I went by the event yesterday as a spectator and got to see Red Team do their run. Of the 23 teams who made it this far, they're the only one that has completed the qualification course so far. People complain that they have a more accurate map and that they're not doing real AI, but based on their performance on this surprise course, they have a real obstacle avoidance system.
In one section there was a minivan parked in the center of the GPS path. Of the eight vehicles I saw run, only three made it past the car. Three hit it, and the rest failed before making it that far.
It seemed that the biggest problems teams had were getting GPS right. Several drifted off course or turned the wrong way, going off course. One got the next GPS coord inside of its turning radius so it kept circling a spot until they turned it off.
Lots of great designs though, and some really impressive engineering.
I tried microwaving my 20's and nothing happened. My guess is that there was something in the middle of the pack which induced enough heat from the microwave to ignite the papers.
His attribution of this to RFID tracking makes it a tin-foil hat theory. An interesting one, but false.
Ashland, OR was one of the first cities to roll out a municipal cable internet system. For years I had been calling the cable company and asking when cable internet would be available. Then the city decided to create its own network. Within a few months the cable company had the entire cable internet system working. The two systems now compete with each other, with many people choosing the city owned provider over the faceless corporation because they prefer to help out their community.
The lesson is simple: Without competition, the current cable/phone companies have no incentive to make things better.
If you kill someone, then their family and everyone they know now hates you. You can't kill them all because the more people you kill, the more people will turn against you.
Killing millions of jews sure worked for hitler. Problem solved eh?
Israel/Palestine have been using violence for decades. It hasn't solved anything because it's a never ending cycle of revenge.
One problem with this approach is that while the plants may detect some of the mines, that's no guarantee that the plants didn't miss any. Say a mine field has 10,000 mines. You put down a bunch of seeds, and they detect 9,000 of them. While your odds of stepping on a mine have dropped substantially, there's still 1000 mines out there that you don't know you missed. The area would still need to be cleared by traditional means for it to be truely safe.
If SCO were to win then Google would probably move to a BSD. All the BSD variants aren't GPL, they're truely free, which is why Apple chose it as the base for OSX (no worries about licensing). Google already has extensive customizations to Linux and at $7 mil they can probably port everything for less.
Perhaps sending an email to the AV company saying "My machine isn't infected, it makes your company look incompetent if it can't figure that out" would be more effective than contacting the company that merely bought the software.
However, as the end consumer I can do anything I want to something I buy as long as I only use it for personal use. If I buy a book then I can skip 10 pages if I want. I'm not required to read all the ads in a newspaper or magazine either. A movie I can fast forward through the bad/slow parts. A TV show I can do the same - skip over parts I don't want to see.
Now, if I tried to rebroadcast or sell these altered versions then that would be a copyright violation, but for personal use there isn't a crime.
For anyone wanting evidence that this is indeed an ad for a movie, the whois info for irobotnow.com has:
Domain Name: IROBOTNOW.COM Domain Status: Registered Administrative Contact:
Fox Webmaster wmf@fox.com
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Intellectual Property Department
P.O. Box 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90213 US
1-3103691000
Record last updated on:..2003-12-02 15:56:14.333 Record expires on:.......2004-12-02 00:00:00.0 Record created on:.......2003-12-02 15:56:13.893
Domain Name Servers:
ns1.foxinc.com 216.205.226.26
ns2.foxinc.com 216.205.228.26
Their site is exellent though, very convincing I'd imagine for most people.
The reason that the RIAA is coming down so hard on file sharing is that there are so many people doing it. Years ago before napster came about, there were just as many songs available online. However, they were harder to get. Your average person wouldn't know where to go or how to get them. If RIAA is able to get the piracy back down to that level then they'll back off.
It only takes one person to break the encryption and put a song up on the net, but if he's likely to get sued/arrested then he'll think twice, and only those "in the know" will know where to go to get the songs.
You should check the armadillo site more often, they haven't worked on the hovering for the last two years. The current ship is a fully functional rocket capable of getting into space with a crew pod and full flight electronics.
1) Mail every registered voter a barcode and it's cleartext alphanumeric number, before the election.
2) They can either go to a website or vote in person somewhere, they put in the number (or scan in the barcode), choose their votes, and affirm that they placed the vote.
