Do notice all the tire tracks that don't lead into the parking spot? Like all of the robotics projects I've been involved in, this took a LOT of tries.
Sure, sure, but did you watch the rest of the videos where the demonstrate how single-modal control fails badly? That's where the other tire marks are from.
The point of the set of videos was not that the car can do slide parking per se, however incredibly awesome that is, but that it took a multi-modal approach to achieve it.
Light doesn't just illuminate something. It has pressure. If you illuminate a satellite from the proper angle with less than the energy required to blow it apart, for long enough, you can change its orbit.
And, importantly, it has the ability to heat whatever it strikes. Heat the object enough, and the surface can be made to ablate and transfer momentum to the main object. Furthermore, since ablation has the potential for release of chemical energy (depending on the materials) in addition to just conversion of energy in the beam, ablation can impart a potentially much larger amount of momentum to the target.
You claim to know where the website is... The FIRST PAGE of the website gives install instructions, source download, and RPM/DEB packages.
Why do people complain when they are too stupid/lazy to take 5 seconds to read 1 page? Honestly if you can't be bothered to read 2 lines of text to learn how to install something, you probably should be using Photoshop anyway.
That, most people are better off using Photoshop, would be exactly the point the GP was implicitly trying to make. Calling the GP stupid and lazy does no one any good: it makes you look rude, makes the GP feel bad, and lowers the tone of discussion. Seriously, no one benefits from that, and everyone in the open source community suffers.
People generally do not like to listen to criticism, and often miss the real message when faced with a complaint like, "I don't know how this works." The real message isn't better instructions are needed when good ones already exist, the real message is that the delivery system that's being used at present is inadequate for the audience. When the audience doesn't hear what you are saying, and your interest is not limited to making yourself feel superior, but rather in disseminating information, you need to change tactics.
Back to GIMP: I use it, reluctantly. I also have a (legal) copy of PS4. The two are not comparable, but when the manipulation I need to do isn't important enough to justify the time overhead associated with transfering the files to my WIndows box, waiting for PS4 to start up, and transfering the modified files back to my primary box running Linux, I use GIMP. Reluctantly, as I said. I had *no* *idea* that plug-ins were available up until this thread. I'm pretty computer savvy. There is no indication within GIMP that plugins to do interesting things might be found.
We CAN build both nuclear and drilling and mining systems safer today. Technology and laws, among other things, helps that to happen. It's unfortunate when businesses save a buck today and cost them and everyone else tomorrow. It's also unfortunate when certain industries come to a halt because of preventable disasters and fear, like the nuclear industry, instead of making them better and safer.
My original point was more in comparing the two industries - both require safety precautions and both have major impacts in a disaster. But for whatever the reasons there is more public fear with radiation than with oil.
I don't know about the oil industry, but given that we have a couple of operating (or at least recently operating) nuclear plants in adjacent New England states, I've followed that industry a bit. So when you say that we, as in Americans, can build better nuclear plants, you're basing this on what? We haven't build a new nuclear plant in well over a decade (and that last one was just one), and haven't designed a new one in about 20 years. Three Mile Island was 30 years ago, Chernobyl 25. There are essentially no living, practicing nuclear power plant engineers in the US with any experience whatsoever. Some of the most recently designed plants (Connecticut Yankee, New Hampshire Seabrook) are maintenance nightmares in present day (hear about the tower collapse in Vermont?). If only half of the stories about Seabrook are true, you wouldn't want to live or work in a building built by the... ahm... workers who constructed that plant.
We might as well be starting from square one. So, again, please provide evidence for your assertion that we are better at building nuclear plants. I see nothing to support that assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
There are two deeper issues with building new nuclear power plants (and I am pro-nuclear, and have been for decades), at least the standard non-breeding designs that require moderators to slow fast neutrons. The first issue is that because of the inherent public safety risk, they require higher standards of construction skill... but lowest-bidding practices nearly guarantee that the crews aren't going to be the best and brightest. The second is that we are still unable to handle nuclear waste from a technological and social standpoint. Moreover, any plan that includes shipping nuclear waste to some central facility (like the thankfully ill-fated Yucca Mountain plan) presents a serious national security liability as the waste is transported from the source to the storage facility.
