The GTA hot coffee mod is a perfect example. How dare they put sex into that game! I want to shoot prostitutes, hijack cars, murder policemen and whack civilians with a baseball bat.
The GTA controversy puzzled me. Why shouldn't GTA have sex? It fits with the GTA world. It should advance the plot, too; seduce an enemy's girlfriend and maybe she'll betray him. Some gangster game from the early 90s had that feature.
Part of the problem is that the last 30 years of physics is a castle in the air. String theory has no experimental confirmation. Supersymmetry remains iffy. That gravity is particle-based is hypothesized but not observed.
Until 40 years ago or so, physicists were the champions of experimental confirmation. From Kepler and Newton forward, physics was about accurate measurement and experimentation. Then physics hit a wall - the phenomena that needed to be measured to confirm or refute theories were out of reach of experimental tools. But this didn't slow down the rate at which Physical Review papers are published. The math is pretty, but may have no tie to reality.
So we don't have the high-energy physicists to act as the hard-liners on experimental confirmation. (Low-energy physics, on the other hand, has made real progress in recent decades, with results which have resulted in useful technologies. Much cool stuff is being made to happen down near absolute zero.)
I once met some MMORPG designers who considered this. The idea was to dump griefers into a parallel instance of the game populated only by NPCs, but not tell the griefer. It wasn't worth the server resources, so it didn't go in, but it was a neat idea.
That's a reasonable idea for vehicles which have to operate in tight spaces, like cities. Autonomous vehicles and mobile robots need body language in some situations. There's been some work on this, but mostly from the people who want robots to express emotions. Merely being able to express where the machine is trying to go next is a big help.
These "remote removal" schemes seem to come with a "sole discretion" clause. Not, say, "after confirmation by the US Computer Emergency Response Team".
Roger Angel is an astronomer. He's done good work on telescope design. Hence the fascination with mirrors.
There have been many elaborate schemes for solar power using collecting optics. The mirrors and supporting machinery usually end up costing more than you save by having less silicon area. Flat solar panels are simple to install, can be made resistant to high winds, and require minimal maintenance.
That's a holiday-season perennial. A number of movies are rolled out every Xmas season, starting with "Miracle on 34th St", and various versions of "Scrooge". (Fortunately, we have been spared a rerun of the "Star Wars Holiday Special")
And they got Andy Lewandowsky, the Berkeley guy with the autonomous motorcycle, too. (He got better results with less money than anybody else.)
It's good to see this. After the DARPA Grand Challenge, it wasn't clear if the whole field was just going to go away again due to lack of funding, like it did after Demo '97. The real lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge was that, 1) the technology was almost there, and 2) with about 10x the funding of the typical robotics project, you actually get working systems. Most previous robotics projects were maybe one professor and four grad students.
"We may permit our vendors to access your Personal Information, but only in connection with services that they perform for us and not to use for their own purposes."
That refers to their suppliers, not their advertisers and data customers.
It's more than a coup attempt, but less than a revolution. The rebels claim a port city, there's some fighting near the capital. Some army units are supporting the rebellion. This is the normal form of regime change in some countries. The people at the top change, but the whole government isn't replaced.
The announced head of the new government is a former justice minister. He seems to be the compromise choice of several factions, which is a good sign. Interestingly, this seems to be a secular rebellion. The leadership isn't talking about establishing an Islamic state.
As I wrote to the Atlantic after being blocked for not having a Disqus account, "Why does the Atlantic presume to require me to enter into a contractual relationship with a third party to communicate with your editors?"
The U.S. Government negotiated better terms from Disqus. The Goverment made them take out the bad stuff. If your site wants to use Disqus, demand to use the Federal terms, not the standard terms.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
The thing on top of the car is a rotating cone of LIDAR scanners. The original version of that was developed by Team DAD for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The prototype, which was a much bigger wheel of scanners, fell off the vehicle. But they then built a more compact production version, the Velodyne scanner, with 64 lasers. It costs about $100K per unit, but automatic driving became much better once that came out. Most of the teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge used that.
