The fact that the term was used first in 1921 doesn't tell you anything about what it means today.
Did you read the sentence *immediately* after what I wrote? Lemme help you: "Read more about the origins of NeoConservatism and how it has been twisted here [wikipedia.org]."
But you apparently subscribe to the typical neo-conservative view that "we're right, and everybody else is wrong and trying to get in our way with politics".
I think you have me confused with someone else. Please be careful to whom you reply.
I think that you are missing the point of my argument. I was supporting the use and implementation of HDR monitors because of some of the current limitations of digital radiology. All of the things that are done to medical quality LCDs and digital enhancement are an attempt to narrow the difference in image quality between film and computer display and HDR monitors will help this out considerably.
I am not arguing against digital radiology, rather I am all for it because of the inherent benefits (less rads, less time, less film processing variability, more convenient, etc....etc....etc...), but the reality is that digital radiology is still not all it could be. You said it yourself in that a well trained radiologist can detect about 80% of the differences present in digital representation. Well..... 20% is still a lot of potential misses on diagnoses.
The reasons that digital has been so successful is not necessarily because of its inherent superiority in image quality. Rather it has been successful because it is cheaper and more convenient especially given the trend away from traditional medical records management.
As to the density of information, I routinely take film images of electron microscopy captures and digitize them because of the convenience, and that is working on the nanoscale range. I am throwing information away by the conversion, but it is more convenient for all of the reasons we have already talked about.
Of course one of the other principal arenas where monitors like this are valuable is in medical imaging. One of the serious shortcomings in the migration of radiology to digital formats is the reduced quality of the images as compared to film. The dynamic range of film is simply so much greater than can be achieved with standard CRTs or LCD monitors that there is a real danger of missing out on very subtle changes in X-Rays for example. While it's true that image processing can make up for some differences, digital still can't quite compete with film for many purposes including data density in many cases.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Go to Hell. I said nothing of the sort and will not tolerate ignorant asses like yourself. NeoCon actually has a very old etymology going back to around 1921 and has no basis other than political. Read more about the origins of NeoConservatism and how it has been twisted here.
"What is most important, however, is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff wrote to a colleague at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement."
This comment is perhaps the most telling in that it shows that Abramoff *knew* what he was doing was wrong and that this would not even pass the sniff test.
The groups are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became Secretary of the Interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, which was a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a religious group founded by Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
This is the sort of incestuous behavior that the current Republican and NeoCon administration encourages. Of course the whako left is not immune from this sort of behavior either, but it seems to have reached a new high in the current political climate. So, regardless of your political leanings, please recognize that this is not the way to run a democratic (small "d") government and now is the time to clean house in next months elections. I'd love to see a complete overhaul of all sitting candidates in favor for new blood, Democrat *and* Republican who can hopefully work together in a more non-partisan way to actually do something rather than continuously position and campaign.
As an aside: How many days a week are our representatives and senators actually on the job in DC? What is their work week like? Anybody here know?
Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.
As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either.:-)
Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.
I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.
I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.
It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.
Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?
So, we've known for some time about the potential for atmospheric mixing in the Jovian atmosphere. In a way, I guess this would have been expected. For an animation of the Great Red Spot and its turbulence, click here and scroll down.
So, ideally this would be part of a uber road warrior ultraportable solution rather than an addition to a USB drive or iPod. Since the demise of the 12in Powerbook G4, many of us have had to shlep around larger form factors (15in Powerbooks/Macbook Pros) that are a bit harder to deal with on planes, trains and such.
I would hope for a little tablet much like the Newton, but running a full version of OS X and given the costs of flash drives, this may in fact be possible at 32 to 64GBs in size which would make for a usable battery life as well. Travel is difficult enough and for really long flights (international ones), battery life simply does not cut it, even with the new MacBooks. And even if you did have a power outlet in your seat, they are incompatible with the current magnetic and oh so cool MacBook power systems.
Having something like this that one could back up photographs to, give talks from, check email and calendar and address books, read ebooks and mark up pdf documents, be able to link via Bluetooth to your cellular phone and such would all be possible in a small form factor that one would not necessarily want/need the ability to run big apps like Photoshop on.
And when the trip is over, you plug into your desktop at home and automagically have everything sync up.
Oh, please... oh, please... oh, please.... Come on Steve! You and I have talked about this going back..... what, years now! The technology is there, the market is there, all the pieces are in place.
maybe the involved scientists need to land some grants in the next six months?
