Wow, so you personally commit fraud and forgery to get your "enemy" a $40 speeding ticket?
sounds like a great idea until the first time a cop is on scene to pull you over.
I hope those kids like jail time!
You're serious??? You would give kids jail time for an administrative prank? For $40? That's sick. Just plain sick. With these kinds of opinions, no wonder we have these kinds of laws.
America would be a better place if we stopped trying to 0wn people in real life, instead of just video games and movies. There is such a thing as partial victories and conditional surrenders.
This just shows again the problems with applying a digital measure to our analog world. Speeding is by no means a crime. A crime implies harm, and having an instantaneous velocity over a certain point on a road hardly qualifies as a crime. Here we have a case of the computer being judge, jury, and executioner. This means that gone are the *very* valid justification that "that's the speed limit because driving any slower was dangerous."
Before, real-life situations could trump an engineer's arbitrary classification of a road. Which is good, because in real life, the situation *is* more important than the simulation. Now, instead of a judge who makes an informed decision that can be understood and formally disagreed with, we have a contractor, who is completely removed from the job. No one to get mad at, and, most importantly, no one to feel guilty. Every person in the chain has no responsibility and no reason to feel bad.
No matter the efficiency advantages of doing otherwise, every penalty applied to a human should be applied by a human.
If you come to my country, learn my fuckin' language! What would you think, if I came to the USA or UK, and *expected* you to speak German (or Luxemburgish, which happens to be my mother's tongue)?
Being perhaps the only other/.er posting from yea ol' Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, I actually disagree quite strongly with this. I understand that Luxembourgers feel under assault, as this year saw the passage of 39% foreigners to 41%. Nonetheless, what asking people to learn a specific one of the 4(!) languages you as a nation speak, natively, is somewhat unfair. I completely agree with the thought that if you want to move to a country, you should learn to speak to its people. However, that's not at all the same thing as learning a language that, honestly, confers no advantages inside or outside the country. By asking people to learn a language that is not necessary to any portion of life in Lux, at all, you're asking them to give up what is important to them-- family, friends, cultural activities, philanthropy, etc...-- in exchange for making you happy. You're asking people to stop doing the things in their lives that make their lives livable, so you can speak Luxembourgish more often. You're asking them to stop visiting their friends, because they don't speak Luxembourgish; to stop playing their sports, beceause the Luxembourgers play indiaca; and to revert to childhood where communication of any sort was difficult, thus raising stress and frustration in life. I don't think it's right to impose that.
Now, if you want that as a nationality requirement, so be it. That's your prerogative as a country, and I can't argue with it, no matter how wrongheaded I feel the application is in this particular circumstance. But that's not the same thing at all as being frustrated at all of us who live and work in the Grand Duchy and don't speak Luxembourgish.
But look at it this way. How many foreigners do you know who like Luxembourg? I know very few. To be fair, I know even less who *don't* like Luxembourg. The general consensus seems to be ambivalence. You might try addressing this problem, as once people identify with Lux, they'll want to speak Letzebuergisch. And, honestly, the country absolutely fails on these grounds. The political class is clearly trying hard to change this, but it doesn't really seem to have the support of the people, or even the acknowledgement by the people of what they need to do in order to make their country attractive as a place to live, not just a place to work. (HINT: Stop tearing down every building that's old just to put up an ugly bank. HINTHINT: Allow street artists to live and prosper, instead of beating the crap out of them and dumping them on the other side of the border, or whatever the police here do to keep the streets are steril as a bank corridor.)
P.S. I've been taking Luxembourgish courses, and quite enjoy them. I am not the typical foreigner in Lux, though. P.S.S. I understand why you as a culture hate speaking French. I'd hate speaking it, too, if the ony time I used it was when talking to adminisration! Nothing like (figuratively) smacking you with a hammer whenever you do something to make you wish you could do anything but.
Octave? Sure. The biggest problem would just be the Hough Transformation. The rest is just some logic, and perhaps not even good logic at that. I'm willing to bet there are far more efficient ways to do this, computationally speaking, but my way worked pretty well and has only gotten faster as computers have gotten more powerful.
I suppose taking lots of pictures and relating them to a database could be pretty efficient. If you binairized everything using Otsu's method as a threshold, you ought to get pretty consistent results. Just take the convolution and see which one it matches up to best. It'd be expensive as heck in computational time terms (convolutions tend to be slow), but as long as the camera didn't budge it should work out well.
The advantage of my method is that the camera and target can move/shake without requiring recalibration. The advantage of yours is I think you could cut the number of lines of code in half, and maybe do everything in Octave without any special image analysis packages. Of course, I prefer Scilab, but that's another story...
Thanks for the compliment! I was really shocked to see how many people still remember that hackaday. That was what, 2005?
Like so many others, I have a project I want to do. The project involves doing X, but alas I can not do X myself. Have any other/.ers done this and have some sample code I can look at and learn how to do this myself?
regards,
someGuyWhoWantsToBeABetterGeek
As it turns out, yes, and I am that guy. smellsofbikes was kind enough to point this out in an earlier post. So sounds as if this were a perfect strategy to leverage some other/.er's existing project into something cool and potentially useful.
I say this as a "young scientist" (the EU's term for us) who eschews the traditional publication factories-- I mean scientific journals-- in favor of publishing online where the audience is more likely to use my research. This is how science is supposed to work... this is how science originally worked. Galileo didn't publish in a "journal of science", he published in the open and then people said, "Cool, I wonder if I can do that?" So what better medium for this effect in the modern world than/. ?
