SIPRNet, or Secret IP Routed Network, I assume is what the poster is referring to. It's basically an IP network for classified information, and supposedly sealed off from the rest of the Internet. There are some heavily firewalled gateways to the Internet, but this hasn't prevented it from being hit from a lot of the VB script email viruses. It seems like a network that's completely seperate from the Internet would probably be a pretty good idea.
The Gulf of Alaska (where Kodiak Island is located) is well known for its bad weather, especially in winter, where storms can get you hurricane force winds in a couple hours. Inaccurate weather models don't help predicting either. I did a report on several Gulf of Alaska phenomena which you can see here.
People favoring "competition" over good service. The two do not necessarily go together. What really annoys me is radio ads in my area (MD, just north of DC), that talk about how the evil Verizon is monopolizing the phone and internet access. They claim that Verizon will do exactly what the power companies did to California. What's really funny is their quote: "Have you noticed the phone service lately?" Yeah, seems to work just fine thanks.
People who are anti Baby Bells (same people who were anti AT&T before it split), don't get it. The regular/. rant is that AT&T used it's monopoly to stifle innovation, made it horrible for everyone, etc. When AT&T had a monopoly, you used to rent your phone from the phone company. It was an inexpensive fee. The phones were high quality and would last for a decade. Now you buy your own phone, they're cheap and they'll last for two years if you're lucky. This is just one example. The phone system is like Unix, the reason it's still around today is that it works. Let the companies who have been working this long on the system continue to operate it, rather than restrict them so newcomers can get a chance.
Re:Public education has serious problems
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 1
Yeah, he's off topic, but I'll give him some defense, hopefully.
Belief in Evolution is a religion. It's usually propagated by scientists who like the average Slashdot reader, would rather believe anything else than a Christian/Jewish God, and subsequently push bad science. It takes a lot more faith to believe that the universe, the earth, and all the species therein were created by a whole lot of nothing exploding and then a bunch of atoms randomly banging into each other than it does to believe that an Intelligent Designer created it. In response to your comment about apes, think about this: C.S. Lewis once said that if the universe was created by accident, and that we're here by accident (a big soup of stuff, atoms bang around, eventually we have humans), then your thoughts are also a complete accident, they're just a bunch of random electrical pulses. Why should we then believe the evolutionists. To quote Lewis, "I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents."
There's a wonderful design in nature and it's a shame you think it happened by accident.
Yeah, me too! I was running around for the entire four days we were down there. Luckily I have Spring Break this week. Our team (449) also got knocked out in the first round on Curie. We came in 8th, and were allied with the team that came in 4th. Which alliance were you on?
You can check out Team 449's entry at robot.mbhs.edu. The competition was pretty cool, although Dean and Woodie's ideas about competition vs. coopertition (coopertition is their buzz word which means having everyone cooperate rather than compete) made the game much less exciting than last year. There's a petition going around for more competition and an easier scoring system next year. Dean and Woodie seem like extreme non-violent pacifists (They both took verbal pot shots at BattleBots calling it the WWF of robot competitions. Woody came out against Revolutionary War reenactments, pretty silly of him IMHO).
Something else that might be of interest to some of you is my PalmBot, a Palm controlled robot inspired by the PPRK. I got to bring this to the Nationals, and even got to meet Bob Metcalfe, creator of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, who happened to be a judge.
Actually, there isn't any fighting at all. Last year the FIRST competition was sort of like a two on two basketball game. This year, to further the founder's socialist ideals, four robots are on the field together trying to get the highest score possible. Really not as exciting as last year's competition. The competition mentioned is only a regional, the finals aren't until the middle of April. Nationals, held outside of Epcot Center, has about 370 entries this year.
You can check out MBHS' entry into the competition (I'm head of pneumatics by the way:-), The Blair Robot Project.
I heard on WTOP this morning that copyright.net was going after Napster users who downloaded the music of Roy Orbison. The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago. I don't think the record company/his estate is making very much money off of CD sales.
Montgomery Blair is a much better school. We've got less funding, a smaller class, and we still got the same number of Intel finalists. And we whooped you on the AHSME. And don't even bother entering the US FIRST robotics competition, because we'll whoop you there.:-) Let the flaming begin:-)
(mostly j/k here, but I'm a little sore that MBHS always gets overlooked).
You need a real magnet school! Try Montgomery Blair. Blair competes with the likes of Stuyvesant in things like the Intel Science Talent Search, (we both had two finalists), as well as a student whose unofficial score was much higher on the American High School Math Exam than their top scoring student. Blair has a class of 100. Stuyvesant and other magnet schools have classes of 1000 or more.
First of all, I don't really think the troll moderation was warranted. I was expressing my opinion, certainly not trolling.
Secondly, responding to esobofh's well thought out and articulated argument: Cloning doesn't really help people. I really don't see how it's going to "advance civilization." Advancing civilization would mean making everyone's life better, not making it so that everyone looks like a supermodel and has Einstein's IQ.
