Let's split the articles into 'tranches' and rate each tranche, so AAA for high quality articles and so on. Seems to have worked for the credit markets...err, oh scrub that.
I've read some of BellKor's papers and they do infact consider many subtle psychological effects in the data, many if not all of their later improvements have been based on such effects. E.g. Giving later ratings additional weight over older ones - because the ratings to be predicted are more recents ratings.
This would be news if this guy overtakes BellKor. As it is (A) he actually hasn't come from nowhere, he's been working on the problem for some time, and (B) Just like everyone else he's been benefiting from the reported results of others.
I foresee a future where geothermal is the predominate energy source just like fossil fuels are now. After about 100 years or so the average temp of the earth's core will be a degree or two cooler overall thus affecting the earth's magnetic field as circulation of molten rock within the earch slows. That's right, we will have caused global cooling!
I agree. The fact of the matter is that without sound space is boring and that's why we don't have a flourishing space industry. Thus, one of the biggest scientific problems facing humanity today is how to get cool sound effects to travel through the vaccum of space. Until that one is solved no-one is interested in space. FACT!;)
I seem to recall Dr Bussard reckoned $200m would put the matter to bed as to whether this form of nuclear fusion reactor would work. That's a tiny fraction of the ITER budget.
It should at least have frikin lasers attached. This could bring a whole new meaning to the 'slashdot effect'... "My garden is on fire!", "yeh, looks like you've been slashdotted good."
"It could let you listen to every conversation you had when you were 21 or find that photograph of the obscure date you had on summer vacation."
Oh great, recall umpteen years of tedium. Woohoo. In case M$ hadn't noticed there are very successful game and movie industries based around the fact that people wan't to escape reality, not have it recalled in high definition!
[Sarcasm mode on] Heck, let's just cut to the chase and have an international law that everything and anything has to be logged and stored for all eternity. That should save a few decades of protesting against dumb legislature that will eventually get in through the back door anyway.
Presumably if storage capacity where unlimited we'd be seeing calls to log the position of every atom in the world! [Sarcasm mode off]
Personally I prefer to run the World Community Grid clients currently searching for drugs for AIDS drugs, Dengue fever and Muscular Dystrophy along with a more general investigation of the Human Proteome.
I feel like SETI is an all or nothing approach at aquiring knowledge - if we are able to receive data from an alien civilisation we could learn far more in a short space of time than from research here on terra firma. It's a gamble and I think maybe we should spread our bets a bit more evenly by shifting CPU time away from SETI and onto these other projects. If just a small proportion of CPU's running SETI switched to WCG that would be a massive boost. Currently the stats show just under 200 years worth of runtime each day (so 73,000 full time clients) versus SETI's over 1.6 million clients.
Even if we did find a signal I doubt we would get much useful information from it. Mainly it would be a big cultural moment for our species.
Looking through the paper about reconstructing a CRT image from its reflection from a diffuse surface (or wall to normal people) - I was pretty amazed at the final result. And that name in the image, Markus Kuhn, hmm, ahh yes he was the guy who cracked videocrypt - the system used by BSkyB (and others) to scramble their analogue satellite TV video output back in the late 80's and 90's. I know 'cause I watched a good many hours of TV for free using versions of his code ported to the ole Commodore Amiga. Small world eh:)
I also wonder if you could recover an image of someone's face from pixelated video. If the camera or the person is moving but only slightly then you may be able to determine the x,y movement of the whole image from the non-pixelated parts of the image. From this you can then consider each of the large pixelated pixels as a sample point on the person's face, and as they move you aquire additional sample points. Over enough time, say a 5 minute interview, you might be able to reconstruct a recognisable face.
Also the R stands for Restrictions not outright bans. A quick google also lead me to a page of exemptions, includign one involving the use of lead and cadmium in 'filtered glass'. I guess if the cadmium is fixed inside a glass sandwhich or something like that, such that it has limited ability to escape into the surrounding environment, well I guess that particualr usage might become exempt.
Hmm, old people as a whole have more wealth the young people and therefore have something to conserve, and therefore are more likely to be conservative. If you have nothing to loose then why defend a bunch of ideals that conserve stuff you don't have?
"I've found two images that are really good candidates for a crash. One was at 38.020248,-119.368515. It looks like a line of tree damage, with a bright object at the edge of the tree line."
That's one hell of a small aircraft that can knock all of those trees over. If that was a crash site then it looks more like the result of a jumbo or B52 crash!
"The state wing of the Civil Air Patrol resumed its search on Wednesday, focusing on a 600-square mile (1,554-sq-km) area south of the airstrip used by Fossett about 80 miles (128 km) southeast of Reno, Nevada."
