It's been tried. From 1934 to 1955, the Chicago Tribune used simplified spelling. A whole generation of Chicagoians grew up with "tho" and "frate" as normal spelling. But nobody went along with the Tribune, and they gave up.
Universities which try to regulate use of the ISM bands are engaging in illegal spectrum theft. It's like putting up a toll gate on a public road.
If they want a controlled network, they have to license spectrum from the FCC, like Ricochet. Educational institutions can usually get a good deal on spectrum. But they can't just arbitrarily take spectrum.
Car phone Big clunky handset, with a good antenna and vehicle power, but modern electronics. Much better connection quality. Wildfire-type voice assistance.
Two-knob TV Two knobs only - channel and volume. No buttons.
The remote has the same two knobs. Turning volume all the way down turns it off. No visible delay on switching to a new channel (this takes extra electronics). Blank channels are automatically skipped, invisibly to the user.
Home jukebox Put in a CD once, and it stores the contents and creates title cards. High-resolution B/W display made to look like the rectangular drum from an old Rock-Ola wall unit.
Select with the big knob that turns the "drum" and illuminated selection buttons.
Gweneth Paltrow and Jude Law said that the lack of sets "freed" them in their acting.
That's one of the things "Sky Captain"'s director got right. There are very few scenes in Sky Captain where the actors are responding to close CG action. Almost all the CG is background. That simplifies life for the actors. Compare, say, Roger Rabbit, where the actors are constantly interacting with CG and mechanical effects. Beautifully done. "Starship Troopers" had the same problem but didn't deal with it as well.
Some of the more wooden moments in Starship Troopers come from that problem.
Note that in one of the few interaction scenes in Sky Captain, where Polly is running from the giant robots, the acting looks bogus. She's clearly running from mark to mark, not evading the giant feet.
This isn't much of a technical advance. Remember
Final Fantasy, three years ago? Even the actors were CG. And "Spy Kids 3D", another all-green-screen epic. Most of the actors were never even in the same room at the same time.
It was supposed to be a low-budget movie, but it ended up costing $70 million, when the original filmmaker couldn't bring it off on schedule and they had to outsource to a half dozen of the usual effects studios. It's somewhat discouraging to see how expensive computer animation still is. It's not the equipment cost any more. It's the army of artists. We've gotten rid of the "cast of thousands", but we now have the "animation team of thousands". (This has major offshoring implications. Look for more effects films from China.)
The look of the film is good, but not original.
The opening scene is a blatant rip-off of the Centropolis Entertainment logo scene, first shown in 1998
on Godzilla.
There's a real admirality law problem, and it revolves around civil forfeiture, which some law enforcement agencies interpret as a license to steal. Forfeiture law derives from admiralty law, and was intended to apply to ships, which, for historical reasons, are considered legal entities of a kind. Under Reagan, forfeiture proceedings were expanded to the "War on Drugs", and a whole multibillion forfeiture industry was created. It's not limited to drugs any more. Forfeiture now crops up in many non-drug cases.
The ACLU and the Cato Institute are both fighting this. When you find both of those organizations on the same side, you know something bad is going on.
Regarding SCO's Motion to Dismiss or Stay, Judge Kimball said, "You're not likely to get that."
SCO asks for more time to compare UNIX and Linux:
Judge Kimball replies "One might assume that a
comparison of UNIX to Linux might have been done before filing a
lawsuit."
SCO asks for more discovery. Judge Kimball asks "Unix is yours and Linux everybody can get hold of it, right? What is it you think you need?".
That's pretty clear.
Judge Kimball is clearly telling SCO's attorneys that they need to present unambiguous evidence of copying, and soon. He's hinting to SCO that unless they come up with something good, he's going to grant IBM's summary judgement motions.
He's giving them one last chance to do so.
This is a U.S. District Court judge. He has many other cases, most of them criminal. Here's his court schedule for the week. Sentencing hearings, plea bargains, and a few civil cases.
