I guess you didn't see the strip? If it's the one I saw, it was *not* a "copy of the original" -- unless strawberry shortcake went through puberty with a vengeance since the last time I saw her.
>Nevertheless this invention could have a host of useful appliances.
Yeah, like the ones actually mentioned in the article.;-)
The cellphone thing is not mentioned in the story at all and is almost certainly not an intended application of this technology.
The article does talk about things like wireless sensors deep inside a nuclear submarine charging themselves off the vibrations of a nearby pump. You don't have to run wires to the sensor or use batteries that someone has to replace.
Yeah, I'm not sure where the submitter came up with that example, certainly not from the article.
My first thought was tapping into energy that is a by-product of something else very large. The vibrations from a ringing phone isn't a very good application for this as the phone does this on purpose to get your attention - the energy is short-lived and infrequent compared to any potential use (recarging the battery).
A huge motor somewhere spinning away generates continuous vibrations in the course of its main function (converting electricity into motion). The idea here is to capture small amounts of energy to power small defives where it may otherwise be impractical to run wires or have to change a battery:
The Navy, Kevin says, wants to use this technology with wireless sensors, which are expensive -- or just plain difficult -- to power. For instance, adding a sensor to a pump in a nuclear reactor means you have to either run an electrical cable into the reactor (expensive) or send a technician in to replace the battery from time to time (very dangerous).
Interesting story -- misleading summary by the submitter.
seem to remember Spock using it to detect just about anything (animal, vegetable or mineral)
this site, although very slow seems to have lots of details:
STANDARD TRICORDER
The standard tricorder is a portable sensing, computing, and data communications device developed by Starfleet R&D and issued to starship crew members. It incorporates miniaturized versions of those scientific instruments found to be most useful for both shipboard and away missions, and its capabilities may be augmented with mission-specific peripherals. Its many functions may be accessed by touch-sensitive controls or, if necessary, voice command.
MAIN FEATURES
The standard tricorder measures 8.5 x 12 x 3 cm and masses 353 grams. The case is constructed of micromilled duranium foam, and is divided into two hinged sections for compact storage. The control surfaces consist of ruggedized positive-feedback buttons and a 2.4 x 3.6 cm display screen. While a full personal access display device-type multilayer control screen would have afforded the user with a wider range of preferences in organizing commands and visual information, the simplified button arrangement was chosen for greater ease of use in the field. The internal electronics, on the other hand, were designed to provide the greatest number of possible options in managing sensor data, visual images, and multichannel communications, in all incoming, outgoing, or recorded modes.
The major electronic components include the primary power loop, sensor assemblies, parallel processing block, control and display interface, subspace communication unit, and multiple memory storage units. Power is provided to the total system through a rechargeable sarium crystal rated for eighteen hours of full instrument activity. True power usage rate and maximum useful time is, of course, dependent on which subsystems are active, and is continuously computed for call-up on the display. Typical power usage is 15.48 watts. The sensor assemblies incorporate a total of 235 mechanical, electromagnetic, and subspace devices mounted about the internal frame as well as imbedded in the casing material as conformal instruments. One hundred and fifteen of these are clustered in the forward end for directional readings, with a field-of-view (FOV) lower limit of 1/4 degree. The other 120 are omnidirectional devices, taking measurements of the surrounding space. The deployable hand sensor incorporates seventeen high-resolution devices for detailed readings down to an FOV of one minute of arc. Within these FOV limits, both active and passive scans can provide readings approaching the theoretical limits of the EM radiation of physical process under study. By combining readings from different sensors, the tricorder computer processors can synthesize images and numerical readouts to be acted upon by the crew member.
The computer capabilities of the standard tricorder are distributed throughout the device as preprocessors attached to the various sensors and twenty-seven polled main computing segments (PMCS). Each PMCS contains subsections dedicated to rapid management of the sensor assemblies, prioritizing of processing tasks, routing of processed data, and management of control and power systems. The PMCS chips supplied with the TR-580 and TR-595H(P) standard tricorders are rated at 150 GFP calculations per second.
The control and display interface (CDI) routes commands from both the panel buttons and display screen to the PMCS for execution of tricorder functions. Multiple functions can be run simultaneously, limited only by PMCS speed. In practice, crew members usually carry out no more than six separate scanning tasks.
Communications functions are carried out by tricorder through the subspace transceiver assembly (STA). Voice and data are uplink/downlinked along standard communicator frequencies. Transmission data rates are variable, with a maximum speed in Em
... June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.
The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
I don't think he turned himself in, but he did realize what he had put together was too 'hot' and he had started dismantling it.
When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.
At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car.
