They had to disable it for TV due to large quantities of NSFW content. See his standup comedy routine sometime - given the roles he played on TV, it is somewhat shocking how crude his material is.
Desalination works very well with solar - since it's a straight heat process, there's not the huge efficiency problem from converting the solar to electricity, so you can get a lot of effect from a relatively small ground surface area versus solar to electricity conversions.
I work with a mainframe-type financial system on occassion. It doesn't like you when you send it lowercase. Therefore, we must use capslock in order to do any data entry, as otherwise either our shift keys would all be worn out in very short order, or we would get no work done aside from the production of error messages and warning beeps:)
Might be the mainframe program's fault... but we've gotta use what we have. Thefore, Capslock lives on.
>Now if they can solve kick-back, I'll be a tablesaw fiend.
Hmm... optical sensors to track sudden acceleration of the workpiece across the table? I wonder if an optical mouse sensor could track fast enough - could make for a fairly easy hack. Of course, detecting the kick-back and stopping it are somewhat different matters - stopping the saw blade with a brake is probably easier then stopping the far less restrained workpiece. Stopping the blade still might reduce the severity of the kickback by giving the workpiece less time to accelerate before the blade stops feeding energy into it, though.
The article addresses that, but to sum it up - the power tool industry has no financial accountability for table saw accidents. There's a longstanding legal precedent for saw makers not being accountable for table saw accidents, on account of the fact that anyone who would use a saw should be well aware of how dangerous they are and should be taking their own precautions as a result.
The rather outrageous licensing fees (8%) the guy was wanting for every saw produced with the technology couldn't have helped, of course. There's also technical issues with cutting conducting materials with it (metal, or even wood that's too wet) triggering false positives.
> limit the session to the IP-address of the visiting user
Bad idea - using some sort of identification is good, but the IP address isn't the one to use - certain web providers (such as AOL) use a proxy scheme that can result in subsequent requests from the same user, even moments away from each other, appearing from a different IP.
Whether or not it's a bad thing to block AOL users from your site is a debatable point, but it doesn't change that it's a bad practice:)
One of the big problems isn't the big metal tools that are easy to keep track of, but rather surgical sponges. They act as potential breading grounds for a post-operative infectiong, and they are astonishingly easy to miss - unlike the shiny metal tools, the sponges, when soaked with blood, look almost identical to body organs. Compound that with potentially dozens of such sponges being used in the course of an operation, multiple sponges used in one place getting tangled with each other, etc. and it makes it quite difficult to keep a count of them. Embedding an RFID tag in just the sponges would help most of the problems.
They do count instruments, btw. There's a checklist of instruments that's reviewed before and after each operation. It just takes one slight miscount by a surgical assistant trying to count all the instruments and simultaneously help out with any of a myriad of other possible things the surgeon needs.
It shouldn't be too large a problem, even if it does take a shot at a passenger aircraft. This isn't a staw wars-esque deal where the target explodes the second the light begins to hit it. It relies on keeping the laser on-target for several seconds to heat the object up enough to cause fuel or warheads to explode. A passenger aircraft takes quite a bit longer to heat up then an RPG due to the size, much less of its mass is combustible, and there will likely be a human manning the system - as soon as they see it has a bad target, they can disengage it before any real harm is done (though there is the potential complication of blinding the pilot on a landing).
Google's design is lightweight. Myspace does not even pretend to suffer from this convenience. Google might very well account for more unique visitors, but Myspace makes up for the visitors by having each page view result in a significantly greater amount of bandwidth usage.
Not to mention, if Google is working in it's optimum capacity, it minimizes page views - if you only load the front page, and then find what you're looking on in the first page of search results, it doesn't generate many page hits.
It's covered in the first two points of their FAQ, but to make things more convenient:
1. Guild War's developers have said that they don't consider their own game an MMO
2. The lack of monthly fees, while not a determination of what type of game it is, make it far harder to track and get useful data - you know how many started playing the game, but without a tracking metric for when they stopped playing the game, it's a useless comparison.