He's not there to listen to SCO's lawyers stall forever. Federal civil procedure doesn't allow that.
Did this story yesterday. Late yesterday. It's still in the "older stuff" list. The Slashdot "editors" aren't even reading their own front page now.
Maybe the Slashdot editors could be replaced by the Google news engine, with a different set of priority rules. Then Slashdot could go on full auto. Might work better.
One real problem with open source is that it's really tough to fix a fundamental architectural problem by ongoing patching. If the problem is too big for one person to rewrite in a short period of time, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.
If the Linux world is to become secure, get behind NSA Secure Linux and push. Make apps work within the NSA Secure Linux mandatory security model. That has a chance of working.
It's not that hard to find spammers. Except for the clueless guy the FTC had in charge of the project.
The one who, after a year, realized they should try to follow the money. Isn't that covered in Introduction to Law Enforcement 101?
There's a whole spammer infrastructure, a constellation of crooked companies that make profitable spamming possible. They're not hard to find. Most of them are committing felonies. So why aren't we hearing about arrests once a week or so, instead of once a year?
Most of the players are actually in the US or Canada, even though they may seem to be offshore.
Just as an exercise, I looked at the last spam I received. It was a porno spam, linking to a web site in China. But on the payment page, the form submission was to a server in Canada, connected to Bellnexxia. That's fairly common. Often, spammers don't want to process the payments through the anonymous crooked ISP that serves the data.
What's really needed is to apply pressure to the banking system to shut down the "high risk third party billing" operations upon which spammers rely for credit card processing. A few money laundering cases would clear up that issue.
discovering that it doesn't actually use a three-feet-down-all-the-time approach but wobbles side to side, remaining dynamically stable as it walks. This is not what you might intuit by simply watching insects walk.
That's not a new result. Full, at Berkeley, discovered that a decade ago. I once went up to his lab to see the cockroach treadmill.
Cockroaches appear to run on their hind legs.
It's not clear, though, whether the stability comes from active control or from planing on a boundary layer in air. For insect-scale locomotion, surface tension and aerodynamics dominate inertia.
There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion. Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go. Reactive systems reached their ceiling years ago.
We realy should be doing better than this.
We should at least have Aibo-type robots running (or at least trotting) over real terrain by now. It's embarassing.
The trouble with this insect stuff is that you can do crap work and get published. If you do work on robots that really balance, you look stupid if your control system doesn't work. Everyone can see you failed. With insect robots, failure is less obvious. Some people think this is a feature.
I'm not saying it would be cost-effective.
It would be a curiosity. It might sell to the crowd that purchases insanely expensive cars and executive helicopters.
It would make a stretch limo or a Hummer look cheap.
There'd never be very many of them.
It's the symbolism. It's needed as a symbol of the future.
We need a project to inspire us, and bring back optimism about the future.
We need flying cars.
There's no reason a flying car can't be built. Just because Moller has been botching it for forty years doesn't mean it can't be done. Hiller did it in the 1950s. The big problems back then were stability and the poor power/weight ratio of reciprocating engines. Both of those problems have been solved.
If Rutan built one, it would work. One good prototype flying car would turn things around.
In 1970, NASA was talking about putting people on Mars by 1980. Now they want 20 to 30 years.
This is as bad as fusion power, which has been twenty years away since 1955 or so. Worse, actually; the fusion people are making some progress.
The field has regressed in recent years
on
Animal Robots
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since the MIT Leg Lab tanked, there hasn't been that much interesting work in the US. Insect-level locomotion has been done many times. With six legs, almost any control approach will work. The same goes for swimming robots. True balancing machines are harder. But they've been done.
Raibert did some great work in the Leg Lab's early days. Raibert's big insight was that balance is more important than gait, and he did work with one-legged machines with springy actuators to force the issue. In his day, the Leg Lab had one, two, and four-legged running machines. But he left MIT to do a startup, which seems to have ended his dynamics work. BDI does mostly kinematic models.
