You can pull as many adaptive whatchamacallits out of the signal processing toolbox, but that doesn't change the simple fact that certain wavelengths will be absorbed by the atmosphere before they even get to your ground-based telescopes.
Certainly true, which is part of the reason newer space scopes focus on things like X ray or IR observation, rather than visible wavelengths. But, even at visible wavelengths, a space telescope can do some things a ground scope can't, like take a continuous week long exposure. A ground based scope can compensate somewhat with a bigger mirror, and thus accomplish a similar shot in a shorter exposure, but it just can't manage that kind of continuous observation. (And, to take a week long exposure with a ground based scope, you'd basically need three weeks worth of observation time, because you can't see that star you want during the day, or when it is obscured by trees near the horizon, etc.
What goddamn sci-fi show is it that has mentioned this name recently and made every nerd yell it at the top of their lungs as soon as space junk is mentioned in order to look clever?
Dunno if you count it as "recent," but (/me shouts:) PLANETES.
Quite. If you're using modern lamps, 30W is ludicrously bright. If you're using old-fashioned incandescents, 30W is pathetically dim. Does such a thing as a 30W bulb actually exist in the world?
Of course, 30 W lights exists. Incandescents in the 30 W range are used for accent lighting, night lights, multi-lamp fixtures, etc. And as for being ludicrously bright, on a film set it is perfectly normal to have multi *kW* halogens and other high end lamps. So, I know at least a few cinematographers who wouldn't even consider 30 W worth of "modern lamps" to be a starting point.
Hey, I understand politics. I don't expect human beings to be pillars of integrity, everyone is corrupt on some level. However, if you are willing to knowingly cause material harm to another human being for money, you need to die.
I don't know that they need to die, but IMO, the punishment for abuse of the public trust by somebody like a judge needs to have a damned harsh punishment. I'd say public stocks for shaming and humiliation. But, the public can do whatever they want to the judges to harass them while on display. Like gang rape. And beating. And, for this sentencing stuff, I'd say that the minimum time served needs to be *higher* than the total time of all the convictions the judges made. Note, that's not a starting point -- I'm talking legal minimum would be something like 2x. I'd expect something more like 10x, and eligibility for parole not before ~5x.
I don't like harsh punishments in general, but when somebody takes on an extr authority, they take on an extra responsibility. Cops, judges, legislators, etc.
Lately I've been really pessimistic about the whole thing, I mean, really, who cares? Even if there were intelligent life on planets that close, we would only be able to exchange communication once every 10 years, not enough to actually learn their language, and we would never be able to travel to visit them, right?
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Sure, conversations would have multi-year latency, but so what? I mean, I don't communicate with Japan, but I still find their cartoons hilarious. Some people in Japan watch American TV and enjoy it, even if they never contact the producer to tell them as much. Once contact is established between two civilisations, you'd have constant data being sent back and forth. It's impossible to say if we'd figure out a language, but it'd still be interesting just to see what they put out there for the universe to see.
And, honestly, I feel that language would be pretty doable, if you get something like TV established. It might be impossible if all we ever get is radio, so we can never see a context for their words, but if we can get something like "Barney" for aliens, we'd probably be able to sort out some of what they are saying.
One of the projects I got to work in my first year of undergrad was a flaming standing wave generator. While Jacob's ladders and Theremins are cool, you can't actually *see* what's going on... not so with the flaming standing wave!
The actual name is the Ruben Tube (not be confused with a Rubix Cube), and it's a fairly simple design, too. Just a hollow tube with holes along the top. One side has a hard cap with a place to attach a gas tube, as with a Bunsen burner. The other side has flexible cap, with a speaker pointing at it.
Holy crap, that's awesome. It's absolutely simple enough for a first year undergrad, and it involves fun with fire, so it'll certainly inspire some of them. Sadly, I'd never even heard of this thing until you mentioned it. Though, now that I know it exists, I can't help but think a few bands I know may be getting a suggestion for their live shows...
The overwhelming majority of their content consists of links whose only use is downloading non-free software for free. If you don't like my "linux test" try some other tests. Look at the "top 100". Every single download is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 applications - every single one is a copyright violation. Look at their top 100 UNIX applications - a category in which plenty of free software is legitimitely distributed by bittorrent - and still over 50% of it is links to free downloads of paid software.
Sue, you can use Pirate Bay to find a lot of stuff which is not licensed for public distribution. But, your searches also demonstrate that there are non infringing uses. So, your solution is to destroy something which has legitimate uses, to the detriment of the people using it in a perfectly legitimate way? Just because some 13 year olds will download software they won't bother to learn, and wouldn't have bothered to purchase?
