The technology used in this launch is going to be reused by SpaceDev to put satellites up for only $5 million a piece. This illustrates the direct effect of the X-prize.
Uh... not quite. Although everyone keeps talking about this launch as if it were really a spaceflight, it's just a high-altitude airplane flight.
In Monday's flight to 100KM the top speed will probably be around Mach 3. The speed needed to achieve a stable orbit is about 15 times faster.
SpaceShipOne can't begin to achieve those kind of speeds.
Once you are in orbit, reentry becomes a serious problem because of atmospheric friction. If SpaceShipOne actually could get into orbit, it would burn up on reentry, because it would need to be coated with refractory material like the space shuttle, or an ablative shield, like the Apollo, Soyuz and other disposable craft.
Although SpaceShipOne is a very impressive engineering feat, it is still very far from being a real space craft.
For that, we'll probably have to wait for SpaceShipThree or SpaceShipFive.
I saw the cloak demonstrated last month and talked to the U. of Tokyo people who were showing it and I have to tell you: this is about the lamest thing ever.
THERE IS NO TECHNOLOGY THERE AT ALL!
It's a grey cloak. That's it. A grey cloak. You look at it, and it's a grey cloak. Nothing special at all. But no, "please look at the video monitor!"
Oh, in the video monitor the cloak is sorta transparent. Why? Because they're doing an absolutely standard compositing effect IN THE VIDEO MONITOR.
The cloak is NOT transparent. It's just a piece of blue screen and they composite the background on it. But only if you look at a video monitor. In real life, the cloak is entirely opaque and it's just a grey cloak.
I asked the professor how long it would be before they had a real working prototype and he said "Maybe 20 years."
In other words, they have nothing. Just a concept. And it's not even a new concept. It's an old science fiction concept.
There is nothing to see here. It's just PR and a very standard old-hat video effect.
Psychological state and mood effects of steroidal chemosignals in women and men.
Jacob S, McClintock MK.
Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
We tested the hypothesis that isolated steroids, claimed to act like pheromones, affect human psychological state or mood. In the first experiment, we established that two steroids, Delta4, 16-androstadien-3-one and 1,3,5(10)16-estratetraen-3-ol, modulated emotional states within 6 min of exposure. In men and women, neither steroid had specific effects on states of alertness or negative-confused mood. However, both steroids increased positive stimulated mood state in women but decreased it in men. These psychological findings do not parallel the reported sexually specific effects of these two steroids on the surface potential activity of putative vomeronasal epithelium. In a second experiment on women, we replicated that Delta4,16-androstadien-3-one modulated their general mood state, even when women were not aware of its odor and gave identical olfactory descriptions for the steroid and the control carrier solutions. In this within-subjects, repeated-measures experiment, androstadienone prevented the deterioration in general mood which occurred during exposure to the clove oil carrier solution in the laboratory environment. Thus, androstadienone appears to modulate affect, rather than releasing stereotyped behaviors or emotions. It is premature to call these steroids human pheromones. They are nonetheless psychologically potent, mandating future work delineating their function-i.e., whether these steroids are communicative chemosignals, context specific, or related to unconscious associations. In light of these modulatory effects and the complexity of human behavior, the function of chemosignals and pheromonal systems in a variety of species may need to be expanded to include the concept of modulators, as well as the traditional releasers, primers, and signaling compounds. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.
I actually found this reference on the site of a company that sells pheromone cologne, in a section describing the basis for their product claims. They're implying at least that they sell either the same pheromones mentioned in that study, or something with similar results.
The Naval Research Labs has an answer for you (from their extensive 2002 report "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D20 System")
... many "skeptics" rejected the anomalous behavior of the polarized Pd/D system as a matter of conviction, i.e. without analyzing the presented material and always asking "where are the neutrons?" Funding or research quickly dried up as anything related to "Cold Fusion" was portrayed as a hoax and not worthy of funding. The term "Cold Fusion" took on a new definition much as the Ford Edsel had done years earlier.
...
We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this research.
What privacy advocates have objected to about Gmail is that, by scanning mail and displaying an ad next to it, the service reduces the "expectation of privacy".
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term which, among other things, influences what the courts allow the government to do when snooping on people without a warrent.
The courts have ruled that it's perfectly OK for law enforcement agencies to pick through your trash because people do not have an "expectation of privacy" when they throw things away.
The danger with Gmail is that it starts to erode the generally-held idea that it is wrong for anyone to read someone else's email. Sure, it's just software and sure, no one is actually reading it. But the contextual ads may give the impression that the mail is read, therefore allowing the courts to rule later that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in email, and allowing the government to snoop through your mail at will.
This isn't coming tomorrow, but it's one of the main objections privacy advocates have to Gmail. Similar sentiments from other privacy advocacy groups are expressed in this article
It's amazing how little you know, and how authoritatively you post.
In fact, the People's Republic of China does not recognise patents of other countries, and does basically no patent enforcement at all. It also requires a patent holder to grant a license to anyone who wants one, and gives a judge the right to make up the terms.
It's well known, in fact, that there's no point in applying for a patent in the PRC because it gets you nowhere.
A good summary of the situation can be found here.
Do you always mouth off about things you have no knowledge of? Maybe now's a good time to stop.
This is completely false. Obviously you've never applied for a patent.
When you apply for a U.S. patent, what you get (if anything) is a patent enforcable for things which are made or sold in the USA. That's it.
In order to apply for any other patents, you have to first file a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application (about $5000 extra) with the USPTO. This gives you the RIGHT to file additional international patents within the next 36 months.
If you DO want to file international patents you have to file EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY in the country you want it filed. Each one has to be translated into that country's language and must be put into their particular format.