Hi. As luck would have it, I am "that guy". I think I've got an improved version of that code somewhere, and I really, really do get 99% accuracy (but not necessarily 99% precision). For your needs, this would probably be just peachy. Since I was calibrating servo motors for my Ball and Plate project, I needed to eliminate those outliers, so even 99% wasn't enough and I had to finish the rest by hand.
Looking at the dials you want to read on your electric meter, my algorithms would work perfectly. (Not the case if you wanted to read the spinning wheel.) You'd just have to make a mask you you're analyzing each dial separately. You also might have to play around with lighting conditions. In fact, judging by the tiny size you'll almost certainly have to make sure it's illuminated with a strong light. Make sure there's no glare or reflection from the light source, though.
You might also place a white piece of paper behind the dials, if you can. I'm guessing you don't have the right to open this up, but if you can, the more contrast the better.
Lastly, since the code is written in Matlab, using the image analysis toolbox, you might not have the ability to run this right away. However, rest assured that it would be relatively simple to port this dial-reader to C using the OpenCV toolkit. Since most of the Matlab code is very readable (even if I didn't comment it too, too extensively), you shouldn't have too hard a time. The biggest hassle would be the Hough (pronounced "hoff") Transform. OpenCV does this, but I've no experience with it myself, so I can't say if my method for tuning the parameters would work well for you.
Give it a shot and let us know. After the/. article is closed to new comments, you can find my email address on my webpages if you want more advice.
I respect your math, but disagree with your conclusion. New technologies do not go straight to users. They get picked up by early adopters, who then tell everyone about them. Half of the students at my university were using Firefox after we left. Mostly because nerds like me installed it on their computers. When people like us start installing Chrome on everyone's computers, everyone will move to Chrome.
So without plugins and without Linux and Mac support, I won't support it. And if I don't, my parents, girlfriend, colleagues, and friends won't, because they don't really care, and why should they?
Seems I spoke too soon. The crash was at high speed, caused by, as another/.er so adroitly put it, a cumulus-granite cloud at 10,100'. This most likely eliminates engine/fuel related issues, as as a general rule when that big pinwheel on the front goes from driving to being driven, 'da plane don't fly so fast.
However, airframe or other controls-related problems are very unlikely. As a general rule, airplanes just don't break anymore. The NTSB has identified the odds of a bonafide engine failure (NOT engine-related, which is usually pilot-error of engine management) at something like 1:200,000 hours. IIRC from a Wings Weekend when a FAA accident examiner held a seminar on aircraft accidents and incident, engine/fuel issues make up 80-90% of accidents.
More likely-- and this is complete guesswork-- more likely Fossett was:
A) flying along in a cloud (unlikely: at that age, he would not have been crazy enough to simply fly into a cloud because it was there, forgetting that he was in the mountains. Old pilots, bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots...);
B) a sudden cloud formed around him and he became disoriented and lost attitude or heading control (this can happen quite suddenly in mountains, as the pressure drop of a gust of wind flowing over the mountain can cause a cloud to temporarily form on the other side. Although it doesn't happen instantaneously, so I think this improbable);
C) he was flying relatively close to the ridge lines and got stuck in a descending part of a mountain wave and couldn't climb out of it in time, either through misjudgment or luck. Any normal piston engine's climbing performance would have greatly limited it at this altitude, as the engine would have been making only half-power or so. Looking at the terrain immediately around the site, this seems the most likely hypothesis. Especially since he hit a mountain at 10,100', and it seems that most obstacles in that region top out at somewhere between 10,000 and 10,800'. Ouch, dammit.
It all depends on the plane's orientation, I guess. If he were flying parallel to the mountain, perhaps he intended to be in the valley (canyon running) and just didn't quite get his turning radius right (depends on what they mean by "high speed" impact). If it were perpendicular to the ridge, he probably flew smack into it.
From my reading of the FA, it seems that oven #4 is the first oven they tried. That's important, because it seems that whether the soil gets there or not, they only get one try with each oven. So they still probably have 7 more to go. Hurrah, NASA!
Maybe he mistyped - a higher power computer + modem probably uses about the same amount of power as a fridge everyday. Luckily computers are starting to get more efficient, but my Athlon XP system + 19" CRT uses ~300W or so. Nope, I live in Europe. My current fridge is, to put it nicely, quite as big as the old one was back when I was in the states.:)
But... that being said, here's the math to back things up:
My wifi modem/router uses 17W. That surprised me, I verified that with some very sensitive instruments, so it's about as accurate as you could want. (NOTE: This includes the stock wall wart included with the modem, so of course if you used a more efficient DC input from solar (which is what I did) then you of course save a lot. That (inefficient) wall wart uses up about 4W, which is over 30% of the energy required to run the modem!)
So the math is pretty simple. At 17W during 24 hours, I use 1.47MJ (Holy crap, running something 24 hours a day adds up quickly!), whereas the 1kWhr/day fridge uses 3.6 MJ/day. So, yeah, that's about the same order of magnitude.
Once again, unplug that damned modem when you're at work and asleep. Or do what I did and put it on a timer. Or do what I'm doing and run it on a timer and off solar.
I've got mod points, but it's better to reply in my capacity as a controls engineer working in sustainable energies, then just mod you down.
As debatable as it is whether CA utilities did or did not build for excess capacity, it is quite frankly irrelevant. The kind of excess capacity that they would have planned for would have not been what we needed then, and especially what we need now.
We need measures to reduce energy consumption and measures to better use what we've got. Thermodynamically, a big plant isn't anywhere near as efficient running a small load, than a small plant running a small load. Ideally, we'd be able to generate 95% (I made that number up out of thin air. 100% is of course ideal, but obviously not attainable) of our energy with base-load plants and only occasionally spin up small gas turbines for the peak loads. While smart grids do nothing for the former (unless people just become more aware of the cost and thus reduce usage) they certainly do help with the latter. A washing machine run at 3AM, for all intents and purposes, is ready in the same amount of time as one that was started just before bedtime.
