Why would you submit a story as an AC? To hide something.
What on earth is there to hide in this story? Either the very posting of it (say your employer doesn't condone spending time on Slashdot), or the authorship of the story.
As the story itself reads suspiciously like advertising copy, it is tempting to conclude that it came from 16systems.com, the sponsor of the contest.
Nothing to see here, except the Slashdot editors falling asleep at the wheel again.
Some of us think that publicly presented information is fair game. And just because I have not spent the necessary effort to develop exact memory does not mean I cannot augment it with a device.
I fear you are mistaken, in a strict legal sense. Whether you are allowed to take a recording (audio or visual) of a presentation is up to the organizers of the conference, not you. Smaller conferences generally allow it by default, and larger conferences generally do not. Generally. I have organized two smaller conferences and have paid specific attention to this issue.
Furthermore, the whole point of doing science is that others can verify your claims by experiment or derivation. That this also leads to finding other people you can discuss your results with (let alone ecstatic enough to write a paper based on a snapshot) is a big bonus.
While having people excited about your work is absolutely wonderful, and it sounds like the PAMELA team is working on a hot ticket, using someone's data, or taking their idea, before it has been peer reviewed and published is unethical, unless you have their permission to do so. Once it has been published, all bets are off; the data are in the public domain, and can be used freely. Showing unreviewed data in a traditionally transient form (ie, a slide presentation) is not publishing it. Certainly, it makes sense that if hot data are shown, people can get excited about it, work on it, come up with new hypotheses and analyses of it, but publish? No. That goes to the people who did the work, first.
Why? Because the scientific world works not on money but on reputation and that is build through citations. And what, pray tell, are the authors of the second study going to reference as their data source -- a slide at a conference presentation? That is not verifiable data, as it is not in the literature, and one hopes that the peer review of the paper raises this serious issue.
Now, that does not, and should not, preclude secondary teams from analyzing the PAMELA data, discussing it with their colleagues, and even making presentations about it at invited talks or at other conferences. But the first fruits of publication go to the PAMELA team here.
The linked article is a summary of a paper that has an analysis of data not written by the original PAMELA team who collected the data. The PAMELA team have not yet published their data or findings, although apparently have presented them at a conference in Stockholm.
The summary quotes the paper thusly: "The preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish."
I am not familiar with the conference in Stockholm that the PAMELA data were originally presented at, but at every large conference I have attended, it is official policy that no photographs are allowed. Taking unpublished data without permission of the authors is theft, pure and simple. Submitting a paper on that data before the original authors do is unethical.
Certainly, such proclamations are made with scant and incomplete information (it could be that Cirelli and Strumia, the non-PAMELA authors, did indeed get permission from the PAMELA team, and everything is kosher), and I hope that either members of the PAMELA team or authors of the new paper might read Slashdot to explain what's going on.
The FDA is worried about someone actually finding a cow with with mad cow disease.
I'm glad that someone else understands what's really going on here.
When the single previous case of BSE was discovered in the US, by statistical extrapolation, it was safe to estimate that there were about 50,000 head infected. (Given the fraction of the cattle that are tested and the total number of cattle in the US; this, of course, is a very poor estimate because of low N statistics, but the probable number of affected head can still be calculated, and it is in the 50,000 range.) Chances are quite high that we will see an increase in vCJD, the version of mad cow disease in humans that is caused by consumption of affected beef, in the coming years. Although the industry has perhaps cleaned itself up in response to that single episode, my guess is that since the government is still arguing against 100% testing, we still have a serious problem in the food stream.
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, and most of them are made of parchament, which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
My reaction to reading that it will take two years was: DAMN THAT'S FAST!
These are fragments of documents, not full scrolls. And there are what, thousands of fragments? They ought to be handled in clean-room conditions (don't know if they will be). They are extremely fragile. Anyone who damages them will suffer the ire of thousands upon millions of people. Since any manipulation runs risk of damage, presumably you want to ensure that it gets done right the first time. That means lots of logistical planning, test scans on simulated documents, training, etc. At least that's what it would mean if someone who knows what they're doing is in charge. Two years? If they had said ten years, I'd have been impressed.
/. gets books to review and some of them are awful. Nothing wrong with putting that on the front page. So please stop can people stop whinging about idle on the front page.
