Just a quick FYI: When those plans were being discussed they weren't planning to deliver 2 HD channels. They were going to be 2 with regular definition, or perhaps just slightly better. And there were no plans at all to use them for sports. That was going to be max bandwidth all the way. And it was before there was much thought, if any, given to mobile applications. I might be wrong, but I think it was the first time the term "narrowcasting" came into popular use.
What you've said is accurate. It's just that the background was a bit different when these discussions first came up.
LOL. Good line. I don't for one minute believe you're dumb enough to think that's my major e-mail addie. I use Thunderbird, by the way, for the stuff that matters...and is on my own machine.
...but I'd rather keep my data and the applications I need to manipulate it on my own machine, under my own control. Even in the absence of sheer blackmail, what happens to your work when some patent/copyright troll finds a way to sue the supplier, and demands that the program you've been using be made unavailable until the case is decided?
They spent that money in the mistaken belief they'd be getting it all back and plenty more besides. There were even plans afoot to take the bandwidth that would normally carry one high-definition channel and split it into two or more. They completely failed to see what broadband and the virtually instant availability of everybody's favorite shows on-line would do to their business model. The point remains...they've had a free ride almost since broadcasting began in North America. I only wish I could remember figures I saw comparing the actual value of the public airwaves versus the price paid for their exclusive use by the broadcasting networks.
Buy or borrow a high-end DSLR. Lay your maps out and provide good lighting (avoid using the flash). Because the images you produce will contain a lot of hard lines, any decent panorama software will stitch them together beautifully. I recommend Hugin, which is free. PhotoShop CS2 or better, if you have it, also does a really good job.
The "public" air waves, which insofar as they can be "owned", are owned by the people of the United States (in this case), have been leased out for a fraction of their value for decades by the US government. There's your subsidy. Where is it written that corporations which have been getting an (almost) free ride virtually since the dawn of broadcasting are entitled to expect it in perpetuity? The people own that bandwidth, and if representatives chosen by the people to deal with these matters decide that access to the internet has changed from a curious obsession to a requirement for full participation in society, then too bad for the companies who thought a free ride was their perpetual right.
In the civilized world, your employer doesn't pay your health care. That's almost exclusively an American perversion. Nevertheless, it is what it is, and the result of WalMart's practice is to off-load its business costs onto the taxpayer. And it forces its suppliers into a similar, corporate welfare business model.
I'm sure you're aware that WalMart makes extensive use of Communist China's slave labour pool. And a lot of that "efficiency" they force on their other suppliers results in off-loading infrastructure costs onto the taxpayer. And let's not forget their practice of keeping employees perpetually under the magic "full-time" level, where they'd get benefits. The cost of those benefits winds up being paid by taxpayers. That's particularly true in the US, where WalMart employees are famous for their reliance on emergency rooms and state health care programs.
I wonder if you were aware when you chose Wally World as your poster boy that you picked a company that more than almost any other has enriched itself by a particularly pernicious variety of corporate welfare, and an unbreakable liplock on the public teat.
It's easy to find cases of government waste and inefficiency. In spite of their best efforts, democratic governments have to release a certain amount of information about how they conduct business, no matter how embarrassing it may be. And then there's whistle-blowers and ex-employees who are happy to provide an endless fund of stories (many accurate, some not) about incompetence, stupidity and outright law-breaking by bureaucrats.
Private businesses are much better at keeping their failures under wraps. Even their minimal disclosure requirements can be thwarted by a friendly board of directors and a few fairly simple machinations. I can relate one simple case (without getting too specific) that surely matches anything in government: One of the busiest people in this company is currently being forced to take jobs to another floor because equipment a few feet away can't be replaced until a management committee decides on the matter (it's routine stuff, by the way...nothing exotic). That won't happen until one committee member gets back from holidays next month. The resulting bottleneck is costing this mid-sized company (conservatively) more than $1,000 per day simply in lost production. Then we have to figure in overtime for the one particular employee with specific expertise who is being run off her feet, and now has to come in on weekends until the situation is rectified.
The floor manager has decided that it's not worth rocking the boat to get a relatively inexpensive machine replaced on his own authority. Cost to the company: $50,000 at the very least, and a star employee who is already thoroughly pissed off (and the end of the situation a long way off).
So to all people out there who are quick to claim running a government like a corporation will save money and be more efficient: Every time you put more than a handful of people together in an organization, waste happens. Any efficiencies that are realized by cutting staff to the bone and forcing them to work under draconian conditions has an ugly pay-off down the road, too. In any case, if financial gains are made, they go into the corporation's bottomless pockets, not into saving taxpayer dollars. I haven't even included another difference: government does stuff that is inherently unprofitable, like building roads into towns that would never be able to afford such amenities and such.