Personally, I think the rotating machinery approach is too expensive for production, and that the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR has more promise as a production product. The ASC system requires some exotic custom imaging ICs, with a time-of-flight timer behind each pixel. That's the kind of thing that's incredibly expensive when you make 10 of them, and cheap when you make 10 million.
Nobody does theatrical reruns any more. Will theaters even run the thing? It's just fake 3D, after all; the source material was filmed in 2D. I can't see exhibitors going in for re-releases of old movies just because they're 3D. Maybe for a film festival or something like that, but not for general release.
This sounds like a limited theatrical release to promote the product for 3D TV displays.
Boston Dynamics is also building the LS3, which is the militarized version of BigDog. Stronger, faster, more range, but not much bigger. That's a tough engineering and mechanical problem.
Although the picosecond thing is silly, the New York Stock Exchange now operates a co-location facility in which each trading platform gets a uniform 35 microsecond latency for the incoming trade data. Some systems can turn around that data and do a trade within 12 microseconds.
The Arduno is cute as a low-level microcontroller. Sometimes you need the next step up - something bigger than an Arduno, but without the bloat of Windows CE or Linux. Big enough to have a protected-mode OS with a networking stack and an Ethernet port, but small enough that you don't need system administration.
Gumstix has some entries in that space, but they don't cater to the hobbyist market.
Yahoo is just reselling Bing now. Yahoo no longer has a search engine. So Bing's total is 29.2%. The US market has been split about like that for the last several years - Google with 2/3 of the market, Microsoft + Yahoo with 1/3, and the rest nowhere.
A huge number of science fiction and fantasy stories have explored this subject. It's not exactly a new idea.
If we discover enough information about brains work to hook into them at that level, we'll be able to build brains. Probably ones that clock a lot faster and definitely have more storage than biological ones.
You can solve TSP for 1 million cities if you're willing to wait a few billion years,
The TSP is quite solvable. There are pathological cases that are NP-hard, but most cases aren't. The classic Bell Labs stochastic solution for the TSP (break path into 3 sections at random, reassemble in shortest way, repeat until no improvement for a while) will converge on the shortest path most of the time, and a near-shortest path almost all the time. This approach requires something like O(N log N) time.
There are many hard problems like that. Linear programming has the same property. It's unknown whether factoring has that property.
Publishing is worthwhile, if the paper is good. Actually going to a minor conference is marginal. I've published a modest number of papers, but only once in my career did I actually go to a conference to present the thing.
(I sent a paper to the MIT Spam Conference a few years ago and forgot about it. Two days before the conference, somebody calls me up to ask if I was going. Turns out they accepted the paper and expected me to show up. I didn't. The paper was still published.)
It's terrible for your business reputation to be known to be good with tools. The kid was right from a career standpoint.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking. There are probably cables, pipes, and ducts in there. Did you use an energized wire detector? A stud finder? Check the building blueprints? It's probably not drywall over wooden 2x4s, either. Commercial construction is different, because the fireproofing requirements are higher. It could be a metal wall, drywall over concrete,
drywall on metal studs, plaster over lath, plaster over brick, or other less-common options, including asbestos insulation. For most of those, a drywall anchor is the wrong fastener.
For something like a coat hook, adhesive hooks are more appropriate. 3M has some good ones.
If you want your employees to have shop class, buy them a TechShop membership.
Slashdot Mirror
The GTA hot coffee mod is a perfect example. How dare they put sex into that game! I want to shoot prostitutes, hijack cars, murder policemen and whack civilians with a baseball bat.
The GTA controversy puzzled me. Why shouldn't GTA have sex? It fits with the GTA world. It should advance the plot, too; seduce an enemy's girlfriend and maybe she'll betray him. Some gangster game from the early 90s had that feature.
The real challenge is not getting a vehicle to go that speed... It's getting a vehicle to stay on the ground and under control at that speed.