I'll tell you that it is a scary world out there in science funding right now. NIH paylines have been cut from ~33% to ~14% over the last five years, so that scientists applying for funding under that system are less than half as likely to get their grant as they were five years ago. Senior researchers I've talked to are scared and junior scientists like me are terrified.
Actually, they are not remotely in the same funding structure as we are and we are not competing for the same research funds. It just so happens that the technologies we've developed are able to inform metabolic questions to a degree other technologies cannot even hope to touch. However, we are applying them to entirely different questions.
Stoking the press is entirely about funding, and all is fair in love and funding.
Actually, that is not the way I prefer to work. Only after the work has been done and you are confident of your results do you go to the scientific press, then the popular press.
I am well aware of how science works as I am a scientist who has spent some time working in the metabolic space. What I am objecting to is the fact that this was brought to the press before they really understood what was going on, bringing back memories of cold fusion and all that. Furthermore, it sounds like other scientists who have reviewed the paper are asking similar questions, so...... no, I don't think I am being too quick to criticize the study. Before making claims such as these, there simply needs to be more work done, and one should not do this kind of science in the popular press. That is what I was objecting to.
So, this is pretty interesting, but this smells like (LOL, H2S.... get it?) incomplete science in that they appear to have gone to the press without first, doing the real experiments that would tell them more about what is going on here. Simply looking at core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure will not tell you the status of organ function, nor will it tell you anything about potential organ system damage. Dr. Chris Pomfrett's letter is right on where he questions: "My big question about this work is: is it reducing brain metabolism or simply having a toxic effect on the brain stem?", but he only gets part of it right in his suggestion to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well.
Additional tests can not simply be EEG combined with standard histology as you need to know something about how the tissues are responding in metabolic space, especially as how they are introducing a new small molecular species to the mix. EEG is only going to tell you the global overall status of the tissues, but it too will be altered in ways that may or may not be informative. I would suggest looking at early immediate gene expression profiles for apoptotic pathways and performing experiments designed to actually look at and document the metabolic profiles of these cells/tissues.
I am thinking specifically of some of the techniques we have developed (pictures of some tissues using these techniques can be seen here), but there are many, many other traditional biochemical and metabolic assays that could have been performed for these studies like HPLC, MassSPEC etc...etc....etc....
Firefly was everything that Star Wars could have/should have been. Good writing, well developed characters, good acting, right setting, good costumes, good etc...etc...etc...
Go out and buy Firefly, you will *not* be disappointed.
This is the problem with most folks in Washington DC. I read this article this morning and thought "well, yeah....". For those of us that have been using the Internet since (or in close proximity to) it's DARPA days, the fact that the Internet is being used for political purposes is not surprising or new for that matter.
What is new I believe is that we now have a critical mass or a critical number of participants present on the Internet. I hate to say it, because I loathe the term, but what John Harris (author of the Washington Post article) has discovered is "Internet 2.0", or the evolution and delivery of many of the promises that the Internet originally offered. And, like any tool, those that have been around for a while knew that the Internet can and will be used as both tools for good and as a weapon for selfish, self-aggrandizing acts, subversion and propaganda.
Google for "adaptive optics." There are no theoretical limits to what you can do with AO, to my knowledge. It just depends on the collector area you're willing to devote to the problem.
I am familiar with adaptive optics (IAAVS I Am A Vision Scientist), and am familiar with David Williams work, but to my knowledge: 1) No adaptive optics have yet been fielded in a space craft, certainly not a commercial imaging satellite. 2) The amount of space required for imaging at beyond 10cm resolution from space at Earth based objects would be prohibitive given the current lift vehicles in inventory. Most adaptive optics systems are ground based (Starfire) due to size and precise control necessary, but if you can provide me with some references on airborne or space based adaptive optics systems, I'll consider myself corrected.
I seriously doubt the US spy satellites can get much better than 10cm with optics as we are now pushing the limits of theoretical optical resolution there (do the math). If you are working with 5cm resolution, those data are not coming from satellites, but rather airborne platforms. Perhaps you mean 5m resolution?
Wow, impressive resolution for such a remote platform. Of course the resolution of the current US spy satellites is about three times better (10cm optimal), but those things are the size of a school bus and regardless, it is impressive what you can see with 30cm resolution.
Does anybody know if the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter is limited to the visible spectrum, or does it have multispectral capabilities?
P.S. I am sure the Google folks will want these data to update Google Mars.:-)
Thats what they are looking for - the right management team with the right product and the right customers at the right place and right time.