The next professor to head the Leg Lab was Gill Pratt, who was more of an actuator guy. He didn't accomplish too much, and is now at some lesser school. Under Pratt, the Leg Lab backed down from running machines to walking machines.
There was somebody after Pratt, but apparently the Leg Lab is now defunct. It's sad. They made so much progress under Raibert.
It's possible to go beyond walking and running on the flat. Legs are really for traction control. All the MIT work assumes that the "feet" don't slip. That doesn't work on real hills or slippery surfaces.
There's two phases to dealing with slip. First, you need to limit joint torques to below where the feet start to slip. Once you do this, you can climb some hills. (Video, 8MB.mov file).
That work is ten years old, and still, nobody else seems to be handling leg slip at all.
The next step is to use the three joints of a leg to adjust the vector at which the normal force is applied to keep the ground contact inside the friction cone. Then you can climb more serious hills. Once you get this figured out, much of how humans move when dealing with terrain becomes clear. Leaning forward and bending the knees more when going uphill is all about slip control. Think about it.
Working on this diverted me off into physics engines, because everything that was available ten years ago sucked. So I did a physics engine that worked, which turned into a business. There are still very few physics engines good enough for legged locomotion work. Most physics engines, especially the Baraff-type impulse/constraint ones, don't do friction well. Since legged locomotion is all about managing foot-ground friction, you need a simulator that gets friction right. (Hint: if a simulator can't do a driving game without special-casing the wheel/ground contact, it won't work for legged work.)
Re:sensors and subprocessors.
on
Animal Robots
·
· Score: 2, Informative
problem is that they have YET to design a sensor like our inner-ear to detect balance and orientation.
Wrong. Buy a small INS here.
There are standard units that contain three accelerometers and three rate gyros (one for each axis), which is what you need. They're getting smaller; 1 cubic inch units with all six sensors are available, and a single-chip version has been prototyped.
Most serious robotics projects today have one of these. They're not good enough for navigation by themselves, but they can provide attitude info just fine.
The basic way you figure out "down" is by using the accelerometers for the long-term component and the rate gyros for short-term corrections. You do lose accurate "down" if you go round and round in a circle for a while. Some aircraft artificial horizons have that problem.
That ad appeared on a billboard near Oracle headquarters, which usually contains some IBM ad tweaking Oracle. I'd expected that if I solved the problem, I'd get back a DB2 ad.
There are better key locks, but they are rare
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You don't see lever locks much any more, but that's a better approach. The key raises a set of hinged levers. Each lever rotates a plate with a slot, and when the slots line up, a bail drops into them, unlocking the lock. In some designs, the turn of the key locks the levers before it drops the bail, so you can't manipulate the levers once the bail is touching the slots.
Lever locks have the combination component one step removed from the input component, which makes them harder to force. If you try to force a lever lock, you may trash the levers, but that won't open the lock.
Safe deposit boxes are traditionally lever locks, although not always very good ones. Jail locks are usually level locks of massive size.
Lever locks are usually big rectangular boxes, unsuitable for embedding in a door. So they're not used much unless serious security is required, as in a jail.
"And, you can't store electricity (like someone suggested pumping water up hill) because if the site was viable for this purpose, it's already in use for it. Think about it: How many folks would want to live near a body of water where the level went up and down dramatic amounts on an unpredictable basis (i.e., non-tidal)?"
Some of the reservoirs of the California Water Project are used for pumped storage. Water is pumped up during off-peak periods, and run out during peak periods. But they're big reservoirs, so the lake level doesn't go up and down much.
There are a few true pumped-storage plants. Recoon Mountain.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been tried. From 1934 to 1955, the Chicago Tribune used simplified spelling. A whole generation of Chicagoians grew up with "tho" and "frate" as normal spelling. But nobody went along with the Tribune, and they gave up.
