Could this type of technology be used for robots to allow them to identify what the 3d layout of the world around them is? Seems like a pretty powerful tool in that area.
Depends where you live. I used to live in Southern California, where everyone jaywalked. It was an acceptable thing. However I moved to Hawaii a few months ago, and was shocked because the cops here take Jaywalking very seriously. I see about one person a day getting a jaywalking ticket here (which in my opinion is ridiculous, and is just because the cops are too lazy to catch other criminals.)
Although, I still think your analogy is still accurate. In that the RIAA are going after the easy "criminals" so that they don't have to worry about doing their job correctly.
Hemp is already legal, and has always been. It's just the cannabis variety of it that's illegal. There are many other strains of it, and it is often used in shipping riggings as it makes a very strong natural fiber rope. Occasionally you'll see it in clothing and materials as well.
As a capitalist myself, I disagree with a lot of the redistribution of wealth ideals we have going on. I'd probably abolish (or at least tone down) social security to start with.
Also, I'd commercialize a lot of the government functions. I'd attempt to start having the government MAKE money rather than take it via taxes. In sectors where the government was failing to make money, I'd attempt to privatize it. Take the US mail for instance - it used to be a government ran cooperation, but went under private ownership and saved a ton of money by working for profits. Many of the other government functions could also be reassigned in this manor.
I'd also abolish unions. There was a time and a place for them, but not today. The only thing they do is interrupt the flow of commerce. If you want a higher wage, don't cry to your union, go work somewhere else.
Obviously things such as country wide internet access would be beautiful, however I think the government would need to have more money to take on a task such as that.
Plastic fibre slashes optical network costs Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
Despite the obvious gold treasure room that has now been created for spammers, hackers etc. etc., I look forward to this. It'll be nice being able to use a universal account online. It will be interesting as well, as I think we'll see more and more that people are going to be known by their avatars rather than their actual name as data becomes universal like this.
Except that software doesn't pose a "threat to national security" if it's transfered on an airplane. Sure they may say that "We want to keep hacker software and naughty viruses out!", which is ginger and all, but there's this one new thing, maybe you've heard of it TSA - called the internet. So really I have to ask why do they need to search peoples hard drives? The people could easily just leave their data at home or on a remote server and transfer it to their laptops once they land.
On the subject of encrypted data, here's an interesting question, what if the user doesn't have the key (e.g. a messenger)? Do they have to delete that data? And how do they know it's entirely deleted? Do they run Nuke and Boot on the user's hard drive?
It seems to me this is just a classic case of political "Lets make laws on things that we don't understand and scare us".
Are there two screens (one per eye) or one for both? If it's two screens then if I'm not mistaken it'd be the first PMP with 3d capabilities, which IMO would be pretty impressive.
...but cooking just doesn't seem all that riveting as a game. Something tells me we aren't going to be seeing Cook Cook Revolution anywhere. Cook Hero just doesn't have the right ring to it either. So to me it's not all that surprising that the game got pulled.
It'd still be a bad move in my opinion. What if you are making a small start up? Can you not probe your own network unless you're "certified" to do so? This would crush small businesses that couldn't afford to hire a "Certified AAA MSCE IT professional networkomagicineer", and could otherwise easily perform the same tasks themselves if it weren't for legal restrictions. These days you don't need to pay to be educated, and all the piece of paper that you get for being certified means is that you shelled out cash for a plaque on the wall.
This is ridiculous. It reminds me of the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" (Roman Catholic list of banned books). The Roman Catholics banned books because they believed that they could be used as a tool against their power, and not simply for the purpose of knowledge. That's the same thing the UK is trying to do now - they're trying to ban software because it might be able to be used for naughty purposes. Why don't you ban the C programming language while you're at it UK? I hear those buffer overflows could be dangerous.
Hopefully this mistake won't take 400 year to remedy.