A good place to look is island grids. Many islands literally do not have a second source of power, so they have to specify their one plant to handle both base and peak load. This is increases capital costs and reduces efficiency at base load, increasing recurring costs. And they can't even sell excess capacity, so the island utility is really pushed up against a wall. Unless... unless you do something to spread out the load. Because, let's face it, an island grid is actually pretty nice from a simplicity standpoint because there are a lot less unknowns. No trains, little industry, just a lot of washing machines and air conditioners.
So, in short, placing the blame on someone else is not the answer. Conservation is not a virtue, and global warming and energy shortages don't stop at our borders. Smart grids are coming and are in fact a very good solution to many of our capacity problems. While they don't help save power use, they do make the usage more efficient.
P.S. As an aside, it's unfortunate that the last, least important step-- time optimization--, is being done first. If people would just put that damned ADSL modem on a timer (mine uses as much energy in a day as my refrigerator), unplug chargers they're not using, and put the computer in hibernate mode at night, that would do far more than time-optimized smart energy.
Sounds more like an indictment of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 than the phone itself. And I understand completely. I've got a Glowfiish [sic] phone from Eten and it's a catastrophe. The phone itself is cool to the max, but WM6 is so bulky, ugly, impossible to use, ill-conceived,... well, I think you get the point. No Windows Media smart phone will ever be worth a dang. There is far too much to redo in order to save WM. They'd have to completely start over.
Ever phone from now on is going to call itself the iPhone killer, but you know as long as they're using Windows, they'll be pigs in a poke. Can't wait for the Openmoko and Android platforms to come to market.
That's silly. Of course they're safe. They might not be as safe (to their occupants) as a Hummer, but that doesn't make them unsafe. In fact, if you want to look at it from the other direction, all these light vehicles are far safer for everyone in the world (6.5 billion people) except for their occupants (2 people).
OK, exactly how far up your ass did you have to reach to pull that one out?
See, we have this thing called "The First Law of Thermodynamics." At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly, not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely). Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy, otherwise cracking water to produce hydrogen would be more cost-effective than cracking methanol (the carbon atoms have a more independent personality and are better able to get over any rejection issues it might have).
Trolling hogwash. On a molecular scale, molecules of water most certainly do break up. It takes a certain amount of energy, of course, but that energy is freely provided by stray molecules that have much more free energy than the average. What you're claiming is akin to saying that evaporation doesn't exist when water isn't at 100C. It does exist, just not so much of it. There's no law of thermodynamics that says that pure water won't boil at 20Cat 1atm, it's just the statistical probability that shows that the odds are so astronomic we can effectively assume, for all intents and purposes, that it won't.
Don't apply macro thermodynamic laws to individual molecules. They only apply to systems. If you want to understand this better, I suggest studying statistical thermodynamics, which give a much better understanding. And as long as you're going to be wrong, you could at least be polite about it. Sheesh...
Who was it that said to always make sure to leave a spot in the fence where children could sneak through? P.T. Barnum, perhaps? The point is, people used to understand and accept that a certain amount of "losses" will occur, and that sometimes these "losses" are in fact good for profits, by driving more paying customers to the business. It's only recently that we've evolved the technology and capabilities to ensure that EVERY person gets charged for EXACTLY what they consume. As if we could even know that for sure...
Don't apply macro-laws (movement of fluids) to micro situations (individual molecules in a fluid). Focus on the macro violations-- widespread corporate use without a license-- but let the little people slip through the cracks. Those of us who install and forget, and never really get much use out of the program anyway, are very unlikely to buy the program in the first place.
Explaining to people how to pirate but appealing to their goodwill might go a little far, though. I would report only the serial numbers used in the registration, along with the IP address that contacts your server (not the IP address of the machine itself). The rest of the information is None Of Your Business (TM). Try to find a happy medium between accepting a couple copied serial numbers in the wild, and noticing that a large number of computers coming from similar IP addresses are using the same serial number.
Definitely do NOT disable the program if it cannot phone home. I *hated* that about Bioshock, when my crappy firewalled network made it almost impossible for me to activate the software. Since you're aiming at corporate networks, you're certain to have lots of people with this problem.
Good luck with it.
PS: What are the current laws on downloading a program and using a serial number to unlock it? We all know that EULAs have yet to be proven in court, with many cases existing that both support and reject EULAs. So is there a clear case where it's illegal to use a serial number to unlock freely given content?
This is excellent advice, and I probably should have read it before posting pretty much the same thing. (Doh!)
One thing I want to add, though, is that a directive is not a law. Regulations are, but directives simply state an objective that member states must arrive at. It's up to the individual member states to decide how to do this.
I'm not sure of the most recent case in England, but as of January 6th, 2003:
The European Commission has sent 'Reasoned Opinions' to the governments of Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom over their apparent failure to implement the Guarantees Directive (1999/44/EC). This Directive, adopted in May 1999 (see IP/99/332 ), sets out certain minimum legal rights for consumers buying goods in the EU. These include a right to return defective goods, or have them repaired or replaced, up to two years after delivery. Member States were obliged to implement the Directive by 1 January 2002. The eight Member States have yet to notify the Commission of the measures taken under their national law to implement the Directive. The sending of a 'Reason Opinion' is the second step in infringement proceedings under Article 226 of the EU Treaty. If the Member States concerned are not able to assure the Commission that the consumer rights set out in the Directive are in fact implemented under their national law the next step will be for the Commission to lodge cases against them with the European Court of Justice.
