That's not entirely true. Cell phones do have adverse health effects. They are known to be substantial contributors to distracted driving accidents that cause thousands of deaths and injuries every year, increasing the risks of accident by a level equal to that created by drunk driving.
If we limit the scope of the claim to first degree adverse health effects, then cell phones have much less of an impact on people, limited to the blunt force trauma caused by phones thrown by angry spouses and the like. But you still can't accurately state that there are no known adverse effects of cell phones.
Had you fully qualified your statement with "directly caused by emitted radiation", then you would have been 100% correct.
I'll paraphrase this particular story then, which might help.
"The city of San Francisco once again vowed to remain steadfast in their commitment to ignorance, but today acknowledged that, because so many people have refused to remain as stupid as they are, the list of like-minded idiots willing to agree with them has plummeted to the point where creating an effective scare tactic campaign is well beyond their admittedly meager level of competence.
Jenny McCarthy is said to be fraught with disappointment, and stuck a fork in her own eye in protest. Terry Childs could not be reached for comment."
Put an MBA in charge of an engineering division, and this is exactly what you get.
MBAs are toxic in any position other than CEO. CPAs should run Finance divisions, engineers should run Engineering divisions, salesmen should run Marketing. MBAs should push mail carts, or mops, until they get it.
And if you have a finite budget, and your users are demanding more new features than your budget allows, where do you spend that money? Do you ignore them while you upgrade stuff that is already doing what they need it to do? Or do you give the people writing the checks what they are asking for now?
You can tell them you need a budget for upgrades. But what do you think gets cut first in the budget priority meetings? The thing with a projected ROI in 6 months, or a thing that might avoid an expense five years from now?
Yes, they have serious problems. Yes, they have had plenty of warning. Yes, companies budget poorly for software maintenance. Yes, companies don't understand TCO. But it's not a rare thing.
That's a lot of "if". Electronics are usually not worth extending. By the end of their warranty, they're already well on their way to obsolescence. The Nook Color? If it failed post warranty, I'd first pop the case to try fixing it myself. Failing that, I'd upgrade to a current tablet like the newest version of the Kindle Fire, or a new mini iPad, or whatever else is current. If nothing else, I'd at least get a Nook++.
Electronics devalue too quickly to waste a lot of money on protection.
I have two strong considerations: if it's an electronic device, it's useful life is roughly not much longer than the warranty. I'll live with an unprotected phone, and by the time something bad happens to it, it'll be near obsolescence anyway. I'll upgrade rather than repair it.
The other consideration is moving parts and repairability. If it has a lot of moving parts and I can't personally repair it if it breaks, I'll consider the warranty. But I can fix a lot of things myself quite easily. And things without many moving parts tend not to break.
I also don't treat my stuff like crap. I don't drop phones, I don't use the iPad as a hammer, I don't have a houseful of destructive children or pets. I tend to repair small problems promptly, before they turn into big problems. My stuff routinely lasts a lot longer than their extended warranties.
My exception for extended warranties is my wife's latest car. The dealer offered a lifetime service contract that was less than the last three years of maintenance on my twelve year old truck, and it includes oil changes and tire rotations. As i tend to keep all my vehicles for over ten years, and I have no plans to move too far away from the dealer, I couldn't pass that up. My risk exposure there is if the car is totaled before the end of its expected life.
Sorry, I just googled for "Hello Kitty AK-47" images and took the first all-pink gun photo that came up. I didn't study it, and I didnt even consider the Goog would deliver the wrong weapon type.
Calm down. Long ago, when "zip guns" were being made out of a stolen car antenna, a rubber band, a clothespin, and a rimfire.22 bullet, and teen gangs started threatening each other with them, nobody banned antennas or clothespins.
You completely misread his essay. Yegge did not try to claim that "bugs are not a big deal" to him. He only pointed that out as a possible viewpoint of a "liberal" programmer.
However, his thesis that programmers are either "conservatives" or "liberals" is completely wrong-headed. People are either engineers (tests, proof, knowledge) or not. Static typing doesn't enter into it. The crap he was yammering about seemed written to justify his choices and his existence, not to provide useful knowledge.
They sound like they are completely dependent upon these cards, and would have to expend at least a few hours of effort to replace them. But overall, converting would probably cost less than two service calls from the card punch guy, and would pay for itself in not many weeks.
On the other hand, they operate a museum piece and are making the news as a result. Free advertising. Lighten up.