If they want a controlled network, they have to license spectrum from the FCC, like Ricochet. Educational institutions can usually get a good deal on spectrum. But they can't just arbitrarily take spectrum.
If you looked up advanced computer science topics like "formal verification", you'd see a Google ad.
That's one of the things "Sky Captain"'s director got right. There are very few scenes in Sky Captain where the actors are responding to close CG action. Almost all the CG is background. That simplifies life for the actors. Compare, say, Roger Rabbit, where the actors are constantly interacting with CG and mechanical effects. Beautifully done. "Starship Troopers" had the same problem but didn't deal with it as well. Some of the more wooden moments in Starship Troopers come from that problem.
Note that in one of the few interaction scenes in Sky Captain, where Polly is running from the giant robots, the acting looks bogus. She's clearly running from mark to mark, not evading the giant feet.
It was supposed to be a low-budget movie, but it ended up costing $70 million, when the original filmmaker couldn't bring it off on schedule and they had to outsource to a half dozen of the usual effects studios. It's somewhat discouraging to see how expensive computer animation still is. It's not the equipment cost any more. It's the army of artists. We've gotten rid of the "cast of thousands", but we now have the "animation team of thousands". (This has major offshoring implications. Look for more effects films from China.)
The look of the film is good, but not original. The opening scene is a blatant rip-off of the Centropolis Entertainment logo scene, first shown in 1998 on Godzilla.
The ACLU and the Cato Institute are both fighting this. When you find both of those organizations on the same side, you know something bad is going on.
But the flag fringe issue is bogus.
That's pretty clear. Judge Kimball is clearly telling SCO's attorneys that they need to present unambiguous evidence of copying, and soon. He's hinting to SCO that unless they come up with something good, he's going to grant IBM's summary judgement motions. He's giving them one last chance to do so.
This is a U.S. District Court judge. He has many other cases, most of them criminal. Here's his court schedule for the week. Sentencing hearings, plea bargains, and a few civil cases. He's not there to listen to SCO's lawyers stall forever. Federal civil procedure doesn't allow that.
When I try it, it tells me I'm not running a Microsoft operating system.
A useful exercise would be to run those tests on Windows vs. Linux source, to see if Microsoft violated the GPL anywhere.
Maybe the Slashdot editors could be replaced by the Google news engine, with a different set of priority rules. Then Slashdot could go on full auto. Might work better.
Any questions?
One real problem with open source is that it's really tough to fix a fundamental architectural problem by ongoing patching. If the problem is too big for one person to rewrite in a short period of time, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.
If the Linux world is to become secure, get behind NSA Secure Linux and push. Make apps work within the NSA Secure Linux mandatory security model. That has a chance of working.
There's a whole spammer infrastructure, a constellation of crooked companies that make profitable spamming possible. They're not hard to find. Most of them are committing felonies. So why aren't we hearing about arrests once a week or so, instead of once a year? Most of the players are actually in the US or Canada, even though they may seem to be offshore.
Just as an exercise, I looked at the last spam I received. It was a porno spam, linking to a web site in China. But on the payment page, the form submission was to a server in Canada, connected to Bellnexxia. That's fairly common. Often, spammers don't want to process the payments through the anonymous crooked ISP that serves the data.
What's really needed is to apply pressure to the banking system to shut down the "high risk third party billing" operations upon which spammers rely for credit card processing. A few money laundering cases would clear up that issue.
That's not a new result. Full, at Berkeley, discovered that a decade ago. I once went up to his lab to see the cockroach treadmill.
Cockroaches appear to run on their hind legs. It's not clear, though, whether the stability comes from active control or from planing on a boundary layer in air. For insect-scale locomotion, surface tension and aerodynamics dominate inertia.
We realy should be doing better than this. We should at least have Aibo-type robots running (or at least trotting) over real terrain by now. It's embarassing.
