The idea is to broadcast useful instructions during an emergency. In the early days, that meant "nukes incoming; prepare to duck and cover / head to bomb shelter / find local fallout shelter". Sometimes we get "tornado incoming; get away from glass"; that one's pretty handy.
What would you broadcast on 9/11 during the brief window between WTF and 100% landed? "Beware of airplanes"? The news had THAT covered well before anyone in the government could put together a coherent sentence.
Some problems:
* Since water is transparent, voxels closer to you won't block ones farther from you. Everything will be translucent.
* Reflections and refractions will cause unintended lighting.
* Drop size and timing precision will limit resolution.
A few thoughts to make it work well:
* The drops will take a while to fall. For playback this is fine, but for realtime use you'd need to release drops in case they might be needed. Thus you need a generic drop pattern to project onto.
* A good pattern might be to drop the drops in regular waves / sheets sweeping away from the light source (assuming it's above the display; sweep toward it if it's lower) - IE, you're creating curved surfaces that are approximately facing the projector. The faster you can sweep the faster your refresh rate; it's limited by making sure the sheets don't start blocking each other.
* Release the drops well above the top of the display. That way they'll be moving faster (less interference; better refresh rate) and a more consistent speed (instead of near-stopped at the top of the display; less curvature in the sheets).
* Use colored drops! If you drop Bayer-pattern RGB sheets and use narrow-band color filters on the light source you might decrease the problems of reflections and refractions considerably - each voxel won't significantly illuminate its neighbors, and will only illuminate some of the drops on the next sheet.
* If you use colored drops, arrange the nozzles in RGBG rows and use dedicated rows of drain-troughs to catch each color so they can be reused.
* Use opaque pigments. It will reduce the refraction problems, but it will probably make the viewing angle narrower.
* With multiple projectors and a really complicated drop pattern you could probably make an amazing display, but the math to find interfering drops gets hard.
IR is a very broad spectrum. They don't say what the wavelength is, but I'd expect they're using near-IR, which is cheap, widely-available laser technology. Do you feel warm when you cover the front of an infrared remote? Near IR isn't a strong heat carrier unless you're pushing a LOT of photons... In which case this isn't a safe alternative to the high power bug-zapping lasers used in those wonderful videos.
Far-IR lasers are expensive, inefficient, finicky machines. They're not the sort of thing you'd deploy to fight malaria.
In between there's a whole lot of spectrum, but really, I think it's most likely they're using near IR, the mosquitoes see it, and for whatever reason they don't want to cross.
Re:I like gvim, except...
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
And which 'vi' do you think the default should be? elvis? nvi? The original Bill Joy version wasn't ported until very recently due to licensing problems, and it's practically abandoned. None of the free distros ship it by default.
If they're going to symlink 'vi' to something else, why not vim? Personally I don't care if I get "full-on syntax highlighting and colouring" even when I don't need it. It's not like vim is heavy or slow on any system with enough RAM to do a default install of any current distro.
And if you really care, why not just install nvi and update-alternatives? That's why they're there.
Right now I keep all my money in dollars, trading in shortly before sending and trading out when I receive. Yes, trading fees suck, but for the small amounts I use I don't really care; it's a fair price to pay to get some experience with cryptocurrency. The 0.5% fees to trade in and out (1% round trip) are still considerably lower than what Visa or Paypal charge.
It's far from certain, but I'm hoping it will eventually stabilize after the get-rich-quick jackoffs finish going broke; then I could keep some "pocket money" in coins.
Some of us are glad to see the price drop. I just want to send money to people without PayPal taking a cut or getting a say in who I can send it to. As such, it makes no difference to me what the price is - I can send 3 coins worth $10 or 10 coins worth $3, and it's all the same.
The price drop has crushed the "get rich quick" crowd, and good riddance. Hopefully they learned their lesson and will stay gone so the rest of us can get back to actually trying to USE Bitcoin for something, and see what it's good for.
Even if it still has terminal problems, it's a damned interesting experiment. We've already learned some important things - like, don't set your currency up so it can turn into a pyramid scheme. Hopefully that's burned itself out, and we can see what the next problem will be. The more we learn, the better Bitcoin2 will be.
A few quick debunks:
No, not all the exchanges have been hacked. MtGox (the big one) got hacked, but had adequate second-line defenses in place to contain the problem, and it didn't affect customers. Bitcoin7 was a bunch of incompetent dorks from the start. We told that to the world, but hey, some people don't listen. MyBitcoin was a wallet service run completely anonymously... I still find it unbelievable that people would give their money to some anonymous guy who promises to be really careful with it. I guess we needed the example to teach people the hard way? Those are all black eyes, but there are far more services that have been running smoothly.