So in each country you need to see how the directive was applied. Judging by my (limited) knowledge of the EU, I figure 10 years is about right for a directive to be implemented globally in a manner satisfactory to the EU Commission.
There is an EU directive pertaining to warranties. I'm not sure how it was implemented (or even if it was) in Britain, but here on the mainland I think most EU countries have adopted it. It's the Guarantees Directive (1999/44/EC).
The Directive lays down a common set of consumer rights valid no matter where in the European Union the goods are purchased. Central amongst these is that if goods are defective, or do not conform with the contract agreed at the time of purchase, consumers have a right of redress against the seller for two years after taking delivery of the goods. The consumer can request the goods be repaired, delivery of new goods, a price reduction on another purchase or a complete refund of their money. For six months after the delivery the burden of proof is on the seller - not the consumer - to prove that the goods sold conformed with the contract of sale and were not defective. The final seller who is responsible vis-à-vis the consumer, can - under circumstances determined by the Member States - hold the producer liable. Member States are allowed to have rules under their national law obliging consumers who wish to use their right of redress to inform the seller of any defect or lack of conformity in the goods within two months of them discovering it.
The directive also requires that commercial guarantees - such as manufacturers guarantees or retailers' guarantees - must be transparent and clearly drafted. When these guarantees are issued it must be indicated that they go beyond the legal rights of the consumer.
In short, the directive states that all sellers must warranty their products against manufacturing defects for two years. In the first 6 months, the burden of proof is on the seller. No ifs, ands, or buts. I suggest you find out what parts of the 1999/44/EC directive have been adopted by your country and then come into the center with a copy of the law in hand. You'd be surprised by how many people don't know this law even exists.
Who through the CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) issue ratings without disclosing how they do it.
Hmm... sounds like people who are just complaining because they're not getting it their way. It's widely known that the film rating system is horribly broken to the side of allowing kids to see Stallone kill 300 people, but not see Mel Gibson's butt-cheek. Seems like the ESRB is just the same.
While Google's response to the problem was magnanimous and exemplary, what's worrying here is that at least part of the Google culture has gone from one of "does this make sense?" to "will our customers complain too much?"
Anyone with half a brain could have told them that, no matter their good intentions, it could never have worked without making people upset. Of course, seen from their point of view, giving Google Checkout credit to people who probably weren't watching the films anymore anyway was probably a net positive for the users, as they get real credit in exchange for something they weren't using anymore. In retrospect, for most users I think this was more than fair. However, that's not the way they presented the solution.
They presented it as "You WILL do this and you WILL like it." And I admit in the beginning I was pretty shocked, too.
Here is a plausible rendition of events:
1) Someone wanted the service shut down immediately (why not let it linger on for forever? Does it cost that much money to maintain a service already established and debugged?). 2) The net result was an inability on Google's part to find out what the customers wanted and what they would find acceptable. (This is not how you or I would have done things as normal people, this is how a large corporation acts when bean-counters are running things.) 3) The users found themselves suddenly shoved in an unexpected direction by a giant corporation. 4) Profit!!! (Sorry, couldn't resist) 5) Users complained and some of these complaints made it to normal people in Google, people who thought as we did that this was pretty unacceptable. 6) These normal-thinking people still hold enormous sway in the company and could set it back on the right track.
Is this hiccough of Google's corporate conduct showing us a culture shift within the giant? Are they spending more time on honing their image skills and less on their products? Time will tell.
Thanks for the info. Here is a site which goes into a bit more detail, including defending the judge as completely computer literate: http://www.out-law.com/page-8062
I think the original point still stands that some people (e.g. Ted Stevens) are hopelessly lost when it comes to understanding the internet and what it means. The wrong example (good correction!) but the right anecdote.
Maybe Elton John just doesn't get the new ways to create, play, and distribute music? To be fair, Elton John's generation and those before destroyed live music in the household, as who needs Joe-Fred johnson to strum his banjo when you can hear professionals first on record, then radio, then TV, etc... So why shouldn't we move the music to another "space"?
I wonder if someone were to give Elton John an internet literacy test how he would do. Considering the British judge Justice Opensha had to ask what a website was while presiding over an internet "terrorism" case, I wouldn't be surprised if Elton John considered the internet nothing more than a Kazaa screen.
I'm a little underwhelmed by their report. The statistical variations are rather small considering the sample size, so it's very difficult to say anything conclusive. As they point out, the only accident in the last 5 years was in (my hometown of) Lexington, KY, so what happened in the 1970s doesn't necessarily reflect on what's happening now.
What would have been far more educational is a survey of all accidents they can find (Europe and Canada have organizations that publish data just like the NTSB) and then a statistic showing the likelihood of surviving any crash at all based on seating. Analyzing only those ones where someone survived is, or course interesting, but it doesn't give the full picture. In fact, it seems a little sensationalistic.
Still, someone did the start of a good journalistic job, pouring over all those NTSB reports. Having done that myself many times, I can completely sympathize with what they call "drudgery". I give a 3 out of 5 for the report.
You will never, refute all you like, see an electronic ignition system as reliable as a piston aircraft's.
Hogwash. Those magnetos have problems just like everything else. They can be very reliable, but mostly because there are two of them. There are some very delicate parts, such as the impactor which is necessary for starting the engine, that can and do fail quite rapidly. How many people would consider it normal to have to have their car's ignition system fail on them after less than 1000 starts? I don't know how many starts an aircraft manages across a few thousand hours of flight, but I suspect that it's far less than one per two hours of flight. Whereas a daily-driven car probably gets 2000 starts in a little over two years, three at the most.
Different strokes for different folks. I hate that Camino doesn't natively open pdfs in the browser window. I see pdfs as just another webpage.