The trouble with this insect stuff is that you can do crap work and get published. If you do work on robots that really balance, you look stupid if your control system doesn't work. Everyone can see you failed. With insect robots, failure is less obvious. Some people think this is a feature.
Steve Jobs does.
It's the symbolism. It's needed as a symbol of the future.
We need flying cars.
There's no reason a flying car can't be built. Just because Moller has been botching it for forty years doesn't mean it can't be done. Hiller did it in the 1950s. The big problems back then were stability and the poor power/weight ratio of reciprocating engines. Both of those problems have been solved.
If Rutan built one, it would work. One good prototype flying car would turn things around.
This is as bad as fusion power, which has been twenty years away since 1955 or so. Worse, actually; the fusion people are making some progress.
Raibert did some great work in the Leg Lab's early days. Raibert's big insight was that balance is more important than gait, and he did work with one-legged machines with springy actuators to force the issue. In his day, the Leg Lab had one, two, and four-legged running machines. But he left MIT to do a startup, which seems to have ended his dynamics work. BDI does mostly kinematic models.
The next professor to head the Leg Lab was Gill Pratt, who was more of an actuator guy. He didn't accomplish too much, and is now at some lesser school. Under Pratt, the Leg Lab backed down from running machines to walking machines.
There was somebody after Pratt, but apparently the Leg Lab is now defunct. It's sad. They made so much progress under Raibert.
It's possible to go beyond walking and running on the flat. Legs are really for traction control. All the MIT work assumes that the "feet" don't slip. That doesn't work on real hills or slippery surfaces.
There's two phases to dealing with slip. First, you need to limit joint torques to below where the feet start to slip. Once you do this, you can climb some hills. (Video, 8MB .mov file).
That work is ten years old, and still, nobody else seems to be handling leg slip at all.
The next step is to use the three joints of a leg to adjust the vector at which the normal force is applied to keep the ground contact inside the friction cone. Then you can climb more serious hills. Once you get this figured out, much of how humans move when dealing with terrain becomes clear. Leaning forward and bending the knees more when going uphill is all about slip control. Think about it.
Working on this diverted me off into physics engines, because everything that was available ten years ago sucked. So I did a physics engine that worked, which turned into a business. There are still very few physics engines good enough for legged locomotion work. Most physics engines, especially the Baraff-type impulse/constraint ones, don't do friction well. Since legged locomotion is all about managing foot-ground friction, you need a simulator that gets friction right. (Hint: if a simulator can't do a driving game without special-casing the wheel/ground contact, it won't work for legged work.)
All this is patented, of course.
Wrong. Buy a small INS here. There are standard units that contain three accelerometers and three rate gyros (one for each axis), which is what you need. They're getting smaller; 1 cubic inch units with all six sensors are available, and a single-chip version has been prototyped.
Most serious robotics projects today have one of these. They're not good enough for navigation by themselves, but they can provide attitude info just fine.
The basic way you figure out "down" is by using the accelerometers for the long-term component and the rate gyros for short-term corrections. You do lose accurate "down" if you go round and round in a circle for a while. Some aircraft artificial horizons have that problem.
That ad appeared on a billboard near Oracle headquarters, which usually contains some IBM ad tweaking Oracle. I'd expected that if I solved the problem, I'd get back a DB2 ad.
Lever locks have the combination component one step removed from the input component, which makes them harder to force. If you try to force a lever lock, you may trash the levers, but that won't open the lock.
Safe deposit boxes are traditionally lever locks, although not always very good ones. Jail locks are usually level locks of massive size.
Lever locks are usually big rectangular boxes, unsuitable for embedding in a door. So they're not used much unless serious security is required, as in a jail.
Some of the reservoirs of the California Water Project are used for pumped storage. Water is pumped up during off-peak periods, and run out during peak periods. But they're big reservoirs, so the lake level doesn't go up and down much.
There are a few true pumped-storage plants. Recoon Mountain.
Four versions in the last ten years is probably overexposure.