We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.
You've heard of Bhopal? Look it up. Makes Chernobyl look like a local hiccough, and was entirely chemical in nature.
Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs,
Is this just a flavor of the month opinon, or do you have actual facts to back up your opinion? The Greek economy has been a minor player in the EU, but a reasonably good one, up until recent years when accounting irregularities underwritten by -- wait for it -- American financial firms caught up with the current government. While the Greek economy has never been structured for a long-lasting boom (nor has the Greek psyche been conducive to sustained growth like their first-world bretheren), it has persisted more-or-less in its present form since 1974 when the military dictatorship collapsed, modulo the explicitly observable shift to the West once the euro was adopted in Greece in 2001.
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative.
I disagree. It is the loss of the ability for people to write the narrative form. Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
You forgot menstruating women. Getting sufficient iron from plant-only sources, while possible, is impractical because the concentrations are so low. According to a Caltech nutrition researcher (damn, where *is* that reference...) a single serving of 4 oz of red meat per week, or one smallish hamburger, is sufficient to replace iron lost in the menses, whereas it would be physically difficult to eat enough spinach, a plant relatively high in iron, to do the same. It's all about eating blood to get the iron-laden haemoglobin, and red meat is red because it still has blood in it (while white meat is white because the blood has been drained). Pregnant women, infants, and children, who all have circulatory systems that are quite literally growing in volume, also need iron to make haemoglobin because their bodies are manufacturing blood. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, an excellent way for humans to get complete balanced protein is by eating animal flesh; in a similar fashion, an excellent way for humans to get bioavailable iron is to eat blood, and the most socially acceptable way of doing that is to eat red meat.
It seems in the very beginning of the clip that there was not enough upward force on the cable for a proper lift off. The launch release caused the payload to immediately swing like a pendulum and there was not enough launch height for the amount of vertical lift being applied to avoid the payload swinging into the ground.
I'm assuming that the actual near vertical crash was due to some kind of abort procedure initiated as a result of the payload being dragged across the ground because there was an (off screen) catastrophic balloon failure at that point.
Or too much horizontal force? The balloon seemed quite a ways downrange. I wonder if they shot up a tracer rocket (ie, a model-rocket sized projectile that left a visible exhaust trail) to assess upper level winds?
The National Ignition Facility is not doing research into energy production. The research they're doing will not have applications in energy production. The hope is that by understanding ignition other nuclear fusion projects will be able to make better progress.. it is completely pure research, as you would expect from a national laboratory.
My understanding from friends who work at LLNL is that it's an open secret that at the NIF they are not working on energy production, but, rather, thermonuclear ignition for weapons research. It's still pure research, in that they're working to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion rather than designing bombs outright, but the purpose of understanding fusion per se is so that we can better understand the current state of our present arsenal as it gets older. At least that's what they tell me.
So, we have a tiered layer of secrecy about NIF:
1. for the public: we're doing energy research for a petroleum-free tomorrow 2. for people who probe: we're doing fusion research to model our ageing weapons stockpile 3. [ guess the real reason here ]
I'm betting the third line is only marginally related to the first two, given the history of activity at LLNL.
...under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware.
But that's an application requirement, not an illustration of the failures of other operating systems. Complete and total control of the hardware isn't generally a good thing to give users who need to do various and sundry computing tsaks. In, hhoever, a process control application, a non-predictive OS is totally inappropriate. Using XP for these kinds of applications is not a good idea, and I'm surprised any engineer would try to make it happen. In my own company we are just now getting away from using DOS in our products and moving to a Linux-based RTOS. Machine bit width was the main reason I think. XP for RTOS applications? Really?? Why?
In an ideal world, I'd love to be doing this on a real RTOS. External constraints, primarily budgetary, prevent that.
