle of a game. It's ALL transparent and like the real world. (Ok, the game bit is an extension but think local paintball)
Well, anyway, been there, done that, got funding, got business plans, no-one was really interested (including Microsoft). They all like little 2D screens and icons.No-one could clue out a 3D based UI. Search for Cyberterm in the archives and the VR print magazines from the early 90's. (Our 3D interface actually preceded Windows 3.1) After 10 years of taking it from a hobby to a company and then nowhere we have given up. (PS The company wasn't called Cyberterm, thats some dude in Florida who got the name before us)
I have an issue with "protein enhancement". My daughter is severly allergic to milk protein. If she has too much, and no medical treatment, she dies. (In fact, I had the worlds first website back in 94 that dealt with milk protein allergy) As such, if this rice,or another plant, is say enhanced with the ability to make a milk protein, with all the good intentions of how beneficial this would be to most people, then this is a real problem. When, not if, the genome spreads in the wild, my daughter would then be unable to risk eating rice unless proven safe by gene testing or checking for the protein. Neither of which are the sort of things your average joe can do. The same applies if the protein comes from peanuts, soy or another source of proteins that other people are allergic to. And once in the wild, being a living organism, controlling it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.
.. not what you think is printed before your eyes get around to reading it.
"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain,"
Notice the phrase "..talks to himself so quietly.."? This is NOT the same as "thinks to himself"
i.e.you mouth the words but don't blow air through your airway so no noise is made.
it's not friggin' mind reading..unlike most of the level 5 posts seem to think.
My god, what sort of 3rd world country do you live in??The US????? When working of field equipment the HV electricians should have been applying physical lockout devices to the mechanical breakers so they can't be turned on remotely. The person working on the equipment is the only person who can remove the lockout, i.e. others should not be able to remove the lockout without him/her knowing. It's called "safe working practices" and engineers do it in civilised countries to stop stupid software/people killing other people. Having worked with industrial robots for over 8 years, and installed dozens, what you say about robots is wrong. When working within the dangerous area of a robot/machine envelope, the hard-wired doubly redundant failsafe interlocks on the gate access systems prevent robot/machine activation when the gate is opened. The teach pendants can reactivate the robots, typically at a reduced speed of 10%, and have deadman switches, all of which is redundant and failsafe electrics. No decent enginner in the right mind would let software just start up machinery in an unsafe manner. There are piles of national standards on this issue and it appears to be taken a lot more seriously than programmers handle code bugs...
Read the risks of computer systems.. http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
The newsletter has been going out for over 15 years now. The idea of software programmers not having the big picture view of all the interrelated components of a complex system isn't new. That's why system engineering is important, why engineers do Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and why big complex things are done by teams of multi-disciplined people. When you put a whole pile of software specialists in a room you get things like Windows...
Re:Patriot missile -- really a "failure"
on
Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 1
The patriot system was a failure in system engineering. If you humans in the loop, you are meant to take their behaviour into account. It's called human factors and is the sort of thing software people forget about. Blaming the operators is a total cop-out, it's not as if they are magic black boxes that no-one knows anything about! You can actually go an talk to them (radical thought for a programmer, I know) ask them how they do things, measure them, work out what the can and can't do and they actually communicate in spoken English and not flashing lights and error codes.
Rather than a wiper, why not have a roll of plastic wrap stretched loosely over the cells, with a take up roller. Every day just wind the roll on a few inches, slowly moving the dust covered plastic onto the take up/waste roller. It would only weigh say 500gm and could remove the issue of dust. Of course you'd want the plastic wrap *without* film on the solar cell side so it doesn't stick.