No. Wrong. There are a gazillion and a half books published every year. You want a bad one? Go and buy almost any arbitrary selection since, like almost everything else, 90% of them are crap.
A book / movie / game / etc. reviewer's job is to (a) weed out the awful stuff and tell you about the gems, and (b) tell you when something you would expect to be good is not.
This review (by an AC, no less) is of self-published drivel. If it were Linus's self-published drivel, it would make it newsworthy, but it isn't. It's by and about someone who went to second-rate universities with commensurate experiences. Someone that before reading this review, I'd never heard of, at all. If it were self-published drivel by Rivest, Shamir or Adelman (to pick examples closer to home for Mr. de Mare), good or bad, the review would be newsworthy. Similarly, we hear about Neal Stephenson's every publication, good or bad, because there is an expectation that they might well be enjoyable, and that Slashdot readers might well purchase copies.
This is not such stuff. This is not material suitable for front page promotion. This is part of the 90% that should not be reviewed, not be reported, and allowed to die a quiet death in obscurity.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer, so this is probably a really naive question that someone with more education and brains can answer:
Why, under conditions when you need extreme reliability, do we use parachutes? I can imagine that a simpler design that has lower chance of failure (like just a long streamer) would be preferable. Is it a weight-to-performance issue?
All the prosecutor would have to do is agree not to use the password itself ("I killed Mrs. Plum in the rumpus room with the crowbar") as evidence against you. Then, revealing the password could not possibly incriminate you.
If you've got something not-so-kosher on your laptop's hard drive, then make the password the confession to its ownership. Agree to indemnity, and poof! no more lawsuit.
But, this is definitely not the same as being compelled to divulge passwords at border crossings before you are actually on US soil and covered by the US Constitution. When you're outside the border, you have very, very few rights.
On of the brilliant strategies (I am n-o-t a lawyer, so take this at face value) I've heard is to make your password the confession of a crime. You cannot be compelled, by 5th Amendment arguments, to divulge it. At least once you've made it past passport control and customs.
... and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
If there's anyone from Transmeta here, they can attest to this. One of my former roommates worked there, and had horrible tales about getting their hardware to boot quickly. Funny thing about these stories were they always concluded with either (a) we found a bug in Microsoft's startup code that was making things run K times slower than they should have or (b) Microsoft specifies that this part of the booting sequence can't be made any faster than X seconds.
A long time ago, and by internet standards, I mean in pre-historic times, there was a computer called the Lisp Machine, designed and built at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We're talking mid-1980s here. That's more than TWO DECADES AGO. Your cell phone would run circles around a LispM.
One of the amazing things about LispMs is that they came up really, really quickly, despite having very large and slow disk drives. They did this by essentially performing a full boot and then saving that precise memory image (including all peripheral state) to a special part of the disk called a band. This is not unlike the modern laptops' suspend-to-disk feature, except that bands were pretty static. The intent was that you set up your machine just so, and then wrote what you felt was the canonical startup state to the band. Then, every time the machine started, the band loaded in from disk, and POOF! was ready to go.
It was a radical departure, and one that, unfortunately, was not learned by the industry. I would *love* to have my laptop use bands. Save-to-disk is nice and all, but since laptop hardware (and Linux support for it) is so f-ing flaky, it's far better to have a feature to boot quickly to a known-good state.
What's the relevance here? LispMs were as fast to boot as you'd expect for a computational appliance. OMFG if I have to boot my current Linux desktop or Windows laptop it takes eons to come up, and that's with hardware that's probably three orders of magnitude faster. Our modern machines should be in a known, operable state in under a second, and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
And what about the times when you are unconscious? Such as when you are in a dreamless sleep, or have been anesthetized, have been struck in the head, etc.?
(If they ask you to delete your photos, you tell them to fuck off, or just pretend to. But if it looks like someone is going to beat the shit out of you... maybe safer just to delete the photos.)
Interesting point that brings up: the photograph, being on/in your camera, is your private property. It is difficult to force anyone to do anything to their private property (at least in the USA) without a court order, even if said property was obtained illegally. There are well-known exceptions to this, but possession, as it's said, is 90% of the law.
My understanding, albeit a little hazy, is that building plans must be filed with local governmental offices, and that they are available for anyone to peruse. Of course, the building plans may or may not accurately match what was actually built, and it may be difficult to chase through all filed modifications and updates, but they should be available.