I used to not enjoy the trackpoint at all, and I scoffed at trackpoint users. However I quickly realized the benefit of having, and have since grown to love it on my new Lenovo X61 Tabletpc. To all the haters that I was once a part of, we don't care about your hate, we have our nub to rub.
Not necessarily. Hairdryers generate heat by sending an electrical current through a filament to heat it up, but that filament directly accessible through the wide nozzle of the hair dryer. This ion-seal doesn't prevent electrical current from touching water, it merely prevents water from seeping through small holes or cracks in a device. With the wide nozzle of the hairdryer, water could still easily flow directly into the filament - which means you can still check to see if your buddies reaction speed is up to par.
Considering that I just sent my iPod through a ride in the washing machine, this could be quite useful. Not only for waterproofing, but also for cleaning electronics. Sure you can send your keyboard through the dishwasher, but you still have to let it dry for quite a while. It'd be a nice way to clean more intricate electronics as well.
I think what SimonTheSoundMan was trying to get at was something called "Over/under cable wrapping". It's a method of wrapping cables used mostly by sound guys that eliminates spin in the wires (which from my personal experience is the #1 reason why cables get all tangled about). You can check out the wikipedia article on it (albeit short) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over/under_cable_coiling , and a great tutorial for it here: http://www.techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/flipcoil/howto.html . In regards to Christmas lights though, this still may not work simply because of the nature of the wire layout and the obstacle the lights themselves create, but it's worth a shot. I wrap all my cables this way, and even in my box of 100+ cables, I almost never get any tangles (and when I do, they only take a few seconds to untangle).
Slashdot Mirror
Could this type of technology be used for robots to allow them to identify what the 3d layout of the world around them is? Seems like a pretty powerful tool in that area.
Depends where you live. I used to live in Southern California, where everyone jaywalked. It was an acceptable thing. However I moved to Hawaii a few months ago, and was shocked because the cops here take Jaywalking very seriously. I see about one person a day getting a jaywalking ticket here (which in my opinion is ridiculous, and is just because the cops are too lazy to catch other criminals.)
Although, I still think your analogy is still accurate. In that the RIAA are going after the easy "criminals" so that they don't have to worry about doing their job correctly.
Furries across the world rejoiced in their parents' basements.
Hemp is already legal, and has always been. It's just the cannabis variety of it that's illegal. There are many other strains of it, and it is often used in shipping riggings as it makes a very strong natural fiber rope. Occasionally you'll see it in clothing and materials as well.
As a capitalist myself, I disagree with a lot of the redistribution of wealth ideals we have going on. I'd probably abolish (or at least tone down) social security to start with.
Also, I'd commercialize a lot of the government functions. I'd attempt to start having the government MAKE money rather than take it via taxes. In sectors where the government was failing to make money, I'd attempt to privatize it. Take the US mail for instance - it used to be a government ran cooperation, but went under private ownership and saved a ton of money by working for profits. Many of the other government functions could also be reassigned in this manor.
I'd also abolish unions. There was a time and a place for them, but not today. The only thing they do is interrupt the flow of commerce. If you want a higher wage, don't cry to your union, go work somewhere else.
Obviously things such as country wide internet access would be beautiful, however I think the government would need to have more money to take on a task such as that.
I was going to use a car analogy to show how ridiculous this was...
Your antics make me laugh! Who else could pull off an attempt to sue someone for downloading files who doesn't have a computer?!
Plastic fibre slashes optical network costs
Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
What's the benefit of 100mbps plasti-fiber over gigabit cat-6?
Despite the obvious gold treasure room that has now been created for spammers, hackers etc. etc., I look forward to this. It'll be nice being able to use a universal account online. It will be interesting as well, as I think we'll see more and more that people are going to be known by their avatars rather than their actual name as data becomes universal like this.
Just an observation but...
(4min)(60seconds/min)(160mb/second)/(8mb/MB) = 4800 MB, or approximately the size of a standard DVD.
Maybe it's just me, but a standard DVD isn't HighDef.