Did you know that if you right click on a pdf opened inside Safari that it gives you the option to open the pdf inside preview? This might help you with your problem.
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Wow, so you personally commit fraud and forgery to get your "enemy" a $40 speeding ticket?
sounds like a great idea until the first time a cop is on scene to pull you over.
I hope those kids like jail time!
You're serious??? You would give kids jail time for an administrative prank? For $40? That's sick. Just plain sick. With these kinds of opinions, no wonder we have these kinds of laws.
America would be a better place if we stopped trying to 0wn people in real life, instead of just video games and movies. There is such a thing as partial victories and conditional surrenders.
This just shows again the problems with applying a digital measure to our analog world. Speeding is by no means a crime. A crime implies harm, and having an instantaneous velocity over a certain point on a road hardly qualifies as a crime. Here we have a case of the computer being judge, jury, and executioner. This means that gone are the *very* valid justification that "that's the speed limit because driving any slower was dangerous."
Before, real-life situations could trump an engineer's arbitrary classification of a road. Which is good, because in real life, the situation *is* more important than the simulation. Now, instead of a judge who makes an informed decision that can be understood and formally disagreed with, we have a contractor, who is completely removed from the job. No one to get mad at, and, most importantly, no one to feel guilty. Every person in the chain has no responsibility and no reason to feel bad.
No matter the efficiency advantages of doing otherwise, every penalty applied to a human should be applied by a human.
If you come to my country, learn my fuckin' language! What would you think, if I came to the USA or UK, and *expected* you to speak German (or Luxemburgish, which happens to be my mother's tongue)?
Being perhaps the only other /.er posting from yea ol' Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, I actually disagree quite strongly with this. I understand that Luxembourgers feel under assault, as this year saw the passage of 39% foreigners to 41%. Nonetheless, what asking people to learn a specific one of the 4(!) languages you as a nation speak, natively, is somewhat unfair. I completely agree with the thought that if you want to move to a country, you should learn to speak to its people. However, that's not at all the same thing as learning a language that, honestly, confers no advantages inside or outside the country. By asking people to learn a language that is not necessary to any portion of life in Lux, at all, you're asking them to give up what is important to them-- family, friends, cultural activities, philanthropy, etc...-- in exchange for making you happy. You're asking people to stop doing the things in their lives that make their lives livable, so you can speak Luxembourgish more often. You're asking them to stop visiting their friends, because they don't speak Luxembourgish; to stop playing their sports, beceause the Luxembourgers play indiaca; and to revert to childhood where communication of any sort was difficult, thus raising stress and frustration in life. I don't think it's right to impose that.
Now, if you want that as a nationality requirement, so be it. That's your prerogative as a country, and I can't argue with it, no matter how wrongheaded I feel the application is in this particular circumstance. But that's not the same thing at all as being frustrated at all of us who live and work in the Grand Duchy and don't speak Luxembourgish.
But look at it this way. How many foreigners do you know who like Luxembourg? I know very few. To be fair, I know even less who *don't* like Luxembourg. The general consensus seems to be ambivalence. You might try addressing this problem, as once people identify with Lux, they'll want to speak Letzebuergisch. And, honestly, the country absolutely fails on these grounds. The political class is clearly trying hard to change this, but it doesn't really seem to have the support of the people, or even the acknowledgement by the people of what they need to do in order to make their country attractive as a place to live, not just a place to work. (HINT: Stop tearing down every building that's old just to put up an ugly bank. HINTHINT: Allow street artists to live and prosper, instead of beating the crap out of them and dumping them on the other side of the border, or whatever the police here do to keep the streets are steril as a bank corridor.)
P.S. I've been taking Luxembourgish courses, and quite enjoy them. I am not the typical foreigner in Lux, though.
P.S.S. I understand why you as a culture hate speaking French. I'd hate speaking it, too, if the ony time I used it was when talking to adminisration! Nothing like (figuratively) smacking you with a hammer whenever you do something to make you wish you could do anything but.
Octave? Sure. The biggest problem would just be the Hough Transformation. The rest is just some logic, and perhaps not even good logic at that. I'm willing to bet there are far more efficient ways to do this, computationally speaking, but my way worked pretty well and has only gotten faster as computers have gotten more powerful.
I suppose taking lots of pictures and relating them to a database could be pretty efficient. If you binairized everything using Otsu's method as a threshold, you ought to get pretty consistent results. Just take the convolution and see which one it matches up to best. It'd be expensive as heck in computational time terms (convolutions tend to be slow), but as long as the camera didn't budge it should work out well.
The advantage of my method is that the camera and target can move/shake without requiring recalibration. The advantage of yours is I think you could cut the number of lines of code in half, and maybe do everything in Octave without any special image analysis packages. Of course, I prefer Scilab, but that's another story...
Thanks for the compliment! I was really shocked to see how many people still remember that hackaday. That was what, 2005?
Dear /.
Like so many others, I have a project I want to do. The project involves doing X, but alas I can not do X myself. Have any other /.ers done this and have some sample code I can look at and learn how to do this myself?
regards,
someGuyWhoWantsToBeABetterGeek
As it turns out, yes, and I am that guy. smellsofbikes was kind enough to point this out in an earlier post. So sounds as if this were a perfect strategy to leverage some other /.er's existing project into something cool and potentially useful.
I say this as a "young scientist" (the EU's term for us) who eschews the traditional publication factories-- I mean scientific journals-- in favor of publishing online where the audience is more likely to use my research. This is how science is supposed to work... this is how science originally worked. Galileo didn't publish in a "journal of science", he published in the open and then people said, "Cool, I wonder if I can do that?" So what better medium for this effect in the modern world than /. ?