Sure, and I am all for this. The only problem is that since so many of them are focused on the very short term, they miss the larger picture (and larger profits). For example, I recently met with a VC group and the first thing they started doing was trying to figure out how to profit *immediately* by breaking the technology up into little bits that they could then sell off individually. What they did not understand (or care about) was how everything worked together to create an environment where you could do more. We therefore decided to take a different approach and do even more of the work ourselves which will take a bit longer, but we will not have to worry about pressure or distractions.
It's a worthy goal to take the state of the art and add something that just makes it better.
Which is exactly what we are doing, by taking technology from a variety of sources (computer science, remote sensing, immunology, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, optics and mechanics) and making something of it that tells us more about biology and biological processes.
Really the right place for basic research is in the public domain where the stakes are high and the rewards few and far between. It makes the search for groundbreaking ideas more efficient because people can trade information with no fear or losing out on millions.
Oh, I agree and very much prefer the openness and free disclosure of information. However, we have a current US Presidential administration that is making it harder for basic scientists (especially in the biosciences) to make a living by cutting funding (the likelyhood that an NIH funded scientist will get a grant has gone from 33% to 14% in the last five years), so I need to start thinking about how make some money if traditional resources are being tapped out.
This also means that the basic research is then available to businesses who can add *their* value in turning it into something usable for the rest of us... along with another bunch of businesses ensuring that competition brings it's benefits to bear.
And this is historically how technological progress has been traditionally made in science and industry. The problem is that for the last five or so years, science, technology and education have taken a back seat here in the US, setting us back considerably in research and development.
The thing about all of these ideas is that they are not really very interesting or innovative. No slam on any of the VCs involved here (particularly the Draper Fisher Jurvetson folks as they are top notch), but these ideas are all about derived markets and products. It seems that the VC world has gotten lots more conservative over the past five years or so and they are looking at giving larger amounts of money to easier/simpler concepts rather than encouraging real cutting edge research.
This of course is a major problem as the US has historically relied upon federal funding to help develop the real cutting edge stuff, yet federal funding for basic science research is being cut dramatically in favor of applied research. So, we now run the risk of losing out on our technological advantage from both traditional government funding and now private funding. (notable exceptions for a number of philanthropists such as Paul Allen, Bill Gates, John Moran and others).
It's harder for VCs to find basic science research projects that have a significant payoff, but the projects are out there. We're banking on our technology and approaches to an area of bioscience and metabolomics to pay off in a variety of spaces from agronomics to medicine, drug development, defense and nutrition among many other applications, but I've found most VCs to be remarkably limited in their approach preferring to focus only on the short term, 1-3 years, rather than the 5-6 necessary for many projects. Its an old story, but focusing on the short term is a good business model where you invest 50% of the capital (or less) for 70-80% of the profits only after 80% of the work has been done. Unfortunately, you miss out on prospects for real impact by focusing on the next marketing tool rather than the next disease cure.
Look, all you have to do is still allow the message to occur and display on the desktop viewfinder, but just not allow it to interrupt a full screen presentation mode. So that when you then exit full screen mode on Powerpoint, you will see the alert. Very simple.
Who writes it is irrelevant. If one program can do it, any program can do it.
Fair enough, but that is why we have *permissions* and why logging in as root is simply an absurd thing to do.
The issue is not that it is hard, the issue is that allowing arbitrary software to programmatically suppress important informational and status messages (like, say, "update your virus definitions" or "unexpected Registry modifications") is a blatantly stupid thing to do.
Not if permissions is at issue.
I do find it ironic someone criticising Microsoft is suggesting they should have some undocumented OS API that only another Microsoft product knows about to implement functionality they want, however.
You know, when it comes down to it, I want my computer to simply allow me to do what it is that I want without getting in my way. If Microsoft has some undocumented APIs that make their functionality so much better, then so be it. I'd buy their products. However, as it is, my bias is towards Apple who manufactures computers and operating systems and applications that appear to work just that much better in many ways. That is not to say that I don't purchase Windows computers anymore, because I do. I have behind a firewall (and a G5) in my office alone four Windows systems and just ordered a brand spankin new Core2 system for one of our graduate students in fact. But for most systems I personally use, it's OS X. Just got a top of the line Mac Pro.:-)
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The fact that the term was used first in 1921 doesn't tell you anything about what it means today.