I wrote a real-time data acquisition system about 10 years ago. It was written to run on DOS. Why? One, and only one reason: under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware. Total, utter control. There's no OS that's going to interrupt with housekeeping, respond to network packets, check to see if there's another thread that wants a slice, or other crap. Only one thread executes at a time (unless you work really really hard to allow that to happen). For instrumentation that cannot tolerate a 20, 50 or even 100 ms pause every now and then, this is vital. DOS, crappy though parts of it are, has a lot of support in the embedded / instrumentation market. It isn't a lack of pressure to update so much as the ability to do exactly what you want, no questions asked, with the hardware. Worked great. As far as I know, that system is still in operation.
More recently, I've written a different real-time data acquisition system, under Windows 98. Almost as much control of the hardware, but not quite. There were gremlins I never figured out that were stealing segments of time every now and then.
And just this year, I ported that second system to Windows XP. Holy crap. Still haven't had time to chase down all of the HUGE number of timing problems now. If W98 drivers were available for the fast modern hardware required for the current project, I'd have stuck with the older OS.
I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
The huge difference was that with film slides -- at least the ones you had to expose with a 35mm camera, or the ones you drew up by hand -- was that the author's actual or perceived difficulty or cost was a damping factor. It make the authors think before making a presentation (anyone other than me remember how expensive a box of overhead sheets were?), and carefully consider what to say and how to say it.
With everything computerized, it's too easy to run off at the mouth, as it were, because the incremental cost of doing so isn't another overpriced sheet of blank acetate and the time to hand-draw the slide, but essentially zero. (You see the same thing on social media sites where photo albums comprised of two dozen nearly, but not quite, identical photos are commonplace.) There is no external cost function forcing the author to self-edit, and we, as a society, have not yet developed the educational infrastructure to promote editorial awareness. Seriously, editing --- the art of reducing excesses of source material into a small, coherent presentation --- is hard and should be taught starting in secondary school. Witness this Slashdot article, we as a society are starting, slowly to understand the problem exists, and, hopefully, we'll begin to work to fixing it.
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
It just wouldn't be worth it. Not saying they wouldn't be interested, just that the expense and effort to take our stuff would not even be close to break even.
Assuming that Earth is not unusual in any way other than habitability (barring hard evidence to the contrary which we resoundingly lack, this is the only justifiable null hypothesis), the argument of cost succinctly made above would suggest that there are only two reasons for alien civilizations to visit our planet: (a) sheer curiosity, or (b) they need the habitable area. Either option requires a rich and highly advanced civilization compared with ours. The first option would mean we might or might not know they are here. The second is not likely to end well for us.
Wow. That's pretty shitty reporting, even for The Register. Yes, Google records SSIDs and (I guess) MAC addresses of wifi APs. That way they can estimate your position for Google Maps on a mobile device, even if you have no GPS on that device. This has been public knowledge for at least a year now.
In regards to Streetview itself and recording SSIDs and such, there is simply no privacy concerns. When you are in public, people can see you. When you broadcast signals, people can receive them. If you don't want to be seen, don't go out in public. If you don't want people to see the SSID of your AP, don't broadcast it.
Except that the AP is a device typically well within the confines of a person's abode where one has an expectation of privacy. Just because you can look in through someone's windows does not make it necessarily legal to do so (see, for example, Peeping Tom laws). By analogy, just because you can see through the walls of someone's abode to the AP does not make it necessarily legal to do so.
In fact, studies on "previously collected samples" are specifically exempted from IRB review.
Not at my institution. They are considered "minimal risk" studies (as would the initial study that collected the data), but are still required to be reviewed.
I wonder if one of the implicit advantages of a highly flexible, programmable robotic system like this, rather than special-purpose hardware, is manufacturing flexibility.
I know that chocolate manufacturers need to retool their lines quite frequenty (Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.), and imagine that's true for lots of industries. Many of the examples from the second video are food handling: a processing plant that handles frozen burgers one week might be making chicken nuggets or fish sticks the next.
Go to the linked article (yes, yes, do it anyway). Skip the Wii demo video that forms the basis of the post because it really isn't interesting. Go to the second video. Watch it.