Good analysis. I hope you don't mind if I make a couple of observations. First, it should be pretty easy to come up with a basic list of things that need to be tracked at EVERY hospital, then gradually extend the list over time. There's some Palm software for nurses that has the concept on a very simple level.
For the sake of argument, put blood work first. There's a pretty standard set of tests that are run everywhere when somebody presents with certain symptoms. A second possibility would be standard drug interactions, so that an electronic chart would throw up a flag when one drug was prescribed in combination with another. The data already exist, they just aren't widely available electronically.
As far as accuracy is concerned, I strongly suspect that things couldn't get much worse. Estimates as high as 180,000 deaths per year due to medical error have been reported, and even conservative figures range from 45,000 - 100,000 deaths per year and about a million injuries. The cost is (again conservatively) estimated at around $5 billion.
I certainly take your point about unexpected complexity, but I'd ask you to consider that laziness, stupidity, pig-headed obstinacy and inertia go a long way toward explaining why a lot of the data aren't already available for standardization and potential inclusion in a database. As it is, I strongly suspect the biggest bottleneck in the whole process will be keyboarding the dusty, yellowing contents of hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets.
One of those know-nothing politicians challenged the US to get to the moon in 10 years. The job got done. Of course, insisting that a hospital somehow manage to make the necessary change to electronic record-keeping in 5 years (when anybody with an ounce of sense has known the change was coming for at least that long already) is impossible.
What's really needed is a multi-national organization to address what's clearly an all-out assault on internet freedom by a variety of vested interests. Governments, patent trolls, multi-national entertainment corporations...all of them are pushing in the same direction, and there doesn't seem to be any unified push back.
Let's be clear: I'm not alleging a conspiracy. What I'm saying is that these groups all know where their best interests lie (screwing the consumer/citizen/user/whatever) and they sense that if they don't get their boot on our throat, no matter how badly they have to bend the various constitutions of the democracies they use for cover, the opportunity will slip away. They aren't about to let that happen if they can possibly help it.
Wow! A real Expert! I've never met one of those before! I guess that's what gives you the power to redefine reality to suit yourself. Let's examine:
"You're the one that specified computer vision, not I".
LOL Nice try. What I actually said in my original message was, "A quick look-see", which was clearly intended in a very general way, and in fact needn't even mean "vision" in the accepted sense of the word. You referred to "machine vision" in your response. And you mentioned a cost in the "low four figures" for guidance. To a well-funded group or minor-league country interested in raising hell, that's more than acceptable for cranking out a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones. By the way, you're awfully quick to dismiss the links I provided (while providing nothing yourself except the unsupported allegation that you know what you're talking about). I guess when you get old and hide-bound, you forget how easy some technology is to adapt. Kids at a local university are already playing with a system very much like one of those mentioned, and making it do strange and sometimes very funny things. Ever seen a robot arm trained to make jerk-off motions when one particular guy gets close to it? (Probably not...I bet your back was turned).
An engineer-hobbyist just screwing around a few years ago, waiting for some cheap tech to let him do something very like this.
"...the Serbs'...main successes were propaganda - by altering photographs and staging scenes..."
I guess that would explain the 5 "smart bombs" that went stupid and creamed the Chinese Embassy.
If there's anybody out of their depth in the calculus class, my friend, it's you. Actually, that's not fair. I suspect you graduated in calculus.....'way back when computers had beads and wires. DO try to keep up. I know it's hard.
You are so far out of touch it's a waste of time talking to you. Nevertheless, because your naivete is good for a laugh:
1. Inertial guidance systems more than accurate enough to find a given block in a specified city have been around since the 1950's. A retarded calculator could do the job, much less a half-decent P4 chip.
2. Shape templates are also childishly easy. You aren't talking about anything sophisticated or error-proof; nothing much more complicated than a silhouette or quick scan through a few thousand images would do the trick. From a given height and orientation there's only so many shapes that fit a semi or a train, or a particular office building. A basic camera and desktop PC can read ASLAN from human hands, for fuck sake. What do you need with "computer vision", especially when a mistake will probably still do damage? Anything here would be more than sophisticated enough to do the job:
A lot of very expensive American ordnance wound up pounding the hell out of civilian targets in the former Yugoslavia because some nasty-minded people figured out all you needed to simulate a SAM site was a microwave oven and a few basic tools. Get a clue.