Did you read the sentence *immediately* after what I wrote? Lemme help you: "Read more about the origins of NeoConservatism and how it has been twisted here [wikipedia.org]."
But you apparently subscribe to the typical neo-conservative view that "we're right, and everybody else is wrong and trying to get in our way with politics".
I think you have me confused with someone else. Please be careful to whom you reply.
I think that you are missing the point of my argument. I was supporting the use and implementation of HDR monitors because of some of the current limitations of digital radiology. All of the things that are done to medical quality LCDs and digital enhancement are an attempt to narrow the difference in image quality between film and computer display and HDR monitors will help this out considerably.
I am not arguing against digital radiology, rather I am all for it because of the inherent benefits (less rads, less time, less film processing variability, more convenient, etc....etc....etc...), but the reality is that digital radiology is still not all it could be. You said it yourself in that a well trained radiologist can detect about 80% of the differences present in digital representation. Well..... 20% is still a lot of potential misses on diagnoses.
The reasons that digital has been so successful is not necessarily because of its inherent superiority in image quality. Rather it has been successful because it is cheaper and more convenient especially given the trend away from traditional medical records management.
As to the density of information, I routinely take film images of electron microscopy captures and digitize them because of the convenience, and that is working on the nanoscale range. I am throwing information away by the conversion, but it is more convenient for all of the reasons we have already talked about.
Of course one of the other principal arenas where monitors like this are valuable is in medical imaging. One of the serious shortcomings in the migration of radiology to digital formats is the reduced quality of the images as compared to film. The dynamic range of film is simply so much greater than can be achieved with standard CRTs or LCD monitors that there is a real danger of missing out on very subtle changes in X-Rays for example. While it's true that image processing can make up for some differences, digital still can't quite compete with film for many purposes including data density in many cases.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Go to Hell. I said nothing of the sort and will not tolerate ignorant asses like yourself. NeoCon actually has a very old etymology going back to around 1921 and has no basis other than political. Read more about the origins of NeoConservatism and how it has been twisted here.
"What is most important, however, is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff wrote to a colleague at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement."
This comment is perhaps the most telling in that it shows that Abramoff *knew* what he was doing was wrong and that this would not even pass the sniff test.
The groups are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became Secretary of the Interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, which was a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a religious group founded by Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
This is the sort of incestuous behavior that the current Republican and NeoCon administration encourages. Of course the whako left is not immune from this sort of behavior either, but it seems to have reached a new high in the current political climate. So, regardless of your political leanings, please recognize that this is not the way to run a democratic (small "d") government and now is the time to clean house in next months elections. I'd love to see a complete overhaul of all sitting candidates in favor for new blood, Democrat *and* Republican who can hopefully work together in a more non-partisan way to actually do something rather than continuously position and campaign.
As an aside: How many days a week are our representatives and senators actually on the job in DC? What is their work week like? Anybody here know?
Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.
:-)
As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either.
Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.
I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.
I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.
It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.
Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?
So, we've known for some time about the potential for atmospheric mixing in the Jovian atmosphere. In a way, I guess this would have been expected. For an animation of the Great Red Spot and its turbulence, click here and scroll down.
So, ideally this would be part of a uber road warrior ultraportable solution rather than an addition to a USB drive or iPod. Since the demise of the 12in Powerbook G4, many of us have had to shlep around larger form factors (15in Powerbooks/Macbook Pros) that are a bit harder to deal with on planes, trains and such.
I would hope for a little tablet much like the Newton, but running a full version of OS X and given the costs of flash drives, this may in fact be possible at 32 to 64GBs in size which would make for a usable battery life as well. Travel is difficult enough and for really long flights (international ones), battery life simply does not cut it, even with the new MacBooks. And even if you did have a power outlet in your seat, they are incompatible with the current magnetic and oh so cool MacBook power systems.
Having something like this that one could back up photographs to, give talks from, check email and calendar and address books, read ebooks and mark up pdf documents, be able to link via Bluetooth to your cellular phone and such would all be possible in a small form factor that one would not necessarily want/need the ability to run big apps like Photoshop on.
And when the trip is over, you plug into your desktop at home and automagically have everything sync up.
Oh, please... oh, please... oh, please.... Come on Steve! You and I have talked about this going back..... what, years now! The technology is there, the market is there, all the pieces are in place.
maybe the involved scientists need to land some grants in the next six months?