Holy frick. Robotic vision and control has come a long way.
I'm torn here. On the one hand, I would not want research on tissue samples being done outside of the scope of the informed consent permissions document under which the samples were collected. If that did, indeed, occur, the researchers lied to their test subjects. That is all kinds of unethical.
And it should have been blocked by the local Institute Review Board (IRB) who is supposed to oversee research involving samples of human tissue for this very reason (shades of Tuskege and vulnerable populations come immediately to mind). Either the researchers didn't get IRB approval, which is a career-ending mistake, or the IRB gave approval for what seems to be unethical use of the samples.
Neither of those seem likely so I'm betting there's more to the story here.
For those who are interested in understanding more about regulations concerning human research, the basis for current theory and practice is something called The Belmont Report (use Google). Also, for Federally Funded research, DHHS has specific guidelines (based on The Belmont Report recommendations): http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/irb/irb_guidebook.htm
You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
It is nearly always advisable to look at what other efforts have done before embarking on a project. The TrackIR Pro has a doodad with three reflectors on it that clips to the user's baseball hat. The three reflectors are in known physical relation to each other, which allows the TrackIR software to extract head position, but it might also be used (I'm speculating at this point) to eliminate spurious inputs by only paying attention to reflections that are in a physically plausible configuration given the known dimensions of the doodad.
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front, and bathe the room in IR. Works like a charm for head-sensing camera-based systems like TrackIR. If you habitually wear glasses, then you are, in fact, at a huge advantage for this sort of device, because there's zero impact to your daily routine, and only upside. Moreover, as long as you leave it on, it will continue to work every morning. Everyone else will have to remember to put something on, which gets to be a pain, and thus because it is not necessary, the neato-keeno device evenutaly will be forgotten or ignored.
I live in a major metropolitan city in the US Northeast. Our road, a medium-busy street was reconstructed recently to include these so-called traffic calming mechanisms. Near the major non-intersection crosswalks, the road was narrowed by expanding the sidewalk. If you look at a plan of the road, it seems to make sense, the road gets significantly narrower at exactly the points where you want the traffic to slow for reasons of pedestrian safety. Great.
Except that the urban planners failed to take into account that this road is in a section of town that has too-few metered parking spaces, so the parking spots are always full. And by "always", I mean over 90 percent of the time. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights. It's hard to find metered parking. This means that the parked cars are *already* performing the narrowing function, and all that happened was the city eliminated four parking spots (two on each side of the road) per crosswalk. Where there used to be parked cars the vast majority of the time, there's now sidewalk. Traffic calming failed utterly, as from the driver's perspective, the width of passable road has not changed one whit, and we are left with even fewer metered spots than before.
...when you are the victim. Don't know for an Wireless AP but I go real headaches from a telco's base station. It was as close as 70 meters from my appartment and although it was 4 storeys higher than my home it still made me sick. And the most interesting part: while climbing the stairs to my appartment going through the floors when I was getting near my floor the nasty sensation was setting off. So the guy may be in his right. All he did was to buy a house and then waited till somebody started making him sick. Why don't you look from the other side - make the lady put her house in a Faraday cage if she insist on her wireless?
Where's the control in your experiment? How do you know that it was the tower and not, say, the ultrasonic pest repellent devices that your landlord had installed on your floor? Or any of a half dozen frequently used but kind of nasty chemicals that are routinely found in apartment buildings? Or the flickering old-style fluorescent lights? Frankly, the fact that the sensation wasn't worse OUTSIDE when the building isn't shielding you from what sounds like line-of-sight irradiation makes me dubious that the source of your headaches have been properly isolated.
Slashdot Mirror
Do notice all the tire tracks that don't lead into the parking spot? Like all of the robotics projects I've been involved in, this took a LOT of tries.
Sure, sure, but did you watch the rest of the videos where the demonstrate how single-modal control fails badly? That's where the other tire marks are from.
The point of the set of videos was not that the car can do slide parking per se, however incredibly awesome that is, but that it took a multi-modal approach to achieve it.