They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
These are lies. There have been no firings of depleted uranium in Iraq. We crushed the crusading infidels and forced them to eat their own DU munitions!
sure to be modded OT, but what the hell, it's only karma:
Damn, the page was taken down.
Due to overwhelming support for welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. We will be bringing it back on a brand new web server that will be dedicated to the task of serving this comical view of history's funniest straight man. This should be up in 24 hours from now.
The site was so popular that 4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on it's own server from the beginning.
Called on the United States to "surrender or be burned in their tanks." We assume he means the tanks sitting in the presidential palaces, but his office could not be reached for clarification.
Hmmm, should we seek some reasonable amount to compensate for our loss? Something like $4,000 or so? That ought to cover it.
Umm, no... we need to send a message. We need to make sure that it gets in the papers. Let's sue them for (wait for it...) a _million_ dollars!
What?! Are you nuts? You'll never collect, these kids don't have that kind of money and no judge in the universe is going to award that kind of judgement! You might as well sue them for a hundred-trillion dollars.
Oh, I see... Then we'll do that! That way they'll know we are _serious_!!!
Say, do you remember when I broke into Larry's house Late at night and tied his mouth with a rag Then I dragged him by his ankles to the middle of the forest And stuffed him in a big plastic bag If the cops ever find him who knows what they'd say But I'm sure if ol' Lar' were still with us today He would have to agree with me it was a pretty good gag
Oh boy, what a joker What a funny, funny guy I'll never forget about Larry No matter how I try
Tell me about it. My wife started telling me about this the other night. I was only half paying attention (as usual, one eye on CNN, yeesh) -- when I did a double-take and went 'huh? what? really? no way -- she went and grabbed the article and put it in front of me. Man, I really lost my appetite.
No,no,no... isn't the point to get away entirely from proprietary formats?
That's what we're doing here. We're converting all of our technical manuals from Adobe Frame or MS Word to XML (DocBook). The software we're using (Arbortext) sucks the content out of these closed formats and puts in into XML, picking which element to use based on the text styles it encounters in the source file. From there, any XML-aware software can get at the content (we were pretty locked in with Adobe and MS, wnated to escape out of that trap).
His point makes complete sense to me from my perspective.
Did we want to still be using frame or word ten years from now? no. Were we going to still have our documents around in ten years? yep.
Google ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results. Google will indicate if a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page below the search box.
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)
Another method for doing this is conducting a phrase search, which simply means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search.
I saw an interview with one of the families last night where they were angry that they learned about it on TV instead of being notified by the military - only they were watching Telemundo or something.
Seems like they should be pissed at the network that aired it, not the DoD because it wasn't able to notify them within 20 minutes of finding out. I think I heard they strive to work within 72 hours which seems pretty reasonable (but then, I don't have any family involved this time - my brother was over there last time, though).
They were also pissed because they didn't know their daughter was in Iraq. They said that the last they knew she was in Kuwait. I'm sorry, is the DoD supposed to make the family of each soldier aware of their location at all times? I mean, this *is* a war, right?
Jammers can be deployed on mountaintops or tall antennas, but it is probably most economical to place them aboard aircraft. Langley thinks the US might also use "spoofing", in which fake signals fool the GPS receiver into thinking it is somewhere else.
Cool, make the enemy think they are about 500 miles east from where they really are.
Where the hell are we? This can't be right! According to this we are 300 miles out in the Gulf.
Good point. Here's what I predict will be the rationalization:
"Evil music companies charge too much for CDs, musicians get too little of the profits. I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong: music companies are ripping off us and the artists, so ripping them off in return isn't a big deal."
"OTOH, comics are cheap - at most they cost the price of a newspaper. The strip writers are fairly compensated for their art. I'm willing to pay this small amount for a subscription because I'm not getting ripped off by some evil company."
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you didn't see the strip? If it's the one I saw, it was *not* a "copy of the original" -- unless strawberry shortcake went through puberty with a vengeance since the last time I saw her.
>Nevertheless this invention could have a host of useful appliances.
;-)
Yeah, like the ones actually mentioned in the article.
The cellphone thing is not mentioned in the story at all and is almost certainly not an intended application of this technology.
The article does talk about things like wireless sensors deep inside a nuclear submarine charging themselves off the vibrations of a nearby pump. You don't have to run wires to the sensor or use batteries that someone has to replace.
Yeah, I'm not sure where the submitter came up with that example, certainly not from the article.
My first thought was tapping into energy that is a by-product of something else very large. The vibrations from a ringing phone isn't a very good application for this as the phone does this on purpose to get your attention - the energy is short-lived and infrequent compared to any potential use (recarging the battery).