3) All results are posted in plaintext to a website. People can check the list to verify that their vote was correct and counted, and they can run their own stats to make sure the counts are correct.
Voting is anonymous because only the voting registration people know which unique ID's go to which people, people get new ID's for each election.
One of the best things that the miniseries has going for it is that it is a fixed, predetermined storyline. You can kill of characters because it's all part of a single, unified plot. Characters don't die because they have conflicts with management, if they die it's because it is part of the storyline.
Perhaps a better route is to make another miniseries, and play it one episode a week, more like what Babylon 5 did but on a shorter air schedule.
There are also lots of small companies who will solder your BGA onto your board though, and companies who will make you a board from a drawing. I think the biggest barrier is that it's harder to get into hardware design - you can't just fiddle around with someone else's code and figure out how everything works as easily as you can with software.
Actually, you can put just about any chip into an FPGA. I know that nVidia prototypes their newest graphics chips using FPGA's. You only need custom fab if you're on the cutting edge, or if you are doing a large run (cheaper)
Just to clarify, CA did not ban these fish. The fish are banned because of an existing law passed well before these fish were created. It's not knee-jerk legislation, just short sighted.
Apparently the law isn't clear on this. In the case of cars, they have decided that parking violations are the responsibility of the vehicle itself (thus, the owner), but moving violations are the responsibility of the driver.
What they need to do is decide whether a person is responsible for what is done with a computer, or whether the computer itself is held responsible (hence, the registered owner).
If the owner is held responsible, then it is really easy to frame someone. If the user is held responsible, then it is easier to get out of lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
The topic of a message is supposed to be the TOPIC, not the first sentence of the body.
I went by the event yesterday as a spectator and got to see Red Team do their run. Of the 23 teams who made it this far, they're the only one that has completed the qualification course so far. People complain that they have a more accurate map and that they're not doing real AI, but based on their performance on this surprise course, they have a real obstacle avoidance system.
In one section there was a minivan parked in the center of the GPS path. Of the eight vehicles I saw run, only three made it past the car. Three hit it, and the rest failed before making it that far.
It seemed that the biggest problems teams had were getting GPS right. Several drifted off course or turned the wrong way, going off course. One got the next GPS coord inside of its turning radius so it kept circling a spot until they turned it off.
Lots of great designs though, and some really impressive engineering.
I tried microwaving my 20's and nothing happened. My guess is that there was something in the middle of the pack which induced enough heat from the microwave to ignite the papers.
His attribution of this to RFID tracking makes it a tin-foil hat theory. An interesting one, but false.
Ashland, OR was one of the first cities to roll out a municipal cable internet system. For years I had been calling the cable company and asking when cable internet would be available. Then the city decided to create its own network. Within a few months the cable company had the entire cable internet system working. The two systems now compete with each other, with many people choosing the city owned provider over the faceless corporation because they prefer to help out their community.
The lesson is simple: Without competition, the current cable/phone companies have no incentive to make things better.
If you kill someone, then their family and everyone they know now hates you. You can't kill them all because the more people you kill, the more people will turn against you.
Killing millions of jews sure worked for hitler. Problem solved eh?
Israel/Palestine have been using violence for decades. It hasn't solved anything because it's a never ending cycle of revenge.
What readers did they use? I was under the impression that RFID tags could only be read from a few meters away...
That's not encrypting, that's encoding.
One problem with this approach is that while the plants may detect some of the mines, that's no guarantee that the plants didn't miss any. Say a mine field has 10,000 mines. You put down a bunch of seeds, and they detect 9,000 of them. While your odds of stepping on a mine have dropped substantially, there's still 1000 mines out there that you don't know you missed. The area would still need to be cleared by traditional means for it to be truely safe.
If SCO were to win then Google would probably move to a BSD. All the BSD variants aren't GPL, they're truely free, which is why Apple chose it as the base for OSX (no worries about licensing). Google already has extensive customizations to Linux and at $7 mil they can probably port everything for less.