Hi. As luck would have it, I am "that guy". I think I've got an improved version of that code somewhere, and I really, really do get 99% accuracy (but not necessarily 99% precision). For your needs, this would probably be just peachy. Since I was calibrating servo motors for my Ball and Plate project, I needed to eliminate those outliers, so even 99% wasn't enough and I had to finish the rest by hand.
Looking at the dials you want to read on your electric meter, my algorithms would work perfectly. (Not the case if you wanted to read the spinning wheel.) You'd just have to make a mask you you're analyzing each dial separately. You also might have to play around with lighting conditions. In fact, judging by the tiny size you'll almost certainly have to make sure it's illuminated with a strong light. Make sure there's no glare or reflection from the light source, though.
You might also place a white piece of paper behind the dials, if you can. I'm guessing you don't have the right to open this up, but if you can, the more contrast the better.
Lastly, since the code is written in Matlab, using the image analysis toolbox, you might not have the ability to run this right away. However, rest assured that it would be relatively simple to port this dial-reader to C using the OpenCV toolkit. Since most of the Matlab code is very readable (even if I didn't comment it too, too extensively), you shouldn't have too hard a time. The biggest hassle would be the Hough (pronounced "hoff") Transform. OpenCV does this, but I've no experience with it myself, so I can't say if my method for tuning the parameters would work well for you.
Give it a shot and let us know. After the /. article is closed to new comments, you can find my email address on my webpages if you want more advice.
I'd be interested to know under what law/legal justification they could possibly do this... and how it turned out. More details?
I respect your math, but disagree with your conclusion. New technologies do not go straight to users. They get picked up by early adopters, who then tell everyone about them. Half of the students at my university were using Firefox after we left. Mostly because nerds like me installed it on their computers. When people like us start installing Chrome on everyone's computers, everyone will move to Chrome.
So without plugins and without Linux and Mac support, I won't support it. And if I don't, my parents, girlfriend, colleagues, and friends won't, because they don't really care, and why should they?
Seems I spoke too soon. The crash was at high speed, caused by, as another /.er so adroitly put it, a cumulus-granite cloud at 10,100'. This most likely eliminates engine/fuel related issues, as as a general rule when that big pinwheel on the front goes from driving to being driven, 'da plane don't fly so fast.
However, airframe or other controls-related problems are very unlikely. As a general rule, airplanes just don't break anymore. The NTSB has identified the odds of a bonafide engine failure (NOT engine-related, which is usually pilot-error of engine management) at something like 1:200,000 hours. IIRC from a Wings Weekend when a FAA accident examiner held a seminar on aircraft accidents and incident, engine/fuel issues make up 80-90% of accidents.
More likely-- and this is complete guesswork-- more likely Fossett was:
A) flying along in a cloud (unlikely: at that age, he would not have been crazy enough to simply fly into a cloud because it was there, forgetting that he was in the mountains. Old pilots, bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots...);
B) a sudden cloud formed around him and he became disoriented and lost attitude or heading control (this can happen quite suddenly in mountains, as the pressure drop of a gust of wind flowing over the mountain can cause a cloud to temporarily form on the other side. Although it doesn't happen instantaneously, so I think this improbable);
C) he was flying relatively close to the ridge lines and got stuck in a descending part of a mountain wave and couldn't climb out of it in time, either through misjudgment or luck. Any normal piston engine's climbing performance would have greatly limited it at this altitude, as the engine would have been making only half-power or so. Looking at the terrain immediately around the site, this seems the most likely hypothesis. Especially since he hit a mountain at 10,100', and it seems that most obstacles in that region top out at somewhere between 10,000 and 10,800'. Ouch, dammit.
It all depends on the plane's orientation, I guess. If he were flying parallel to the mountain, perhaps he intended to be in the valley (canyon running) and just didn't quite get his turning radius right (depends on what they mean by "high speed" impact). If it were perpendicular to the ridge, he probably flew smack into it.
From my reading of the FA, it seems that oven #4 is the first oven they tried. That's important, because it seems that whether the soil gets there or not, they only get one try with each oven. So they still probably have 7 more to go. Hurrah, NASA!
But... that being said, here's the math to back things up:
My wifi modem/router uses 17W. That surprised me, I verified that with some very sensitive instruments, so it's about as accurate as you could want. (NOTE: This includes the stock wall wart included with the modem, so of course if you used a more efficient DC input from solar (which is what I did) then you of course save a lot. That (inefficient) wall wart uses up about 4W, which is over 30% of the energy required to run the modem!)
So the math is pretty simple. At 17W during 24 hours, I use 1.47MJ (Holy crap, running something 24 hours a day adds up quickly!), whereas the 1kWhr/day fridge uses 3.6 MJ/day. So, yeah, that's about the same order of magnitude.
Once again, unplug that damned modem when you're at work and asleep. Or do what I did and put it on a timer. Or do what I'm doing and run it on a timer and off solar.
I've got mod points, but it's better to reply in my capacity as a controls engineer working in sustainable energies, then just mod you down.
As debatable as it is whether CA utilities did or did not build for excess capacity, it is quite frankly irrelevant. The kind of excess capacity that they would have planned for would have not been what we needed then, and especially what we need now.
We need measures to reduce energy consumption and measures to better use what we've got. Thermodynamically, a big plant isn't anywhere near as efficient running a small load, than a small plant running a small load. Ideally, we'd be able to generate 95% (I made that number up out of thin air. 100% is of course ideal, but obviously not attainable) of our energy with base-load plants and only occasionally spin up small gas turbines for the peak loads. While smart grids do nothing for the former (unless people just become more aware of the cost and thus reduce usage) they certainly do help with the latter. A washing machine run at 3AM, for all intents and purposes, is ready in the same amount of time as one that was started just before bedtime.