A similiar device was built in the 1960's. It too used hydraulics for force supplement but wasn't too successful. Hydraulic control was analog and not digital and with all analog hydraulic robots, doesn't work very well. The power source was an issue and I can't recall whether it was part of the frame or not. There isn't a lot on web about it (used to be some, good luck finding it now), but it is in books (remember kiddies, those quaint things with writing on paper) One main difference was it included the arms and I think the basic idea was to use it for logging in hard to get areas. Of course 40 years of new materials, digital control and experience with other robots makes it all a bit easier. Still a long way to go, like real robots the whole lot needs wrapping in something tough so it's fragile actuators, sensors and cotnrols don't damaged or snagged
For a moment then my sleep deprived brain was trying to formulate some sort of gun toting seal,working under cover for the FBI, splashing through the waves hunting down drug smugglers..I couldn't really work out how the seal held the gun..(of course the rest all made perfect sense:-) )
Probably.As someone who has been involved with a company developing a new toy and attempting to work with Hasbro (and their only competition)on something "new", it will be interesting to see how good this is. From our experience Hasbro's marketing direction will be to totally minimise useful technical features and max up on promoting a particular line, be it StarWars, Lincoln Logs or some other highly marketable theme. What they wanted at the end of the day was a poor cousin of what was proposed. They simply didn't want a toy with smarts (good luck Creature Labs, been there, done that) or one that was radical with features link wireless links, unique and evolving personality or enough RAM (let alone FLASH RAM) to do somehting useful with. Just look how far Furby has evolved since it's big hit, or those other crappy "Techno" clones. New development and improvement has decreasing returns and is hard work, especially once the novelty wears off and there's competition from the next movie/cartoon series. And BTW, the raw material cost, including plstic body, motors etc, is about 10% of final on-shelf cost. It's amazing how cheap some of these bits of electronics are in volume.And don't forget the sweat shops they are assembled in.
Gee, at least the method is really secure..
on
Build Your Own Virus
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· Score: 1
"Responding to criticisms that such research could lead to bioterrorists engineering new lethal viruses, the scientists behind the experiment said that only a few people had the knowledge to make it happen." Well this makes me feel safer because we all know so well how security through obscurity works. Just as well only a few chemists know how to make ecstasy too, otherwise all sorts of undesirables would be making illegal drugs, and we know that doesn't happen either. It's not as if anyone can get the recipe for that of the internet either. And of course, middle class people fighting for a cause would never bother getting degrees in biochemistry. (or learn to fly jets) Is there any sort of weird maths that allows for individuals to have really high IQ, and all IQ's to be positive, and yet overall the mean appears to be negative??
It will be interesting seeing the details, if any, in this report. Of cause post hoc details won't be relevant though after the meme generated by that headline. I'd love to see if they compared if people are initially different and then attracted to games or not. I'd love to see what sort of games if any, they seperated the results into. Every game I play simply couldn't be completed without plenty of creative thinking so I reckon they must just be looking at shootem-ups. And I wonder what the control group was, if any. And how did they know the games caused permanent damage if the people had been playing the games for years and weren't measured before they started playing?
"Many of the people in this group told researchers that they got angry easily, couldn't concentrate, and had trouble associating with friends." D'oh, maybe thats why they played computer games a lot !!
There seems to be a trend in Japanese research that playing computer games is bad. I wonder how much of this is science and how much is cultural bias by older researchers against the changes in a young population?
The next 3 statements sum up the quality of their work: "...separating the beta waves that indicate liveliness and degree of *tension*...." "Beta wave activity in people in the videogame group, who spent between two and seven hours each day playing games, was constantly near zero... " "Many videogames stir up tension.." Sorry guys, can't have it both ways!! I think they should perform some Pavlovian experiments on the researchers where they shock them if they don't generate beta-waves when playing games. Eventually, I'm sure they would learn to start being creative and use their frontal lobes to generate some *scientific* research.
"Al Qaeda has hired script kiddies to bring down rain down computer destruction. I don't understand why the fuck things not designed to be hooked up to the internet are being hooked up to it." Generally they are not. There is/was a push to do more of that but the machines that do real world controlling typically don't need/require internet access and the *engineers* you work on them have more sense. A script kiddie has zero chance of understanding, geting hold of the special software, passwords and physical access that is required to work on SCADA systems.
"I ask in all seriousness, why is a railway switch hooked up to the public internet?" It's not, well not is oz anyway.
"What good reason is there for eletronic valve controls for fresh or sewage water to be hooked up to the internet?" It wasn't/isn't.
"I can understand having some sort of network linking a bunch of sensors and whatnot, that makes sense" Evidently, your not a control systems engineer.
If the Hoover dam control system does have modem access it will use dial back modems and passwords. And you would most likely need an exact copy of the PLC's software with the correct version of both application and development software. This is far from a trivial task, even for the people who are meant to maintain the system.