I'll tell you that it is a scary world out there in science funding right now. NIH paylines have been cut from ~33% to ~14% over the last five years, so that scientists applying for funding under that system are less than half as likely to get their grant as they were five years ago. Senior researchers I've talked to are scared and junior scientists like me are terrified.
Actually, they are not remotely in the same funding structure as we are and we are not competing for the same research funds. It just so happens that the technologies we've developed are able to inform metabolic questions to a degree other technologies cannot even hope to touch. However, we are applying them to entirely different questions.
Stoking the press is entirely about funding, and all is fair in love and funding.
Actually, that is not the way I prefer to work. Only after the work has been done and you are confident of your results do you go to the scientific press, then the popular press.
I am well aware of how science works as I am a scientist who has spent some time working in the metabolic space. What I am objecting to is the fact that this was brought to the press before they really understood what was going on, bringing back memories of cold fusion and all that. Furthermore, it sounds like other scientists who have reviewed the paper are asking similar questions, so...... no, I don't think I am being too quick to criticize the study. Before making claims such as these, there simply needs to be more work done, and one should not do this kind of science in the popular press. That is what I was objecting to.
So, this is pretty interesting, but this smells like (LOL, H2S.... get it?) incomplete science in that they appear to have gone to the press without first, doing the real experiments that would tell them more about what is going on here. Simply looking at core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure will not tell you the status of organ function, nor will it tell you anything about potential organ system damage. Dr. Chris Pomfrett's letter is right on where he questions: "My big question about this work is: is it reducing brain metabolism or simply having a toxic effect on the brain stem?", but he only gets part of it right in his suggestion to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well.
Additional tests can not simply be EEG combined with standard histology as you need to know something about how the tissues are responding in metabolic space, especially as how they are introducing a new small molecular species to the mix. EEG is only going to tell you the global overall status of the tissues, but it too will be altered in ways that may or may not be informative. I would suggest looking at early immediate gene expression profiles for apoptotic pathways and performing experiments designed to actually look at and document the metabolic profiles of these cells/tissues.
I am thinking specifically of some of the techniques we have developed (pictures of some tissues using these techniques can be seen here), but there are many, many other traditional biochemical and metabolic assays that could have been performed for these studies like HPLC, MassSPEC etc...etc....etc....
Firefly was everything that Star Wars could have/should have been. Good writing, well developed characters, good acting, right setting, good costumes, good etc...etc...etc...
Go out and buy Firefly, you will *not* be disappointed.
This is the problem with most folks in Washington DC. I read this article this morning and thought "well, yeah....". For those of us that have been using the Internet since (or in close proximity to) it's DARPA days, the fact that the Internet is being used for political purposes is not surprising or new for that matter.
What is new I believe is that we now have a critical mass or a critical number of participants present on the Internet. I hate to say it, because I loathe the term, but what John Harris (author of the Washington Post article) has discovered is "Internet 2.0", or the evolution and delivery of many of the promises that the Internet originally offered. And, like any tool, those that have been around for a while knew that the Internet can and will be used as both tools for good and as a weapon for selfish, self-aggrandizing acts, subversion and propaganda.
It was only a matter of time...
By the way, I like your site (simple, well organized...very satisfying design).
Thanks. I've tried to keep it simple with no ads to clutter the experience.
Google for "adaptive optics." There are no theoretical limits to what you can do with AO, to my knowledge. It just depends on the collector area you're willing to devote to the problem.
I am familiar with adaptive optics (IAAVS I Am A Vision Scientist), and am familiar with David Williams work, but to my knowledge: 1) No adaptive optics have yet been fielded in a space craft, certainly not a commercial imaging satellite. 2) The amount of space required for imaging at beyond 10cm resolution from space at Earth based objects would be prohibitive given the current lift vehicles in inventory. Most adaptive optics systems are ground based (Starfire) due to size and precise control necessary, but if you can provide me with some references on airborne or space based adaptive optics systems, I'll consider myself corrected.
I don't buy it...... sorry, but my understanding of physics precludes that possibility. Can you send me a link/reference?
I seriously doubt the US spy satellites can get much better than 10cm with optics as we are now pushing the limits of theoretical optical resolution there (do the math). If you are working with 5cm resolution, those data are not coming from satellites, but rather airborne platforms. Perhaps you mean 5m resolution?
Wow, impressive resolution for such a remote platform. Of course the resolution of the current US spy satellites is about three times better (10cm optimal), but those things are the size of a school bus and regardless, it is impressive what you can see with 30cm resolution.
:-)
Does anybody know if the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter is limited to the visible spectrum, or does it have multispectral capabilities?