That's because the new system is frequently implemented in the latest version of a one-size-fits-all, Three-Letter-Acronym, popular technology of the day. And that's because the implementers are obsessed with flexing their technological prowess, instead of solving the business problem. I know a guy who would start by insisting this company should replace this thing with a Grails / Hadoop based solution. Why? Because he's a Grails and Hadoop fanboy, not because they have anything to do with this business' needs. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like Michaelangelo's Pieta.
The bigger question is if this could be replaced with a "faster" system. It probably could, but you have to consider the entire manufacturing and accounting processes it handles. Do they punch the cards and include them with the job? Do workers write notes on the punch cards before returning them? How would all those activities be replaced? There are tons of further things to consider, like a shop floor is a notoriously dirty environment. Labels might be tough because adhesives won't stick due to oil on the work products. A beeping scanner might not work if the employees wear hearing protection. And no matter what, if you have to retrain your employees to do a process differently, there will be a temporary slowdown due to the learning curve.
On the plus side, if you are honestly looking at your business process with an eye to changing the automation, you can probably find places where the new automation would help you to eliminate waste. Do the shop guys measure things with a dial caliper and write them down? Plug in a data collecting caliper and skip the pencils. Do the guys have to move a job sheet from bin to bin as they do their work? RFID tags on the bins could eliminate the handling of the job sheet. Can a new scheduling program help you find the more profitable jobs, or the faster paying customers, and move them to the front of the queue when cashflow is tight?
There's likely a lot of things they could improve with automation, but any of them would involve a lot of change, and many people are uncomfortable with that much change.
A robot army that could assemble itself from flat storage - assuming one is operational for the original assembly or hand assembled does sound like something from a sci-fi plot about world domination...
The bacteria only have to survive long enough to deliver the radiation to the cancer cells, which is a much shorter time frame than the lethality of the bacterial infection itself. Stick the patient in a PET scanner, inject him with the radioactive bacteria, wait a while, and watch until the little buggers to find their way to the tumor. Then begin treatment with cipro. If the bacteria die while inside the pancreas, that's even better - the radiation remains inside their stationary tiny corpses, and will continue to attack the cancer cells until it decays or until the T-cells haul it away.
Remember, this is just the news announcing some promising experiments. It's not a packaged treatment yet. Perhaps they find a way to genetically modify the listeria to produce lower levels of toxins. Perhaps they splice in a weakening mutation that causes it to immediately die in the presence of a certain antibiotic, or when exposed to fairly low levels of RF. Maybe they add Terminator genes to prevent it from reproducing. I'm sure there 's a long list of potential kill-switches that they're already testing out.
Is it risky? Heck, yeah. But is the risk worse than that of pancreatic cancer?
You're absolutely right, of course, and I do apologize to civil engineers as I don't mean to trivialize what they do.
What I was intending to say is that most traffic bridge projects don't have many hidden problems, and the parts that aren't hidden are very well understood and repeatable. Beams support load X, they span distance D, etc. the problem space is well defined and understood, its been repeated hundreds of times, and there are formulas that yield estimates. Beams are off-the-rack commodities. An engineer doesn't invent a new type of beam for each bridge, because that would be expensive and wasteful.
Similarly, cranking out websites on a Wordpress framework is pretty straight forward and cheap. Packages like that are the I-beams of the software world. But building a custom app to invoke bizarre and arcane business logic, to serve irrational people with an ill-defined idea of what they want, that's when it gets unpredictable and expensive. Libraries, architectures, patterns, frameworks, they all help reduce the constant reinvention of the computing wheel, but are often misused, or are inefficient, or don't adequately match the task, or suffer from some other hidden shortcoming that has to be worked around. People forget to account for failure conditions, or imagine terrible bugaboos that require layers of complex logic to guard against an eventuality that never materializes. And lots of developers fail to test, and produce code that occasionally works by accident more than by design.
Actually, most of those things can be predicted. What is harder to predict is the creative aspect of development. Predicting a civil engineering project, like a bridge, is easy because engineers can compute the number of beams, the volume of concrete, the depths of the footings, etc, and they already have a good idea how construction people will behave, so they can add 5% for vacations, 20% for staffing difficulties, 10% for late trucks, etc. Predicting the creation of a new piece of software is less certain, because so many of those pieces are unknown. You make an initial survey of the requirements, and take an educated guess at what the solution might be, but you know that's never the final picture of the real solution.