I think you will find this sort of security on all major infrastructure projects designed by engineers. These are not the same sort of people who designed the Windows OS, it's flaky applications, browsers and Web servers. These people do Failure Mode and Effects Analysis' when they build things, have proven standards, system specifications, are conservative and plan for "bad things" to happen.They are not your typical/. reader. Taking out this infrastructure *can* be done, but it will need to be an inside job if you don't want to use lots of bang. So work out how it could all fail and what would be needed before running around thinking failure of the internet means no power,phones, water,gas etc. Because it simply doesn't...
What a load of bull. It was conceiveable! Just after the 1993 attack on the WTC failed I talked about what had happened with friends, pointing out the *obvious* portable bomb was a jet full of fuel and the obvious target was the highest concentration of people in a potentially dangerous place (eg high up). Of course this assumed people could hijack a plane but that happens often enough.It *was* obvious one day someone would do what happened, I guess the only surprise was they did it 4 times at once. (Of course these friends were pretty freaked out 8 years later when it happened) The point is, you can work out how to do *bad* things to infrastructure if you want to. It's not magic. It's a simple engineering problem as long as your utterly ignore ethics and morality. As long as you look, talk about and believe "bad things" can happen you have a chance of finding them in time. If you don't, history will keep on repeating.It is not unpatriotic to believe "bad things" can happen to your country, it is being realistic. (Big hi! to the Eschelon guys and gals reading this)
How come there is a spike , by a factor of 10, of shares traded in the last minutes on Monday? I wonder who was selling out before the bubble burst later in the week?
If I remember correctly, the high tech race brought to rapid extinction in Larry Nivens book "Ringworld" is a case to point. When discovered many aons after their passing it is determined that their technology came to a grinding halt when a bug that ate copper got loose. Of course it's only a story but people need to be extremely of how fragile a high level of technology is to sustain, and once it takes a big fall there is no guarantee it gets back up.
There is a bigger picture here that is being missed. THe whole reason we in Oz have such crap comms. is due to an appalling lack of infrastructure, due to Telstra's monopoly of the market. In a nutshell, they will only allow what is good for their shareholders, and as such the infrastructure sucks. Although I live in the middle of a city of 1 Million people, Adelaide, I can't access ADSL nor broadband, due to the distance to my exchange and the demographic of the suberb I live in. My modem connection gets 9600 or 12000bps max, and they can't fix it.
So I would propose an infrastrcuture based on spread spectrum radios set up by groups of like minded individuals with crap access, or a grudge with crappy broadband/ADSL. The cost of these units is similiar to ADSL modems and no license is required. They plug straight into your network card. They run at 10 Mb/s. They have a range of 30 miles. With a star topology and only requiring one decent connection to the real internet at the hub it should be quite easy to set up P2P networks that supply most of a users need.
Some sort of information is timeless, and won't go out of date. Some sort of information is only relevant to todays technology and can be discarded or moved to a museum when no longer used. Currently I can read books/notes that were written hundreds of years ago in my local library. I don't need any special skills or hardware apart from my ability to read and a set of eyes. It can always be accessed by me, my children and all future generations.Do people really think it is wise to put *important* material onto media that will be redundant (and unreadable)in 20 years time??This article is a nerd feeding frenzy, a whole lot of technical solutions which miss the big picture.
The first description on the website below on generating ball lightning using a Tesla coil seems to use the same concept for an ignitor and relies on carbon soot for ball formation. http://www.amasci.com/weird/unusual/bl .html Whats the link's here people? A fair bit sounds the same. Now if you could get ball lightning inside your microwave, the sort that goes through glass....
What is below is a post from about 5 years ago I made to the sci.space.tech newsgroup. After 5 years of development it is still relevent as we don't have free (or even cheap enough) consumer energy. Of course humanity might still make it, but I wouldn't bet on taking all of your "flesh and blood" with you.
--article starts--
Many moons ago ('bout 200) Ares magazine had an article title "The 1
Billion dollar bottle of wine" or something similiar. Ares is/was(?) a
gaming magazine. The article aimed to show the ridiculous cost of
interplanetary space travel and why humans might have trouble leaving
the solar system, even if we want to. The article is lost in the shed
but from memory what follows is the rough jist of it. I read this
article before I did Uni physics so didn't question it's truth that
much.