I'm a content producer. I'm currently in production (Was supposed to shoot today, but we had camera problems) of the first episode of an online web video series. I plan to pursue bit torrent based distribution for it. You want to shut down a resource I consider extremely useful for the benefit of established companies. What makes them more important than me? Because, if you side with the big guys and their ability to hurt things like Pirate Bay, you side against the little guys who see how to use it, and want to create content they otherwise wouldn't have an effective way to distribute.
Well, consider how much refined materials cost in space, what is wrong with sending it to the moon or to Mars? Somebody might want a bolt or some wire one day, aboard whatever ideal craft they follow up with.
Using ISS as a ship is obviously crazy, but considering that it will take some fuel to safely deorbit it anyway, I would love to see it put into a "storage" orbit someplace out of the way. Maybe somebody will have a use for it in 20 years. Maybe not. But, I'd really like to think that my great grand children would be able to come up from a Luna settlement on a daytrip to visit the old hulk and see how earlier generations lived in space.
I've always thought that was a silly distinction for the law to make. The words are the problem, not the medium. What difference does it make whether it was spoken or written?
I've long thought the same. I mean, the standard argument is that written jerkiness will be more persistent than in you just spout off in a bar out loud, because an arbitrary number of people can read a book over an extended period of time, but only a certain number of people can hear you shout something in a bar.
But, I think that if I got on national TV and said that Hatta killed a kitten for fun, a hell of a lot more people would hear the claim than if I posted it on some online forum full of trolls that I've never heard of before. And, the idea that writing involves more thought is no longer true. A prepared, rehearsed speech obviously involves more consideration than an IRC message, but IRC is written and therefore presumed to be a bigger deal. Think about how much more thought goes into a YouTube vdeo, versus a written comment on that video.
The state of Slander/Libel law in America makes little more sense than our IP law at this point. Sad but true.
And really, no reasonable person would consider a forum troll as a reliable source of information. ever. I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a clear fucking line dividing a reasonable person from a retard that shouldn't be allowed near the Internet. therefore, proper libel in some crappy forum should be nearly completely impossible unless you really generate lots of corroborating evidence, support yourself with intentionally false references, and be convincing in your effort to claim that you are posting under a real name, and have a real relationship with the person being libeled, and a reason to state your claims in a forum, rather than reporting to Police or something. Libel in an online forum should require months of full time to work before any reasonable person would consider the claims credible.
Since 2004 The source code for windows is available for $20 on blackhat websites. SO it's avaialble for scrutiny by a very select few since possession is criminal.
If I were really trying to spin up a counter-FUD campaign, this would be a significant part of my delivery. Yes, anybody can read the source to open source software. But, people can also read the source to Windows, thanks to leaks and the Shared Source program. If somebody find a bug in open source software, they have permission to tell the author, or even submit a patch. If somebody does the exact same thing with windows, they would never tell Microsoft, because they would need to do a lot of explaining about where they got the source. Sure, some unhelpful people will read the source to open source software, but *only* unhelpful people will read the source to closed source software. (And, of course, the devs themselves.)
An example of this, was that I was not going to finish this post because this stuff is dumb, and people would come back saying that Apples UI is not that great, so I closed the tab. Safari asked if I wanted to close the tab because I was in the middle of filling in this form, with the default being Close (not OK, Cancel, or whatever).
I just want to jump in and say "me too." Seriously, using verbs on buttons instead okay OK/Cancel is such an obvious interface improvement, and yet probably 90% of dialog boxes I see are OK/Cancel or Yes/No. I say death to whoever thought of the dialog box UI paradigm of "throw a paragraph of meandering text which mentions several different actions at the user, and then OK and Cancel." I think some of the philosophy of OO programming leaked out and rotted the brains of UI designers and convinced them computers should be built of objects instead of actions. The bastards.
While you are largely correct, I think you missed the point. The kids that would be using sugar aren't going to read the python code and try to determine what the program is doing. Rather, they will look for something that looks vaguely similar to what they want to change, change something about it, and see what happens. Repeat enough times, and they're starting to get an understanding of Python and programming. I don't know about you, but when I saw my first program code, I didn't read it top to bottom for an understanding, I skimmed it for words that I was interested in, and started changing stuff.