Perhaps sending an email to the AV company saying "My machine isn't infected, it makes your company look incompetent if it can't figure that out" would be more effective than contacting the company that merely bought the software.
stop hard coding your taglines, if we want to read your ads we'll turn on sig's
You can also detect traffic jams by simply putting in speed sensors. Cheap, anonymous, and reflects the actual speeds of the cars.
You only need to know the actual ID of a car if you want to track it's individual movement.
However, as the end consumer I can do anything I want to something I buy as long as I only use it for personal use. If I buy a book then I can skip 10 pages if I want. I'm not required to read all the ads in a newspaper or magazine either. A movie I can fast forward through the bad/slow parts. A TV show I can do the same - skip over parts I don't want to see.
Now, if I tried to rebroadcast or sell these altered versions then that would be a copyright violation, but for personal use there isn't a crime.
For anyone wanting evidence that this is indeed an ad for a movie, the whois info for irobotnow.com has:
Domain Name: IROBOTNOW.COM
Domain Status: Registered
Administrative Contact:
Fox Webmaster wmf@fox.com
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Intellectual Property Department
P.O. Box 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90213 US
1-3103691000
Record last updated on:..2003-12-02 15:56:14.333
Record expires on:.......2004-12-02 00:00:00.0
Record created on:.......2003-12-02 15:56:13.893
Domain Name Servers:
ns1.foxinc.com 216.205.226.26
ns2.foxinc.com 216.205.228.26
Their site is exellent though, very convincing I'd imagine for most people.
The reason that the RIAA is coming down so hard on file sharing is that there are so many people doing it. Years ago before napster came about, there were just as many songs available online. However, they were harder to get. Your average person wouldn't know where to go or how to get them. If RIAA is able to get the piracy back down to that level then they'll back off.
It only takes one person to break the encryption and put a song up on the net, but if he's likely to get sued/arrested then he'll think twice, and only those "in the know" will know where to go to get the songs.
You should check the armadillo site more often, they haven't worked on the hovering for the last two years. The current ship is a fully functional rocket capable of getting into space with a crew pod and full flight electronics.
Uh, why do they have the canadian flag for armadillo? Armadillo is in Texas and fly's out of Oklahoma...
I had an idea.
1) Mail every registered voter a barcode and it's cleartext alphanumeric number, before the election.
2) They can either go to a website or vote in person somewhere, they put in the number (or scan in the barcode), choose their votes, and affirm that they placed the vote.
3) All results are posted in plaintext to a website. People can check the list to verify that their vote was correct and counted, and they can run their own stats to make sure the counts are correct.
Voting is anonymous because only the voting registration people know which unique ID's go to which people, people get new ID's for each election.
One of the best things that the miniseries has going for it is that it is a fixed, predetermined storyline. You can kill of characters because it's all part of a single, unified plot. Characters don't die because they have conflicts with management, if they die it's because it is part of the storyline.
Perhaps a better route is to make another miniseries, and play it one episode a week, more like what Babylon 5 did but on a shorter air schedule.
Heh, I swear my server could have handled a slashdotting. But in the last 50 minutes it's gotten 125,000 loads at 2.07 gigs.
:)
The images are down to 50 wide now, and compressed better, but even with that the sheer volume of slashdotters is tough to handle
There are also lots of small companies who will solder your BGA onto your board though, and companies who will make you a board from a drawing. I think the biggest barrier is that it's harder to get into hardware design - you can't just fiddle around with someone else's code and figure out how everything works as easily as you can with software.
Actually, you can put just about any chip into an FPGA. I know that nVidia prototypes their newest graphics chips using FPGA's. You only need custom fab if you're on the cutting edge, or if you are doing a large run (cheaper)
Just to clarify, CA did not ban these fish. The fish are banned because of an existing law passed well before these fish were created. It's not knee-jerk legislation, just short sighted.
The preceding message was brought to you by ClearChannel Communications, "What we say makes everything clear."
Apparently the law isn't clear on this. In the case of cars, they have decided that parking violations are the responsibility of the vehicle itself (thus, the owner), but moving violations are the responsibility of the driver.
What they need to do is decide whether a person is responsible for what is done with a computer, or whether the computer itself is held responsible (hence, the registered owner).
If the owner is held responsible, then it is really easy to frame someone. If the user is held responsible, then it is easier to get out of lawsuits.