Question is: How close to the mark is it?
Please, please this is not super-serious!!!
Please excuse any slight math rounding and total disregard for
relativistic effects , I have similiarly misplaced Einsteins
equations. If necessary we'll assume the ship gets up to 10% speed of
light and then coasts if need be.:)
Argument goes like such.
Energy to accelate ship is 0.5*m*((ato)^2 - (ati)^2)
m is mass, say 10 ton
a is acceleration, assume constant 1g
to,ti time
with to - ti = 1 second above simplifies down to
Power = 0.5 ma^2
= 500kW (to accelerate 10 tonne ship at 10m/s^2)
Now assume it uses 100% efficient matter/ antimatter drive:-)
(ok,ok this is a mighty big assume)
Power costs roughly $0.12 per kW/hr in Oz
This will be the cost in electricity of generating anti-matter
(ignores rather severe capital investment and assumes 100% efficient
process, this is even bigger assume)
So cost for power is 3.3e-5 $/kWHr per second of
manufacture/consumption in drive
Seems cheap so far!:-)
But at 500kW this turns out to be $15/second.
So if we accelerate for one year turn around for one year
decaccelerating, also at 1 gee.(someone else work out distance
travelled? aiming for 4.7 light year )
Total cost to make anti-matter we used is very roughly (at best!)
$15 * (60*60*24*365) * 2 = $1000 Million
Summary: I don't know how much useful "stuff" one could send to
nearest star but I wouldn't mind betting 10 tonne doesn't supply much
life support system! Which led to the reference of a bottle of wine
once drives and controls are taken into account.
Keyboard?? Try APL in 1977 using marked up cards! Only sysops got keyboards and VDU's. I still have some cards, maybe I'll scan them and preverse their perverse symbols for ever now.You must have had shear luxury!!
(Going back to my hole in the road and warm gravel)
Active worlds gets a mention but hasn't taken off because it has no use. I have helped write a Snowcrash universe (Cyberterm for those who care and remember), commercialised it with dotcom funding and tried marketting and selling it. The simple problem is that as nice as the idea is, there is no commercial use for it yet. Our world had autonomous AI, avatars, persistance, dispersed over multiple servers etc. etc. but we have been unable to find a commercial use. It is just like the Snowcrash or Neuromancer world (without the jacks) but what use is it really?
Come on guys, karma this up, I want to know what use such a world has!!!
This isn't that silly. Many years ago (1983), before high power LED, a friend an myself knocked up an RS232 transmitter using LEDS. To get extra range we ran them in liquid nitrogen. usual current consumption, 20mA. With LN, 1A(!!)without burnout, with room lighting brightness to match. Semiconductors work *much* better cold.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
1 When we designed our software that did this we didn't wait for the hardware to come along. I'm sure it will one day.
2 Even though I said 3D, it doesn't have to be normal 3D. The inside of your filing cabinet can be an entire room or library you can move around in. Think Tardis from Dr. Who. Of course you can teleport to many virtual places, your virtual office can be whatever you want, organised how you want it. Virtual agents can still search through files, files can still live in folders. But real folders..
3 In our software you could do that, like get lists of file names in directories. We had it written on the side of the 3D file directory the mini-app ran to display you directories. And you could always get a search agent to look for something if you lost it or left it somewhere and bring it back to you.
4 Whats hard?? We did it because we forget to ask anyone if it was impossible and didn't start it with any sort of 2D idea. The basic idea was to make a VR world but in the end , people who saw it thought it was really more of an OS.
Problems with 2D paradigm.
1 The real world isn't 2D. People have to learn that icons mean things and all about clicking and double clicking to make it do stuff (i.e. run) So there is this whole training thing. Those who have helped show the older generation how to use PC's know all about this.
2 2D is really limited space. You have a 15"->20" display that has borders.Unless windows go wrong you can't put things off screen. The real world is not like this, I can turn around and put stuff on the table behind me, or on the floor, or on the shelf. I don't have a tiny little workspace, no-one does. Yes , Linux, Irix can have multiple "windows", but the whole thing doesn't scroll, you just choose another rectangle to look at. Although we accept this , take some time to look around your cube, office or kitchen. The real world is not so constrained, why should the virtual one???