A good place to look is island grids. Many islands literally do not have a second source of power, so they have to specify their one plant to handle both base and peak load. This is increases capital costs and reduces efficiency at base load, increasing recurring costs. And they can't even sell excess capacity, so the island utility is really pushed up against a wall. Unless... unless you do something to spread out the load. Because, let's face it, an island grid is actually pretty nice from a simplicity standpoint because there are a lot less unknowns. No trains, little industry, just a lot of washing machines and air conditioners.
So, in short, placing the blame on someone else is not the answer. Conservation is not a virtue, and global warming and energy shortages don't stop at our borders. Smart grids are coming and are in fact a very good solution to many of our capacity problems. While they don't help save power use, they do make the usage more efficient.
P.S. As an aside, it's unfortunate that the last, least important step-- time optimization--, is being done first. If people would just put that damned ADSL modem on a timer (mine uses as much energy in a day as my refrigerator), unplug chargers they're not using, and put the computer in hibernate mode at night, that would do far more than time-optimized smart energy.
Sounds more like an indictment of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 than the phone itself. And I understand completely. I've got a Glowfiish [sic] phone from Eten and it's a catastrophe. The phone itself is cool to the max, but WM6 is so bulky, ugly, impossible to use, ill-conceived,... well, I think you get the point. No Windows Media smart phone will ever be worth a dang. There is far too much to redo in order to save WM. They'd have to completely start over.
Ever phone from now on is going to call itself the iPhone killer, but you know as long as they're using Windows, they'll be pigs in a poke. Can't wait for the Openmoko and Android platforms to come to market.
That's silly. Of course they're safe. They might not be as safe (to their occupants) as a Hummer, but that doesn't make them unsafe. In fact, if you want to look at it from the other direction, all these light vehicles are far safer for everyone in the world (6.5 billion people) except for their occupants (2 people).
OK, exactly how far up your ass did you have to reach to pull that one out?
See, we have this thing called "The First Law of Thermodynamics." At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly, not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely). Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy, otherwise cracking water to produce hydrogen would be more cost-effective than cracking methanol (the carbon atoms have a more independent personality and are better able to get over any rejection issues it might have).
Trolling hogwash. On a molecular scale, molecules of water most certainly do break up. It takes a certain amount of energy, of course, but that energy is freely provided by stray molecules that have much more free energy than the average. What you're claiming is akin to saying that evaporation doesn't exist when water isn't at 100C. It does exist, just not so much of it. There's no law of thermodynamics that says that pure water won't boil at 20Cat 1atm, it's just the statistical probability that shows that the odds are so astronomic we can effectively assume, for all intents and purposes, that it won't.
Don't apply macro thermodynamic laws to individual molecules. They only apply to systems. If you want to understand this better, I suggest studying statistical thermodynamics, which give a much better understanding. And as long as you're going to be wrong, you could at least be polite about it. Sheesh...
Who was it that said to always make sure to leave a spot in the fence where children could sneak through? P.T. Barnum, perhaps? The point is, people used to understand and accept that a certain amount of "losses" will occur, and that sometimes these "losses" are in fact good for profits, by driving more paying customers to the business. It's only recently that we've evolved the technology and capabilities to ensure that EVERY person gets charged for EXACTLY what they consume. As if we could even know that for sure...
Don't apply macro-laws (movement of fluids) to micro situations (individual molecules in a fluid). Focus on the macro violations-- widespread corporate use without a license-- but let the little people slip through the cracks. Those of us who install and forget, and never really get much use out of the program anyway, are very unlikely to buy the program in the first place.
Explaining to people how to pirate but appealing to their goodwill might go a little far, though. I would report only the serial numbers used in the registration, along with the IP address that contacts your server (not the IP address of the machine itself). The rest of the information is None Of Your Business (TM). Try to find a happy medium between accepting a couple copied serial numbers in the wild, and noticing that a large number of computers coming from similar IP addresses are using the same serial number.
Definitely do NOT disable the program if it cannot phone home. I *hated* that about Bioshock, when my crappy firewalled network made it almost impossible for me to activate the software. Since you're aiming at corporate networks, you're certain to have lots of people with this problem.
Good luck with it.
PS: What are the current laws on downloading a program and using a serial number to unlock it? We all know that EULAs have yet to be proven in court, with many cases existing that both support and reject EULAs. So is there a clear case where it's illegal to use a serial number to unlock freely given content?
This is excellent advice, and I probably should have read it before posting pretty much the same thing. (Doh!)
One thing I want to add, though, is that a directive is not a law. Regulations are, but directives simply state an objective that member states must arrive at. It's up to the individual member states to decide how to do this.
I'm not sure of the most recent case in England, but as of January 6th, 2003:
The European Commission has sent 'Reasoned Opinions' to the governments of Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom over their apparent failure to implement the Guarantees Directive (1999/44/EC). This Directive, adopted in May 1999 (see IP/99/332 ), sets out certain minimum legal rights for consumers buying goods in the EU. These include a right to return defective goods, or have them repaired or replaced, up to two years after delivery. Member States were obliged to implement the Directive by 1 January 2002. The eight Member States have yet to notify the Commission of the measures taken under their national law to implement the Directive. The sending of a 'Reason Opinion' is the second step in infringement proceedings under Article 226 of the EU Treaty. If the Member States concerned are not able to assure the Commission that the consumer rights set out in the Directive are in fact implemented under their national law the next step will be for the Commission to lodge cases against them with the European Court of Justice.
So in each country you need to see how the directive was applied. Judging by my (limited) knowledge of the EU, I figure 10 years is about right for a directive to be implemented globally in a manner satisfactory to the EU Commission.