A huge motor somewhere spinning away generates continuous vibrations in the course of its main function (converting electricity into motion). The idea here is to capture small amounts of energy to power small defives where it may otherwise be impractical to run wires or have to change a battery:
The Navy, Kevin says, wants to use this technology with wireless sensors, which are expensive -- or just plain difficult -- to power. For instance, adding a sensor to a pump in a nuclear reactor means you have to either run an electrical cable into the reactor (expensive) or send a technician in to replace the battery from time to time (very dangerous).
Interesting story -- misleading summary by the submitter.
hmmm, good question -- lessee
seem to remember Spock using it to detect just about anything (animal, vegetable or mineral)
this site, although very slow seems to have lots of details:
STANDARD TRICORDER
The standard tricorder is a portable sensing, computing, and data communications device developed by Starfleet R&D and issued to starship crew members. It incorporates miniaturized versions of those scientific instruments found to be most useful for both shipboard and away missions, and its capabilities may be augmented with mission-specific peripherals. Its many functions may be accessed by touch-sensitive controls or, if necessary, voice command.
MAIN FEATURES
The standard tricorder measures 8.5 x 12 x 3 cm and masses 353 grams. The case is constructed of micromilled duranium foam, and is divided into two hinged sections for compact storage. The control surfaces consist of ruggedized positive-feedback buttons and a 2.4 x 3.6 cm display screen. While a full personal access display device-type multilayer control screen would have afforded the user with a wider range of preferences in organizing commands and visual information, the simplified button arrangement was chosen for greater ease of use in the field. The internal electronics, on the other hand, were designed to provide the greatest number of possible options in managing sensor data, visual images, and multichannel communications, in all incoming, outgoing, or recorded modes.
The major electronic components include the primary power loop, sensor assemblies, parallel processing block, control and display interface, subspace communication unit, and multiple memory storage units.
Power is provided to the total system through a rechargeable sarium crystal rated for eighteen hours of full instrument activity. True power usage rate and maximum useful time is, of course, dependent on which subsystems are active, and is continuously computed for call-up on the display. Typical power usage is 15.48 watts. The sensor assemblies incorporate a total of 235 mechanical, electromagnetic, and subspace devices mounted about the internal frame as well as imbedded in the casing material as conformal instruments. One hundred and fifteen of these are clustered in the forward end for directional readings, with a field-of-view (FOV) lower limit of 1/4 degree. The other 120 are omnidirectional devices, taking measurements of the surrounding space. The deployable hand sensor incorporates seventeen high-resolution devices for detailed readings down to an FOV of one minute of arc. Within these FOV limits, both active and passive scans can provide readings approaching the theoretical limits of the EM radiation of physical process under study. By combining readings from different sensors, the tricorder computer processors can synthesize images and numerical readouts to be acted upon by the crew member.
The computer capabilities of the standard tricorder are distributed throughout the device as preprocessors attached to the various sensors and twenty-seven polled main computing segments (PMCS). Each PMCS contains subsections dedicated to rapid management of the sensor assemblies, prioritizing of processing tasks, routing of processed data, and management of control and power systems. The PMCS chips supplied with the TR-580 and TR-595H(P) standard tricorders are rated at 150 GFP calculations per second.
The control and display interface (CDI) routes commands from both the panel buttons and display screen to the PMCS for execution of tricorder functions. Multiple functions can be run simultaneously, limited only by PMCS speed. In practice, crew members usually carry out no more than six separate scanning tasks.
Communications functions are carried out by tricorder through the subspace transceiver assembly (STA). Voice and data are uplink/downlinked along standard communicator frequencies. Transmission data rates are variable, with a maximum speed in Em
radioactive boyscout
... June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.
Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.
The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
I don't think he turned himself in, but he did realize what he had put together was too 'hot' and he had started dismantling it.
When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.
At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car.
They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
sure, that makes it safe, right?
DEPLETED URANIUM EDUCATION PROJECT
WHO studies depleted uranium in Iraq
These are lies. There have been no firings of depleted uranium in Iraq. We crushed the crusading infidels and forced them to eat their own DU munitions!
uh, no -- slash does that to stop page-widening trolls, IIRC
I'll say,
m /w p-adv/advertisers/popunders/reliaquote2_april03.ht ml
The pop-under that came up with the washpost page was strange in that it was a doubleclick ad page that errored on 404:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/www.washingtonpost.co
Error 404 Not Found
What are the chances?
I'm sure there's a IN SOVIET RUSSIA joke there somewhere, but I'm too tired to give it much effort this afternoon...
sure to be modded OT, but what the hell, it's only karma:
Damn, the page was taken down.
Due to overwhelming support for welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. We will be bringing it back on a brand new web server that will be dedicated to the task of serving this comical view of history's funniest straight man. This should be up in 24 hours from now.
