It's also great because (current strategies aside) they don't have to pander to ratings figures, but can afford to be that little bit more experimental with their programming.
I'm no great fan of socialism, but I still hold that it would be a sad day indeed if they disposed of the BBC's state funding.
I haven't seen any other suggestions anywhere for this, and I have no idea why, but sapphires make a damn fine choice. My mother's a jeweller, and she made a sapphire, silver and gold band for a friend of mine to propose with, and it looked absolutely gorgeous on the finger. Thing was, he was a student at the time, so it was a cabochon-cut synthetic sapphire. Thus not only geek factor grooviness (used as bearings in watches and in nonlinear optics), but an incredibly intense blue colour to boot.
Re:Which is why you use an LCD...
on
IBM's Deep View
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· Score: 1
Someone's already done this. I forget if it was Sony or Hitachi, but I remember seeing a proof-of-concept model of a 1280x1024 monitor made from several smaller units. The whole thing was about an inch thick. The CRTs used some high-somethingorother phosphor that only needed a couple of hundred volts between anode and cathode. This was about a year after TFTs hit the mainstream, I think, so it died a death. Nice idea, though.
As a recently graduated terro^H^H^H^H^Helectronic engineering student, I think I'll just save everyone's time and check myself in to the Hilton Leavenworth for a few years on the government...
From Microsoft's point of view, and the point of view they're trying to represent, the hardware was secure, simply because it would have taken maliciousness and conscious effort to show otherwise. The fact that the security problem existed, and that they didn't fix it before manufacture, is irrelevant, because the problem can't be exploited without knowing it's there.
The point is that there are two distinct requirements for financial loss as a result of a security blunder. The first is a fuck-up in the design, and the second is disseminated knowledge about that fuck-up. Microsoft like to think that they can fight on all fronts at once, especially those that mean they don't need to change their internal procedures. That costs money, and slows things down, which costs even more money.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but they've got some good (if not especially subtle) tacticians kicking about. It wouldn't surprise me if legislation resulted from this little episode. After all, Microsoft has a constitutional right to make a profit, doesn't it?
While almost completely without merit otherwise, this was one idea I liked from Seaquest DSV - the Whiskers. Autonomous sensor platforms that flitted about the outside of the sub. A very nice idea, if you can deal with the gobs of data that you'd get as a result.
Actually, you'd get 5 different versions of the same data. If it's optical data you're gathering, you could use that to create a higher resolution composite image. If it's something like radio direction finding, on the other hand, having an airborne phased array could be extremely handy...
I'm usually the first guy to freak out about the government taking liberties in a kind of knee-jerky fashion, and, in that vein, I had a quick look at the bill in question when I first came across it a couple of months ago. It's really harmless. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The bill itself boils down to about three sentences, wrapped up in enough red tape to justify employing a murder of civil servants for a few days. About the only situation that I can envisage being a problem is if having the equivalent of a dynamically-defined MAC on a wireless network becomes desirable. Of course, those better educated than I should feel free to correct me in that. Note that I do not specifically agree with this legislation. The place for these measures, if they must be there, is in the technology, not in the legislature.
As far as I can tell, one reason for shifting up to ultrasonics is that you don't need a phased array. You could get the same directionality with a large array of speakers transmitting at the original frequency, but it would be too big to be practical. Doing it this way, you only need two transducers. I think.
Re:I'm inclined to think this is bullcrap.
on
Voices in Your Head
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· Score: 1
Just to play devil's advocate, using the example of the huge parabolic reflectors, if you stood slightly out from the focal point of the transmitting mirror and spoke, the sound would be focussed to a point. Oh, and there is a finite speed at which a person passing through a doorway will diffract. Not that that's at all relevant.
Personally, if this sort of thing gets deployed in public places, I want to start carrying one of the boxes you used to downmix bat echolocation down to audible, locate the speakers, and use my Leatherman on them... Or my Browning.
Hang on a tick...
You'd be using a box to turn an ultrasonic signal into an audible one. Don't the bat downmixers just mix an audio stream with a 30kHz signal and take a single sideband anyway?
This is not going into the stun devices, but phasors cannot work anyhow, looking at the link the person who wrote the page seems to believe that they were based on laser technology, this causes a problem since it will just burn holes in people, that would stun me, but I'd likely die shortly afterwards. The link has very little to do with sonic based weaponry, which is a pity.