If you're on a mature Agile team, you trot out your velocity, map your epics to some t-shirt sizes, and do some simplistic multiplication. But you also know to announce the estimates in terms of your team's delivery dates, and you don't overpromise. At this point, either management trusts your team's reputation and you boldly go forward, or you give them estimates with confidence levels around 20%, because you simply can't be more accurate than that.
If you're on a waterfall team, any software development estimate with an accuracy figure of higher than about 50% should be viewed with suspicion, and anyone claiming 90% or higher should be flagged as a true bullshit artist.
Even if the bacteria continue to reproduce in harmful rates, they can be treated later with antibiotics. First things first - target the cancer cells. Then you can worry about what the infection might have done to you.
I realize you were probably asking this in jest, but Verizon Business Security is independent of their cell phone business. What happened is their investigators got pretty darn good at rooting out hackers, both internal and external. Helping customers find external hackers in their networks led them to offering these investigation services to other corporations. I'm pretty sure that their security team is a profitable self-sustaining division these days.
The most important thing to the rest of us is they created a schema for recording incidents, and they publish the data (after anonymizing it.) With the number of investigations they perform, it becomes a statistically significant source of information about breaches, which had been a real black hole of information before.
Most companies are reluctant to announce anything about their breaches. They're always negative publicity, they lead to accusations of wrongdoing or incompetence, and they may reveal other sensitive internal information about the kinds of data they keep. By being anonymized through the DBIR, we all get to learn much more about the threat landscape without being able to blame a specific company for a specific loss.
There was no "betrayal of their own community" here, unless their community is a community of violent bombers. This was some human beings who heard of some criminals discussing a plot, and not wanting other innocent humans to die as a result of their inaction.
Not every Muslim prays for "death to the infidels", not even if they attend the same mosque.
If the images had been of sufficient quality, the number of false positives could be low enough that humans could individually investigate the results. And in a manhunt like this, they would have been.
Even the automated turnpike ticketing process has a planned out manual step - issue all tickets regardless of the quality of the plate imaging, and reverse them based on driver complaints. Don't think that wasn't planned out, it's just the commission's goal was to maximize revenue at the expense of a few mistakes, knowing they would never achieve 100% accuracy. If the law had been written such that "all incorrect tickets shall result in a $1000 penalty being paid by the Turnpike Commission to the falsely accused" they might have more incentive to improve their read accuracy. (They'd also be the targets of a massive fraud effort, too, but that's a different topic.)
Whenever someone mentions "automating" some part of a task, some people immediately jump to the conclusion that the entire task will be relegated to computers. Unfortunately, some of those people will be the operators and enforcers of that system, and who believe in the infallibility of it. Worse, they're negatively conditioned by the number of fraudulent complaints. Your dad had a legitimate complaint, yet a real complaint is often lost in a sea of people just whining to get out of tickets that they actually deserve. Believe it or not, in your dad's case the system worked exactly as designed; just remember the system wasn't designed with his convenience as a requirement.
I think we both agree that their sample size of one planet is not statistically significant. If he wants to be taken seriously, this guy should be funding the hell out of SETI.
Hahahahahahaha, sorry, that last sentence was too hard to type without laughing.
Actually, even low resolution cameras can be really useful, under certain conditions. If the suspect stands still for a few frames, the images can sometimes be enhanced due to motion differences between the frames. The process is like anti-aliasing in reverse.
In the video clips i saw on the news the suspects were walking, and the differences between frames looked too great to get the kind of data needed to interpolate.
If you're interested in seeing this done in a non-fakey-CSI application, Thierry Legault is an astrophotographer who uses frame interpolation to produce amazingly clear shots of objects like the ISS. See his site here to learn more: http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/
I am always amused when I see these posts on $(any_topic) that reveal the inability of the poster to recognize things happen on a variety of levels.
In this case, intelligence refers not to the subset of humans capable of posting on slashdot, or playing music. Intelligence in this context refers to the evolution of a brain capable of making decisions based on stimuli as well as experience. An earthworm would qualify as intelligent. It takes a whole lot more steps to get from amino acid soup to an earthworm's level of intelligence than it would to get from an earthworm-sized brain to a human brain.
You're being so literal it's constraining your thinking. It's like you have your own personal grammar nazi that keeps you from seeing a bigger picture. That's especially dangerous on slashdot where the "editors" rarely choose the right words. Learn to expand and adapt.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not entirely true. Cell phones do have adverse health effects. They are known to be substantial contributors to distracted driving accidents that cause thousands of deaths and injuries every year, increasing the risks of accident by a level equal to that created by drunk driving.