Way to make the world a better place. I'm certain your parents are very proud of your accomplishments. Perhaps you can now go find someone else's sandbox to defecate in, I suggest your own, because I certainly would rather you not be here.
I have no doubt that the reCAPTCHA folks understand that there are going to be people who find such childish behavior irresisible or entertaining, and either start discounting such answers (based on IP address) or build in filtering to discount particular words.
But, really, you ask people to be good, to help improve the world, to, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it, listen to our better angels of our nature, and this is what you get? Teenage boys who find it titillating to type bad words. My cup runneth over.
That makes me wonder if this software would be capable of identifying people as the age sortof. If it has enough data it could find a progressive path from one age to another, and you could find pics of yourself all over the place.
Very cool stuff! Does anyone know (are any of the project team members here?) how much foreknowledge of the object being orbited that is required?
For example, is a 3D wireframe model necessary?
Is a filtering of the photos necessary to ensure that they are all of the same subject?
What level of pre-processing is required on the photos, either automated, or manual?
How well does the system fare when the object being photographed isn't absolutely static? A drawbridge, for example, changes shape. Or Niagara Falls. Or a flag. Or a single person.
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
I have mod points right now, and this post makes me wish there was a "-1 ignorant" rating.
You must be new here. Or at least not tech-savvy or young enough to never have thought about these things.
If you want to minimize wear between two friction surfaces the WORST thing to do is to make them both out of the same material. The best is to make one hard and the other soft. I don't know why this is true, but perhaps someone more versed in mechanical engineering and materials science can explain. In watches, for example (mechanical ones), the jeweled bearings you hear about are typically a sapphire or ruby (synthetic) cone in which a metal (steel or brass) pin rotates, not gem-against-gem. So diamond-against-vinyl makes sense (hard against soft). And not all phonograph needles were diamond; that was a relatively late phenomenon.
But far more important is how the medium -- the record itself in this case -- is manufactured. In some cases they were injection molded (rare), but more often they were pressed. Now think for a second, how are you going to make records, and do it inexpensively enough that you can sell them? Make them out of metal, like steel? And then what, cut each groove? Probably not (although that's exactly how the original lacquer disks were made). A moldable plastic sounds like a good idea. And that's how the majority of disks were (and still are) made: take a hot lump of vinyl, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and press it between two hot disks of metal into which are carefully machined (ie, cut) grooves. Use enough pressure and the vinyl will replicate nearly every nuance of the mold. Although you can do this with a hard plastic, plastics are all pretty soft, and hard plastics have a regrettable tendency to break easily because they're brittle (like the old 78 RPM disks).
Now, you can argue that perhaps a less expensive material could be used instead of diamond for the needle, and was for a long time (eg, garnet), but the materials cost of industrial diamonds that weigh a few micrograms is next to nothing. The expense is in the shaping (playback needles aren't just pointed cones, at least good ones weren't) since that requires highly specialized equipment and skilled labor.
So, yes, it is brilliant to use diamond and vinyl. Did you ever see black dust or ribbon coming off of a record from the needle -- at least for one that was in proper alignment and not being dragged crosswise? I never did. And I still have my very playable record collection. The wear in records was not from removal of material, as with many wear mechanisms, but in gradual reshaping of the groove as the needle passed through. Thus the progress over time to lighter and lighter contact pressures and lighter and lighter cantilevers, with lighter and lighter moving masses -- eg, the moving magnet approach.
Uggg... more knee jerk reaction to a pretty obvious case of prudent police work.
There's a fire in his house. The fire dept. and police come, and put out the fire. In the process of putting out the fire, they notice hundreds of vials of chemicals. Not in a rack, not on a shelf, not even on a table, but all over the place. On the floor, on furniture, everywhere. No reasonable chemist would be dumb enough to do that with any chemicals.
1. Police don't normally respond to a fire. Firefighters do. You've got the facts not quite right.
2. What, exactly, were the firefighters doing in the basement when the fire was on the second floor?
I informed her that I had an electronics lab, and beer brewing equipment in mine to which she made the comment "I bet your neighbors are thrilled about that".
If you were MY neighbor, I'd definitely be thrilled about it -- as long as you shared your beer!
The article claims at least one copy was purchased by mistake (that's not quite the right word, "by stupidity," might be a better phrasing) where the purchaser thought it was a joke.