3 In the real world I like piling things so I put related things together. This requires 3D. Try this on 2D and you either get a mess or require "folders" to put things in. These folders are just more 2D..
4 Relationships between objects. Our whole brain has evolved to handle 3D relationships. e.g. the files are on the table, the calender is near the phone, the phone is near the window. Our brains thrive on this and it works really well because our brains are good at 3D mapping. Living in a 2D icon based world is mentally crippling. We have to label things with words to know what they are, we need folders and tree structures for directories. These might have seemed a good idea at the time but did anyone ever do some testing to see how effective these paradigms were? Anyone?? Of course we (and in particular younger people) take this all for granted but who says it is any good? Think outside the square people. Icons, folders, windows??? Come on!!
What do people think about having a UI which is a window into a 3D world. It looks 3D because it really is. The calender looks like a calender and is where you would expect it. The Inbox looks like an inbox and is on your table. Your diary is on the table and open to today. You software manuals are on the shelf and look like books, when you move closer you can read the spines.No training required.When you move an cursor (think focus of gaze) over what you want to do icons appear near the object with a list of tasks it can do appear. Move your icon/point of interest away and they go away. Walk down the hall and there is Fred's office , there's Freds stuff. Fred might let you borrow his stuff or he might not. Walk out of that door over there and anything and everything changes and your in the middle of a game. It's ALL transparent and like the real world. (Ok, the game bit is an extension but think local paintball)
Well, anyway, been there, done that, got funding, got business plans, no-one was really interested (including Microsoft). They all like little 2D screens and icons.No-one could clue out a 3D based UI. Search for Cyberterm in the archives and the VR print magazines from the early 90's. (Our 3D interface actually preceded Windows 3.1)
After 10 years of taking it from a hobby to a company and then nowhere we have given up.
(PS The company wasn't called Cyberterm, thats some dude in Florida who got the name before us)
I have an issue with "protein enhancement". My daughter is severly allergic to milk protein. If she has too much, and no medical treatment, she dies. (In fact, I had the worlds first website back in 94 that dealt with milk protein allergy) As such, if this rice ,or another plant, is say enhanced with the ability to make a milk protein, with all the good intentions of how beneficial this would be to most people, then this is a real problem. When, not if, the genome spreads in the wild, my daughter would then be unable to risk eating rice unless proven safe by gene testing or checking for the protein. Neither of which are the sort of things your average joe can do. The same applies if the protein comes from peanuts, soy or another source of proteins that other people are allergic to. And once in the wild, being a living organism, controlling it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.
.. not what you think is printed before your eyes get around to reading it.
"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain,"
Notice the phrase "..talks to himself so quietly.."?
This is NOT the same as "thinks to himself"
i.e.you mouth the words but don't blow air through your airway so no noise is made.
it's not friggin' mind reading..unlike most of the level 5 posts seem to think.
My god, what sort of 3rd world country do you live in??The US?????
When working of field equipment the HV electricians should have been applying physical lockout devices to the mechanical breakers so they can't be turned on remotely. The person working on the equipment is the only person who can remove the lockout, i.e. others should not be able to remove the lockout without him/her knowing. It's called "safe working practices" and engineers do it in civilised countries to stop stupid software/people killing other people. Having worked with industrial robots for over 8 years, and installed dozens, what you say about robots is wrong. When working within the dangerous area of a robot/machine envelope, the hard-wired doubly redundant failsafe interlocks on the gate access systems prevent robot/machine activation when the gate is opened. The teach pendants can reactivate the robots, typically at a reduced speed of 10%, and have deadman switches, all of which is redundant and failsafe electrics. No decent enginner in the right mind would let software just start up machinery in an unsafe manner. There are piles of national standards on this issue and it appears to be taken a lot more seriously than programmers handle code bugs...
Read the risks of computer systems..
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
The newsletter has been going out for over 15 years now. The idea of software programmers not having the big picture view of all the interrelated components of a complex system isn't new. That's why system engineering is important, why engineers do Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and why big complex things are done by teams of multi-disciplined people. When you put a whole pile of software specialists in a room you get things like Windows...