I think you may have missed the point of the link, but that's OK, 'cos I didn't think much of the phaser debunking section myself either. Basically, what the linked page was trying to say was that phase coherence is irrelevant if you've got frequency coherence, because the average amount of energy is the same whether or not the phase is matched. Leaving aside the likelihood of nonlinearities in the response of the target making peaks more dangerous, it has nothing to do with the current topic, because, with a sound wave (and with a laser, but for different reasons), if you've got frequency coherence, you've always got phase coherence.
Anyway, the phaser explanation I always liked was the one where you use a UV laser to ionise a path through the air, then transmit T-waves down your newly-formed conductor to incapacitate your intended date^H^H^H^Hvictim.
A nuclear bomb produces several huge pressure waves, as do some smaller explosives, but those aren't really sounds... when you get down to small fractions of a Hz, trying to understand them as sound waves will just mislead you.
They are, though. They don't get misleading if your model of sound isn't too simplistic. Hell, how do you think rifle sound suppressors work? All they do is filter the sound coming out of the barrel to attenuate the pop of the propellant.
There's no reason you couldn't use a 'sonic gun' to produce a sound wave like that, as long as whatever passed for a membrane in the speaker could withstand the collossal movement involved, or avoided it somehow... Sometimes, it's easier to make beautiful music with C4.
A friend of mine was working on something similar for his final year project at college, except it was a single-camera system used for 3D gesture recognition - one of the steps was building a skeletal interpretation of the person the camera was looking at. Actually, thinking about it, the system would have been better than that in Minority Report, because you didn't have to wear those gloves.
That's a pretty standard procedure for correcting just about any image degradation process. Find the transfer function of the degradation process, invert it, mess with it so the maths works out, and apply it to the original image.
No it's not. It just means "apply to the end of the beginning". So we get, variously,
"Eopen sourcevery now and then, you get what you don't pay for,"
"Every Open source now and then, you get what you don't pay for," and
"Every now and then Open Source, you get what you don't pay for."
Admittedly, none of these are what the guy originally meant, but they're all valid interpretations of "append to the beginning", thus it has meaning.
Hah! Outpedant that, you bounder!
Which book was it that had people going mad because of this effect with adverts in the eyes? Was it Diamond Age, or a Gibson? Can't remember, but if we think spam's bad now, we've got some fun in store...
You should be able to do it with the original heads and more than one pass, if you can get at the signal processing algorithms. A "1" overwritten by a "1" will be more "1" than a "0" overwritten by a "1", but it's rather nonlinear. Doesn't need access to the head shifts, either, but it's only good for (maybe) a couple of layers of data.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be forgetting Mother Russia, then.
It's also great because (current strategies aside) they don't have to pander to ratings figures, but can afford to be that little bit more experimental with their programming.
I'm no great fan of socialism, but I still hold that it would be a sad day indeed if they disposed of the BBC's state funding.
I haven't seen any other suggestions anywhere for this, and I have no idea why, but sapphires make a damn fine choice. My mother's a jeweller, and she made a sapphire, silver and gold band for a friend of mine to propose with, and it looked absolutely gorgeous on the finger. Thing was, he was a student at the time, so it was a cabochon-cut synthetic sapphire. Thus not only geek factor grooviness (used as bearings in watches and in nonlinear optics), but an incredibly intense blue colour to boot.
Someone's already done this. I forget if it was Sony or Hitachi, but I remember seeing a proof-of-concept model of a 1280x1024 monitor made from several smaller units. The whole thing was about an inch thick. The CRTs used some high-somethingorother phosphor that only needed a couple of hundred volts between anode and cathode. This was about a year after TFTs hit the mainstream, I think, so it died a death. Nice idea, though.
As a recently graduated terro^H^H^H^H^Helectronic engineering student, I think I'll just save everyone's time and check myself in to the Hilton Leavenworth for a few years on the government...
From Microsoft's point of view, and the point of view they're trying to represent, the hardware was secure, simply because it would have taken maliciousness and conscious effort to show otherwise. The fact that the security problem existed, and that they didn't fix it before manufacture, is irrelevant, because the problem can't be exploited without knowing it's there.