P.S. I am sure the Google folks will want these data to update Google Mars.
Thats what they are looking for - the right management team with the right product and the right customers at the right place and right time.
Sure, and I am all for this. The only problem is that since so many of them are focused on the very short term, they miss the larger picture (and larger profits). For example, I recently met with a VC group and the first thing they started doing was trying to figure out how to profit *immediately* by breaking the technology up into little bits that they could then sell off individually. What they did not understand (or care about) was how everything worked together to create an environment where you could do more. We therefore decided to take a different approach and do even more of the work ourselves which will take a bit longer, but we will not have to worry about pressure or distractions.
It's a worthy goal to take the state of the art and add something that just makes it better.
Which is exactly what we are doing, by taking technology from a variety of sources (computer science, remote sensing, immunology, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, optics and mechanics) and making something of it that tells us more about biology and biological processes.
Really the right place for basic research is in the public domain where the stakes are high and the rewards few and far between. It makes the search for groundbreaking ideas more efficient because people can trade information with no fear or losing out on millions.
Oh, I agree and very much prefer the openness and free disclosure of information. However, we have a current US Presidential administration that is making it harder for basic scientists (especially in the biosciences) to make a living by cutting funding (the likelyhood that an NIH funded scientist will get a grant has gone from 33% to 14% in the last five years), so I need to start thinking about how make some money if traditional resources are being tapped out.
This also means that the basic research is then available to businesses who can add *their* value in turning it into something usable for the rest of us... along with another bunch of businesses ensuring that competition brings it's benefits to bear.
And this is historically how technological progress has been traditionally made in science and industry. The problem is that for the last five or so years, science, technology and education have taken a back seat here in the US, setting us back considerably in research and development.
The thing about all of these ideas is that they are not really very interesting or innovative. No slam on any of the VCs involved here (particularly the Draper Fisher Jurvetson folks as they are top notch), but these ideas are all about derived markets and products. It seems that the VC world has gotten lots more conservative over the past five years or so and they are looking at giving larger amounts of money to easier/simpler concepts rather than encouraging real cutting edge research.
This of course is a major problem as the US has historically relied upon federal funding to help develop the real cutting edge stuff, yet federal funding for basic science research is being cut dramatically in favor of applied research. So, we now run the risk of losing out on our technological advantage from both traditional government funding and now private funding. (notable exceptions for a number of philanthropists such as Paul Allen, Bill Gates, John Moran and others).
It's harder for VCs to find basic science research projects that have a significant payoff, but the projects are out there. We're banking on our technology and approaches to an area of bioscience and metabolomics to pay off in a variety of spaces from agronomics to medicine, drug development, defense and nutrition among many other applications, but I've found most VCs to be remarkably limited in their approach preferring to focus only on the short term, 1-3 years, rather than the 5-6 necessary for many projects. Its an old story, but focusing on the short term is a good business model where you invest 50% of the capital (or less) for 70-80% of the profits only after 80% of the work has been done. Unfortunately, you miss out on prospects for real impact by focusing on the next marketing tool rather than the next disease cure.
Look, all you have to do is still allow the message to occur and display on the desktop viewfinder, but just not allow it to interrupt a full screen presentation mode. So that when you then exit full screen mode on Powerpoint, you will see the alert. Very simple.
Who writes it is irrelevant. If one program can do it, any program can do it.
:-)
Fair enough, but that is why we have *permissions* and why logging in as root is simply an absurd thing to do.
The issue is not that it is hard, the issue is that allowing arbitrary software to programmatically suppress important informational and status messages (like, say, "update your virus definitions" or "unexpected Registry modifications") is a blatantly stupid thing to do.
Not if permissions is at issue.
I do find it ironic someone criticising Microsoft is suggesting they should have some undocumented OS API that only another Microsoft product knows about to implement functionality they want, however.
You know, when it comes down to it, I want my computer to simply allow me to do what it is that I want without getting in my way. If Microsoft has some undocumented APIs that make their functionality so much better, then so be it. I'd buy their products. However, as it is, my bias is towards Apple who manufactures computers and operating systems and applications that appear to work just that much better in many ways. That is not to say that I don't purchase Windows computers anymore, because I do. I have behind a firewall (and a G5) in my office alone four Windows systems and just ordered a brand spankin new Core2 system for one of our graduate students in fact. But for most systems I personally use, it's OS X. Just got a top of the line Mac Pro.