If we limit the scope of the claim to first degree adverse health effects, then cell phones have much less of an impact on people, limited to the blunt force trauma caused by phones thrown by angry spouses and the like. But you still can't accurately state that there are no known adverse effects of cell phones.
Had you fully qualified your statement with "directly caused by emitted radiation", then you would have been 100% correct.
I'll paraphrase this particular story then, which might help.
"The city of San Francisco once again vowed to remain steadfast in their commitment to ignorance, but today acknowledged that, because so many people have refused to remain as stupid as they are, the list of like-minded idiots willing to agree with them has plummeted to the point where creating an effective scare tactic campaign is well beyond their admittedly meager level of competence.
Jenny McCarthy is said to be fraught with disappointment, and stuck a fork in her own eye in protest. Terry Childs could not be reached for comment."
Put an MBA in charge of an engineering division, and this is exactly what you get.
MBAs are toxic in any position other than CEO. CPAs should run Finance divisions, engineers should run Engineering divisions, salesmen should run Marketing. MBAs should push mail carts, or mops, until they get it.
And if you have a finite budget, and your users are demanding more new features than your budget allows, where do you spend that money? Do you ignore them while you upgrade stuff that is already doing what they need it to do? Or do you give the people writing the checks what they are asking for now?
You can tell them you need a budget for upgrades. But what do you think gets cut first in the budget priority meetings? The thing with a projected ROI in 6 months, or a thing that might avoid an expense five years from now?
Yes, they have serious problems. Yes, they have had plenty of warning. Yes, companies budget poorly for software maintenance. Yes, companies don't understand TCO. But it's not a rare thing.
That's a lot of "if". Electronics are usually not worth extending. By the end of their warranty, they're already well on their way to obsolescence. The Nook Color? If it failed post warranty, I'd first pop the case to try fixing it myself. Failing that, I'd upgrade to a current tablet like the newest version of the Kindle Fire, or a new mini iPad, or whatever else is current. If nothing else, I'd at least get a Nook++.
Electronics devalue too quickly to waste a lot of money on protection.
I have two strong considerations: if it's an electronic device, it's useful life is roughly not much longer than the warranty. I'll live with an unprotected phone, and by the time something bad happens to it, it'll be near obsolescence anyway. I'll upgrade rather than repair it.
The other consideration is moving parts and repairability. If it has a lot of moving parts and I can't personally repair it if it breaks, I'll consider the warranty. But I can fix a lot of things myself quite easily. And things without many moving parts tend not to break.
I also don't treat my stuff like crap. I don't drop phones, I don't use the iPad as a hammer, I don't have a houseful of destructive children or pets. I tend to repair small problems promptly, before they turn into big problems. My stuff routinely lasts a lot longer than their extended warranties.
My exception for extended warranties is my wife's latest car. The dealer offered a lifetime service contract that was less than the last three years of maintenance on my twelve year old truck, and it includes oil changes and tire rotations. As i tend to keep all my vehicles for over ten years, and I have no plans to move too far away from the dealer, I couldn't pass that up. My risk exposure there is if the car is totaled before the end of its expected life.
Sorry, I just googled for "Hello Kitty AK-47" images and took the first all-pink gun photo that came up. I didn't study it, and I didnt even consider the Goog would deliver the wrong weapon type.
Calm down. Long ago, when "zip guns" were being made out of a stolen car antenna, a rubber band, a clothespin, and a rimfire .22 bullet, and teen gangs started threatening each other with them, nobody banned antennas or clothespins.
There's always the Hello Kitty AK-47.
You completely misread his essay. Yegge did not try to claim that "bugs are not a big deal" to him. He only pointed that out as a possible viewpoint of a "liberal" programmer.
However, his thesis that programmers are either "conservatives" or "liberals" is completely wrong-headed. People are either engineers (tests, proof, knowledge) or not. Static typing doesn't enter into it. The crap he was yammering about seemed written to justify his choices and his existence, not to provide useful knowledge.
I, for one, will SWAT our new robotic fly overlords! Ha ha!
They sound like they are completely dependent upon these cards, and would have to expend at least a few hours of effort to replace them. But overall, converting would probably cost less than two service calls from the card punch guy, and would pay for itself in not many weeks.
On the other hand, they operate a museum piece and are making the news as a result. Free advertising. Lighten up.