Keep in mind, though, that there are a lot of stolen credit cards out there, and this would be a perfect use for them. My bet is that of these 8 copies, nearly all will be either fraudulent, or result in a chargeback.
It seems you're trying to shoehorn too many things into one package. It also seems like you have a remarkably small budget for a company that does a lot of travel. But, given those two, my recommendations would be:
1. Get a used road-warrior class ultraportable from eBay. An IBM x31 or HP nc4000. Both are light (under 3lbs), have full-size keyboards, decent displays, and will fit the bill for a presentation machine. Both are available for about $300 if you are careful (be sure to ask about the display).
2. Get another subsidized RAZR under contract. Why have your boss spend his time learning a new phone, perhaps a very complicated one, rather than on important things like promoting the business?
That's it. It's a technique that's so new that it doesn't have a fully accepted name yet (I'm just on the fringes of the field, so I might be a few months out of date). The idea was developed for electron microscopy, but could be easily adapted to light microscopy as well: put an automated stage in the beampath so that the sample can be shifted from place to place and a high resolution image captured at each stopping point, and then computationally stitch the tiles together. Sounds relatively straightforward, except that when you want to capture a sample 10 mm across at 10 nm resolution, even the smallest positioning accuracies, field non-linearities, temperature distortions, etc., accumulate. For a simple idea like this, there's a heap of imaging hardware engineering (including hard vacuum stuff) and software engineering to be done. The computational loads for manipulating a one-million-by-one-million pixel image are staggering. Just moving one of these images around on the network is challenging. Think of it this way: a standard digital camera takes an N-megapixel image; these microscopes are constructing images with one thousand times as many pixels.
But the really no way! part of these projects is that the intent is then to progress in the third dimension as well to create high-res 3D images. One such assembled 3D image will take many TB to represent, and the goal is to be able to computationally fly through the sample and follow small structures across large extents.
Slashdot Mirror
This story was submitted by an AC.
Why would you submit a story as an AC? To hide something.
What on earth is there to hide in this story? Either the very posting of it (say your employer doesn't condone spending time on Slashdot), or the authorship of the story.
As the story itself reads suspiciously like advertising copy, it is tempting to conclude that it came from 16systems.com, the sponsor of the contest.
Nothing to see here, except the Slashdot editors falling asleep at the wheel again.
Some of us think that publicly presented information is fair game. And just because I have not spent the necessary effort to develop exact memory does not mean I cannot augment it with a device.
I fear you are mistaken, in a strict legal sense. Whether you are allowed to take a recording (audio or visual) of a presentation is up to the organizers of the conference, not you. Smaller conferences generally allow it by default, and larger conferences generally do not. Generally. I have organized two smaller conferences and have paid specific attention to this issue.
Furthermore, the whole point of doing science is that others can verify your claims by experiment or derivation. That this also leads to finding other people you can discuss your results with (let alone ecstatic enough to write a paper based on a snapshot) is a big bonus.
While having people excited about your work is absolutely wonderful, and it sounds like the PAMELA team is working on a hot ticket, using someone's data, or taking their idea, before it has been peer reviewed and published is unethical, unless you have their permission to do so. Once it has been published, all bets are off; the data are in the public domain, and can be used freely. Showing unreviewed data in a traditionally transient form (ie, a slide presentation) is not publishing it. Certainly, it makes sense that if hot data are shown, people can get excited about it, work on it, come up with new hypotheses and analyses of it, but publish? No. That goes to the people who did the work, first.
Why? Because the scientific world works not on money but on reputation and that is build through citations. And what, pray tell, are the authors of the second study going to reference as their data source -- a slide at a conference presentation? That is not verifiable data, as it is not in the literature, and one hopes that the peer review of the paper raises this serious issue.
Now, that does not, and should not, preclude secondary teams from analyzing the PAMELA data, discussing it with their colleagues, and even making presentations about it at invited talks or at other conferences. But the first fruits of publication go to the PAMELA team here.
The linked article is a summary of a paper that has an analysis of data not written by the original PAMELA team who collected the data. The PAMELA team have not yet published their data or findings, although apparently have presented them at a conference in Stockholm.
The summary quotes the paper thusly: "The preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish."