As for Mr. Borkowski, there's a big difference between taking an aspirin to help you feel better and creating/destroying human lives. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't use medicines, perform surgery or anything like that. It's when you mess with life itself that's the problem. Whether you're taking innocent lives or creating life on a whim, it's just plain wrong. God is the giver of life and the taker of life. It's not man's job to interfere.
As for the rest of you trying to disprove God's existence, you better be careful. A lot of people have tried to disprove God's existence only to believe in Him when they realize it can't be done.
First of all, reducing C02 doesn't really lower greenhouse gases. The biggest greenhouse gas is water vapor, making up 98% of all greenhouse gases. We can't control water vapor. Also, the sunatmosphereearth system is a very tricky system. No scientist can claim to understand it completely. Greenhouse gases reflect sunlight away from the Earth as well as holding it in.
Secondly, during the 60s, people worried about a global cooldown. It was similar to the worry about global warming now, only the reverse. As we know now, this didn't happen.
Third, global temperature depends on where you measure temperature. If I measure temperature in the middle of the city, it will go way up as the city increases in size and population. If I measure it in the country, it's not going to increase. Statistics lie, that's what they're good for.
Lastly, scientists don't agree on global warming. There was a similar conference earlier this year where scientists decided that they couldn't come up with a solid decision on global warming.
Don't let allow bad science to impede your rights!
Kamen, DEKA, and the wheelchair...
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
Don't know if anyone has actually posted what this is. Dean Kamen is the founder of FIRST the people that do a robotics competition for high school students mentioned a few days ago.
Anyone who went to the national FIRST competition last year saw Dean demonstrate the wheelchair he/DEKA created. I actually have a picture of the thing, but I'm at school right now and can't post it. The wheelchair is designed to make a disabled person feel completely independent and reduce the feeling of inferiority that might come from having to sit in a wheelchair while someone stands over you. The chair has a gyroscope for stability. This means it can switch positions from a normal two wheels on either side, to a one wheel on top of the other position. This makes the person in the wheelchair at the same height as a non-disabled person so that they can look eye to eye. It can actually walk like this, balanced on one wheel. While Dean showed it off, he sat in it the entire time. The thing is designed to work in various terrains, including sand. Another feature Dean showed is one's ability to climb stairs with the device. Using the railing on a set of stairs, one can easily pull themselves up the stairs, while the wheels circle around to climb the stairs. Dean Kamen's done some pretty cool stuff with robotics.
It's very easy (and cheap) to make your own robot based on the SV203 board that the PPRK is based on. Greg Reshko has some good instructions, but you can make a version for a lot cheaper. Here's what I'm doing: I got the SV203 from Pontech (www.pontech.com) ($60), and two HS-303 servos from ServoCity (www.servocity.com) ($18). The PPRK instructions tell you to get $18 servos, which are way too expensive, and he buys extremely high quality wheels, etc. which make the price go up. The rest of the robot I'm making out of some very cheap gears, timing belts, and a wooden base (could've used angle aluminum). Sensors will get added later.
Well, first of all, I'm in Maryland, not Mississippi. As for Massachusetts, I'm not sure. It works differently in different states and counties. My advice for you would be to look for a magnet school, but if you can't get into one, don't let that stop you. Try to learn as much as you can in your home school. Try to get programs started that interest you. If you can't learn it at school, you can probably get a good handle on it by reading a book or getting a tutorial off of the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a ton of robots on the Mindstorms site and on robots.net that are much more sophisticated.
SIPRNet, or Secret IP Routed Network, I assume is what the poster is referring to. It's basically an IP network for classified information, and supposedly sealed off from the rest of the Internet. There are some heavily firewalled gateways to the Internet, but this hasn't prevented it from being hit from a lot of the VB script email viruses. It seems like a network that's completely seperate from the Internet would probably be a pretty good idea.
The Gulf of Alaska (where Kodiak Island is located) is well known for its bad weather, especially in winter, where storms can get you hurricane force winds in a couple hours. Inaccurate weather models don't help predicting either. I did a report on several Gulf of Alaska phenomena which you can see here.
RoboCup is only one part of IJCAI. Another interesting event taking place at IJCAI is the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition for urban search and rescue (USAR) robots. They have to navigate three courses developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The courses have proved extremely difficult for autonomous robots to navigate.
"Uh oh eh, the arm's about to break, eh."
"Just get me another beer, eh." "Take off, eh, you hoser."
People who are anti Baby Bells (same people who were anti AT&T before it split), don't get it. The regular /. rant is that AT&T used it's monopoly to stifle innovation, made it horrible for everyone, etc. When AT&T had a monopoly, you used to rent your phone from the phone company. It was an inexpensive fee. The phones were high quality and would last for a decade. Now you buy your own phone, they're cheap and they'll last for two years if you're lucky. This is just one example. The phone system is like Unix, the reason it's still around today is that it works. Let the companies who have been working this long on the system continue to operate it, rather than restrict them so newcomers can get a chance.