Light doesn't just illuminate something. It has pressure. If you illuminate a satellite from the proper angle with less than the energy required to blow it apart, for long enough, you can change its orbit.
And, importantly, it has the ability to heat whatever it strikes. Heat the object enough, and the surface can be made to ablate and transfer momentum to the main object. Furthermore, since ablation has the potential for release of chemical energy (depending on the materials) in addition to just conversion of energy in the beam, ablation can impart a potentially much larger amount of momentum to the target.
1995 called. It wants its website theme back.
Indeed. The eye-bleed quality of his web site design brings into serious question the validity of the poster's inquiry.
You claim to know where the website is... The FIRST PAGE of the website gives install instructions, source download, and RPM/DEB packages.
Why do people complain when they are too stupid/lazy to take 5 seconds to read 1 page? Honestly if you can't be bothered to read 2 lines of text to learn how to install something, you probably should be using Photoshop anyway.
That, most people are better off using Photoshop, would be exactly the point the GP was implicitly trying to make. Calling the GP stupid and lazy does no one any good: it makes you look rude, makes the GP feel bad, and lowers the tone of discussion. Seriously, no one benefits from that, and everyone in the open source community suffers.
People generally do not like to listen to criticism, and often miss the real message when faced with a complaint like, "I don't know how this works." The real message isn't better instructions are needed when good ones already exist, the real message is that the delivery system that's being used at present is inadequate for the audience. When the audience doesn't hear what you are saying, and your interest is not limited to making yourself feel superior, but rather in disseminating information, you need to change tactics.
Back to GIMP: I use it, reluctantly. I also have a (legal) copy of PS4. The two are not comparable, but when the manipulation I need to do isn't important enough to justify the time overhead associated with transfering the files to my WIndows box, waiting for PS4 to start up, and transfering the modified files back to my primary box running Linux, I use GIMP. Reluctantly, as I said. I had *no* *idea* that plug-ins were available up until this thread. I'm pretty computer savvy. There is no indication within GIMP that plugins to do interesting things might be found.
We CAN build both nuclear and drilling and mining systems safer today. Technology and laws, among other things, helps that to happen. It's unfortunate when businesses save a buck today and cost them and everyone else tomorrow. It's also unfortunate when certain industries come to a halt because of preventable disasters and fear, like the nuclear industry, instead of making them better and safer.
My original point was more in comparing the two industries - both require safety precautions and both have major impacts in a disaster. But for whatever the reasons there is more public fear with radiation than with oil.
I don't know about the oil industry, but given that we have a couple of operating (or at least recently operating) nuclear plants in adjacent New England states, I've followed that industry a bit. So when you say that we, as in Americans, can build better nuclear plants, you're basing this on what? We haven't build a new nuclear plant in well over a decade (and that last one was just one), and haven't designed a new one in about 20 years. Three Mile Island was 30 years ago, Chernobyl 25. There are essentially no living, practicing nuclear power plant engineers in the US with any experience whatsoever. Some of the most recently designed plants (Connecticut Yankee, New Hampshire Seabrook) are maintenance nightmares in present day (hear about the tower collapse in Vermont?). If only half of the stories about Seabrook are true, you wouldn't want to live or work in a building built by the ... ahm ... workers who constructed that plant.
We might as well be starting from square one. So, again, please provide evidence for your assertion that we are better at building nuclear plants. I see nothing to support that assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
There are two deeper issues with building new nuclear power plants (and I am pro-nuclear, and have been for decades), at least the standard non-breeding designs that require moderators to slow fast neutrons. The first issue is that because of the inherent public safety risk, they require higher standards of construction skill ... but lowest-bidding practices nearly guarantee that the crews aren't going to be the best and brightest. The second is that we are still unable to handle nuclear waste from a technological and social standpoint. Moreover, any plan that includes shipping nuclear waste to some central facility (like the thankfully ill-fated Yucca Mountain plan) presents a serious national security liability as the waste is transported from the source to the storage facility.
We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.
