Basically our eyes work the same way as reptiles' (or as those of hookers in Family Guy) and are based on movement. They just happen to include active scanning to refresh their view even of objects which aren't moving.
I'm sure you could process out the saccades using the same basic image stabilization technology that's used in all but the cheapest digital cameras these days. Then again, why do that when you can use them to your advantage? Mimic the eye's structure with a super-high-rez 'fovea' plus a low rez whole-field sensor, then stitch/combine the images from the whole-field sensor (small rapid movements are perfect for this) to give a lower frame rate, higher resolution wide angle image, while the main focal point gives a high rez, high frame rate view that again can be stitched to provide a full high-rez scene.
The stick was working. The Rav4 EV, Ford Ranger EV, Honda EV+ and the EV1 were all developed specifically due to the CARB mandate and redacted by the Ministry of Truth the moment the mandate was dropped.
The carrot is there, in terms of waived onroad costs in some states (others actually tax MORE because EVs don't pay fuel tax, which I think is horribly ass-backwards at this stage of their development), free reign to use carpool lanes etc. The reason EVs are having image problems now is that people are stupid and believe advertising (that's why they do it) and that most of the major car manufacturers went on a 5-year smear campaign to convince everyone how crap EVs were.
What really annoys me is Toyota's marketing of the Prius, where they actually tout its defective-by-design inability to charge the batteries from an external source as a major benefit! "You never plug it in!" they say, and people are too stupid to think "charging from wall: $0.20/kWh, charging from petrol using onboard generator: $1-$2/kWh at least".
(but that vehicle still isn't as practical as a gasoline vehicle, especially if gas costs $3).
Bingo. The other problem is that most people are so hung up on one of two things: 1) "it's electric therefore it's slow" (um, no), and 2) "I can't drive it to Zimbabwe and back on the weekend" (Well, no, not unless you can add a range extender module which you easily can).
The range issue seems to be the major one, because people can't handle the idea of "filling up" their car each evening when they get home instead of leaving it for 500+ kms. They don't seem to be able to look past the "plug it into your garage wall when you get out" to the "and for $2 you have a full battery".
As for people stepping in to build one, they fall into two groups, the golf buggy manufacturers who make golf carts with headlights and wind up windows and expect people to use them like cars, and the "let's make a ferrari-beating electric car to prove something to the world" types who make a car that's awesome, but costs as much as a private jet. If only these people could see that the right market is actually "people who'd buy a Toyota Corolla". Just make it go fast enough to be fun, and far enough to get them to work or drop the kids off at school, with a stop at the shops on the way home, and it'll be a perfectly good second car. They have to stop trying to build a vehicle which will do everything and take over the world, and just take baby steps to start with.
Actually, you don't _power_ the motors backwards, you _drain_ power from them while using them as brakes, and charge your batteries with it. It's as if engine braking in your car sucked back some of the CO2 and NOx and turned it back into petrol.
They were leasing at a loss because they made LESS THAN TWO HUNDRED of the damn things. A production run of them would bring the price per unit down hugely. As said below, the problem with electric cars is that they are _too good_, they're too reliable and they don't break down. The only secondary industry other than smash repairs and tyres is replacing the battery packs, and that's not something a car company like GM wants to retool to become.
If they were genuinely not a good product, and that's all there was to it, then why would GM have recalled and quietly crushed them instead of just letting people buy out the leases? Don't say liability or maintainence reasons, they're easy to get around with contract terms.
Forget the corrosiveness. Start thinking about where the stuff comes from, lupine (above) is correct. The 'well-to-wheels' efficiency of a hydrogen car is worse than that of a petrol car let alone a battery electric.
Electric light bulbs will put a huge demand on today's electric grid.
What does that mean?? Expensive electricity for EVERYBODY. Not just the owner of the electric light bulb.
With the raise of demand, the environmental requirements will be dropped to compensate for the need to build new power plants fast. By dropping the requirements, we will get power plants that will generate 3 to 4 times more pollution that gas lamps would have generated.
And lets not talk about all the pollution generate in the production and disposal of electricity. (wait what? disposal of electricity?)