Yeah, IME, when a tinkerer kid gets ahold of source to their favorite toy, the first task is usually just to start changing text strings, so that in the game where you normally visit the "Medicine Shop," in the new customised modded version the player character is now able to visit the "Poop Shop." It's not proper programming in any real sense, but it gives the kid a chance to start interacting with the system, and feel that he has power over it. Some sort of weird manifestation about the magic schtick where if you know the true name of something you can have power over it. Once you know the true name of the variable that holds the name you are interested in, you can make it anything. "Crap Shop" "Stupid Shop" even "Dookie Head Fart Sho" when you suddenly discover that the game has a limit on the length of the name and won't shop you the last p. Then, you start looking at the code around the "discovery" of teh particular variable and you find some reference to a font and a font size, and you make the text smaller, etc. Suddenly you've had to learn more syntax for the sake of exploring your childish vulgarity.
IMO, it's important not to underestimate that sort of childish hobby tinkering, even when the available code isn't good for or meant for teaching. The point is learning, not teaching.
How exactly does "an ID program that works" eliminate all crime?
Slightly paranoid tinfoil hatty answer... You can ID everybody who says that there is crime, throw them in jail, and then just declare victory over crime. Everybody thinks you accomplished something and then you get re-elected and keep your cushy job ruining democracy.
So what you are saying is that with RFID a terrorist could plant a mine and it wouldn't go off until a passport signal was close to it?
Kind of like the way your run-of-the-mill standard mine waits for an object to trip the device with pressure before it goes off, except with a "normal" mine the person is in direct line of fire because of how close they must be to trigger the mine before it goes off?
I think an old school mine would work better and do more damage to the intended target. I don't think you were modded "interesting" for the reasons you think.
The issue is that while an old school mine could do more damage to whoever stepped on it, there's no particular justification for expecting that it was the intended target. If you want to be sure to get an American in a city full of your countrymen, you don't want to use a standard mine. You'll just kill your own side, and probably never actually hit an American. The issue with an RFID passport sensitive mine is that you can have it only blow when an American walks by. You could even configure it to trigger only with a certain threshold of Americans.
And, you don't need them to physically step right on a small object like a mine. And, since you don't need any physical contact with the target, you don't need to have your weapon sitting out in the open where somebody can see it. You can hide it much easier. You don't need your own people to be near the bomb when it goes off like if you wanted to have somebody with a remote control watching for an American.
I don't generally get in a huff about silly threats, but IMO RFID triggered mines in foreign cities targeting Americans would be a reasonable tactic. You need some power, but an RFID reader can run on pretty low power. You can probably get substantial lifetimes on battery. Worst case scenario - just plug it in. I'd expect that sweeping for an RFID reader would be pretty damned difficult, given the low power levels involved, and the fact there there will be similar legitimate equipment in the city as well.
Intel is simply going to put more of the functionality of GPUs into its CPUs. Meanwhile they are talking about a future with "thousands of cores" in the computers of mainstream users.
Actually, AMD is out front on putting GPU functionality into CPU's with the "fusion" platform. Intel is taking the long way around with Larrabee and putting X86 into the GPU. Go figure. Anyhow, the end result will be to reduce chip counts and take advantage of the high number of transistors that can cheaply be put on a single chip and integrate as much as practical.
Personally, I'm surprised we haven't seen more in the way of SOC's marketed at the desktop market yet. I'm sure it'll come, and you'll just get a motherboard with PCIe slots, DIMM slots, and a CPU socket, but no chipset or anything soldered on.
There will always be millions of people who will have problems with the switchover. Most are poor and / or elderly. No amount of delay and / or money thrown at the problem will fix it. Just flip the damn switch already and deal with the small percentage of folks negatively affected. Seriously, this has been in the works for years -- if you don't know about it by now, you won't until your picture turns to a bunch of stati
Actually, if you look at the statistics, the most "unprepared" group is young people rather than poor/elderly. That is, the most tech savvy group which could most easily hook up a box to their TV if they cared. The politicians are just unable to comprehend that large groups just don't care. Larger groups don't care than will be negatively effected. All the statistics seem to foxus on "is there a TV in your house which won't recieve digital broadcasts," but I still have yet to see any statistics based on a survey which included the question "Do you actually even give a fuck about the TV, or will you just keep using facebook as a passtime or maybe read a book?"
As for the small group of poor people who applied for coupons, but haven't gotten them. Well, the senate should stop fucking around with the damned delay and just try to make sure that they get their coupons. I mean, maybe some of the people who really love their TV will be without it for a month until they get the coupon. So what? Seriously, so fucking what? The worst case scenario is that they spend a small amount of time waiting for the coupon to come, and some of them take up a more fulfilling hobby than watching TV. The rest just listen to the radio. BFD.