Belief in Evolution is a religion. It's usually propagated by scientists who like the average Slashdot reader, would rather believe anything else than a Christian/Jewish God, and subsequently push bad science. It takes a lot more faith to believe that the universe, the earth, and all the species therein were created by a whole lot of nothing exploding and then a bunch of atoms randomly banging into each other than it does to believe that an Intelligent Designer created it. In response to your comment about apes, think about this:
C.S. Lewis once said that if the universe was created by accident, and that we're here by accident (a big soup of stuff, atoms bang around, eventually we have humans), then your thoughts are also a complete accident, they're just a bunch of random electrical pulses. Why should we then believe the evolutionists. To quote Lewis, "I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents."
There's a wonderful design in nature and it's a shame you think it happened by accident.
Yeah, me too! I was running around for the entire four days we were down there. Luckily I have Spring Break this week. Our team (449) also got knocked out in the first round on Curie. We came in 8th, and were allied with the team that came in 4th. Which alliance were you on?
Something else that might be of interest to some of you is my PalmBot, a Palm controlled robot inspired by the PPRK. I got to bring this to the Nationals, and even got to meet Bob Metcalfe, creator of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, who happened to be a judge.
NASA: Mommy! Where's my Polar Lander? NIMA: Right where you left it!
As usual, the big one gets the most coverage. ESPN has even covered it in the past, not sure if they will this time.
You can check out MBHS' entry into the competition (I'm head of pneumatics by the way :-), The Blair Robot Project.
Carnegie Mellon has had one for years. Can you get a Palm Pilot to connect to it? Nuh-uh.
I heard on WTOP this morning that copyright.net was going after Napster users who downloaded the music of Roy Orbison. The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago. I don't think the record company/his estate is making very much money off of CD sales.
(mostly j/k here, but I'm a little sore that MBHS always gets overlooked).
That's the stuff we've been looking for to get our robot working! (See US FIRST)
You need a real magnet school! Try Montgomery Blair. Blair competes with the likes of Stuyvesant in things like the Intel Science Talent Search, (we both had two finalists), as well as a student whose unofficial score was much higher on the American High School Math Exam than their top scoring student. Blair has a class of 100. Stuyvesant and other magnet schools have classes of 1000 or more.
First of all, I don't really think the troll moderation was warranted. I was expressing my opinion, certainly not trolling.
Secondly, responding to esobofh's well thought out and articulated argument: Cloning doesn't really help people. I really don't see how it's going to "advance civilization." Advancing civilization would mean making everyone's life better, not making it so that everyone looks like a supermodel and has Einstein's IQ.
As for Mr. Borkowski, there's a big difference between taking an aspirin to help you feel better and creating/destroying human lives. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't use medicines, perform surgery or anything like that. It's when you mess with life itself that's the problem. Whether you're taking innocent lives or creating life on a whim, it's just plain wrong. God is the giver of life and the taker of life. It's not man's job to interfere.
As for the rest of you trying to disprove God's existence, you better be careful. A lot of people have tried to disprove God's existence only to believe in Him when they realize it can't be done.
Yep, the dust cloud from Pinatubo circled the world. It spewed out a lot of crap. Humans don't affect the Earth nearly as it affects itself.
Secondly, during the 60s, people worried about a global cooldown. It was similar to the worry about global warming now, only the reverse. As we know now, this didn't happen.
Third, global temperature depends on where you measure temperature. If I measure temperature in the middle of the city, it will go way up as the city increases in size and population. If I measure it in the country, it's not going to increase. Statistics lie, that's what they're good for.
Lastly, scientists don't agree on global warming. There was a similar conference earlier this year where scientists decided that they couldn't come up with a solid decision on global warming.
Don't let allow bad science to impede your rights!
Anyone who went to the national FIRST competition last year saw Dean demonstrate the wheelchair he/DEKA created. I actually have a picture of the thing, but I'm at school right now and can't post it. The wheelchair is designed to make a disabled person feel completely independent and reduce the feeling of inferiority that might come from having to sit in a wheelchair while someone stands over you. The chair has a gyroscope for stability. This means it can switch positions from a normal two wheels on either side, to a one wheel on top of the other position. This makes the person in the wheelchair at the same height as a non-disabled person so that they can look eye to eye. It can actually walk like this, balanced on one wheel. While Dean showed it off, he sat in it the entire time. The thing is designed to work in various terrains, including sand. Another feature Dean showed is one's ability to climb stairs with the device. Using the railing on a set of stairs, one can easily pull themselves up the stairs, while the wheels circle around to climb the stairs. Dean Kamen's done some pretty cool stuff with robotics.
...if it doesn't fall apart after taking the last data point, you've overengineered it.
...click here.
It's very easy (and cheap) to make your own robot based on the SV203 board that the PPRK is based on. Greg Reshko has some good instructions, but you can make a version for a lot cheaper. Here's what I'm doing: I got the SV203 from Pontech (www.pontech.com) ($60), and two HS-303 servos from ServoCity (www.servocity.com) ($18). The PPRK instructions tell you to get $18 servos, which are way too expensive, and he buys extremely high quality wheels, etc. which make the price go up. The rest of the robot I'm making out of some very cheap gears, timing belts, and a wooden base (could've used angle aluminum). Sensors will get added later.
Best of luck,
Justin