The patriot system was a failure in system engineering. If you humans in the loop, you are meant to take their behaviour into account. It's called human factors and is the sort of thing software people forget about. Blaming the operators is a total cop-out, it's not as if they are magic black boxes that no-one knows anything about! You can actually go an talk to them (radical thought for a programmer, I know) ask them how they do things, measure them, work out what the can and can't do and they actually communicate in spoken English and not flashing lights and error codes.
Rather than a wiper, why not have a roll of plastic wrap stretched loosely over the cells, with a take up roller. Every day just wind the roll on a few inches, slowly moving the dust covered plastic onto the take up/waste roller. It would only weigh say 500gm and could remove the issue of dust. Of course you'd want the plastic wrap *without* film on the solar cell side so it doesn't stick.
A similiar device was built in the 1960's. It too used hydraulics for force supplement but wasn't too successful. Hydraulic control was analog and not digital and with all analog hydraulic robots, doesn't work very well. The power source was an issue and I can't recall whether it was part of the frame or not. There isn't a lot on web about it (used to be some, good luck finding it now), but it is in books (remember kiddies, those quaint things with writing on paper) One main difference was it included the arms and I think the basic idea was to use it for logging in hard to get areas. Of course 40 years of new materials, digital control and experience with other robots makes it all a bit easier. Still a long way to go, like real robots the whole lot needs wrapping in something tough so it's fragile actuators, sensors and cotnrols don't damaged or snagged
For a moment then my sleep deprived brain was trying to formulate some sort of gun toting seal,working under cover for the FBI, splashing through the waves hunting down drug smugglers..I couldn't really work out how the seal held the gun..(of course the rest all made perfect sense :-) )
When my daughter was 3 3/4 my mum gave her the usual scary bag of xmas goodies. Contents included 4 tubes of superglue this time around..
Probably.As someone who has been involved with a company developing a new toy and attempting to work with Hasbro (and their only competition)on something "new", it will be interesting to see how good this is. From our experience Hasbro's marketing direction will be to totally minimise useful technical features and max up on promoting a particular line, be it StarWars, Lincoln Logs or some other highly marketable theme. What they wanted at the end of the day was a poor cousin of what was proposed. They simply didn't want a toy with smarts (good luck Creature Labs, been there, done that) or one that was radical with features link wireless links, unique and evolving personality or enough RAM (let alone FLASH RAM) to do somehting useful with. Just look how far Furby has evolved since it's big hit, or those other crappy "Techno" clones. New development and improvement has decreasing returns and is hard work, especially once the novelty wears off and there's competition from the next movie/cartoon series.
And BTW, the raw material cost, including plstic body, motors etc, is about 10% of final on-shelf cost. It's amazing how cheap some of these bits of electronics are in volume.And don't forget the sweat shops they are assembled in.
"Responding to criticisms that such research could lead to bioterrorists engineering new lethal viruses, the scientists behind the experiment said that only a few people had the knowledge to make it happen."
Well this makes me feel safer because we all know so well how security through obscurity works. Just as well only a few chemists know how to make ecstasy too, otherwise all sorts of undesirables would be making illegal drugs, and we know that doesn't happen either. It's not as if anyone can get the recipe for that of the internet either. And of course, middle class people fighting for a cause would never bother getting degrees in biochemistry. (or learn to fly jets) Is there any sort of weird maths that allows for individuals to have really high IQ, and all IQ's to be positive, and yet overall the mean appears to be negative??
It will be interesting seeing the details, if any, in this report. Of cause post hoc details won't be relevant though after the meme generated by that headline. I'd love to see if they compared if people are initially different and then attracted to games or not. I'd love to see what sort of games if any, they seperated the results into. Every game I play simply couldn't be completed without plenty of creative thinking so I reckon they must just be looking at shootem-ups. And I wonder what the control group was, if any.
.."
And how did they know the games caused permanent damage if the people had been playing the games for years and weren't measured before they started playing?
"Many of the people in this group told researchers that they got angry easily, couldn't concentrate, and had trouble associating with friends."
D'oh, maybe thats why they played computer games a lot !!
There seems to be a trend in Japanese research that playing computer games is bad. I wonder how much of this is science and how much is cultural bias by older researchers against the changes in a young population?