Can we please, please go back to the Win32 API? It was such a joy to use, and I've got a Visual Studio 6 license laying around here somewhere.
You know, as much as the raw Win32 API is a nightmare, it actually does make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you can't mix GTK and Qt widgets easily because each of those API's demands that you use their loop for all event handling. Win32 is/was heinously ugly, but it also gave you very easy control over exactly what was going on in your app, and I still consider it oddly practical for a lot of things.
Part of me really wishes that somebody had madee a cleaned up Win32 that was still charmingly simpleminded, but less ugly, and less obviously created by people who are as simple minded as the API. And, if you want to write QuickTime code on Windows, doing it with something modern like Qt is apparently harder than it should be. Though, in my experience, the QuickTime API is evil in a way that oddly compliments raw Win32, so maybe that particular unholy union is somehow perfect.::shudder::
No, in a game against terran, 'toss can mind control an SCV to build terran buildings and units. It's possible to have both buildings. =)
Ahh, it's all slowly coming back to me. In fact, as near as I can tell, I was thinking of the Zerg capturing terran command center. In most of my PVP games of starcraft all those years ago, it was terran v. Zerg, so the protoss mind control didn't happen that often. Still, it was awesome when it did!
So what I would like is a multi-camera system that uses similar kinds of interpolation to rebuild the image of the person so that they are looking directly at the camera. So if I put one webcam on either side of my screen, they can combine their images to create a shifted image where I am looking directly at the viewer on the other end.
Geometric view interpolation is not unknown in the labs right now, and in some cases is being researched for exactly the reason you suggest. As another poster suggested, there are certainly some cases where the interpolation will break down. (Put a hand in front of each webcam at the side of your monitor, and it won't interpolate two palms to look like your face, for example.) Another one is that anything transparent makes it impossible to estimate the depth at a particular point because there are actually two depth values there. So, the smoke from your cigarette which is an amorphous volume of semitransparency through which you can see a window, the schmutz on the window, a reflection on the window, and something through the window will just ruin any chance of doing the interpolation properly. When you try to shift the pixel correctly to accomodate for the view shift, you get like seven different answers for what direction it is supposed to go.
Still, look up the Foundry's "Ocula" system for 3D cinematography. It's a shipping commercial product that does a lot of strong magic with stereoscopic imagery on a daily basis. (Which i would have assumed was currently impossible.)
It's too slow to be used for real time conferencing. You let it cook overnight for a single shot, or a handful of shots to compute disparity maps offline. It needs to be at least an order of magnitude faster to be practical for real time work. Thankfully, there are a lot of researches trying to figure out clever hacks to speed up these sorts of things, and a lot of engineers figuring out ways to build stonking GPU's to run OpenCL in a year or two. Expect stereo stuff to become mainstream somewhere around 2011-2012 would be my guess.
There's no such thing as a Robotics Lab in Starcraft. There is, however, a Robotics Support Bay and a Robotics Facility, but those are Protoss buildings. Having a Terran and a Protoss prerequisite makes so sense. Perhaps you meant a Physics Lab? Now if you excuse me, I have to dodge the incoming projectiles that have been thrown at me by people who don't give a shit.
*ducks
Wasn't it possible to capture enemy buildings? It's been ages since I played starcraft, but I seem to vaguely recall it being possible. IMO, it'd be pretty sweet to have, for example, a Zerg superweapon that requires capturing both a specific Terran and a specific Protoss building as prerequisites.
And, if you get into any visual effects for your hours of uncompressed video, you may eventually discover the joys of the multilayer exr format. It's currently becoming very popular for rendering multipass CG in the effects world, and basically it allows you to render one file which contains separate images for matte passes, diffuse shading, base color, specular lighting, reflection, etc., etc. The new workflows available make this technique suddenly much more popular. And, a lot of studios will render out 32 bit per channel instead of the 10 bit per channel listed in the table you linked. So, multiply the data rates at the top end of that chart by a factor of at least fifteen when talking about CG. Then double it because it'll be done progressive instead of interlaced. Then double it again because you wouldn't render to 4:2:0 - you'd render to 4:4:4. Then quadruple it because you want to work at 4k instead of 2k HD. Then, if you want to work at the high end in 8k, quadruple it again. (Though, not many people are currently working in 8k, and those who are do so at 24p, not 60p. So, the final quadrupling is probably unfair.)