The Edison bulb is a nice "concept" lamp... but not a real practical one for the general public.
...is that 10 years ago GM was telling us exactly that about the EV1, and we (the people who wanted one) were saying "but it's awesome, why are you telling us we don't want one?" and they were saying "there's no demand, it's not cost effective, it's terrible anyway".
Damn CARB for crumbling and allowing any car with a slightly larger battery that can crank itself along with its starter motor to count as a "low emissions vehicle".
I know that every time someone says, "there ought to be a law," god kills a kitten [...]
Actually, this is a case of correlation != causation. There's a hidden common factor - every time someone says "there ought to be a law", a laywer m@$#urbates.
I dunno what version you're using to say that working with Visual Studio is hellish. I've just switched jobs to a place that uses Borland C++ Builder... maybe it's partly familiarity but VS2005 is, IMO, leaps and bound ahead in usability.
The question, though, is why C# or Java "programming" is so different from "scripting" that you'd expect a sysadmin to know the latter, but not the former.
It's not that it's "so different", just that they're different specialised domains of "programming". It's no different from expecting, say, a scientist doing number crunching to know FORTRAN and MatLab but not DirectX. Or expecting a hardware driver engineer to know how to work with the WDM but not how to validate a field in an MS Access form.
+1, Agree. In my youth (ha!) I did a fair bit of work with video mixing for night clubs and the like, often involving very low rez camera feeds. A 64x64 picture is plenty to give the viewer a good idea of what's going on if the viewpoint is moving in the right way (which is the natural way that the user of such a device would move their head) and the frame rate is acceptably high (30+ fps). Hell, broadcast quality analogue TV is only 320x240 or so (argue and I'll find a format that fits that, grr!:P ) and that's plenty for some people to live their whole lives in front of.
A modern DLP chip can pack movable micromirrors in more densely than the cones in my eye are spaced. I'd be amazed if they couldn't make simple electrodes smaller than that by an order of magnitude.
I believe when you're saying we won't get much better, you're thinking of the direct brain interface research to restore sight to people who have lost sight due to optic nerve damage or the like. This technology is simply stimulating the retinal nerves directly, and optic nerves are laid out in the correct spatial arrangement already, so is much simpler and more amenable to increased resolution.
So can you recommend a less bloated distro which retains the "everything just works" factor that, like it or not, is a necessity for a modern desktop computer? I recently bought a new computer which is currently running xubuntu, but I'd like something a little more minimal* if there's anything that will fit the bill.
That said, it's my primary system so it has to be running samba, Wine, Pigeon, and have a bunch of utilities such as disk burner, GIMP, media player, swanky 3d screensavers etc. I don't really see how xubuntu could be cut down much in terms of overhead compared to the default install without removing stuff I actually use.
* Minimal = less active, running overhead. I don't give a rat's if the install is 1GB compared to 500MB. I'm only using something like 20% of my new primary hard drive anyway.
I seem to recall reading that the X number of virgins in the afterlife was a mistranslation and it's actually 40 pumpkins and a goat, or somesuch. Then again I'm at work so I'm somewhat reticent to research combinations of pumpkins, virgins and goats...
Hell, I bet McDonalds kills more people with hearteriosclerosis each year than die from bullets in the US. That doesn't figure, though, because peoples' brains have evolved to remember rare dramatic events over common boring events. Uncle Mick cheeseburgering himself to death is both common and boring. That one guy who got eaten by a shark in his bathtub, or the one who always carried his lucky penny everywhere and then won the lottery... those are the ones we remember. That's why Lotto attracts the same schmucks every week, and why many people are scared of air travel when by rights they should be ten times as scared of driving down to the local shops.
Just pointing out that blurring details on a friggin' online map is stupid, as you know, and that if you get within a few hundred meters of a school your 540THz radar should suffice for accurate targetting.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, 'cuz that totally didn't happen about a hundred years ago.
Oh, wait.
Basically our eyes work the same way as reptiles' (or as those of hookers in Family Guy) and are based on movement. They just happen to include active scanning to refresh their view even of objects which aren't moving.