The next 3 statements sum up the quality of their work:
"...separating the beta waves that indicate liveliness and degree of *tension*...."
"Beta wave activity in people in the videogame group, who spent between two and seven hours each day playing games, was constantly near zero... "
"Many videogames stir up tension
Sorry guys, can't have it both ways!!
I think they should perform some Pavlovian experiments on the researchers where they shock them if they don't generate beta-waves when playing games. Eventually, I'm sure they would learn to start being creative and use their frontal lobes to generate some *scientific* research.
"Al Qaeda has hired script kiddies to bring down rain down computer destruction. I don't understand why the fuck things not designed to be hooked up to the internet are being hooked up to it."
/. reader.
Generally they are not. There is/was a push to do more of that but the machines that do real world controlling typically don't need/require internet access and the *engineers* you work on them have more sense. A script kiddie has zero chance of understanding, geting hold of the special software, passwords and physical access that is required to work on SCADA systems.
"I ask in all seriousness, why is a railway switch hooked up to the public internet?"
It's not, well not is oz anyway.
"What good reason is there for eletronic valve controls for fresh or sewage water to be hooked up to the internet?"
It wasn't/isn't.
"I can understand having some sort of network linking a bunch of sensors and whatnot, that makes sense"
Evidently, your not a control systems engineer.
If the Hoover dam control system does have modem access it will use dial back modems and passwords. And you would most likely need an exact copy of the PLC's software with the correct version of both application and development software. This is far from a trivial task, even for the people who are meant to maintain the system.
I think you will find this sort of security on all major infrastructure projects designed by engineers. These are not the same sort of people who designed the Windows OS, it's flaky applications, browsers and Web servers. These people do Failure Mode and Effects Analysis' when they build things, have proven standards, system specifications, are conservative and plan for "bad things" to happen.They are not your typical
Taking out this infrastructure *can* be done, but it will need to be an inside job if you don't want to use lots of bang.
So work out how it could all fail and what would be needed before running around thinking failure of the internet means no power,phones, water,gas etc. Because it simply doesn't...
What a load of bull.
It was conceiveable! Just after the 1993 attack on the WTC failed I talked about what had happened with friends, pointing out the *obvious* portable bomb was a jet full of fuel and the obvious target was the highest concentration of people in a potentially dangerous place (eg high up). Of course this assumed people could hijack a plane but that happens often enough.It *was* obvious one day someone would do what happened, I guess the only surprise was they did it 4 times at once. (Of course these friends were pretty freaked out 8 years later when it happened)
The point is, you can work out how to do *bad* things to infrastructure if you want to. It's not magic. It's a simple engineering problem as long as your utterly ignore ethics and morality. As long as you look, talk about and believe "bad things" can happen you have a chance of finding them in time. If you don't, history will keep on repeating.It is not unpatriotic to believe "bad things" can happen to your country, it is being realistic.
(Big hi! to the Eschelon guys and gals reading this)
How come there is a spike , by a factor of 10, of shares traded in the last minutes on Monday? I wonder who was selling out before the bubble burst later in the week?
If I remember correctly, the high tech race brought to rapid extinction in Larry Nivens book "Ringworld" is a case to point. When discovered many aons after their passing it is determined that their technology came to a grinding halt when a bug that ate copper got loose. Of course it's only a story but people need to be extremely of how fragile a high level of technology is to sustain, and once it takes a big fall there is no guarantee it gets back up.
There is a bigger picture here that is being missed. THe whole reason we in Oz have such crap comms. is due to an appalling lack of infrastructure, due to Telstra's monopoly of the market. In a nutshell, they will only allow what is good for their shareholders, and as such the infrastructure sucks. Although I live in the middle of a city of 1 Million people, Adelaide, I can't access ADSL nor broadband, due to the distance to my exchange and the demographic of the suberb I live in. My modem connection gets 9600 or 12000bps max, and they can't fix it.
So I would propose an infrastrcuture based on spread spectrum radios set up by groups of like minded individuals with crap access, or a grudge with crappy broadband/ADSL. The cost of these units is similiar to ADSL modems and no license is required. They plug straight into your network card. They run at 10 Mb/s. They have a range of 30 miles. With a star topology and only requiring one decent connection to the real internet at the hub it should be quite easy to set up P2P networks that supply most of a users need.