Right. Producing enough downforce has dominated racing for years. Power hasn't been the problem for decades.
This is very useful data. We're going to know considerably more about how language really works once this is analyzed.
A few more people need to do this, for comparison and confirmation. It also needs to be done for a tonal language, like Chinese.
This is sad. A has-been celebrates the end of a major American presence in space.
But it's inevitable. Unless we get past chemical rockets, space flight isn't going to get cheaper.
Part of the problem is that the last 30 years of physics is a castle in the air. String theory has no experimental confirmation. Supersymmetry remains iffy. That gravity is particle-based is hypothesized but not observed.
Until 40 years ago or so, physicists were the champions of experimental confirmation. From Kepler and Newton forward, physics was about accurate measurement and experimentation. Then physics hit a wall - the phenomena that needed to be measured to confirm or refute theories were out of reach of experimental tools. But this didn't slow down the rate at which Physical Review papers are published. The math is pretty, but may have no tie to reality.
So we don't have the high-energy physicists to act as the hard-liners on experimental confirmation. (Low-energy physics, on the other hand, has made real progress in recent decades, with results which have resulted in useful technologies. Much cool stuff is being made to happen down near absolute zero.)
I once met some MMORPG designers who considered this. The idea was to dump griefers into a parallel instance of the game populated only by NPCs, but not tell the griefer. It wasn't worth the server resources, so it didn't go in, but it was a neat idea.
That's a reasonable idea for vehicles which have to operate in tight spaces, like cities. Autonomous vehicles and mobile robots need body language in some situations. There's been some work on this, but mostly from the people who want robots to express emotions. Merely being able to express where the machine is trying to go next is a big help.
These "remote removal" schemes seem to come with a "sole discretion" clause. Not, say, "after confirmation by the US Computer Emergency Response Team".
Roger Angel is an astronomer. He's done good work on telescope design. Hence the fascination with mirrors.
There have been many elaborate schemes for solar power using collecting optics. The mirrors and supporting machinery usually end up costing more than you save by having less silicon area. Flat solar panels are simple to install, can be made resistant to high winds, and require minimal maintenance.
"Nightmare Before Christmas 3D"
That's a holiday-season perennial. A number of movies are rolled out every Xmas season, starting with "Miracle on 34th St", and various versions of "Scrooge". (Fortunately, we have been spared a rerun of the "Star Wars Holiday Special")
And they got Andy Lewandowsky, the Berkeley guy with the autonomous motorcycle, too. (He got better results with less money than anybody else.)
It's good to see this. After the DARPA Grand Challenge, it wasn't clear if the whole field was just going to go away again due to lack of funding, like it did after Demo '97. The real lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge was that, 1) the technology was almost there, and 2) with about 10x the funding of the typical robotics project, you actually get working systems. Most previous robotics projects were maybe one professor and four grad students.
"We may permit our vendors to access your Personal Information, but only in connection with services that they perform for us and not to use for their own purposes."
That refers to their suppliers, not their advertisers and data customers.
It's more than a coup attempt, but less than a revolution. The rebels claim a port city, there's some fighting near the capital. Some army units are supporting the rebellion. This is the normal form of regime change in some countries. The people at the top change, but the whole government isn't replaced.
The announced head of the new government is a former justice minister. He seems to be the compromise choice of several factions, which is a good sign. Interestingly, this seems to be a secular rebellion. The leadership isn't talking about establishing an Islamic state.
As I wrote to the Atlantic after being blocked for not having a Disqus account, "Why does the Atlantic presume to require me to enter into a contractual relationship with a third party to communicate with your editors?"
The Disqus terms allow them to spam you and to send your information to advertisers.: "We use Personal Information ... to provide you with information and offers from us or third parties that we believe you may find useful or interesting, including newsletters "
The U.S. Government negotiated better terms from Disqus. The Goverment made them take out the bad stuff. If your site wants to use Disqus, demand to use the Federal terms, not the standard terms.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
The thing on top of the car is a rotating cone of LIDAR scanners. The original version of that was developed by Team DAD for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The prototype, which was a much bigger wheel of scanners, fell off the vehicle. But they then built a more compact production version, the Velodyne scanner, with 64 lasers. It costs about $100K per unit, but automatic driving became much better once that came out. Most of the teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge used that.