Now, think about how many iterations you go through as the director says "Make this part faster. Make the wing flaps longer. Make Jar Jar die." Whatever. You wind up with umpteen version of a sequence that you want to keep around for review and comparison.
So, yeah. There are plenty of fields where 2 TB is a tiny joke, rather than being enough for a lifetime of data. I just happen to be involved with one of them.:) Some studios passed the 100 TB online mark years ago. Hollywood will take all the storage the engineers can give them. And big GPU's.:)
I did too. But how can you write assembler for a 31 stage pipeline by hand ? Or out of order instructions ? I'm pretty sure that's completely impossible, unless you insert 30 NOPs between each instructions, and by that time it's far from being optimized anymore !
Out of order execution is something to compensate for suboptimal instruction ordering, so I'm not sure why you think it would make it harder to write assembly for an OOO chip. You just worry slightly less about sequencing. As for deep pipelines, you really just have to be careful with conditionals and load/store to memory. I'm oversimplifying a bit, and I think it's almost never useful to write much in assembly these days, but these new chip features don't make it any harder to write ASM. They just make it hard to beat the compiler by doing it.
A bunch of people seeing old favorites in crappy streaming flash, I can understand, would remind people how fun a DVD-quality video of their favorites would be.
And when technology gets good enough to skip the "a dvd of this would be nice" phase, that business model will no longer work. Then look for artificial limitations (quality, advertisements) to create that differential
For now though, yes it does seem like a big fat ITYS for the content copyright holders who assumed that internets REDUCE sales.
Humbly, I do think you miss two points. First, Monty Python became noteworthy in an era when buying home videos was unheard of. So, what you suggest would only be a return to a previous state. Second, it is already trivial to download whatever you want in essentially DVD quality for free, thanks to the internet. Fans aren't buying box sets because they have no other way to get the content. We crossed that mark a few years ago. So, there is something more to it than just necessity. I think people will buy DVD's for the same reason they buy a copy of the newspaper when there is a special event. People want a physical thing. That alone may drive sales in an age when maintaining a strangehold on information becomes ever more impractical.
I am gonna cry Godwin. You are comparing industrialized mass murder to the United States spying on lawyers for a Saudi charity. Which country did 15 of 19 hijackers come from again? I have no lost love for Bush or policies like this (is this the "change" we can believe in?) but that doesn't make your comparison any less absurd.
I might agree with you if I hadn't heard your argument. You emphasize the fact that it's a Saudi charity as if that somehow justifies things. You seem to imply that because some of the guys involved in 9/11 were Saudi, therefore the Saudis are evil, and don't deserve the same protections of law as other, decent kinds of people. So, once I read your argument against the idea, suddenly the comparison to Hitler's ideologies seemed more sensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly true, which is part of the reason newer space scopes focus on things like X ray or IR observation, rather than visible wavelengths. But, even at visible wavelengths, a space telescope can do some things a ground scope can't, like take a continuous week long exposure. A ground based scope can compensate somewhat with a bigger mirror, and thus accomplish a similar shot in a shorter exposure, but it just can't manage that kind of continuous observation. (And, to take a week long exposure with a ground based scope, you'd basically need three weeks worth of observation time, because you can't see that star you want during the day, or when it is obscured by trees near the horizon, etc.
Dunno if you count it as "recent," but (/me shouts:) PLANETES.
Of course, 30 W lights exists. Incandescents in the 30 W range are used for accent lighting, night lights, multi-lamp fixtures, etc. And as for being ludicrously bright, on a film set it is perfectly normal to have multi *kW* halogens and other high end lamps. So, I know at least a few cinematographers who wouldn't even consider 30 W worth of "modern lamps" to be a starting point.
I don't know that they need to die, but IMO, the punishment for abuse of the public trust by somebody like a judge needs to have a damned harsh punishment. I'd say public stocks for shaming and humiliation. But, the public can do whatever they want to the judges to harass them while on display. Like gang rape. And beating. And, for this sentencing stuff, I'd say that the minimum time served needs to be *higher* than the total time of all the convictions the judges made. Note, that's not a starting point -- I'm talking legal minimum would be something like 2x. I'd expect something more like 10x, and eligibility for parole not before ~5x.
I don't like harsh punishments in general, but when somebody takes on an extr authority, they take on an extra responsibility. Cops, judges, legislators, etc.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Sure, conversations would have multi-year latency, but so what? I mean, I don't communicate with Japan, but I still find their cartoons hilarious. Some people in Japan watch American TV and enjoy it, even if they never contact the producer to tell them as much. Once contact is established between two civilisations, you'd have constant data being sent back and forth. It's impossible to say if we'd figure out a language, but it'd still be interesting just to see what they put out there for the universe to see.