Bitcoin is different from painting numbers on rocks. Anyone can paint numbers on rocks and devalue the rest of them. Bitcoins are generated in fixed quantities (500 per hour, decreasing to 250 per hour in about a year, with further decreases in the future), resulting in a small and predictable amount of inflation.
It is a currency: you can trade it for things. It might not have the same properties as some currencies you're used to, and it's quite possible it's not a good currency depending how you want to use it, but it is most certainly a currency.
Declaring it a currency doesn't destroy it through regulation. There are many non-federal-government-issue currencies operating in the United States without problem.
There IS a lot of fraud occurring. That's largely because people are used to electronic transactions being like PayPal or Visa - highly traceable and reversible. Bitcoin is much more like cash - don't give it to someone unless you trust them! That's an inherent tradeoff, but not necessarily a design flaw. Like I said, I don't want PayPal looking over my shoulder, telling me I can't send money for porn or WikiLeaks, and taking a cut for the privilege. I want something that works like cash, and I accept the responsibility that securing my cash requires! When (if?) people learn to see it that way, the fraud will decline. Again, it's not for everyone and everything, but I think it has a place.
The trouble with attenuating lasers is that you still need to see. Green is where we have our best vision by far. Red is fair, and our vision in blue is terrible. That's why the green lasers are always the biggest problem.
Thing is, green is right in the middle of the spectrum. Most filters are high-pass or low-pass. It's quite hard to make a very narrow notch filter that won't take out a huge swath of your most important vision information. That's why there are different laser safety goggles for different wavelengths - if you're using a red laser, you break out the blue goggles.
Pilots can't afford to lose that much vision on final approach.
I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken. I'd add a telephoto camera to the front of the plane that can zoom in and take a few shots whenever the plane gets hit with a laser. Even if you can't make out their faces, you might get some license plates, or see whose back yard it's coming from.
I think there are also nontechnological things they should be doing. First up would be to take some cockpit videos using a camera with a nice wide aperture - real sensitive, like your eyes are in the dark. Show the runway getting closer, closer, then FLASH you're completely overwhelmed by green for a couple seconds, stop the camera down a few to simulate your now-desensitized eyes, and then go back to trying to land the plane, now much closer to the runway and somewhat disoriented. Then publicize the hell out of the videos and some people will get the message.
For the rest, well, that's what the telephoto pictures are for.
Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?
Yes. I don't care when I know that I need the literal modifier when I'm initially typing the query. I DO care when I typed a reasonable query and Google does some dumb interpretation of it. With quotes, I now have to either switch to my mouse twice to insert the pair, or use a lot of arrow keys to move across the word. Either way is more annoying than using a single +.
I also don't like overloading the String operator with Literal functionality.
I'll grant that fuzzy-search-default is a benefit to average users, but what was wrong with the + ?
The monopoly is in operating systems, not web browsers. An increase in non-MS browsers on that chart indicates a success of antitrust law, not a failure.
First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser.
The problem isn't that the OS comes with a web browser.
The problem is that Microsoft, who has a monopoly position in operating systems, is leveraging that position to gain control of another market (web browsers). That's an immoral business practice, and that is exactly why we made it illegal with antitrust law.
I respect the fact that they go back on ideas that are bad.
I have nothing but respect for them for this. I wish more companies would behave this way.
The big question is why this idea ever got so far in the first place. It's a terrible idea, and if they weren't able to see that through intuition, statistical understanding of their market, focus groups, or any other means, then I have to conclude that they're incompetent.
Actually, no, it's still not the gyroscopic effect keeping you upright. The caster and trail (parameters of a bike's front suspension geometry) result in the bike having a self-balancing effect: as you lean to the right, it wants to steer right, and the centrifugal force of the turn pushes you left, keeping you from falling over. This works fine with zero-mass wheels that do not have any gyro effect.
At low speeds this effect is not enough for stability: with no active control it wants to turn constantly, and follows a squiggly, unsettled path. At mid-speeds it will want to turn, but they will be stable turns. At high speeds the bike becomes over-stable: if you let go mid-turn, the bike will automatically straighten itself out and return to a stable straight line. This is contrary to what you'd expect from the gyro effect, which would be to hold the bike leaning into the turn.
The gyro effect does exist, but its really not that strong compared to your weight and all the other forces involved.
You should read your link more carefully. Leaning is necessary to turn, but it is not what causes you to turn.