You've heard of Bhopal? Look it up. Makes Chernobyl look like a local hiccough, and was entirely chemical in nature.
Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs,
Is this just a flavor of the month opinon, or do you have actual facts to back up your opinion? The Greek economy has been a minor player in the EU, but a reasonably good one, up until recent years when accounting irregularities underwritten by -- wait for it -- American financial firms caught up with the current government. While the Greek economy has never been structured for a long-lasting boom (nor has the Greek psyche been conducive to sustained growth like their first-world bretheren), it has persisted more-or-less in its present form since 1974 when the military dictatorship collapsed, modulo the explicitly observable shift to the West once the euro was adopted in Greece in 2001.
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.
What, there haven't been enough major oil spills already to make up your mind? Seriously, even if you only recognize the Exxon Valdez (1989), and while it was a very bad spill, it doesn't even rank in the top 15. Quoting the late, great Jacques Cousteau, "we are entirely unable to handle oil safely."
Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative.
I disagree. It is the loss of the ability for people to write the narrative form. Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
You forgot menstruating women. Getting sufficient iron from plant-only sources, while possible, is impractical because the concentrations are so low. According to a Caltech nutrition researcher (damn, where *is* that reference ...) a single serving of 4 oz of red meat per week, or one smallish hamburger, is sufficient to replace iron lost in the menses, whereas it would be physically difficult to eat enough spinach, a plant relatively high in iron, to do the same. It's all about eating blood to get the iron-laden haemoglobin, and red meat is red because it still has blood in it (while white meat is white because the blood has been drained). Pregnant women, infants, and children, who all have circulatory systems that are quite literally growing in volume, also need iron to make haemoglobin because their bodies are manufacturing blood. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, an excellent way for humans to get complete balanced protein is by eating animal flesh; in a similar fashion, an excellent way for humans to get bioavailable iron is to eat blood, and the most socially acceptable way of doing that is to eat red meat.
It seems in the very beginning of the clip that there was not enough upward force on the cable for a proper lift off. The launch release caused the payload to immediately swing like a pendulum and there was not enough launch height for the amount of vertical lift being applied to avoid the payload swinging into the ground.
I'm assuming that the actual near vertical crash was due to some kind of abort procedure initiated as a result of the payload being dragged across the ground because there was an (off screen) catastrophic balloon failure at that point.
Or too much horizontal force? The balloon seemed quite a ways downrange. I wonder if they shot up a tracer rocket (ie, a model-rocket sized projectile that left a visible exhaust trail) to assess upper level winds?
The National Ignition Facility is not doing research into energy production. The research they're doing will not have applications in energy production. The hope is that by understanding ignition other nuclear fusion projects will be able to make better progress.. it is completely pure research, as you would expect from a national laboratory.
My understanding from friends who work at LLNL is that it's an open secret that at the NIF they are not working on energy production, but, rather, thermonuclear ignition for weapons research. It's still pure research, in that they're working to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion rather than designing bombs outright, but the purpose of understanding fusion per se is so that we can better understand the current state of our present arsenal as it gets older. At least that's what they tell me.
So, we have a tiered layer of secrecy about NIF:
1. for the public: we're doing energy research for a petroleum-free tomorrow
2. for people who probe: we're doing fusion research to model our ageing weapons stockpile
3. [ guess the real reason here ]
I'm betting the third line is only marginally related to the first two, given the history of activity at LLNL.
...under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware.
But that's an application requirement, not an illustration of the failures of other operating systems. Complete and total control of the hardware isn't generally a good thing to give users who need to do various and sundry computing tsaks. In, hhoever, a process control application, a non-predictive OS is totally inappropriate. Using XP for these kinds of applications is not a good idea, and I'm surprised any engineer would try to make it happen. In my own company we are just now getting away from using DOS in our products and moving to a Linux-based RTOS. Machine bit width was the main reason I think. XP for RTOS applications? Really?? Why?
In an ideal world, I'd love to be doing this on a real RTOS. External constraints, primarily budgetary, prevent that.