And, honestly, I feel that language would be pretty doable, if you get something like TV established. It might be impossible if all we ever get is radio, so we can never see a context for their words, but if we can get something like "Barney" for aliens, we'd probably be able to sort out some of what they are saying.
Holy crap, that's awesome. It's absolutely simple enough for a first year undergrad, and it involves fun with fire, so it'll certainly inspire some of them. Sadly, I'd never even heard of this thing until you mentioned it. Though, now that I know it exists, I can't help but think a few bands I know may be getting a suggestion for their live shows...
Sue, you can use Pirate Bay to find a lot of stuff which is not licensed for public distribution. But, your searches also demonstrate that there are non infringing uses. So, your solution is to destroy something which has legitimate uses, to the detriment of the people using it in a perfectly legitimate way? Just because some 13 year olds will download software they won't bother to learn, and wouldn't have bothered to purchase?
I'm a content producer. I'm currently in production (Was supposed to shoot today, but we had camera problems) of the first episode of an online web video series. I plan to pursue bit torrent based distribution for it. You want to shut down a resource I consider extremely useful for the benefit of established companies. What makes them more important than me? Because, if you side with the big guys and their ability to hurt things like Pirate Bay, you side against the little guys who see how to use it, and want to create content they otherwise wouldn't have an effective way to distribute.
Using ISS as a ship is obviously crazy, but considering that it will take some fuel to safely deorbit it anyway, I would love to see it put into a "storage" orbit someplace out of the way. Maybe somebody will have a use for it in 20 years. Maybe not. But, I'd really like to think that my great grand children would be able to come up from a Luna settlement on a daytrip to visit the old hulk and see how earlier generations lived in space.
I've long thought the same. I mean, the standard argument is that written jerkiness will be more persistent than in you just spout off in a bar out loud, because an arbitrary number of people can read a book over an extended period of time, but only a certain number of people can hear you shout something in a bar.
But, I think that if I got on national TV and said that Hatta killed a kitten for fun, a hell of a lot more people would hear the claim than if I posted it on some online forum full of trolls that I've never heard of before. And, the idea that writing involves more thought is no longer true. A prepared, rehearsed speech obviously involves more consideration than an IRC message, but IRC is written and therefore presumed to be a bigger deal. Think about how much more thought goes into a YouTube vdeo, versus a written comment on that video.
The state of Slander/Libel law in America makes little more sense than our IP law at this point. Sad but true.
And really, no reasonable person would consider a forum troll as a reliable source of information. ever. I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a clear fucking line dividing a reasonable person from a retard that shouldn't be allowed near the Internet. therefore, proper libel in some crappy forum should be nearly completely impossible unless you really generate lots of corroborating evidence, support yourself with intentionally false references, and be convincing in your effort to claim that you are posting under a real name, and have a real relationship with the person being libeled, and a reason to state your claims in a forum, rather than reporting to Police or something. Libel in an online forum should require months of full time to work before any reasonable person would consider the claims credible.
If I were really trying to spin up a counter-FUD campaign, this would be a significant part of my delivery. Yes, anybody can read the source to open source software. But, people can also read the source to Windows, thanks to leaks and the Shared Source program. If somebody find a bug in open source software, they have permission to tell the author, or even submit a patch. If somebody does the exact same thing with windows, they would never tell Microsoft, because they would need to do a lot of explaining about where they got the source. Sure, some unhelpful people will read the source to open source software, but *only* unhelpful people will read the source to closed source software. (And, of course, the devs themselves.)
I just want to jump in and say "me too." Seriously, using verbs on buttons instead okay OK/Cancel is such an obvious interface improvement, and yet probably 90% of dialog boxes I see are OK/Cancel or Yes/No. I say death to whoever thought of the dialog box UI paradigm of "throw a paragraph of meandering text which mentions several different actions at the user, and then OK and Cancel." I think some of the philosophy of OO programming leaked out and rotted the brains of UI designers and convinced them computers should be built of objects instead of actions. The bastards.