Any takers?
Some sort of information is timeless, and won't go out of date. Some sort of information is only relevant to todays technology and can be discarded or moved to a museum when no longer used. Currently I can read books/notes that were written hundreds of years ago in my local library. I don't need any special skills or hardware apart from my ability to read and a set of eyes. It can always be accessed by me, my children and all future generations.Do people really think it is wise to put *important* material onto media that will be redundant (and unreadable)in 20 years time??This article is a nerd feeding frenzy, a whole lot of technical solutions which miss the big picture.
The first description on the website below on generating ball lightning using a Tesla coil seems to use the same concept for an ignitor and relies on carbon soot for ball formation.l .html
http://www.amasci.com/weird/unusual/b
Whats the link's here people? A fair bit sounds the same. Now if you could get ball lightning inside your microwave, the sort that goes through glass....
What is below is a post from about 5 years ago I made to the sci.space.tech newsgroup. After 5 years of development it is still relevent as we don't have free (or even cheap enough) consumer energy. Of course humanity might still make it, but I wouldn't bet on taking all of your "flesh and blood" with you.
:)
:-)
:-)
--article starts--
Many moons ago ('bout 200) Ares magazine had an article title "The 1
Billion dollar bottle of wine" or something similiar. Ares is/was(?) a
gaming magazine. The article aimed to show the ridiculous cost of
interplanetary space travel and why humans might have trouble leaving
the solar system, even if we want to. The article is lost in the shed
but from memory what follows is the rough jist of it. I read this
article before I did Uni physics so didn't question it's truth that
much.
Question is: How close to the mark is it?
Please, please this is not super-serious!!!
Please excuse any slight math rounding and total disregard for
relativistic effects , I have similiarly misplaced Einsteins
equations. If necessary we'll assume the ship gets up to 10% speed of
light and then coasts if need be.
Argument goes like such.
Energy to accelate ship is 0.5*m*((ato)^2 - (ati)^2)
m is mass, say 10 ton
a is acceleration, assume constant 1g
to,ti time
with to - ti = 1 second above simplifies down to
Power = 0.5 ma^2
= 500kW (to accelerate 10 tonne ship at 10m/s^2)
Now assume it uses 100% efficient matter/ antimatter drive
(ok,ok this is a mighty big assume)
Power costs roughly $0.12 per kW/hr in Oz
This will be the cost in electricity of generating anti-matter
(ignores rather severe capital investment and assumes 100% efficient
process, this is even bigger assume)
So cost for power is 3.3e-5 $/kWHr per second of
manufacture/consumption in drive
Seems cheap so far!
But at 500kW this turns out to be $15/second.
So if we accelerate for one year turn around for one year
decaccelerating, also at 1 gee.(someone else work out distance
travelled? aiming for 4.7 light year )
Total cost to make anti-matter we used is very roughly (at best!)
$15 * (60*60*24*365) * 2 = $1000 Million
Summary: I don't know how much useful "stuff" one could send to
nearest star but I wouldn't mind betting 10 tonne doesn't supply much
life support system! Which led to the reference of a bottle of wine
once drives and controls are taken into account.
Keyboard?? Try APL in 1977 using marked up cards! Only sysops got keyboards and VDU's. I still have some cards, maybe I'll scan them and preverse their perverse symbols for ever now.You must have had shear luxury!!
(Going back to my hole in the road and warm gravel)
Active worlds gets a mention but hasn't taken off because it has no use. I have helped write a Snowcrash universe (Cyberterm for those who care and remember), commercialised it with dotcom funding and tried marketting and selling it. The simple problem is that as nice as the idea is, there is no commercial use for it yet. Our world had autonomous AI, avatars, persistance, dispersed over multiple servers etc. etc. but we have been unable to find a commercial use. It is just like the Snowcrash or Neuromancer world (without the jacks) but what use is it really? Come on guys, karma this up, I want to know what use such a world has!!!
This isn't that silly. Many years ago (1983), before high power LED, a friend an myself knocked up an RS232 transmitter using LEDS. To get extra range we ran them in liquid nitrogen. usual current consumption, 20mA. With LN, 1A(!!)without burnout, with room lighting brightness to match. Semiconductors work *much* better cold. :-)