I am not familiar with the conference in Stockholm that the PAMELA data were originally presented at, but at every large conference I have attended, it is official policy that no photographs are allowed. Taking unpublished data without permission of the authors is theft, pure and simple. Submitting a paper on that data before the original authors do is unethical.
Certainly, such proclamations are made with scant and incomplete information (it could be that Cirelli and Strumia, the non-PAMELA authors, did indeed get permission from the PAMELA team, and everything is kosher), and I hope that either members of the PAMELA team or authors of the new paper might read Slashdot to explain what's going on.
The FDA is worried about someone actually finding a cow with with mad cow disease.
I'm glad that someone else understands what's really going on here.
When the single previous case of BSE was discovered in the US, by statistical extrapolation, it was safe to estimate that there were about 50,000 head infected. (Given the fraction of the cattle that are tested and the total number of cattle in the US; this, of course, is a very poor estimate because of low N statistics, but the probable number of affected head can still be calculated, and it is in the 50,000 range.) Chances are quite high that we will see an increase in vCJD, the version of mad cow disease in humans that is caused by consumption of affected beef, in the coming years. Although the industry has perhaps cleaned itself up in response to that single episode, my guess is that since the government is still arguing against 100% testing, we still have a serious problem in the food stream.
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, and most of them are made of parchament, which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
My reaction to reading that it will take two years was: DAMN THAT'S FAST!
These are fragments of documents, not full scrolls. And there are what, thousands of fragments? They ought to be handled in clean-room conditions (don't know if they will be). They are extremely fragile. Anyone who damages them will suffer the ire of thousands upon millions of people. Since any manipulation runs risk of damage, presumably you want to ensure that it gets done right the first time. That means lots of logistical planning, test scans on simulated documents, training, etc. At least that's what it would mean if someone who knows what they're doing is in charge. Two years? If they had said ten years, I'd have been impressed.
/. gets books to review and some of them are awful. Nothing wrong with putting that on the front page. So please stop can people stop whinging about idle on the front page.
No. Wrong. There are a gazillion and a half books published every year. You want a bad one? Go and buy almost any arbitrary selection since, like almost everything else, 90% of them are crap.
A book / movie / game / etc. reviewer's job is to (a) weed out the awful stuff and tell you about the gems, and (b) tell you when something you would expect to be good is not.
This review (by an AC, no less) is of self-published drivel. If it were Linus's self-published drivel, it would make it newsworthy, but it isn't. It's by and about someone who went to second-rate universities with commensurate experiences. Someone that before reading this review, I'd never heard of, at all. If it were self-published drivel by Rivest, Shamir or Adelman (to pick examples closer to home for Mr. de Mare), good or bad, the review would be newsworthy. Similarly, we hear about Neal Stephenson's every publication, good or bad, because there is an expectation that they might well be enjoyable, and that Slashdot readers might well purchase copies.
This is not such stuff. This is not material suitable for front page promotion. This is part of the 90% that should not be reviewed, not be reported, and allowed to die a quiet death in obscurity.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer, so this is probably a really naive question that someone with more education and brains can answer:
Why, under conditions when you need extreme reliability, do we use parachutes? I can imagine that a simpler design that has lower chance of failure (like just a long streamer) would be preferable. Is it a weight-to-performance issue?
All the prosecutor would have to do is agree not to use the password itself ("I killed Mrs. Plum in the rumpus room with the crowbar") as evidence against you. Then, revealing the password could not possibly incriminate you.
If you've got something not-so-kosher on your laptop's hard drive, then make the password the confession to its ownership. Agree to indemnity, and poof! no more lawsuit.
But, this is definitely not the same as being compelled to divulge passwords at border crossings before you are actually on US soil and covered by the US Constitution. When you're outside the border, you have very, very few rights.
On of the brilliant strategies (I am n-o-t a lawyer, so take this at face value) I've heard is to make your password the confession of a crime. You cannot be compelled, by 5th Amendment arguments, to divulge it. At least once you've made it past passport control and customs.
Once you're signed into Gmail:
Settings -> Always use https -> Save changes
And then you need to reload the page otherwise you're still on http. At least that's what my browser showed.
... and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
If there's anyone from Transmeta here, they can attest to this. One of my former roommates worked there, and had horrible tales about getting their hardware to boot quickly. Funny thing about these stories were they always concluded with either (a) we found a bug in Microsoft's startup code that was making things run K times slower than they should have or (b) Microsoft specifies that this part of the booting sequence can't be made any faster than X seconds.