Yeah, IME, when a tinkerer kid gets ahold of source to their favorite toy, the first task is usually just to start changing text strings, so that in the game where you normally visit the "Medicine Shop," in the new customised modded version the player character is now able to visit the "Poop Shop." It's not proper programming in any real sense, but it gives the kid a chance to start interacting with the system, and feel that he has power over it. Some sort of weird manifestation about the magic schtick where if you know the true name of something you can have power over it. Once you know the true name of the variable that holds the name you are interested in, you can make it anything. "Crap Shop" "Stupid Shop" even "Dookie Head Fart Sho" when you suddenly discover that the game has a limit on the length of the name and won't shop you the last p. Then, you start looking at the code around the "discovery" of teh particular variable and you find some reference to a font and a font size, and you make the text smaller, etc. Suddenly you've had to learn more syntax for the sake of exploring your childish vulgarity.
IMO, it's important not to underestimate that sort of childish hobby tinkering, even when the available code isn't good for or meant for teaching. The point is learning, not teaching.
Slightly paranoid tinfoil hatty answer... You can ID everybody who says that there is crime, throw them in jail, and then just declare victory over crime. Everybody thinks you accomplished something and then you get re-elected and keep your cushy job ruining democracy.
The issue is that while an old school mine could do more damage to whoever stepped on it, there's no particular justification for expecting that it was the intended target. If you want to be sure to get an American in a city full of your countrymen, you don't want to use a standard mine. You'll just kill your own side, and probably never actually hit an American. The issue with an RFID passport sensitive mine is that you can have it only blow when an American walks by. You could even configure it to trigger only with a certain threshold of Americans.
And, you don't need them to physically step right on a small object like a mine. And, since you don't need any physical contact with the target, you don't need to have your weapon sitting out in the open where somebody can see it. You can hide it much easier. You don't need your own people to be near the bomb when it goes off like if you wanted to have somebody with a remote control watching for an American.
I don't generally get in a huff about silly threats, but IMO RFID triggered mines in foreign cities targeting Americans would be a reasonable tactic. You need some power, but an RFID reader can run on pretty low power. You can probably get substantial lifetimes on battery. Worst case scenario - just plug it in. I'd expect that sweeping for an RFID reader would be pretty damned difficult, given the low power levels involved, and the fact there there will be similar legitimate equipment in the city as well.
Actually, AMD is out front on putting GPU functionality into CPU's with the "fusion" platform. Intel is taking the long way around with Larrabee and putting X86 into the GPU. Go figure. Anyhow, the end result will be to reduce chip counts and take advantage of the high number of transistors that can cheaply be put on a single chip and integrate as much as practical.
Personally, I'm surprised we haven't seen more in the way of SOC's marketed at the desktop market yet. I'm sure it'll come, and you'll just get a motherboard with PCIe slots, DIMM slots, and a CPU socket, but no chipset or anything soldered on.
Actually, if you look at the statistics, the most "unprepared" group is young people rather than poor/elderly. That is, the most tech savvy group which could most easily hook up a box to their TV if they cared. The politicians are just unable to comprehend that large groups just don't care. Larger groups don't care than will be negatively effected. All the statistics seem to foxus on "is there a TV in your house which won't recieve digital broadcasts," but I still have yet to see any statistics based on a survey which included the question "Do you actually even give a fuck about the TV, or will you just keep using facebook as a passtime or maybe read a book?"
As for the small group of poor people who applied for coupons, but haven't gotten them. Well, the senate should stop fucking around with the damned delay and just try to make sure that they get their coupons. I mean, maybe some of the people who really love their TV will be without it for a month until they get the coupon. So what? Seriously, so fucking what? The worst case scenario is that they spend a small amount of time waiting for the coupon to come, and some of them take up a more fulfilling hobby than watching TV. The rest just listen to the radio. BFD.
You know, as much as the raw Win32 API is a nightmare, it actually does make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you can't mix GTK and Qt widgets easily because each of those API's demands that you use their loop for all event handling. Win32 is/was heinously ugly, but it also gave you very easy control over exactly what was going on in your app, and I still consider it oddly practical for a lot of things.
Part of me really wishes that somebody had madee a cleaned up Win32 that was still charmingly simpleminded, but less ugly, and less obviously created by people who are as simple minded as the API. And, if you want to write QuickTime code on Windows, doing it with something modern like Qt is apparently harder than it should be. Though, in my experience, the QuickTime API is evil in a way that oddly compliments raw Win32, so maybe that particular unholy union is somehow perfect. ::shudder::
Ahh, it's all slowly coming back to me. In fact, as near as I can tell, I was thinking of the Zerg capturing terran command center. In most of my PVP games of starcraft all those years ago, it was terran v. Zerg, so the protoss mind control didn't happen that often. Still, it was awesome when it did!