Read the next section. If you want to turn right, you briefly turn the handlebars left. That leans you to the right. You then turn the handlebars to the right, and enter a stable right turn. To exit the turn, you turn right a little harder, which brings you vertical again, and then you straighten out.
If one component is failed, why not replace it? The reason we don't do that now is that it's a complicated operation to do in space but if the point is to develop the technologies to make this kind of salvage possible, wouldn't it be just as easy to replace the broken part in some cases?
It has about the same level of effect as joining the military would. (Essentially none)
In any case, the whole point of my post was a cynical and sarcastic jab at US foreign policy. I'm surprised that everyone's trying to pick it apart as if I was serious.:/
I'm not criticizing the soldiers at all, actually. I'm just making a cynical joke of our foreign policy, which has, quite frankly, become a cynical joke.
Sure we'll stay, as long as you give us the right to rape, pillage and murder with no consequences. Oh, you've decided it's time for us to go home? Well, we know it's gonna be a rough time, but of course we'll honor your wishes. OK, see you next decade!
(takes off and buries a couple WMDs in the desert so they can be "found" again when needed, should have done that last time)
The one that overheated didn't shut down; it just had reduced power.
The brake problem was it lost its power assist, not all braking... It was perfectly drivable, and just needed a new fuse.
I'll grant you those are problems, but the fact that you think the car needed to be pushed home just shows my point about it being misleading. And neither of them is a problem with the battery life, which is what we were talking about here.
Moving where it's burned is worthwhile as long as we're being efficient, which batteries are, relatively. Power stations are cleaner than cars.
It DOES solve the problem if we generate electricity from non-carbon sources. Wind and nuclear are good choices, but solar has some problems if we need to charge batteries at night.
There's no problem obtaining and transporting hydrogen. You make it at the fueling station from water and electricity - the exact inverse reaction that occurs in a fuel cell. Of course, that electricity comes from the grid, the same as it would if you were generating the hydrogen at a central station.
With either batteries or hydrogen, the grid is capable of supporting 90% of our transportation needs, right now, no upgrades required, even in California. The trick is that we have to do the bulk charging / electrolysis off-peak. Why is that a deal-killer?
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is to broadcast useful instructions during an emergency. In the early days, that meant "nukes incoming; prepare to duck and cover / head to bomb shelter / find local fallout shelter". Sometimes we get "tornado incoming; get away from glass"; that one's pretty handy.
What would you broadcast on 9/11 during the brief window between WTF and 100% landed? "Beware of airplanes"? The news had THAT covered well before anyone in the government could put together a coherent sentence.
I think that's a great idea.
Some problems:
* Since water is transparent, voxels closer to you won't block ones farther from you. Everything will be translucent.
* Reflections and refractions will cause unintended lighting.
* Drop size and timing precision will limit resolution.
A few thoughts to make it work well:
* The drops will take a while to fall. For playback this is fine, but for realtime use you'd need to release drops in case they might be needed. Thus you need a generic drop pattern to project onto.
* A good pattern might be to drop the drops in regular waves / sheets sweeping away from the light source (assuming it's above the display; sweep toward it if it's lower) - IE, you're creating curved surfaces that are approximately facing the projector. The faster you can sweep the faster your refresh rate; it's limited by making sure the sheets don't start blocking each other.
* Release the drops well above the top of the display. That way they'll be moving faster (less interference; better refresh rate) and a more consistent speed (instead of near-stopped at the top of the display; less curvature in the sheets).
* Use colored drops! If you drop Bayer-pattern RGB sheets and use narrow-band color filters on the light source you might decrease the problems of reflections and refractions considerably - each voxel won't significantly illuminate its neighbors, and will only illuminate some of the drops on the next sheet.
* If you use colored drops, arrange the nozzles in RGBG rows and use dedicated rows of drain-troughs to catch each color so they can be reused.
* Use opaque pigments. It will reduce the refraction problems, but it will probably make the viewing angle narrower.
* With multiple projectors and a really complicated drop pattern you could probably make an amazing display, but the math to find interfering drops gets hard.
Good luck!
... No problem, L4D taught us how to deal with this: AIM FOR THE HEAD.
IR is a very broad spectrum. They don't say what the wavelength is, but I'd expect they're using near-IR, which is cheap, widely-available laser technology. Do you feel warm when you cover the front of an infrared remote? Near IR isn't a strong heat carrier unless you're pushing a LOT of photons... In which case this isn't a safe alternative to the high power bug-zapping lasers used in those wonderful videos.
Far-IR lasers are expensive, inefficient, finicky machines. They're not the sort of thing you'd deploy to fight malaria.
In between there's a whole lot of spectrum, but really, I think it's most likely they're using near IR, the mosquitoes see it, and for whatever reason they don't want to cross.