I wrote a real-time data acquisition system about 10 years ago. It was written to run on DOS. Why? One, and only one reason: under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware. Total, utter control. There's no OS that's going to interrupt with housekeeping, respond to network packets, check to see if there's another thread that wants a slice, or other crap. Only one thread executes at a time (unless you work really really hard to allow that to happen). For instrumentation that cannot tolerate a 20, 50 or even 100 ms pause every now and then, this is vital. DOS, crappy though parts of it are, has a lot of support in the embedded / instrumentation market. It isn't a lack of pressure to update so much as the ability to do exactly what you want, no questions asked, with the hardware. Worked great. As far as I know, that system is still in operation.
More recently, I've written a different real-time data acquisition system, under Windows 98. Almost as much control of the hardware, but not quite. There were gremlins I never figured out that were stealing segments of time every now and then.
And just this year, I ported that second system to Windows XP. Holy crap. Still haven't had time to chase down all of the HUGE number of timing problems now. If W98 drivers were available for the fast modern hardware required for the current project, I'd have stuck with the older OS.
I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
The huge difference was that with film slides -- at least the ones you had to expose with a 35mm camera, or the ones you drew up by hand -- was that the author's actual or perceived difficulty or cost was a damping factor. It make the authors think before making a presentation (anyone other than me remember how expensive a box of overhead sheets were?), and carefully consider what to say and how to say it.
With everything computerized, it's too easy to run off at the mouth, as it were, because the incremental cost of doing so isn't another overpriced sheet of blank acetate and the time to hand-draw the slide, but essentially zero. (You see the same thing on social media sites where photo albums comprised of two dozen nearly, but not quite, identical photos are commonplace.) There is no external cost function forcing the author to self-edit, and we, as a society, have not yet developed the educational infrastructure to promote editorial awareness. Seriously, editing --- the art of reducing excesses of source material into a small, coherent presentation --- is hard and should be taught starting in secondary school. Witness this Slashdot article, we as a society are starting, slowly to understand the problem exists, and, hopefully, we'll begin to work to fixing it.
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
It just wouldn't be worth it. Not saying they wouldn't be interested, just that the expense and effort to take our stuff would not even be close to break even.
Assuming that Earth is not unusual in any way other than habitability (barring hard evidence to the contrary which we resoundingly lack, this is the only justifiable null hypothesis), the argument of cost succinctly made above would suggest that there are only two reasons for alien civilizations to visit our planet: (a) sheer curiosity, or (b) they need the habitable area. Either option requires a rich and highly advanced civilization compared with ours. The first option would mean we might or might not know they are here. The second is not likely to end well for us.
Start looking for a new job: your current situation sounds bad for your long-term health.
Wow. That's pretty shitty reporting, even for The Register. Yes, Google records SSIDs and (I guess) MAC addresses of wifi APs. That way they can estimate your position for Google Maps on a mobile device, even if you have no GPS on that device. This has been public knowledge for at least a year now.
In regards to Streetview itself and recording SSIDs and such, there is simply no privacy concerns. When you are in public, people can see you. When you broadcast signals, people can receive them. If you don't want to be seen, don't go out in public. If you don't want people to see the SSID of your AP, don't broadcast it.
Except that the AP is a device typically well within the confines of a person's abode where one has an expectation of privacy. Just because you can look in through someone's windows does not make it necessarily legal to do so (see, for example, Peeping Tom laws). By analogy, just because you can see through the walls of someone's abode to the AP does not make it necessarily legal to do so.
In fact, studies on "previously collected samples" are specifically exempted from IRB review.
Not at my institution. They are considered "minimal risk" studies (as would the initial study that collected the data), but are still required to be reviewed.
I wonder if one of the implicit advantages of a highly flexible, programmable robotic system like this, rather than special-purpose hardware, is manufacturing flexibility.
I know that chocolate manufacturers need to retool their lines quite frequenty (Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.), and imagine that's true for lots of industries. Many of the examples from the second video are food handling: a processing plant that handles frozen burgers one week might be making chicken nuggets or fish sticks the next.