Hmm, Reno is way outside the area covered by the fresh satellite imagery.
I missed the best function in Eclipse - if you double click on a variable all uses of that variable are highlighted and the RHS margin shows you were they all are in the current document as a whole. That margin also shows you where all the errors, warnings, TODO comments, etc are. Not being able to do that one simple thing in VS is actually starting to annoy me.:( Fingers crossed for VS 2008.
I use the call graph and type hierarchy views in Eclipse all the time. They're particularly useful for learning the structure of code you haven't written or come into contact with before and they allow you to navigate code almost effortlessly. Visual Studio's equivalents are pretty dire in comparison, the 'Find References' view just gives a flat list and lists methods with the same name but different signatures and as such I often resort to compiling C# and navigating it with the excellent.Net Reflector tool.
Oh and automatic insertion of import statements and import re-organisation is pretty useful.
Also Eclipse's incremental compilation generally seems to be of a higher quality than VS, e.g. it shows you errors as you type whereas VS does so only after an explicit compilation. VS's incremental compilation appears to be limited to driving syntax coloring of class names and code completion (AKA Intellisense(TM) I believe).
Eclipse's local history of file changes has saved my arse on one occasion (no equivalent in VS) and the file comparer when checking into CVS is pretty cool, far ahead of the (admittedly dated) Visual Source Safe V6 we still use at my workplace (Team Studio was too expensive apparently).
Speaking as a mainly VS user I find that setting up projects in Eclipse can be pretty bewildering at times, but that could just be lack of experience.
Eclipse has *never* crashed on me. VS crashes very occasionally now, but it does still happen.
On balance I would say Eclipse is a far higher quality product than VS, and considering it's free it's a pretty amazing IDE. You can of course get VS Express editions for free now with some functions disabled, multithreaded debugging and compilation for 64bit environments being the missing bits that I have come across.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's split the articles into 'tranches' and rate each tranche, so AAA for high quality articles and so on. Seems to have worked for the credit markets...err, oh scrub that.
!news
I've read some of BellKor's papers and they do infact consider many subtle psychological effects in the data, many if not all of their later improvements have been based on such effects. E.g. Giving later ratings additional weight over older ones - because the ratings to be predicted are more recents ratings.
This would be news if this guy overtakes BellKor. As it is (A) he actually hasn't come from nowhere, he's been working on the problem for some time, and (B) Just like everyone else he's been benefiting from the reported results of others.
ummm, just change you nickname. Problem solved.
[Tongue-in-cheek-mode-on]
I foresee a future where geothermal is the predominate energy source just like fossil fuels are now. After about 100 years or so the average temp of the earth's core will be a degree or two cooler overall thus affecting the earth's magnetic field as circulation of molten rock within the earch slows. That's right, we will have caused global cooling!
I agree. The fact of the matter is that without sound space is boring and that's why we don't have a flourishing space industry. Thus, one of the biggest scientific problems facing humanity today is how to get cool sound effects to travel through the vaccum of space. Until that one is solved no-one is interested in space. FACT! ;)
Exactly zero.
Perhaps a better subject line would've been "Voyager 2 Surfin' the termination shock wave!"
What happened to Dr Bussard's Polywell?
Should Google Go Nuclear?
Dr Bussard's Google Tech Talk on the subject.
I seem to recall Dr Bussard reckoned $200m would put the matter to bed as to whether this form of nuclear fusion reactor would work. That's a tiny fraction of the ITER budget.
It should at least have frikin lasers attached. This could bring a whole new meaning to the 'slashdot effect'... "My garden is on fire!", "yeh, looks like you've been slashdotted good."
yourtube.com? hmm, that joke could be interpreted a couple of different ways depending on how twisted your mind is :)
"Do you really want to record when you're jacking off? Or taking a dump?"
Well yeh, I'd want to keep the highlights at least.
"It could let you listen to every conversation you had when you were 21 or find that photograph of the obscure date you had on summer vacation."
Oh great, recall umpteen years of tedium. Woohoo. In case M$ hadn't noticed there are very successful game and movie industries based around the fact that people wan't to escape reality, not have it recalled in high definition!
[Sarcasm mode on]
Heck, let's just cut to the chase and have an international law that everything and anything has to be logged and stored for all eternity. That should save a few decades of protesting against dumb legislature that will eventually get in through the back door anyway.
Presumably if storage capacity where unlimited we'd be seeing calls to log the position of every atom in the world!
[Sarcasm mode off]
Personally I prefer to run the World Community Grid clients currently searching for drugs for AIDS drugs, Dengue fever and Muscular Dystrophy along with a more general investigation of the Human Proteome.