A long time ago, and by internet standards, I mean in pre-historic times, there was a computer called the Lisp Machine, designed and built at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We're talking mid-1980s here. That's more than TWO DECADES AGO. Your cell phone would run circles around a LispM.
One of the amazing things about LispMs is that they came up really, really quickly, despite having very large and slow disk drives. They did this by essentially performing a full boot and then saving that precise memory image (including all peripheral state) to a special part of the disk called a band. This is not unlike the modern laptops' suspend-to-disk feature, except that bands were pretty static. The intent was that you set up your machine just so, and then wrote what you felt was the canonical startup state to the band. Then, every time the machine started, the band loaded in from disk, and POOF! was ready to go.
It was a radical departure, and one that, unfortunately, was not learned by the industry. I would *love* to have my laptop use bands. Save-to-disk is nice and all, but since laptop hardware (and Linux support for it) is so f-ing flaky, it's far better to have a feature to boot quickly to a known-good state.
What's the relevance here? LispMs were as fast to boot as you'd expect for a computational appliance. OMFG if I have to boot my current Linux desktop or Windows laptop it takes eons to come up, and that's with hardware that's probably three orders of magnitude faster. Our modern machines should be in a known, operable state in under a second, and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
I am aware 100% of the time that I exist.
And what about the times when you are unconscious? Such as when you are in a dreamless sleep, or have been anesthetized, have been struck in the head, etc.?
(If they ask you to delete your photos, you tell them to fuck off, or just pretend to. But if it looks like someone is going to beat the shit out of you... maybe safer just to delete the photos.)
Interesting point that brings up: the photograph, being on/in your camera, is your private property. It is difficult to force anyone to do anything to their private property (at least in the USA) without a court order, even if said property was obtained illegally. There are well-known exceptions to this, but possession, as it's said, is 90% of the law.
My understanding, albeit a little hazy, is that building plans must be filed with local governmental offices, and that they are available for anyone to peruse. Of course, the building plans may or may not accurately match what was actually built, and it may be difficult to chase through all filed modifications and updates, but they should be available.
Way to make the world a better place. I'm certain your parents are very proud of your accomplishments. Perhaps you can now go find someone else's sandbox to defecate in, I suggest your own, because I certainly would rather you not be here.
I have no doubt that the reCAPTCHA folks understand that there are going to be people who find such childish behavior irresisible or entertaining, and either start discounting such answers (based on IP address) or build in filtering to discount particular words.
But, really, you ask people to be good, to help improve the world, to, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it, listen to our better angels of our nature, and this is what you get? Teenage boys who find it titillating to type bad words. My cup runneth over.
That makes me wonder if this software would be capable of identifying people as the age sortof. If it has enough data it could find a progressive path from one age to another, and you could find pics of yourself all over the place.
Totally cool idea!
Very cool stuff! Does anyone know (are any of the project team members here?) how much foreknowledge of the object being orbited that is required?
For example, is a 3D wireframe model necessary?
Is a filtering of the photos necessary to ensure that they are all of the same subject?
What level of pre-processing is required on the photos, either automated, or manual?
How well does the system fare when the object being photographed isn't absolutely static? A drawbridge, for example, changes shape. Or Niagara Falls. Or a flag. Or a single person.
Anyone know?
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
I have mod points right now, and this post makes me wish there was a "-1 ignorant" rating.
You must be new here. Or at least not tech-savvy or young enough to never have thought about these things.
If you want to minimize wear between two friction surfaces the WORST thing to do is to make them both out of the same material. The best is to make one hard and the other soft. I don't know why this is true, but perhaps someone more versed in mechanical engineering and materials science can explain. In watches, for example (mechanical ones), the jeweled bearings you hear about are typically a sapphire or ruby (synthetic) cone in which a metal (steel or brass) pin rotates, not gem-against-gem. So diamond-against-vinyl makes sense (hard against soft). And not all phonograph needles were diamond; that was a relatively late phenomenon.