The site was so popular that 4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on it's own server from the beginning.
Google's cache
Called on the United States to "surrender or be burned in their tanks." We assume he means the tanks sitting in the presidential palaces, but his office could not be reached for clarification.
> They are smarter than us.
Evil will *always* triumph over good because good is *dumb*!
> if the telescope is 6 month behind, because then the sun is in the way....
Well, I assume that's why he said
and another 3 months behind (for line of sight comms)
don't know if that would work, but at least he thought of it
Ya think?
Hmmm, should we seek some reasonable amount to compensate for our loss? Something like $4,000 or so? That ought to cover it.
Umm, no... we need to send a message. We need to make sure that it gets in the papers. Let's sue them for (wait for it...) a _million_ dollars!
What?! Are you nuts? You'll never collect, these kids don't have that kind of money and no judge in the universe is going to award that kind of judgement! You might as well sue them for a hundred-trillion dollars.
Oh, I see... Then we'll do that! That way they'll know we are _serious_!!!
*groan*
Reminds me of that Wierd Al song:
Say, do you remember when I broke into Larry's house
Late at night and tied his mouth with a rag
Then I dragged him by his ankles to the middle of the forest
And stuffed him in a big plastic bag
If the cops ever find him who knows what they'd say
But I'm sure if ol' Lar' were still with us today
He would have to agree with me it was a pretty good gag
Oh boy, what a joker
What a funny, funny guy
I'll never forget about Larry
No matter how I try
Tell me about it. My wife started telling me about this the other night. I was only half paying attention (as usual, one eye on CNN, yeesh) -- when I did a double-take and went 'huh? what? really? no way -- she went and grabbed the article and put it in front of me. Man, I really lost my appetite.
In general I would agree that the 4/1 stuff here is pretty weak.
/. editors. Looks like Raster is responsible for this one and /. just picked it up:
In this particular instance I wouldn't assign blame to the
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/news.html
>Slashdot is supposed to be a serious news source.
Really? Since when?
Comments concerning the layout, construction and functionality of this site
;-]
should be sent to webmaster@icann.org.
Why don't you drop 'im a line, then.
Huh? Wrap binary data? Whaddimiss?
No,no,no... isn't the point to get away entirely from proprietary formats?
That's what we're doing here. We're converting all of our technical manuals from Adobe Frame or MS Word to XML (DocBook). The software we're using (Arbortext) sucks the content out of these closed formats and puts in into XML, picking which element to use based on the text styles it encounters in the source file. From there, any XML-aware software can get at the content (we were pretty locked in with Adobe and MS, wnated to escape out of that trap).
His point makes complete sense to me from my perspective.
Did we want to still be using frame or word ten years from now? no.
Were we going to still have our documents around in ten years? yep.
Man, who knew the devil had such a nice @ss!
"There has to be a national effort to protect the freedom of the press even more," said al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout
Wow - think he gets asked about his name a lot?
yah, but google apparenly doesn't consider there to be a "stopword":
there works fine and there.com is the first result.
google basics
Google ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results. Google will indicate if a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page below the search box.
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)
Another method for doing this is conducting a phrase search, which simply means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search.
My first thought on seeing this thread was Bender.
Olde Fortran malt liquor, was it?
yah OT but -
I saw an interview with one of the families last night where they were angry that they learned about it on TV instead of being notified by the military - only they were watching Telemundo or something.
Seems like they should be pissed at the network that aired it, not the DoD because it wasn't able to notify them within 20 minutes of finding out. I think I heard they strive to work within 72 hours which seems pretty reasonable (but then, I don't have any family involved this time - my brother was over there last time, though).
They were also pissed because they didn't know their daughter was in Iraq. They said that the last they knew she was in Kuwait. I'm sorry, is the DoD supposed to make the family of each soldier aware of their location at all times? I mean, this *is* a war, right?
From New Scientist
Jammers can be deployed on mountaintops or tall antennas, but it is probably most economical to place them aboard aircraft. Langley thinks the US might also use "spoofing", in which fake signals fool the GPS receiver into thinking it is somewhere else.
Cool, make the enemy think they are about 500 miles east from where they really are.
Where the hell are we? This can't be right! According to this we are 300 miles out in the Gulf.
Good point. Here's what I predict will be the rationalization:
"Evil music companies charge too much for CDs, musicians get too little of the profits. I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong: music companies are ripping off us and the artists, so ripping them off in return isn't a big deal."
"OTOH, comics are cheap - at most they cost the price of a newspaper. The strip writers are fairly compensated for their art. I'm willing to pay this small amount for a subscription because I'm not getting ripped off by some evil company."