I feel like SETI is an all or nothing approach at aquiring knowledge - if we are able to receive data from an alien civilisation we could learn far more in a short space of time than from research here on terra firma. It's a gamble and I think maybe we should spread our bets a bit more evenly by shifting CPU time away from SETI and onto these other projects. If just a small proportion of CPU's running SETI switched to WCG that would be a massive boost. Currently the stats show just under 200 years worth of runtime each day (so 73,000 full time clients) versus SETI's over 1.6 million clients.
Even if we did find a signal I doubt we would get much useful information from it. Mainly it would be a big cultural moment for our species.
Indeed :)
:)
Looking through the paper about reconstructing a CRT image from its reflection from a diffuse surface (or wall to normal people) - I was pretty amazed at the final result. And that name in the image, Markus Kuhn, hmm, ahh yes he was the guy who cracked videocrypt - the system used by BSkyB (and others) to scramble their analogue satellite TV video output back in the late 80's and 90's. I know 'cause I watched a good many hours of TV for free using versions of his code ported to the ole Commodore Amiga. Small world eh
I also wonder if you could recover an image of someone's face from pixelated video. If the camera or the person is moving but only slightly then you may be able to determine the x,y movement of the whole image from the non-pixelated parts of the image. From this you can then consider each of the large pixelated pixels as a sample point on the person's face, and as they move you aquire additional sample points. Over enough time, say a 5 minute interview, you might be able to reconstruct a recognisable face.
Also the R stands for Restrictions not outright bans. A quick google also lead me to a page of exemptions, includign one involving the use of lead and cadmium in 'filtered glass'. I guess if the cadmium is fixed inside a glass sandwhich or something like that, such that it has limited ability to escape into the surrounding environment, well I guess that particualr usage might become exempt.
Hmm, old people as a whole have more wealth the young people and therefore have something to conserve, and therefore are more likely to be conservative. If you have nothing to loose then why defend a bunch of ideals that conserve stuff you don't have?
Were these images taken at the same time as the b/w ones? If not then the plane at 38 15'31.05"N,119 18'59.08"W must be stationary.
Also the color images seem a lot darker, they actually make it harder to pick out details, that plane being a good example.
I think the airfield he used is at 3830'35.18"N 11913'0.68"W
This is approx 80miles SE of Reno as detailed on http://www.stevefossett.com/index.html
"I've found two images that are really good candidates for a crash. One was at 38.020248,-119.368515. It looks like a line of tree damage, with a bright object at the edge of the tree line."
That's one hell of a small aircraft that can knock all of those trees over. If that was a crash site then it looks more like the result of a jumbo or B52 crash!
This article has the following detail:
"The state wing of the Civil Air Patrol resumed its search on Wednesday, focusing on a 600-square mile (1,554-sq-km) area south of the airstrip used by Fossett about 80 miles (128 km) southeast of Reno, Nevada."
Hmm, Reno is way outside the area covered by the fresh satellite imagery.
Loosk like it may actually be flying. It may even be a search plane.
I missed the best function in Eclipse - if you double click on a variable all uses of that variable are highlighted and the RHS margin shows you were they all are in the current document as a whole. That margin also shows you where all the errors, warnings, TODO comments, etc are. Not being able to do that one simple thing in VS is actually starting to annoy me. :( Fingers crossed for VS 2008.
I use the call graph and type hierarchy views in Eclipse all the time. They're particularly useful for learning the structure of code you haven't written or come into contact with before and they allow you to navigate code almost effortlessly. Visual Studio's equivalents are pretty dire in comparison, the 'Find References' view just gives a flat list and lists methods with the same name but different signatures and as such I often resort to compiling C# and navigating it with the excellent .Net Reflector tool.
Oh and automatic insertion of import statements and import re-organisation is pretty useful.
Also Eclipse's incremental compilation generally seems to be of a higher quality than VS, e.g. it shows you errors as you type whereas VS does so only after an explicit compilation. VS's incremental compilation appears to be limited to driving syntax coloring of class names and code completion (AKA Intellisense(TM) I believe).
Eclipse's local history of file changes has saved my arse on one occasion (no equivalent in VS) and the file comparer when checking into CVS is pretty cool, far ahead of the (admittedly dated) Visual Source Safe V6 we still use at my workplace (Team Studio was too expensive apparently).
Speaking as a mainly VS user I find that setting up projects in Eclipse can be pretty bewildering at times, but that could just be lack of experience.
Eclipse has *never* crashed on me. VS crashes very occasionally now, but it does still happen.
On balance I would say Eclipse is a far higher quality product than VS, and considering it's free it's a pretty amazing IDE. You can of course get VS Express editions for free now with some functions disabled, multithreaded debugging and compilation for 64bit environments being the missing bits that I have come across.