Good luck with that. If I were designing one of those and my objective was to kill innocent people and/or disrupt a country's manufacturing/distribution infrastructure, all I need is a chip that will get it where it's going, run through a series of shape templates (a bus, train or transport truck or specific building, for example), then dive into it.
Easy, cheap, and no external control needed. Another plus: hardening such throw-away devices is usually easy and cheap. Example: Inertial navigation to target, flip on the video for a quick look-see, then hit whatever's closest. And you build lots and lots of 'em.
The judge is either stupid or corrupt. Given the general characteristics of the species, and the fact that so many of them start out as lawyers and sink from there, she's probably both.
"Contempt of court? Why, no, Your Honour, I have contempt for you as a human being and a jurist, and I figure you just barely had enough brains to tuck the bribe money out of sight under your robe before you walked in here. And I have enormous contempt for the mouth-breathing half-wits who voted you into office. But contempt of court? Never!"
Step 1: From a conspicuously untraceable location, have somebody you trust mail you a particularly vile specimen of pornography.
Step 2: Immediately complain to the police.
Step 3: Sue the Post Office for conveying this distressing item to your house, where no doubt it was seen by children, kittens and the church officials you happened to have as guests.
Step 4: Complain about the terrible damage to the tender sensibilities of said guests and damage to your impeccable reputation for moral rectitude.
Step 5: Profit!
I'm moving to Australia, where I'll soon be rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice...at least until some specimen of the local wildlife bites, stings, chomps or otherwise envenoms me and I die screaming in agony.
I don't doubt for a minute that China will, "...crack down on hacking according to law." Hacking that isn't according to law, however, will continue as usual.
It isn't "news" anymore when it is no longer current or of significant informative value. I suspect if this guy persists, he'll find out the hard way about the difference between displaying an image for the amusement of perverts and displaying the same image because it does, in fact, have real news value.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a quick FYI: When those plans were being discussed they weren't planning to deliver 2 HD channels. They were going to be 2 with regular definition, or perhaps just slightly better. And there were no plans at all to use them for sports. That was going to be max bandwidth all the way. And it was before there was much thought, if any, given to mobile applications. I might be wrong, but I think it was the first time the term "narrowcasting" came into popular use.
What you've said is accurate. It's just that the background was a bit different when these discussions first came up.
LOL. Good line. I don't for one minute believe you're dumb enough to think that's my major e-mail addie. I use Thunderbird, by the way, for the stuff that matters...and is on my own machine.
...but I'd rather keep my data and the applications I need to manipulate it on my own machine, under my own control. Even in the absence of sheer blackmail, what happens to your work when some patent/copyright troll finds a way to sue the supplier, and demands that the program you've been using be made unavailable until the case is decided?
They spent that money in the mistaken belief they'd be getting it all back and plenty more besides. There were even plans afoot to take the bandwidth that would normally carry one high-definition channel and split it into two or more. They completely failed to see what broadband and the virtually instant availability of everybody's favorite shows on-line would do to their business model. The point remains...they've had a free ride almost since broadcasting began in North America. I only wish I could remember figures I saw comparing the actual value of the public airwaves versus the price paid for their exclusive use by the broadcasting networks.
Buy or borrow a high-end DSLR. Lay your maps out and provide good lighting (avoid using the flash). Because the images you produce will contain a lot of hard lines, any decent panorama software will stitch them together beautifully. I recommend Hugin, which is free. PhotoShop CS2 or better, if you have it, also does a really good job.
Feel free to send me a copy. I love old maps.
The "public" air waves, which insofar as they can be "owned", are owned by the people of the United States (in this case), have been leased out for a fraction of their value for decades by the US government. There's your subsidy. Where is it written that corporations which have been getting an (almost) free ride virtually since the dawn of broadcasting are entitled to expect it in perpetuity? The people own that bandwidth, and if representatives chosen by the people to deal with these matters decide that access to the internet has changed from a curious obsession to a requirement for full participation in society, then too bad for the companies who thought a free ride was their perpetual right.
In the civilized world, your employer doesn't pay your health care. That's almost exclusively an American perversion. Nevertheless, it is what it is, and the result of WalMart's practice is to off-load its business costs onto the taxpayer. And it forces its suppliers into a similar, corporate welfare business model.
I'm sure you're aware that WalMart makes extensive use of Communist China's slave labour pool. And a lot of that "efficiency" they force on their other suppliers results in off-loading infrastructure costs onto the taxpayer. And let's not forget their practice of keeping employees perpetually under the magic "full-time" level, where they'd get benefits. The cost of those benefits winds up being paid by taxpayers. That's particularly true in the US, where WalMart employees are famous for their reliance on emergency rooms and state health care programs.