That's because the new system is frequently implemented in the latest version of a one-size-fits-all, Three-Letter-Acronym, popular technology of the day. And that's because the implementers are obsessed with flexing their technological prowess, instead of solving the business problem. I know a guy who would start by insisting this company should replace this thing with a Grails / Hadoop based solution. Why? Because he's a Grails and Hadoop fanboy, not because they have anything to do with this business' needs. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like Michaelangelo's Pieta.
The bigger question is if this could be replaced with a "faster" system. It probably could, but you have to consider the entire manufacturing and accounting processes it handles. Do they punch the cards and include them with the job? Do workers write notes on the punch cards before returning them? How would all those activities be replaced? There are tons of further things to consider, like a shop floor is a notoriously dirty environment. Labels might be tough because adhesives won't stick due to oil on the work products. A beeping scanner might not work if the employees wear hearing protection. And no matter what, if you have to retrain your employees to do a process differently, there will be a temporary slowdown due to the learning curve.
On the plus side, if you are honestly looking at your business process with an eye to changing the automation, you can probably find places where the new automation would help you to eliminate waste. Do the shop guys measure things with a dial caliper and write them down? Plug in a data collecting caliper and skip the pencils. Do the guys have to move a job sheet from bin to bin as they do their work? RFID tags on the bins could eliminate the handling of the job sheet. Can a new scheduling program help you find the more profitable jobs, or the faster paying customers, and move them to the front of the queue when cashflow is tight?
There's likely a lot of things they could improve with automation, but any of them would involve a lot of change, and many people are uncomfortable with that much change.
A robot army that could assemble itself from flat storage - assuming one is operational for the original assembly or hand assembled does sound like something from a sci-fi plot about world domination...
Let me guess, the story is titled "I, Kea".
The bacteria only have to survive long enough to deliver the radiation to the cancer cells, which is a much shorter time frame than the lethality of the bacterial infection itself. Stick the patient in a PET scanner, inject him with the radioactive bacteria, wait a while, and watch until the little buggers to find their way to the tumor. Then begin treatment with cipro. If the bacteria die while inside the pancreas, that's even better - the radiation remains inside their stationary tiny corpses, and will continue to attack the cancer cells until it decays or until the T-cells haul it away.
Remember, this is just the news announcing some promising experiments. It's not a packaged treatment yet. Perhaps they find a way to genetically modify the listeria to produce lower levels of toxins. Perhaps they splice in a weakening mutation that causes it to immediately die in the presence of a certain antibiotic, or when exposed to fairly low levels of RF. Maybe they add Terminator genes to prevent it from reproducing. I'm sure there 's a long list of potential kill-switches that they're already testing out.
Is it risky? Heck, yeah. But is the risk worse than that of pancreatic cancer?
You're absolutely right, of course, and I do apologize to civil engineers as I don't mean to trivialize what they do.
What I was intending to say is that most traffic bridge projects don't have many hidden problems, and the parts that aren't hidden are very well understood and repeatable. Beams support load X, they span distance D, etc. the problem space is well defined and understood, its been repeated hundreds of times, and there are formulas that yield estimates. Beams are off-the-rack commodities. An engineer doesn't invent a new type of beam for each bridge, because that would be expensive and wasteful.
Similarly, cranking out websites on a Wordpress framework is pretty straight forward and cheap. Packages like that are the I-beams of the software world. But building a custom app to invoke bizarre and arcane business logic, to serve irrational people with an ill-defined idea of what they want, that's when it gets unpredictable and expensive. Libraries, architectures, patterns, frameworks, they all help reduce the constant reinvention of the computing wheel, but are often misused, or are inefficient, or don't adequately match the task, or suffer from some other hidden shortcoming that has to be worked around. People forget to account for failure conditions, or imagine terrible bugaboos that require layers of complex logic to guard against an eventuality that never materializes. And lots of developers fail to test, and produce code that occasionally works by accident more than by design.
Actually, most of those things can be predicted. What is harder to predict is the creative aspect of development. Predicting a civil engineering project, like a bridge, is easy because engineers can compute the number of beams, the volume of concrete, the depths of the footings, etc, and they already have a good idea how construction people will behave, so they can add 5% for vacations, 20% for staffing difficulties, 10% for late trucks, etc. Predicting the creation of a new piece of software is less certain, because so many of those pieces are unknown. You make an initial survey of the requirements, and take an educated guess at what the solution might be, but you know that's never the final picture of the real solution.