Geometric view interpolation is not unknown in the labs right now, and in some cases is being researched for exactly the reason you suggest. As another poster suggested, there are certainly some cases where the interpolation will break down. (Put a hand in front of each webcam at the side of your monitor, and it won't interpolate two palms to look like your face, for example.) Another one is that anything transparent makes it impossible to estimate the depth at a particular point because there are actually two depth values there. So, the smoke from your cigarette which is an amorphous volume of semitransparency through which you can see a window, the schmutz on the window, a reflection on the window, and something through the window will just ruin any chance of doing the interpolation properly. When you try to shift the pixel correctly to accomodate for the view shift, you get like seven different answers for what direction it is supposed to go.
Still, look up the Foundry's "Ocula" system for 3D cinematography. It's a shipping commercial product that does a lot of strong magic with stereoscopic imagery on a daily basis. (Which i would have assumed was currently impossible.)
It's too slow to be used for real time conferencing. You let it cook overnight for a single shot, or a handful of shots to compute disparity maps offline. It needs to be at least an order of magnitude faster to be practical for real time work. Thankfully, there are a lot of researches trying to figure out clever hacks to speed up these sorts of things, and a lot of engineers figuring out ways to build stonking GPU's to run OpenCL in a year or two. Expect stereo stuff to become mainstream somewhere around 2011-2012 would be my guess.
Personally, I'm saving up for the Blade Runner Alpha Turbo EX World Fighting Champion Edition.
Wasn't it possible to capture enemy buildings? It's been ages since I played starcraft, but I seem to vaguely recall it being possible. IMO, it'd be pretty sweet to have, for example, a Zerg superweapon that requires capturing both a specific Terran and a specific Protoss building as prerequisites.
And, if you get into any visual effects for your hours of uncompressed video, you may eventually discover the joys of the multilayer exr format. It's currently becoming very popular for rendering multipass CG in the effects world, and basically it allows you to render one file which contains separate images for matte passes, diffuse shading, base color, specular lighting, reflection, etc., etc. The new workflows available make this technique suddenly much more popular. And, a lot of studios will render out 32 bit per channel instead of the 10 bit per channel listed in the table you linked. So, multiply the data rates at the top end of that chart by a factor of at least fifteen when talking about CG. Then double it because it'll be done progressive instead of interlaced. Then double it again because you wouldn't render to 4:2:0 - you'd render to 4:4:4. Then quadruple it because you want to work at 4k instead of 2k HD. Then, if you want to work at the high end in 8k, quadruple it again. (Though, not many people are currently working in 8k, and those who are do so at 24p, not 60p. So, the final quadrupling is probably unfair.)
Now, think about how many iterations you go through as the director says "Make this part faster. Make the wing flaps longer. Make Jar Jar die." Whatever. You wind up with umpteen version of a sequence that you want to keep around for review and comparison.
So, yeah. There are plenty of fields where 2 TB is a tiny joke, rather than being enough for a lifetime of data. I just happen to be involved with one of them. :) Some studios passed the 100 TB online mark years ago. Hollywood will take all the storage the engineers can give them. And big GPU's. :)
Out of order execution is something to compensate for suboptimal instruction ordering, so I'm not sure why you think it would make it harder to write assembly for an OOO chip. You just worry slightly less about sequencing. As for deep pipelines, you really just have to be careful with conditionals and load/store to memory. I'm oversimplifying a bit, and I think it's almost never useful to write much in assembly these days, but these new chip features don't make it any harder to write ASM. They just make it hard to beat the compiler by doing it.
Humbly, I do think you miss two points. First, Monty Python became noteworthy in an era when buying home videos was unheard of. So, what you suggest would only be a return to a previous state. Second, it is already trivial to download whatever you want in essentially DVD quality for free, thanks to the internet. Fans aren't buying box sets because they have no other way to get the content. We crossed that mark a few years ago. So, there is something more to it than just necessity. I think people will buy DVD's for the same reason they buy a copy of the newspaper when there is a special event. People want a physical thing. That alone may drive sales in an age when maintaining a strangehold on information becomes ever more impractical.
I might agree with you if I hadn't heard your argument. You emphasize the fact that it's a Saudi charity as if that somehow justifies things. You seem to imply that because some of the guys involved in 9/11 were Saudi, therefore the Saudis are evil, and don't deserve the same protections of law as other, decent kinds of people. So, once I read your argument against the idea, suddenly the comparison to Hitler's ideologies seemed more sensible.