I wonder if you were aware when you chose Wally World as your poster boy that you picked a company that more than almost any other has enriched itself by a particularly pernicious variety of corporate welfare, and an unbreakable liplock on the public teat.
It's easy to find cases of government waste and inefficiency. In spite of their best efforts, democratic governments have to release a certain amount of information about how they conduct business, no matter how embarrassing it may be. And then there's whistle-blowers and ex-employees who are happy to provide an endless fund of stories (many accurate, some not) about incompetence, stupidity and outright law-breaking by bureaucrats.
Private businesses are much better at keeping their failures under wraps. Even their minimal disclosure requirements can be thwarted by a friendly board of directors and a few fairly simple machinations. I can relate one simple case (without getting too specific) that surely matches anything in government: One of the busiest people in this company is currently being forced to take jobs to another floor because equipment a few feet away can't be replaced until a management committee decides on the matter (it's routine stuff, by the way...nothing exotic). That won't happen until one committee member gets back from holidays next month. The resulting bottleneck is costing this mid-sized company (conservatively) more than $1,000 per day simply in lost production. Then we have to figure in overtime for the one particular employee with specific expertise who is being run off her feet, and now has to come in on weekends until the situation is rectified.
The floor manager has decided that it's not worth rocking the boat to get a relatively inexpensive machine replaced on his own authority. Cost to the company: $50,000 at the very least, and a star employee who is already thoroughly pissed off (and the end of the situation a long way off).
So to all people out there who are quick to claim running a government like a corporation will save money and be more efficient: Every time you put more than a handful of people together in an organization, waste happens. Any efficiencies that are realized by cutting staff to the bone and forcing them to work under draconian conditions has an ugly pay-off down the road, too. In any case, if financial gains are made, they go into the corporation's bottomless pockets, not into saving taxpayer dollars. I haven't even included another difference: government does stuff that is inherently unprofitable, like building roads into towns that would never be able to afford such amenities and such.
Good analysis. I hope you don't mind if I make a couple of observations. First, it should be pretty easy to come up with a basic list of things that need to be tracked at EVERY hospital, then gradually extend the list over time. There's some Palm software for nurses that has the concept on a very simple level.
For the sake of argument, put blood work first. There's a pretty standard set of tests that are run everywhere when somebody presents with certain symptoms. A second possibility would be standard drug interactions, so that an electronic chart would throw up a flag when one drug was prescribed in combination with another. The data already exist, they just aren't widely available electronically.
As far as accuracy is concerned, I strongly suspect that things couldn't get much worse. Estimates as high as 180,000 deaths per year due to medical error have been reported, and even conservative figures range from 45,000 - 100,000 deaths per year and about a million injuries. The cost is (again conservatively) estimated at around $5 billion.
I certainly take your point about unexpected complexity, but I'd ask you to consider that laziness, stupidity, pig-headed obstinacy and inertia go a long way toward explaining why a lot of the data aren't already available for standardization and potential inclusion in a database. As it is, I strongly suspect the biggest bottleneck in the whole process will be keyboarding the dusty, yellowing contents of hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets.
One of those know-nothing politicians challenged the US to get to the moon in 10 years. The job got done. Of course, insisting that a hospital somehow manage to make the necessary change to electronic record-keeping in 5 years (when anybody with an ounce of sense has known the change was coming for at least that long already) is impossible.
Give me a break!
Soft head...tiny brain...a Paleoconservative, no doubt.
Yeah, it's not like Israel has ever been caught red-handed doing this before, is it?
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-751918.html
What's really needed is a multi-national organization to address what's clearly an all-out assault on internet freedom by a variety of vested interests. Governments, patent trolls, multi-national entertainment corporations...all of them are pushing in the same direction, and there doesn't seem to be any unified push back.
Let's be clear: I'm not alleging a conspiracy. What I'm saying is that these groups all know where their best interests lie (screwing the consumer/citizen/user/whatever) and they sense that if they don't get their boot on our throat, no matter how badly they have to bend the various constitutions of the democracies they use for cover, the opportunity will slip away. They aren't about to let that happen if they can possibly help it.
Wow! A real Expert! I've never met one of those before! I guess that's what gives you the power to redefine reality to suit yourself. Let's examine:
"You're the one that specified computer vision, not I".