If you're on a mature Agile team, you trot out your velocity, map your epics to some t-shirt sizes, and do some simplistic multiplication. But you also know to announce the estimates in terms of your team's delivery dates, and you don't overpromise. At this point, either management trusts your team's reputation and you boldly go forward, or you give them estimates with confidence levels around 20%, because you simply can't be more accurate than that.
If you're on a waterfall team, any software development estimate with an accuracy figure of higher than about 50% should be viewed with suspicion, and anyone claiming 90% or higher should be flagged as a true bullshit artist.
Even if the bacteria continue to reproduce in harmful rates, they can be treated later with antibiotics. First things first - target the cancer cells. Then you can worry about what the infection might have done to you.
I realize you were probably asking this in jest, but Verizon Business Security is independent of their cell phone business. What happened is their investigators got pretty darn good at rooting out hackers, both internal and external. Helping customers find external hackers in their networks led them to offering these investigation services to other corporations. I'm pretty sure that their security team is a profitable self-sustaining division these days.
The most important thing to the rest of us is they created a schema for recording incidents, and they publish the data (after anonymizing it.) With the number of investigations they perform, it becomes a statistically significant source of information about breaches, which had been a real black hole of information before.
Most companies are reluctant to announce anything about their breaches. They're always negative publicity, they lead to accusations of wrongdoing or incompetence, and they may reveal other sensitive internal information about the kinds of data they keep. By being anonymized through the DBIR, we all get to learn much more about the threat landscape without being able to blame a specific company for a specific loss.
Why would they betray their own community?
There was no "betrayal of their own community" here, unless their community is a community of violent bombers. This was some human beings who heard of some criminals discussing a plot, and not wanting other innocent humans to die as a result of their inaction.
Not every Muslim prays for "death to the infidels", not even if they attend the same mosque.
If the images had been of sufficient quality, the number of false positives could be low enough that humans could individually investigate the results. And in a manhunt like this, they would have been.
Even the automated turnpike ticketing process has a planned out manual step - issue all tickets regardless of the quality of the plate imaging, and reverse them based on driver complaints. Don't think that wasn't planned out, it's just the commission's goal was to maximize revenue at the expense of a few mistakes, knowing they would never achieve 100% accuracy. If the law had been written such that "all incorrect tickets shall result in a $1000 penalty being paid by the Turnpike Commission to the falsely accused" they might have more incentive to improve their read accuracy. (They'd also be the targets of a massive fraud effort, too, but that's a different topic.)
Whenever someone mentions "automating" some part of a task, some people immediately jump to the conclusion that the entire task will be relegated to computers. Unfortunately, some of those people will be the operators and enforcers of that system, and who believe in the infallibility of it. Worse, they're negatively conditioned by the number of fraudulent complaints. Your dad had a legitimate complaint, yet a real complaint is often lost in a sea of people just whining to get out of tickets that they actually deserve. Believe it or not, in your dad's case the system worked exactly as designed; just remember the system wasn't designed with his convenience as a requirement.
I think we both agree that their sample size of one planet is not statistically significant. If he wants to be taken seriously, this guy should be funding the hell out of SETI.
Hahahahahahaha, sorry, that last sentence was too hard to type without laughing.
Citizen! Do not question the integrity of the site! Mandatory government monitoring of your traffic is for your own protection!
Or maybe a bunch of nerds are too lazy to update their certs.
Actually, even low resolution cameras can be really useful, under certain conditions. If the suspect stands still for a few frames, the images can sometimes be enhanced due to motion differences between the frames. The process is like anti-aliasing in reverse.
In the video clips i saw on the news the suspects were walking, and the differences between frames looked too great to get the kind of data needed to interpolate.
If you're interested in seeing this done in a non-fakey-CSI application, Thierry Legault is an astrophotographer who uses frame interpolation to produce amazingly clear shots of objects like the ISS. See his site here to learn more: http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/
I am always amused when I see these posts on $(any_topic) that reveal the inability of the poster to recognize things happen on a variety of levels.
In this case, intelligence refers not to the subset of humans capable of posting on slashdot, or playing music. Intelligence in this context refers to the evolution of a brain capable of making decisions based on stimuli as well as experience. An earthworm would qualify as intelligent. It takes a whole lot more steps to get from amino acid soup to an earthworm's level of intelligence than it would to get from an earthworm-sized brain to a human brain.
You're being so literal it's constraining your thinking. It's like you have your own personal grammar nazi that keeps you from seeing a bigger picture. That's especially dangerous on slashdot where the "editors" rarely choose the right words. Learn to expand and adapt.