And which 'vi' do you think the default should be? elvis? nvi? The original Bill Joy version wasn't ported until very recently due to licensing problems, and it's practically abandoned. None of the free distros ship it by default.
If they're going to symlink 'vi' to something else, why not vim? Personally I don't care if I get "full-on syntax highlighting and colouring" even when I don't need it. It's not like vim is heavy or slow on any system with enough RAM to do a default install of any current distro.
And if you really care, why not just install nvi and update-alternatives? That's why they're there.
Right now I keep all my money in dollars, trading in shortly before sending and trading out when I receive. Yes, trading fees suck, but for the small amounts I use I don't really care; it's a fair price to pay to get some experience with cryptocurrency. The 0.5% fees to trade in and out (1% round trip) are still considerably lower than what Visa or Paypal charge.
It's far from certain, but I'm hoping it will eventually stabilize after the get-rich-quick jackoffs finish going broke; then I could keep some "pocket money" in coins.
Some of us are glad to see the price drop. I just want to send money to people without PayPal taking a cut or getting a say in who I can send it to. As such, it makes no difference to me what the price is - I can send 3 coins worth $10 or 10 coins worth $3, and it's all the same.
The price drop has crushed the "get rich quick" crowd, and good riddance. Hopefully they learned their lesson and will stay gone so the rest of us can get back to actually trying to USE Bitcoin for something, and see what it's good for.
Even if it still has terminal problems, it's a damned interesting experiment. We've already learned some important things - like, don't set your currency up so it can turn into a pyramid scheme. Hopefully that's burned itself out, and we can see what the next problem will be. The more we learn, the better Bitcoin2 will be.
A few quick debunks:
No, not all the exchanges have been hacked. MtGox (the big one) got hacked, but had adequate second-line defenses in place to contain the problem, and it didn't affect customers. Bitcoin7 was a bunch of incompetent dorks from the start. We told that to the world, but hey, some people don't listen. MyBitcoin was a wallet service run completely anonymously... I still find it unbelievable that people would give their money to some anonymous guy who promises to be really careful with it. I guess we needed the example to teach people the hard way? Those are all black eyes, but there are far more services that have been running smoothly.
Bitcoin is different from painting numbers on rocks. Anyone can paint numbers on rocks and devalue the rest of them. Bitcoins are generated in fixed quantities (500 per hour, decreasing to 250 per hour in about a year, with further decreases in the future), resulting in a small and predictable amount of inflation.
It is a currency: you can trade it for things. It might not have the same properties as some currencies you're used to, and it's quite possible it's not a good currency depending how you want to use it, but it is most certainly a currency.
Declaring it a currency doesn't destroy it through regulation. There are many non-federal-government-issue currencies operating in the United States without problem.
There IS a lot of fraud occurring. That's largely because people are used to electronic transactions being like PayPal or Visa - highly traceable and reversible. Bitcoin is much more like cash - don't give it to someone unless you trust them! That's an inherent tradeoff, but not necessarily a design flaw. Like I said, I don't want PayPal looking over my shoulder, telling me I can't send money for porn or WikiLeaks, and taking a cut for the privilege. I want something that works like cash, and I accept the responsibility that securing my cash requires! When (if?) people learn to see it that way, the fraud will decline. Again, it's not for everyone and everything, but I think it has a place.
The trouble with attenuating lasers is that you still need to see. Green is where we have our best vision by far. Red is fair, and our vision in blue is terrible. That's why the green lasers are always the biggest problem.
Thing is, green is right in the middle of the spectrum. Most filters are high-pass or low-pass. It's quite hard to make a very narrow notch filter that won't take out a huge swath of your most important vision information. That's why there are different laser safety goggles for different wavelengths - if you're using a red laser, you break out the blue goggles.
Pilots can't afford to lose that much vision on final approach.
I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken. I'd add a telephoto camera to the front of the plane that can zoom in and take a few shots whenever the plane gets hit with a laser. Even if you can't make out their faces, you might get some license plates, or see whose back yard it's coming from.
I think there are also nontechnological things they should be doing. First up would be to take some cockpit videos using a camera with a nice wide aperture - real sensitive, like your eyes are in the dark. Show the runway getting closer, closer, then FLASH you're completely overwhelmed by green for a couple seconds, stop the camera down a few to simulate your now-desensitized eyes, and then go back to trying to land the plane, now much closer to the runway and somewhat disoriented. Then publicize the hell out of the videos and some people will get the message.
For the rest, well, that's what the telephoto pictures are for.
Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?