After a little while, you start to get the thousands-of-little-pinpricks feeling. But just as in sports, to be one of the true hardcore, you've got to play through the pain, man. Play through the pain.
Capital One = Big Bad Evil of the financial world
on
Dealing with Phishing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Admittedly off-topic, but you might want to look into ditching any CapitalOne credit cards you have. They've been using a somewhat questionable reporting practice recently of only telling how much you have on your card to the reporting agencies, rather then the amount you have and your maximum. The credit agencies, with only the one number, assumes it to be both your current limit and the amount you're using - in other words, that you're using 100% of your credit. This can really screw your credit score.
(If you're curious as to the source of this info, check out Clark Howard's website - if you haven't heard of him, he has a talk radio show and a few books about personal finances)
... but being scared in a game isn't for everyone. I know that for myself, I've never been able to stand survival horror games like RE and the like. Other games that have horror elements will get me really on edge - for example, when I played through Half Life 2, and got to the Ravenholme level, I could only play a half hour at a time before taking a break. Based on sales of survival horror games, there are most certainly people that love those sorts of thrills, but it's certainly not a requirement!
(Note that I just RTFA, and to me it looks more like it's referring to how the refinement of presentation to increase the scarriness in RE4 served to enchance the game by enhancing it's genre appeal. I don't think the article is actually referring to turning all games into horror games, but rather, is more of a case in point of refinement in a game by proper focus on the genre can serve to enhance the game.)
(No, while I play WoW, I'm not actually a raider, but if Blizzard is allowed to condescendingly put L2BWL in a video they distribute about it, I can condescendingly put it in a slashdot post;) )
Users stuck behind Websense (such as me during the school year), however, are not so lucky. Websense (admittedly, somewhat correctly) classified it as a proxy avoidance service about two and a half years ago, so no WBM for me:(
Just building it isn't exactly simply - it's a different variety of engineering - most of the robots are built from a more mechanical or electrical engineering standpoint (most of them use servos, so more of the focus is mechanical) then software. Unfortunately, the hardware is a major roadblock to someone looking to do it just for special software. There are kits available, but they're in the $4K-5K+ range, and those have no sensors so would need heavy modification, so a casual programmer might find it difficult to justify getting the hardware. As a result, there aren't many younger people working on it, as it's hard to afford for anyone who isn't well employed - I did a preliminary design on one (I've been doing Battlebots for several years, and several Battlebots people recently started making them in order to hold a US competition), but I had to shelve it because it needed something like $1500 in servo hardware, not very affordable for a college student, and that was having fewer degrees of freedom then the top Japanese bots.
All but the most simple do have software, since the highest channel RC vehicle radio systems only have 9 channels, and the RoboOne need at least 12 degrees of freedom just to walk; The best of the Japanese bots have closer to 30, so they have to have translator functions. It's usually a keyframe system, and the better ones with servo position feedback (there's a simple hack to the standard servos to read the postion off easily) - a series of positions are programmed in for various switches on the controller, and the microcontroller reads back the position until it reaches the target frame before moving on to the next. Different functions will be defined for punches, kicks, victory postions, and self righting; usually, there will be a toggle or two that switches between sets, so they'll have about 20 special functions in addition to standard motion.
Wheeled Sumo, on the other hand, seems perfect for AI research. The platform is simple enough that there isn't a high difficulty getting involved initially - kits are available for under $100, and with some work it can be done for less. Of course, the difficulty in that is that wheeled servo is pretty common, and there's already some killer designs around - it's daunting for a newcomer. Perhaps a wheeled sumo class with a standard chassis/sensor array with the programming all that's left to complete would be optimal - the platform would be relatively cheap, and the programming not so daunting as to turn off casual programmers, but with enough room for improvement that decent AI still offers enough advantage to justify it.
It's an order of magnitude more complicated to do AI in one of these then to do a remote control one. I read this complaint every time there is a Battlebots article or similar - the AI is not up to doing full control of one of them, at least with amateur development. It just won't stand a chance against a human opponent.