LOL Nice try. What I actually said in my original message was, "A quick look-see", which was clearly intended in a very general way, and in fact needn't even mean "vision" in the accepted sense of the word. You referred to "machine vision" in your response. And you mentioned a cost in the "low four figures" for guidance. To a well-funded group or minor-league country interested in raising hell, that's more than acceptable for cranking out a virtually unlimited supply of cheap drones. By the way, you're awfully quick to dismiss the links I provided (while providing nothing yourself except the unsupported allegation that you know what you're talking about). I guess when you get old and hide-bound, you forget how easy some technology is to adapt. Kids at a local university are already playing with a system very much like one of those mentioned, and making it do strange and sometimes very funny things. Ever seen a robot arm trained to make jerk-off motions when one particular guy gets close to it? (Probably not...I bet your back was turned).
http://www.microstrain.com/3dm-gx3-25.aspx
Since by your own admission you're a dedicated hobbyist, I'm surprised you don't know about these folks.
http://terrandev.com/projects/ignc/ignc.html
An engineer-hobbyist just screwing around a few years ago, waiting for some cheap tech to let him do something very like this.
"...the Serbs'...main successes were propaganda - by altering photographs and staging scenes..."
I guess that would explain the 5 "smart bombs" that went stupid and creamed the Chinese Embassy.
If there's anybody out of their depth in the calculus class, my friend, it's you. Actually, that's not fair. I suspect you graduated in calculus.....'way back when computers had beads and wires. DO try to keep up. I know it's hard.
You are so far out of touch it's a waste of time talking to you. Nevertheless, because your naivete is good for a laugh:
1. Inertial guidance systems more than accurate enough to find a given block in a specified city have been around since the 1950's. A retarded calculator could do the job, much less a half-decent P4 chip. 2. Shape templates are also childishly easy. You aren't talking about anything sophisticated or error-proof; nothing much more complicated than a silhouette or quick scan through a few thousand images would do the trick. From a given height and orientation there's only so many shapes that fit a semi or a train, or a particular office building. A basic camera and desktop PC can read ASLAN from human hands, for fuck sake. What do you need with "computer vision", especially when a mistake will probably still do damage? Anything here would be more than sophisticated enough to do the job:
http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/72734/Automated--shape--detection
http://www.springerlink.com/content/xx452562rw513402/
http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/Research/MatlabFns/othersites.html
A lot of very expensive American ordnance wound up pounding the hell out of civilian targets in the former Yugoslavia because some nasty-minded people figured out all you needed to simulate a SAM site was a microwave oven and a few basic tools. Get a clue.
You don't know what inertial guidance is, do you.
Good luck with that. If I were designing one of those and my objective was to kill innocent people and/or disrupt a country's manufacturing/distribution infrastructure, all I need is a chip that will get it where it's going, run through a series of shape templates (a bus, train or transport truck or specific building, for example), then dive into it.
Easy, cheap, and no external control needed. Another plus: hardening such throw-away devices is usually easy and cheap. Example: Inertial navigation to target, flip on the video for a quick look-see, then hit whatever's closest. And you build lots and lots of 'em.
LOL. Looks like I got moderated by a judge...or somebody who bought one and doesn't like to see the merchandise devalued.
The judge is either stupid or corrupt. Given the general characteristics of the species, and the fact that so many of them start out as lawyers and sink from there, she's probably both.
"Contempt of court? Why, no, Your Honour, I have contempt for you as a human being and a jurist, and I figure you just barely had enough brains to tuck the bribe money out of sight under your robe before you walked in here. And I have enormous contempt for the mouth-breathing half-wits who voted you into office. But contempt of court? Never!"
I'm Canadian, actually, and have engaged in many a beer-swilling contest with my fellow Commonwealth members.
Step 1: From a conspicuously untraceable location, have somebody you trust mail you a particularly vile specimen of pornography.
Step 2: Immediately complain to the police.
Step 3: Sue the Post Office for conveying this distressing item to your house, where no doubt it was seen by children, kittens and the church officials you happened to have as guests.
Step 4: Complain about the terrible damage to the tender sensibilities of said guests and damage to your impeccable reputation for moral rectitude.
Step 5: Profit!
I'm moving to Australia, where I'll soon be rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice...at least until some specimen of the local wildlife bites, stings, chomps or otherwise envenoms me and I die screaming in agony.
-1? LOL. Looks like one of the silly buggers got himself some moderator privileges.
I don't doubt for a minute that China will, "...crack down on hacking according to law." Hacking that isn't according to law, however, will continue as usual.
It isn't "news" anymore when it is no longer current or of significant informative value. I suspect if this guy persists, he'll find out the hard way about the difference between displaying an image for the amusement of perverts and displaying the same image because it does, in fact, have real news value.