Yes. I don't care when I know that I need the literal modifier when I'm initially typing the query. I DO care when I typed a reasonable query and Google does some dumb interpretation of it. With quotes, I now have to either switch to my mouse twice to insert the pair, or use a lot of arrow keys to move across the word. Either way is more annoying than using a single +.
I also don't like overloading the String operator with Literal functionality.
I'll grant that fuzzy-search-default is a benefit to average users, but what was wrong with the + ?
The monopoly is in operating systems, not web browsers. An increase in non-MS browsers on that chart indicates a success of antitrust law, not a failure.
First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser.
The problem isn't that the OS comes with a web browser.
The problem is that Microsoft, who has a monopoly position in operating systems, is leveraging that position to gain control of another market (web browsers). That's an immoral business practice, and that is exactly why we made it illegal with antitrust law.
I respect the fact that they go back on ideas that are bad.
I have nothing but respect for them for this. I wish more companies would behave this way.
The big question is why this idea ever got so far in the first place. It's a terrible idea, and if they weren't able to see that through intuition, statistical understanding of their market, focus groups, or any other means, then I have to conclude that they're incompetent.
Actually, no, it's still not the gyroscopic effect keeping you upright. The caster and trail (parameters of a bike's front suspension geometry) result in the bike having a self-balancing effect: as you lean to the right, it wants to steer right, and the centrifugal force of the turn pushes you left, keeping you from falling over. This works fine with zero-mass wheels that do not have any gyro effect.
At low speeds this effect is not enough for stability: with no active control it wants to turn constantly, and follows a squiggly, unsettled path. At mid-speeds it will want to turn, but they will be stable turns. At high speeds the bike becomes over-stable: if you let go mid-turn, the bike will automatically straighten itself out and return to a stable straight line. This is contrary to what you'd expect from the gyro effect, which would be to hold the bike leaning into the turn.
The gyro effect does exist, but its really not that strong compared to your weight and all the other forces involved.
You should read your link more carefully. Leaning is necessary to turn, but it is not what causes you to turn.
Read the next section. If you want to turn right, you briefly turn the handlebars left. That leans you to the right. You then turn the handlebars to the right, and enter a stable right turn. To exit the turn, you turn right a little harder, which brings you vertical again, and then you straighten out.
If one component is failed, why not replace it? The reason we don't do that now is that it's a complicated operation to do in space but if the point is to develop the technologies to make this kind of salvage possible, wouldn't it be just as easy to replace the broken part in some cases?
It has about the same level of effect as joining the military would. (Essentially none)
In any case, the whole point of my post was a cynical and sarcastic jab at US foreign policy. I'm surprised that everyone's trying to pick it apart as if I was serious. :/
Indeed, why let it? Was the bit about burying WMDs in the desert too subtle an indicator that this wasn't mean to be taken too seriously?
Erm, no. I think if everyone quit becoming soldiers it would help these things not happen.
I'm not criticizing the soldiers at all, actually. I'm just making a cynical joke of our foreign policy, which has, quite frankly, become a cynical joke.
Yeah, god knows they might convict someone.
Sure we'll stay, as long as you give us the right to rape, pillage and murder with no consequences. Oh, you've decided it's time for us to go home? Well, we know it's gonna be a rough time, but of course we'll honor your wishes. OK, see you next decade!
(takes off and buries a couple WMDs in the desert so they can be "found" again when needed, should have done that last time)
The one that overheated didn't shut down; it just had reduced power.
The brake problem was it lost its power assist, not all braking... It was perfectly drivable, and just needed a new fuse.
I'll grant you those are problems, but the fact that you think the car needed to be pushed home just shows my point about it being misleading. And neither of them is a problem with the battery life, which is what we were talking about here.
Yep, which is why I think hydrogen is a dead-end unless we make power super-cheap, like adopting nuclear in a big way. Or fusion.
And thus hydrogen is simply a dead-end.
Moving where it's burned is worthwhile as long as we're being efficient, which batteries are, relatively. Power stations are cleaner than cars.
It DOES solve the problem if we generate electricity from non-carbon sources. Wind and nuclear are good choices, but solar has some problems if we need to charge batteries at night.
There's no problem obtaining and transporting hydrogen. You make it at the fueling station from water and electricity - the exact inverse reaction that occurs in a fuel cell. Of course, that electricity comes from the grid, the same as it would if you were generating the hydrogen at a central station.
With either batteries or hydrogen, the grid is capable of supporting 90% of our transportation needs, right now, no upgrades required, even in California. The trick is that we have to do the bulk charging / electrolysis off-peak. Why is that a deal-killer?