Except that software doesn't pose a "threat to national security" if it's transfered on an airplane. Sure they may say that "We want to keep hacker software and naughty viruses out!", which is ginger and all, but there's this one new thing, maybe you've heard of it TSA - called the internet. So really I have to ask why do they need to search peoples hard drives? The people could easily just leave their data at home or on a remote server and transfer it to their laptops once they land.
On the subject of encrypted data, here's an interesting question, what if the user doesn't have the key (e.g. a messenger)? Do they have to delete that data? And how do they know it's entirely deleted? Do they run Nuke and Boot on the user's hard drive?
It seems to me this is just a classic case of political "Lets make laws on things that we don't understand and scare us".
Are there two screens (one per eye) or one for both? If it's two screens then if I'm not mistaken it'd be the first PMP with 3d capabilities, which IMO would be pretty impressive.
Ladies and gentlemen, I (according to the moderators) may have just become the first man to successfully troll himself.
...but cooking just doesn't seem all that riveting as a game. Something tells me we aren't going to be seeing Cook Cook Revolution anywhere. Cook Hero just doesn't have the right ring to it either. So to me it's not all that surprising that the game got pulled.
I r not good with the englishs. ...*are only hose rules...
I know at the moment there is only house rules for critical failures (i.e. rolling a 1 on a d20). Will there be set rules for this in 4.0?
Paperclips - AKA the Maguyver multitool of the devil!
I see you can quote the anonymous coward above you http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=405258&cid=21900882 Quick! Tell the UK that Copy/Paste should be outlawed too! It's being used for devious purposes!
It'd still be a bad move in my opinion. What if you are making a small start up? Can you not probe your own network unless you're "certified" to do so? This would crush small businesses that couldn't afford to hire a "Certified AAA MSCE IT professional networkomagicineer", and could otherwise easily perform the same tasks themselves if it weren't for legal restrictions. These days you don't need to pay to be educated, and all the piece of paper that you get for being certified means is that you shelled out cash for a plaque on the wall.
This is ridiculous. It reminds me of the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" (Roman Catholic list of banned books). The Roman Catholics banned books because they believed that they could be used as a tool against their power, and not simply for the purpose of knowledge. That's the same thing the UK is trying to do now - they're trying to ban software because it might be able to be used for naughty purposes. Why don't you ban the C programming language while you're at it UK? I hear those buffer overflows could be dangerous.
Hopefully this mistake won't take 400 year to remedy.
I used to not enjoy the trackpoint at all, and I scoffed at trackpoint users. However I quickly realized the benefit of having, and have since grown to love it on my new Lenovo X61 Tabletpc. To all the haters that I was once a part of, we don't care about your hate, we have our nub to rub.
Not necessarily. Hairdryers generate heat by sending an electrical current through a filament to heat it up, but that filament directly accessible through the wide nozzle of the hair dryer. This ion-seal doesn't prevent electrical current from touching water, it merely prevents water from seeping through small holes or cracks in a device. With the wide nozzle of the hairdryer, water could still easily flow directly into the filament - which means you can still check to see if your buddies reaction speed is up to par.
Considering that I just sent my iPod through a ride in the washing machine, this could be quite useful. Not only for waterproofing, but also for cleaning electronics. Sure you can send your keyboard through the dishwasher, but you still have to let it dry for quite a while. It'd be a nice way to clean more intricate electronics as well.
I think what SimonTheSoundMan was trying to get at was something called "Over/under cable wrapping". It's a method of wrapping cables used mostly by sound guys that eliminates spin in the wires (which from my personal experience is the #1 reason why cables get all tangled about). You can check out the wikipedia article on it (albeit short) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over/under_cable_coiling , and a great tutorial for it here: http://www.techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/flipcoil/howto.html .
In regards to Christmas lights though, this still may not work simply because of the nature of the wire layout and the obstacle the lights themselves create, but it's worth a shot. I wrap all my cables this way, and even in my box of 100+ cables, I almost never get any tangles (and when I do, they only take a few seconds to untangle).