A little AI doing balancing might be helpful, but it is still a massive increase in complexity - they would have to be retrofitted with sensors and the ability to read the sensors, and processing the sensor data properly isn't easy (the DARPA race vehicles found interpreting the data they were receiving to be one of the most complex issues). I could see a large team working together getting it done, but it's an amateur sport at this point, and the resources aren't really there to do something that advanced and still stay competitive.
Does your school have a moderator? If so, you might want to complain - I'm a mod, so I know some of what's going on, and if someone doesn't take care of things within 3-4 days (the system emails moderators with ratings to check on/approve on a daily basis) things get dumped to the general pool along with ratings from schools without moderators (the general pool is for more experience moderators), though this wasn't the case until a couple months ago; and if bad ratings are slipping through, it can hurt the site - if you have specific examples, include them when you contact the site admin. Also, as a FYI, if you did it very recently (last month or so), there was a database crash/corrupted backup issue that lost a couple weeks worth of data, that might be causing the problem.
Another decent teacher review site is RateMyProfessors.com - it's got moderation, to avoid issues like this; Bascially, the intent of the moderation is to remove libel (saying someone has a psychiatric condition on a whim without proof definately isn't legal...), but leave pretty much anything else that describes in some way the teacher and their class.
I've got to admit to trying it, back before I knew sufficient physics to know why it wouldn't work. I'd always put together designs that would get energy out, or at least not loose any... assuming you were missing a few key forces I didn't know much about then (such as friction, or air resistance). As I've studied more physics, I've been cured of trying to do it, since I understand about the number of forces acting on the system.
That (somewhat) exists. It isn't possible to just fight whatever you bring, due to not wanting to off and kill all the spectators with exploding robots, but there are smaller non-televised competitions that are builder/live-audience focused. Most of them are on the east coast, started due to the fact that it costs as much to go to San Fran to compete as it does to build a robot if you don't live in or near California. Anyone in North Carolina, there's one coming up in a week - Details are available at http://www.secr.org
Slashdot Mirror
> Porn is on the net, not in email.
;)
For a nice little disproof of that statement, just turn your spam filter down a couple notches
They had to disable it for TV due to large quantities of NSFW content. See his standup comedy routine sometime - given the roles he played on TV, it is somewhat shocking how crude his material is.
Desalination works very well with solar - since it's a straight heat process, there's not the huge efficiency problem from converting the solar to electricity, so you can get a lot of effect from a relatively small ground surface area versus solar to electricity conversions.
I work with a mainframe-type financial system on occassion. It doesn't like you when you send it lowercase. Therefore, we must use capslock in order to do any data entry, as otherwise either our shift keys would all be worn out in very short order, or we would get no work done aside from the production of error messages and warning beeps :)
Might be the mainframe program's fault... but we've gotta use what we have. Thefore, Capslock lives on.
You mean like This UPS cargo plane fire?
>Now if they can solve kick-back, I'll be a tablesaw fiend. Hmm... optical sensors to track sudden acceleration of the workpiece across the table? I wonder if an optical mouse sensor could track fast enough - could make for a fairly easy hack. Of course, detecting the kick-back and stopping it are somewhat different matters - stopping the saw blade with a brake is probably easier then stopping the far less restrained workpiece. Stopping the blade still might reduce the severity of the kickback by giving the workpiece less time to accelerate before the blade stops feeding energy into it, though.
The article addresses that, but to sum it up - the power tool industry has no financial accountability for table saw accidents. There's a longstanding legal precedent for saw makers not being accountable for table saw accidents, on account of the fact that anyone who would use a saw should be well aware of how dangerous they are and should be taking their own precautions as a result.
The rather outrageous licensing fees (8%) the guy was wanting for every saw produced with the technology couldn't have helped, of course. There's also technical issues with cutting conducting materials with it (metal, or even wood that's too wet) triggering false positives.
> limit the session to the IP-address of the visiting user
:)
Bad idea - using some sort of identification is good, but the IP address isn't the one to use - certain web providers (such as AOL) use a proxy scheme that can result in subsequent requests from the same user, even moments away from each other, appearing from a different IP.