Go to the linked article (yes, yes, do it anyway). Skip the Wii demo video that forms the basis of the post because it really isn't interesting. Go to the second video. Watch it.
Holy frick. Robotic vision and control has come a long way.
I'm torn here. On the one hand, I would not want research on tissue samples being done outside of the scope of the informed consent permissions document under which the samples were collected. If that did, indeed, occur, the researchers lied to their test subjects. That is all kinds of unethical.
And it should have been blocked by the local Institute Review Board (IRB) who is supposed to oversee research involving samples of human tissue for this very reason (shades of Tuskege and vulnerable populations come immediately to mind). Either the researchers didn't get IRB approval, which is a career-ending mistake, or the IRB gave approval for what seems to be unethical use of the samples.
Neither of those seem likely so I'm betting there's more to the story here.
For those who are interested in understanding more about regulations concerning human research, the basis for current theory and practice is something called The Belmont Report (use Google). Also, for Federally Funded research, DHHS has specific guidelines (based on The Belmont Report recommendations): http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/irb/irb_guidebook.htm
You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
It is nearly always advisable to look at what other efforts have done before embarking on a project. The TrackIR Pro has a doodad with three reflectors on it that clips to the user's baseball hat. The three reflectors are in known physical relation to each other, which allows the TrackIR software to extract head position, but it might also be used (I'm speculating at this point) to eliminate spurious inputs by only paying attention to reflections that are in a physically plausible configuration given the known dimensions of the doodad.
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front, and bathe the room in IR. Works like a charm for head-sensing camera-based systems like TrackIR. If you habitually wear glasses, then you are, in fact, at a huge advantage for this sort of device, because there's zero impact to your daily routine, and only upside. Moreover, as long as you leave it on, it will continue to work every morning. Everyone else will have to remember to put something on, which gets to be a pain, and thus because it is not necessary, the neato-keeno device evenutaly will be forgotten or ignored.
This is on Slashdot because ... it's 3D? ... it's something for the blind? ... it's an art book? ... it was written by a woman? ... it's vaguely about sex?
The news item doesn't quite seem to raise up to even kdawson's lowest interpretation of "news for nerds, stuff that matters."
I live in a major metropolitan city in the US Northeast. Our road, a medium-busy street was reconstructed recently to include these so-called traffic calming mechanisms. Near the major non-intersection crosswalks, the road was narrowed by expanding the sidewalk. If you look at a plan of the road, it seems to make sense, the road gets significantly narrower at exactly the points where you want the traffic to slow for reasons of pedestrian safety. Great.
Except that the urban planners failed to take into account that this road is in a section of town that has too-few metered parking spaces, so the parking spots are always full. And by "always", I mean over 90 percent of the time. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights. It's hard to find metered parking. This means that the parked cars are *already* performing the narrowing function, and all that happened was the city eliminated four parking spots (two on each side of the road) per crosswalk. Where there used to be parked cars the vast majority of the time, there's now sidewalk. Traffic calming failed utterly, as from the driver's perspective, the width of passable road has not changed one whit, and we are left with even fewer metered spots than before.
...when you are the victim. Don't know for an Wireless AP but I go real headaches from a telco's base station. It was as close as 70 meters from my appartment and although it was 4 storeys higher than my home it still made me sick. And the most interesting part: while climbing the stairs to my appartment going through the floors when I was getting near my floor the nasty sensation was setting off. So the guy may be in his right. All he did was to buy a house and then waited till somebody started making him sick. Why don't you look from the other side - make the lady put her house in a Faraday cage if she insist on her wireless?
Where's the control in your experiment? How do you know that it was the tower and not, say, the ultrasonic pest repellent devices that your landlord had installed on your floor? Or any of a half dozen frequently used but kind of nasty chemicals that are routinely found in apartment buildings? Or the flickering old-style fluorescent lights? Frankly, the fact that the sensation wasn't worse OUTSIDE when the building isn't shielding you from what sounds like line-of-sight irradiation makes me dubious that the source of your headaches have been properly isolated.
Or, you're trolling, and I fell for it.