Personally, I think the rotating machinery approach is too expensive for production, and that the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR has more promise as a production product. The ASC system requires some exotic custom imaging ICs, with a time-of-flight timer behind each pixel. That's the kind of thing that's incredibly expensive when you make 10 of them, and cheap when you make 10 million.
Nobody does theatrical reruns any more. Will theaters even run the thing? It's just fake 3D, after all; the source material was filmed in 2D. I can't see exhibitors going in for re-releases of old movies just because they're 3D. Maybe for a film festival or something like that, but not for general release. This sounds like a limited theatrical release to promote the product for 3D TV displays.
Boston Dynamics is also building the LS3, which is the militarized version of BigDog. Stronger, faster, more range, but not much bigger. That's a tough engineering and mechanical problem.
Although the picosecond thing is silly, the New York Stock Exchange now operates a co-location facility in which each trading platform gets a uniform 35 microsecond latency for the incoming trade data. Some systems can turn around that data and do a trade within 12 microseconds.
Computers aren't fast enough for this. The latest thing is writing trading algorithms in Verilog and compiling them into an FPGA.
This worries me.
Product was covered yesterday. This is an article about a review.
The Arduno is cute as a low-level microcontroller. Sometimes you need the next step up - something bigger than an Arduno, but without the bloat of Windows CE or Linux. Big enough to have a protected-mode OS with a networking stack and an Ethernet port, but small enough that you don't need system administration.
Gumstix has some entries in that space, but they don't cater to the hobbyist market.
ComScore reports search engine market share for the US each month. They report, for January 2011:
Yahoo is just reselling Bing now. Yahoo no longer has a search engine. So Bing's total is 29.2%. The US market has been split about like that for the last several years - Google with 2/3 of the market, Microsoft + Yahoo with 1/3, and the rest nowhere.
Outside the US, Google is dominant in most countries other than China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex).
A huge number of science fiction and fantasy stories have explored this subject. It's not exactly a new idea.
If we discover enough information about brains work to hook into them at that level, we'll be able to build brains. Probably ones that clock a lot faster and definitely have more storage than biological ones.
You can solve TSP for 1 million cities if you're willing to wait a few billion years,
The TSP is quite solvable. There are pathological cases that are NP-hard, but most cases aren't. The classic Bell Labs stochastic solution for the TSP (break path into 3 sections at random, reassemble in shortest way, repeat until no improvement for a while) will converge on the shortest path most of the time, and a near-shortest path almost all the time. This approach requires something like O(N log N) time.
There are many hard problems like that. Linear programming has the same property. It's unknown whether factoring has that property.
Publishing is worthwhile, if the paper is good. Actually going to a minor conference is marginal. I've published a modest number of papers, but only once in my career did I actually go to a conference to present the thing.
(I sent a paper to the MIT Spam Conference a few years ago and forgot about it. Two days before the conference, somebody calls me up to ask if I was going. Turns out they accepted the paper and expected me to show up. I didn't. The paper was still published.)
It's terrible for your business reputation to be known to be good with tools. The kid was right from a career standpoint.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking. There are probably cables, pipes, and ducts in there. Did you use an energized wire detector? A stud finder? Check the building blueprints? It's probably not drywall over wooden 2x4s, either. Commercial construction is different, because the fireproofing requirements are higher. It could be a metal wall, drywall over concrete, drywall on metal studs, plaster over lath, plaster over brick, or other less-common options, including asbestos insulation. For most of those, a drywall anchor is the wrong fastener.
For something like a coat hook, adhesive hooks are more appropriate. 3M has some good ones.
If you want your employees to have shop class, buy them a TechShop membership.