Whether or not it's a bad thing to block AOL users from your site is a debatable point, but it doesn't change that it's a bad practice
One of the big problems isn't the big metal tools that are easy to keep track of, but rather surgical sponges. They act as potential breading grounds for a post-operative infectiong, and they are astonishingly easy to miss - unlike the shiny metal tools, the sponges, when soaked with blood, look almost identical to body organs. Compound that with potentially dozens of such sponges being used in the course of an operation, multiple sponges used in one place getting tangled with each other, etc. and it makes it quite difficult to keep a count of them. Embedding an RFID tag in just the sponges would help most of the problems. They do count instruments, btw. There's a checklist of instruments that's reviewed before and after each operation. It just takes one slight miscount by a surgical assistant trying to count all the instruments and simultaneously help out with any of a myriad of other possible things the surgeon needs.
It shouldn't be too large a problem, even if it does take a shot at a passenger aircraft. This isn't a staw wars-esque deal where the target explodes the second the light begins to hit it. It relies on keeping the laser on-target for several seconds to heat the object up enough to cause fuel or warheads to explode. A passenger aircraft takes quite a bit longer to heat up then an RPG due to the size, much less of its mass is combustible, and there will likely be a human manning the system - as soon as they see it has a bad target, they can disengage it before any real harm is done (though there is the potential complication of blinding the pilot on a landing).
Google's design is lightweight. Myspace does not even pretend to suffer from this convenience. Google might very well account for more unique visitors, but Myspace makes up for the visitors by having each page view result in a significantly greater amount of bandwidth usage. Not to mention, if Google is working in it's optimum capacity, it minimizes page views - if you only load the front page, and then find what you're looking on in the first page of search results, it doesn't generate many page hits.
It's covered in the first two points of their FAQ, but to make things more convenient: 1. Guild War's developers have said that they don't consider their own game an MMO 2. The lack of monthly fees, while not a determination of what type of game it is, make it far harder to track and get useful data - you know how many started playing the game, but without a tracking metric for when they stopped playing the game, it's a useless comparison.
After a little while, you start to get the thousands-of-little-pinpricks feeling. But just as in sports, to be one of the true hardcore, you've got to play through the pain, man. Play through the pain.
Admittedly off-topic, but you might want to look into ditching any CapitalOne credit cards you have. They've been using a somewhat questionable reporting practice recently of only telling how much you have on your card to the reporting agencies, rather then the amount you have and your maximum. The credit agencies, with only the one number, assumes it to be both your current limit and the amount you're using - in other words, that you're using 100% of your credit. This can really screw your credit score.
:)
(If you're curious as to the source of this info, check out Clark Howard's website - if you haven't heard of him, he has a talk radio show and a few books about personal finances)
Just an FYI
... but being scared in a game isn't for everyone. I know that for myself, I've never been able to stand survival horror games like RE and the like. Other games that have horror elements will get me really on edge - for example, when I played through Half Life 2, and got to the Ravenholme level, I could only play a half hour at a time before taking a break. Based on sales of survival horror games, there are most certainly people that love those sorts of thrills, but it's certainly not a requirement!
(Note that I just RTFA, and to me it looks more like it's referring to how the refinement of presentation to increase the scarriness in RE4 served to enchance the game by enhancing it's genre appeal. I don't think the article is actually referring to turning all games into horror games, but rather, is more of a case in point of refinement in a game by proper focus on the genre can serve to enhance the game.)
Molten Core? L2BWL, Noob.
;) )
(No, while I play WoW, I'm not actually a raider, but if Blizzard is allowed to condescendingly put L2BWL in a video they distribute about it, I can condescendingly put it in a slashdot post
Users stuck behind Websense (such as me during the school year), however, are not so lucky. Websense (admittedly, somewhat correctly) classified it as a proxy avoidance service about two and a half years ago, so no WBM for me :(
Just building it isn't exactly simply - it's a different variety of engineering - most of the robots are built from a more mechanical or electrical engineering standpoint (most of them use servos, so more of the focus is mechanical) then software. Unfortunately, the hardware is a major roadblock to someone looking to do it just for special software. There are kits available, but they're in the $4K-5K+ range, and those have no sensors so would need heavy modification, so a casual programmer might find it difficult to justify getting the hardware. As a result, there aren't many younger people working on it, as it's hard to afford for anyone who isn't well employed - I did a preliminary design on one (I've been doing Battlebots for several years, and several Battlebots people recently started making them in order to hold a US competition), but I had to shelve it because it needed something like $1500 in servo hardware, not very affordable for a college student, and that was having fewer degrees of freedom then the top Japanese bots.