The point is that there are two distinct requirements for financial loss as a result of a security blunder. The first is a fuck-up in the design, and the second is disseminated knowledge about that fuck-up. Microsoft like to think that they can fight on all fronts at once, especially those that mean they don't need to change their internal procedures. That costs money, and slows things down, which costs even more money.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but they've got some good (if not especially subtle) tacticians kicking about. It wouldn't surprise me if legislation resulted from this little episode. After all, Microsoft has a constitutional right to make a profit, doesn't it?
Holy Spider Bikes, Batman! Someone's been playing too much Dark Reign!
I can't believe how cool that thing is.
While almost completely without merit otherwise, this was one idea I liked from Seaquest DSV - the Whiskers. Autonomous sensor platforms that flitted about the outside of the sub. A very nice idea, if you can deal with the gobs of data that you'd get as a result.
Actually, you'd get 5 different versions of the same data. If it's optical data you're gathering, you could use that to create a higher resolution composite image. If it's something like radio direction finding, on the other hand, having an airborne phased array could be extremely handy...
I'm usually the first guy to freak out about the government taking liberties in a kind of knee-jerky fashion, and, in that vein, I had a quick look at the bill in question when I first came across it a couple of months ago.
It's really harmless. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The bill itself boils down to about three sentences, wrapped up in enough red tape to justify employing a murder of civil servants for a few days. About the only situation that I can envisage being a problem is if having the equivalent of a dynamically-defined MAC on a wireless network becomes desirable. Of course, those better educated than I should feel free to correct me in that.
Note that I do not specifically agree with this legislation. The place for these measures, if they must be there, is in the technology, not in the legislature.
As far as I can tell, one reason for shifting up to ultrasonics is that you don't need a phased array. You could get the same directionality with a large array of speakers transmitting at the original frequency, but it would be too big to be practical. Doing it this way, you only need two transducers. I think.
Just to play devil's advocate, using the example of the huge parabolic reflectors, if you stood slightly out from the focal point of the transmitting mirror and spoke, the sound would be focussed to a point.
Oh, and there is a finite speed at which a person passing through a doorway will diffract. Not that that's at all relevant.
Hang on a tick...
You'd be using a box to turn an ultrasonic signal into an audible one. Don't the bat downmixers just mix an audio stream with a 30kHz signal and take a single sideband anyway?
Anyway, the phaser explanation I always liked was the one where you use a UV laser to ionise a path through the air, then transmit T-waves down your newly-formed conductor to incapacitate your intended date^H^H^H^Hvictim.
There's no reason you couldn't use a 'sonic gun' to produce a sound wave like that, as long as whatever passed for a membrane in the speaker could withstand the collossal movement involved, or avoided it somehow... Sometimes, it's easier to make beautiful music with C4.
A friend of mine was working on something similar for his final year project at college, except it was a single-camera system used for 3D gesture recognition - one of the steps was building a skeletal interpretation of the person the camera was looking at. Actually, thinking about it, the system would have been better than that in Minority Report, because you didn't have to wear those gloves.
That's a pretty standard procedure for correcting just about any image degradation process. Find the transfer function of the degradation process, invert it, mess with it so the maths works out, and apply it to the original image.
Pens.
8^)
No it's not. It just means "apply to the end of the beginning". So we get, variously,
"Eopen sourcevery now and then, you get what you don't pay for,"
"Every Open source now and then, you get what you don't pay for," and
"Every now and then Open Source, you get what you don't pay for."
Admittedly, none of these are what the guy originally meant, but they're all valid interpretations of "append to the beginning", thus it has meaning.
Hah! Outpedant that, you bounder!
Which book was it that had people going mad because of this effect with adverts in the eyes? Was it Diamond Age, or a Gibson? Can't remember, but if we think spam's bad now, we've got some fun in store...
Let's just hope that the effects of radiation at belt level aren't any worse than the effects at head level, then.
Not to mention all those evil Bluetooth rays...
Unless you can see backscatter from the receiver, of course...
And what triggers the heartbeats? Current flowing through the neural circuits.
You should be able to do it with the original heads and more than one pass, if you can get at the signal processing algorithms. A "1" overwritten by a "1" will be more "1" than a "0" overwritten by a "1", but it's rather nonlinear. Doesn't need access to the head shifts, either, but it's only good for (maybe) a couple of layers of data.
Uh... Where do you think the major NSA listening stations for the Eastern Hemisphere are?
Hint: there's one here, and another one here.