I'm sure you could process out the saccades using the same basic image stabilization technology that's used in all but the cheapest digital cameras these days. Then again, why do that when you can use them to your advantage? Mimic the eye's structure with a super-high-rez 'fovea' plus a low rez whole-field sensor, then stitch/combine the images from the whole-field sensor (small rapid movements are perfect for this) to give a lower frame rate, higher resolution wide angle image, while the main focal point gives a high rez, high frame rate view that again can be stitched to provide a full high-rez scene.
GP must be a mathematician.
"Ah, this problem is provably solvable!" *goes off to the pub*
The stick was working. The Rav4 EV, Ford Ranger EV, Honda EV+ and the EV1 were all developed specifically due to the CARB mandate and redacted by the Ministry of Truth the moment the mandate was dropped.
The carrot is there, in terms of waived onroad costs in some states (others actually tax MORE because EVs don't pay fuel tax, which I think is horribly ass-backwards at this stage of their development), free reign to use carpool lanes etc. The reason EVs are having image problems now is that people are stupid and believe advertising (that's why they do it) and that most of the major car manufacturers went on a 5-year smear campaign to convince everyone how crap EVs were.
What really annoys me is Toyota's marketing of the Prius, where they actually tout its defective-by-design inability to charge the batteries from an external source as a major benefit! "You never plug it in!" they say, and people are too stupid to think "charging from wall: $0.20/kWh, charging from petrol using onboard generator: $1-$2/kWh at least".
(but that vehicle still isn't as practical as a gasoline vehicle, especially if gas costs $3).
Bingo. The other problem is that most people are so hung up on one of two things: 1) "it's electric therefore it's slow" (um, no), and 2) "I can't drive it to Zimbabwe and back on the weekend" (Well, no, not unless you can add a range extender module which you easily can).
The range issue seems to be the major one, because people can't handle the idea of "filling up" their car each evening when they get home instead of leaving it for 500+ kms. They don't seem to be able to look past the "plug it into your garage wall when you get out" to the "and for $2 you have a full battery".
As for people stepping in to build one, they fall into two groups, the golf buggy manufacturers who make golf carts with headlights and wind up windows and expect people to use them like cars, and the "let's make a ferrari-beating electric car to prove something to the world" types who make a car that's awesome, but costs as much as a private jet. If only these people could see that the right market is actually "people who'd buy a Toyota Corolla". Just make it go fast enough to be fun, and far enough to get them to work or drop the kids off at school, with a stop at the shops on the way home, and it'll be a perfectly good second car. They have to stop trying to build a vehicle which will do everything and take over the world, and just take baby steps to start with.
Actually, you don't _power_ the motors backwards, you _drain_ power from them while using them as brakes, and charge your batteries with it. It's as if engine braking in your car sucked back some of the CO2 and NOx and turned it back into petrol.
They were leasing at a loss because they made LESS THAN TWO HUNDRED of the damn things. A production run of them would bring the price per unit down hugely. As said below, the problem with electric cars is that they are _too good_, they're too reliable and they don't break down. The only secondary industry other than smash repairs and tyres is replacing the battery packs, and that's not something a car company like GM wants to retool to become.
If they were genuinely not a good product, and that's all there was to it, then why would GM have recalled and quietly crushed them instead of just letting people buy out the leases? Don't say liability or maintainence reasons, they're easy to get around with contract terms.
Forget the corrosiveness. Start thinking about where the stuff comes from, lupine (above) is correct. The 'well-to-wheels' efficiency of a hydrogen car is worse than that of a petrol car let alone a battery electric.
Electric light bulbs will put a huge demand on today's electric grid.
... but not a real practical one for the general public.
What does that mean?? Expensive electricity for EVERYBODY. Not just the owner of the electric light bulb.
With the raise of demand, the environmental requirements will be dropped to compensate for the need to build new power plants fast. By dropping the requirements, we will get power plants that will generate 3 to 4 times more pollution that gas lamps would have generated.
And lets not talk about all the pollution generate in the production and disposal of electricity. (wait what? disposal of electricity?)