But far more important is how the medium -- the record itself in this case -- is manufactured. In some cases they were injection molded (rare), but more often they were pressed. Now think for a second, how are you going to make records, and do it inexpensively enough that you can sell them? Make them out of metal, like steel? And then what, cut each groove? Probably not (although that's exactly how the original lacquer disks were made). A moldable plastic sounds like a good idea. And that's how the majority of disks were (and still are) made: take a hot lump of vinyl, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and press it between two hot disks of metal into which are carefully machined (ie, cut) grooves. Use enough pressure and the vinyl will replicate nearly every nuance of the mold. Although you can do this with a hard plastic, plastics are all pretty soft, and hard plastics have a regrettable tendency to break easily because they're brittle (like the old 78 RPM disks).
Now, you can argue that perhaps a less expensive material could be used instead of diamond for the needle, and was for a long time (eg, garnet), but the materials cost of industrial diamonds that weigh a few micrograms is next to nothing. The expense is in the shaping (playback needles aren't just pointed cones, at least good ones weren't) since that requires highly specialized equipment and skilled labor.
So, yes, it is brilliant to use diamond and vinyl. Did you ever see black dust or ribbon coming off of a record from the needle -- at least for one that was in proper alignment and not being dragged crosswise? I never did. And I still have my very playable record collection. The wear in records was not from removal of material, as with many wear mechanisms, but in gradual reshaping of the groove as the needle passed through. Thus the progress over time to lighter and lighter contact pressures and lighter and lighter cantilevers, with lighter and lighter moving masses -- eg, the moving magnet approach.
Uggg... more knee jerk reaction to a pretty obvious case of prudent police work.
There's a fire in his house. The fire dept. and police come, and put out the fire. In the process of putting out the fire, they notice hundreds of vials of chemicals. Not in a rack, not on a shelf, not even on a table, but all over the place. On the floor, on furniture, everywhere. No reasonable chemist would be dumb enough to do that with any chemicals.
1. Police don't normally respond to a fire. Firefighters do. You've got the facts not quite right.
2. What, exactly, were the firefighters doing in the basement when the fire was on the second floor?
I informed her that I had an electronics lab, and beer brewing equipment in mine to which she made the comment "I bet your neighbors are thrilled about that".
If you were MY neighbor, I'd definitely be thrilled about it -- as long as you shared your beer!
The article claims at least one copy was purchased by mistake (that's not quite the right word, "by stupidity," might be a better phrasing) where the purchaser thought it was a joke.
Keep in mind, though, that there are a lot of stolen credit cards out there, and this would be a perfect use for them. My bet is that of these 8 copies, nearly all will be either fraudulent, or result in a chargeback.
Duh, they've discovered OIL on Mars!
It seems you're trying to shoehorn too many things into one package. It also seems like you have a remarkably small budget for a company that does a lot of travel. But, given those two, my recommendations would be:
1. Get a used road-warrior class ultraportable from eBay. An IBM x31 or HP nc4000. Both are light (under 3lbs), have full-size keyboards, decent displays, and will fit the bill for a presentation machine. Both are available for about $300 if you are careful (be sure to ask about the display).
2. Get another subsidized RAZR under contract. Why have your boss spend his time learning a new phone, perhaps a very complicated one, rather than on important things like promoting the business?
Gigapixel microscopy I haven't heard of. I'm assuming it's taking multiple pictures though?
That's it. It's a technique that's so new that it doesn't have a fully accepted name yet (I'm just on the fringes of the field, so I might be a few months out of date). The idea was developed for electron microscopy, but could be easily adapted to light microscopy as well: put an automated stage in the beampath so that the sample can be shifted from place to place and a high resolution image captured at each stopping point, and then computationally stitch the tiles together. Sounds relatively straightforward, except that when you want to capture a sample 10 mm across at 10 nm resolution, even the smallest positioning accuracies, field non-linearities, temperature distortions, etc., accumulate. For a simple idea like this, there's a heap of imaging hardware engineering (including hard vacuum stuff) and software engineering to be done. The computational loads for manipulating a one-million-by-one-million pixel image are staggering. Just moving one of these images around on the network is challenging. Think of it this way: a standard digital camera takes an N-megapixel image; these microscopes are constructing images with one thousand times as many pixels.
But the really no way! part of these projects is that the intent is then to progress in the third dimension as well to create high-res 3D images. One such assembled 3D image will take many TB to represent, and the goal is to be able to computationally fly through the sample and follow small structures across large extents.