All but the most simple do have software, since the highest channel RC vehicle radio systems only have 9 channels, and the RoboOne need at least 12 degrees of freedom just to walk; The best of the Japanese bots have closer to 30, so they have to have translator functions. It's usually a keyframe system, and the better ones with servo position feedback (there's a simple hack to the standard servos to read the postion off easily) - a series of positions are programmed in for various switches on the controller, and the microcontroller reads back the position until it reaches the target frame before moving on to the next. Different functions will be defined for punches, kicks, victory postions, and self righting; usually, there will be a toggle or two that switches between sets, so they'll have about 20 special functions in addition to standard motion.
Wheeled Sumo, on the other hand, seems perfect for AI research. The platform is simple enough that there isn't a high difficulty getting involved initially - kits are available for under $100, and with some work it can be done for less. Of course, the difficulty in that is that wheeled servo is pretty common, and there's already some killer designs around - it's daunting for a newcomer. Perhaps a wheeled sumo class with a standard chassis/sensor array with the programming all that's left to complete would be optimal - the platform would be relatively cheap, and the programming not so daunting as to turn off casual programmers, but with enough room for improvement that decent AI still offers enough advantage to justify it.
It's an order of magnitude more complicated to do AI in one of these then to do a remote control one. I read this complaint every time there is a Battlebots article or similar - the AI is not up to doing full control of one of them, at least with amateur development. It just won't stand a chance against a human opponent.
A little AI doing balancing might be helpful, but it is still a massive increase in complexity - they would have to be retrofitted with sensors and the ability to read the sensors, and processing the sensor data properly isn't easy (the DARPA race vehicles found interpreting the data they were receiving to be one of the most complex issues). I could see a large team working together getting it done, but it's an amateur sport at this point, and the resources aren't really there to do something that advanced and still stay competitive.
... and then you wasted 30 seconds posting about it?
Does your school have a moderator? If so, you might want to complain - I'm a mod, so I know some of what's going on, and if someone doesn't take care of things within 3-4 days (the system emails moderators with ratings to check on/approve on a daily basis) things get dumped to the general pool along with ratings from schools without moderators (the general pool is for more experience moderators), though this wasn't the case until a couple months ago; and if bad ratings are slipping through, it can hurt the site - if you have specific examples, include them when you contact the site admin. Also, as a FYI, if you did it very recently (last month or so), there was a database crash/corrupted backup issue that lost a couple weeks worth of data, that might be causing the problem.
Another decent teacher review site is RateMyProfessors.com - it's got moderation, to avoid issues like this; Bascially, the intent of the moderation is to remove libel (saying someone has a psychiatric condition on a whim without proof definately isn't legal...), but leave pretty much anything else that describes in some way the teacher and their class.
http://www.reallifecomics.com/daily.php?strip_id=1 112 - Very relevant comic on the issue of Battlebots on Mars :)
I've got to admit to trying it, back before I knew sufficient physics to know why it wouldn't work. I'd always put together designs that would get energy out, or at least not loose any... assuming you were missing a few key forces I didn't know much about then (such as friction, or air resistance). As I've studied more physics, I've been cured of trying to do it, since I understand about the number of forces acting on the system.
That (somewhat) exists. It isn't possible to just fight whatever you bring, due to not wanting to off and kill all the spectators with exploding robots, but there are smaller non-televised competitions that are builder/live-audience focused. Most of them are on the east coast, started due to the fact that it costs as much to go to San Fran to compete as it does to build a robot if you don't live in or near California. Anyone in North Carolina, there's one coming up in a week - Details are available at http://www.secr.org