There is an EU directive pertaining to warranties. I'm not sure how it was implemented (or even if it was) in Britain, but here on the mainland I think most EU countries have adopted it. It's the Guarantees Directive (1999/44/EC).
The Directive lays down a common set of consumer rights valid no matter where in the European Union the goods are purchased. Central amongst these is that if goods are defective, or do not conform with the contract agreed at the time of purchase, consumers have a right of redress against the seller for two years after taking delivery of the goods. The consumer can request the goods be repaired, delivery of new goods, a price reduction on another purchase or a complete refund of their money. For six months after the delivery the burden of proof is on the seller - not the consumer - to prove that the goods sold conformed with the contract of sale and were not defective. The final seller who is responsible vis-à-vis the consumer, can - under circumstances determined by the Member States - hold the producer liable. Member States are allowed to have rules under their national law obliging consumers who wish to use their right of redress to inform the seller of any defect or lack of conformity in the goods within two months of them discovering it.
The directive also requires that commercial guarantees - such as manufacturers guarantees or retailers' guarantees - must be transparent and clearly drafted. When these guarantees are issued it must be indicated that they go beyond the legal rights of the consumer.
In short, the directive states that all sellers must warranty their products against manufacturing defects for two years. In the first 6 months, the burden of proof is on the seller. No ifs, ands, or buts. I suggest you find out what parts of the 1999/44/EC directive have been adopted by your country and then come into the center with a copy of the law in hand. You'd be surprised by how many people don't know this law even exists.
Who through the CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) issue ratings without disclosing how they do it.
Hmm... sounds like people who are just complaining because they're not getting it their way. It's widely known that the film rating system is horribly broken to the side of allowing kids to see Stallone kill 300 people, but not see Mel Gibson's butt-cheek. Seems like the ESRB is just the same.
While Google's response to the problem was magnanimous and exemplary, what's worrying here is that at least part of the Google culture has gone from one of "does this make sense?" to "will our customers complain too much?"
Anyone with half a brain could have told them that, no matter their good intentions, it could never have worked without making people upset. Of course, seen from their point of view, giving Google Checkout credit to people who probably weren't watching the films anymore anyway was probably a net positive for the users, as they get real credit in exchange for something they weren't using anymore. In retrospect, for most users I think this was more than fair. However, that's not the way they presented the solution.
They presented it as "You WILL do this and you WILL like it." And I admit in the beginning I was pretty shocked, too.
Here is a plausible rendition of events:
1) Someone wanted the service shut down immediately (why not let it linger on for forever? Does it cost that much money to maintain a service already established and debugged?).
2) The net result was an inability on Google's part to find out what the customers wanted and what they would find acceptable. (This is not how you or I would have done things as normal people, this is how a large corporation acts when bean-counters are running things.)
3) The users found themselves suddenly shoved in an unexpected direction by a giant corporation.
4) Profit!!! (Sorry, couldn't resist)
5) Users complained and some of these complaints made it to normal people in Google, people who thought as we did that this was pretty unacceptable.
6) These normal-thinking people still hold enormous sway in the company and could set it back on the right track.
Is this hiccough of Google's corporate conduct showing us a culture shift within the giant? Are they spending more time on honing their image skills and less on their products? Time will tell.
Thanks for the info. Here is a site which goes into a bit more detail, including defending the judge as completely computer literate: http://www.out-law.com/page-8062
I think the original point still stands that some people (e.g. Ted Stevens) are hopelessly lost when it comes to understanding the internet and what it means. The wrong example (good correction!) but the right anecdote.
Maybe Elton John just doesn't get the new ways to create, play, and distribute music? To be fair, Elton John's generation and those before destroyed live music in the household, as who needs Joe-Fred johnson to strum his banjo when you can hear professionals first on record, then radio, then TV, etc... So why shouldn't we move the music to another "space"?
I wonder if someone were to give Elton John an internet literacy test how he would do. Considering the British judge Justice Opensha had to ask what a website was while presiding over an internet "terrorism" case, I wouldn't be surprised if Elton John considered the internet nothing more than a Kazaa screen.
I'm a little underwhelmed by their report. The statistical variations are rather small considering the sample size, so it's very difficult to say anything conclusive. As they point out, the only accident in the last 5 years was in (my hometown of) Lexington, KY, so what happened in the 1970s doesn't necessarily reflect on what's happening now.
What would have been far more educational is a survey of all accidents they can find (Europe and Canada have organizations that publish data just like the NTSB) and then a statistic showing the likelihood of surviving any crash at all based on seating. Analyzing only those ones where someone survived is, or course interesting, but it doesn't give the full picture. In fact, it seems a little sensationalistic.
Still, someone did the start of a good journalistic job, pouring over all those NTSB reports. Having done that myself many times, I can completely sympathize with what they call "drudgery". I give a 3 out of 5 for the report.
You will never, refute all you like, see an electronic ignition system as reliable as a piston aircraft's.
Hogwash. Those magnetos have problems just like everything else. They can be very reliable, but mostly because there are two of them. There are some very delicate parts, such as the impactor which is necessary for starting the engine, that can and do fail quite rapidly. How many people would consider it normal to have to have their car's ignition system fail on them after less than 1000 starts? I don't know how many starts an aircraft manages across a few thousand hours of flight, but I suspect that it's far less than one per two hours of flight. Whereas a daily-driven car probably gets 2000 starts in a little over two years, three at the most.
Different strokes for different folks. I hate that Camino doesn't natively open pdfs in the browser window. I see pdfs as just another webpage.
Did you know that if you right click on a pdf opened inside Safari that it gives you the option to open the pdf inside preview? This might help you with your problem.