The Edison bulb is a nice "concept" lamp
...is that 10 years ago GM was telling us exactly that about the EV1, and we (the people who wanted one) were saying "but it's awesome, why are you telling us we don't want one?" and they were saying "there's no demand, it's not cost effective, it's terrible anyway".
Damn CARB for crumbling and allowing any car with a slightly larger battery that can crank itself along with its starter motor to count as a "low emissions vehicle".
I know that every time someone says, "there ought to be a law," god kills a kitten [...]
Actually, this is a case of correlation != causation. There's a hidden common factor - every time someone says "there ought to be a law", a laywer m@$#urbates.
"intelligent dribbling"? I thought that was less the domain of Raptor Jesus and more the domain of Stephen Hawking...
I dunno what version you're using to say that working with Visual Studio is hellish. I've just switched jobs to a place that uses Borland C++ Builder... maybe it's partly familiarity but VS2005 is, IMO, leaps and bound ahead in usability.
The question, though, is why C# or Java "programming" is so different from "scripting" that you'd expect a sysadmin to know the latter, but not the former.
It's not that it's "so different", just that they're different specialised domains of "programming". It's no different from expecting, say, a scientist doing number crunching to know FORTRAN and MatLab but not DirectX. Or expecting a hardware driver engineer to know how to work with the WDM but not how to validate a field in an MS Access form.
Yes, but like any quantum cryptography method, it's still vulnerable to a SITM (Shark In The Middle) attack.
OH SH-
+1, Agree. In my youth (ha!) I did a fair bit of work with video mixing for night clubs and the like, often involving very low rez camera feeds. A 64x64 picture is plenty to give the viewer a good idea of what's going on if the viewpoint is moving in the right way (which is the natural way that the user of such a device would move their head) and the frame rate is acceptably high (30+ fps). Hell, broadcast quality analogue TV is only 320x240 or so (argue and I'll find a format that fits that, grr! :P ) and that's plenty for some people to live their whole lives in front of.
A modern DLP chip can pack movable micromirrors in more densely than the cones in my eye are spaced. I'd be amazed if they couldn't make simple electrodes smaller than that by an order of magnitude.
I believe when you're saying we won't get much better, you're thinking of the direct brain interface research to restore sight to people who have lost sight due to optic nerve damage or the like. This technology is simply stimulating the retinal nerves directly, and optic nerves are laid out in the correct spatial arrangement already, so is much simpler and more amenable to increased resolution.
So can you recommend a less bloated distro which retains the "everything just works" factor that, like it or not, is a necessity for a modern desktop computer? I recently bought a new computer which is currently running xubuntu, but I'd like something a little more minimal* if there's anything that will fit the bill.
That said, it's my primary system so it has to be running samba, Wine, Pigeon, and have a bunch of utilities such as disk burner, GIMP, media player, swanky 3d screensavers etc. I don't really see how xubuntu could be cut down much in terms of overhead compared to the default install without removing stuff I actually use.
* Minimal = less active, running overhead. I don't give a rat's if the install is 1GB compared to 500MB. I'm only using something like 20% of my new primary hard drive anyway.
KILL ZEM ALL!
I seem to recall reading that the X number of virgins in the afterlife was a mistranslation and it's actually 40 pumpkins and a goat, or somesuch. Then again I'm at work so I'm somewhat reticent to research combinations of pumpkins, virgins and goats...
Or maybe just blur the sides that are actually populated by people?
Hell, I bet McDonalds kills more people with hearteriosclerosis each year than die from bullets in the US. That doesn't figure, though, because peoples' brains have evolved to remember rare dramatic events over common boring events. Uncle Mick cheeseburgering himself to death is both common and boring. That one guy who got eaten by a shark in his bathtub, or the one who always carried his lucky penny everywhere and then won the lottery... those are the ones we remember. That's why Lotto attracts the same schmucks every week, and why many people are scared of air travel when by rights they should be ten times as scared of driving down to the local shops.
Just pointing out that blurring details on a friggin' online map is stupid, as you know, and that if you get within a few hundred meters of a school your 540THz radar should suffice for accurate targetting.
My 'real life' is already blurred, you insensitive clod! I've been reading slashdot at -3.25 diopters for years...