If you decide to file in every country, it will end up costing perhaps $200K or so more (depending on the length of the patent and therefore translation fees). But some countries (notably Taiwan) are not signers to the PCT, and have to be filed entirely separately.
The U.S. does not rule the world yet, and U.S. patents are not valid everywhere.
Millipede does have moving parts. The polymer moves under the needles, which read and write to it through heat.
They also mention that they've designed it to be resistant to external vibrations. Which implies that it could be adversely affected by some types of vibrations.
It also has an ability to be rewritten only about 100,000 times, apparently, making it not suitable as a hard disk replacement.
It seems as if this tech at least initially will be good for what IBM is saying it's good for: as a FLASH replacement, at least for some applications. It doesn't appear to be useful as a general-purpose storage device.
Hard drives aren't going bye-bye all that soon, it seems.
If you do some research and reading, it doesn't seem to be true that Google has applied a SPAM filter.
Many of the sites which have disappeared from normal search results were not Spammers and had no particular optimizations.
Rather, they were businesses who had obtained their ranking through legitimate use of descriptive text and through obtaining pagerank from their links. Many of these are now gone completely from results, forcing them to buy Adwords ads or not appear at all on Google.
There are really only two alternative explanations for this:
1) Google tried to apply some kind of filter with good intentions but it's really buggy and is banning thousands of sites who did nothing wrong.
2) Google is cynically banning thousands of sites in hopes that their Adwords revenue will jump pre-IPO.
In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.
It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.
What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.
Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/.
This message has some good data and a summary of the argument.
What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.
The article says that all PCs, not just TVs, etc. will be required to include DRM which enforces these restrictions.
If the DRM software uses licensed tech which costs money, and every copy of Linux is required to have this, doesn't that have a destructive effect on the whole free software model?
Re:Adapt and Succeeed
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, what happened with MicroChannel was that IBM tried to set a new standard, which actually was much better than the old PC-AT slot standard. It included automatic configuration of interrupts, better mechanical characteristics, etc.
The problems were: a) IBM wanted to charge a rather high fee for anyone to license the new bus, both to clone manufacturers and to card manufacturers. b) Card manufacturers found it more expensive to make cards for the new bus, partly because the traces required for the slot contacts had such a tight tolerance requirement.
This spurred the industry to create their own new standard, the VESA bus, which was then superceded when Intel successfully forced the industry to adopt the PCI bus. But that's another story.
Whether it's approved or not, RFID will probably be in every car eventually, and if it's keyed to the Vehicle Identification Number which is in every automobile registration, it will be trivial to know who each car belongs to.
Put a few RFID detectors by the side of the road (or embedded in the road), measure the time it takes to go between two of them and you have the system described in the article.
The ISPs are negligent in failing to filter out the viruses.
Virus filtering software for email servers has been available for years. The fact that they don't implement these is clearly just because they don't feel like spending the money.
I think this is a false economy for them, and certainly for the world in general.
For the ISPs, getting rid of the viruses would mean:
- a reduced amount of mail traffic hitting their servers (since they wouldn't have thousands of infected users sending millions of messages). - reduced number of tech support calls from users trying to figure out what to do.
For the world in general it would mean: - less lost time - less time taken in eradicating viruses - less lost data etc.
A few successful lawsuits or some legislation would force the ISPs to install this software, and that would basically be the end of the Email virus.
Balance is both a neurological and muscular issue. To balance you need:
- A set of clear inputs from your feet telling you about the surface you're trying to stand on, its angles, its texture, etc. - Inputs from your inner ear, telling you what angle you are standing at. - Other proprioception to accurately judge joint angles. - The ability to integrate these inputs. - Output to your muscles to maintain balance, especially while walking or when stepping onto something uneven.
This exoskeleton appears to amplify only a few muscle movements. Those connected with balance requiring strength in the ankle joints, the feet, etc. as well as angular motions of the knees don't appear to be covered in this device. Nor does it appear to help with balance.
For such a device to be really practical for disabled elderly, it needs to be able to balance on its own. I'm sure that's coming eventually but this device doesn't appear to be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... not quite. Although everyone keeps talking about this launch as if it were really a spaceflight, it's just a high-altitude airplane flight.
In Monday's flight to 100KM the top speed will probably be around Mach 3. The speed needed to achieve a stable orbit is about 15 times faster.
SpaceShipOne can't begin to achieve those kind of speeds.
Once you are in orbit, reentry becomes a serious problem because of atmospheric friction. If SpaceShipOne actually could get into orbit, it would burn up on reentry, because it would need to be coated with refractory material like the space shuttle, or an ablative shield, like the Apollo, Soyuz and other disposable craft.
Although SpaceShipOne is a very impressive engineering feat, it is still very far from being a real space craft.
For that, we'll probably have to wait for SpaceShipThree or SpaceShipFive.
I saw the cloak demonstrated last month and talked to the U. of Tokyo people who were showing it and I have to tell you: this is about the lamest thing ever.
THERE IS NO TECHNOLOGY THERE AT ALL!
It's a grey cloak. That's it. A grey cloak. You look at it, and it's a grey cloak. Nothing special at all. But no, "please look at the video monitor!"
Oh, in the video monitor the cloak is sorta transparent. Why? Because they're doing an absolutely standard compositing effect IN THE VIDEO MONITOR.
The cloak is NOT transparent. It's just a piece of blue screen and they composite the background on it. But only if you look at a video monitor. In real life, the cloak is entirely opaque and it's just a grey cloak.
I asked the professor how long it would be before they had a real working prototype and he said "Maybe 20 years."
In other words, they have nothing. Just a concept. And it's not even a new concept. It's an old science fiction concept.
There is nothing to see here. It's just PR and a very standard old-hat video effect.
I hope they're going to add capacity.
0 /movies/LuckyStr1948_2/LuckyStr1948_2.mpg is currently downloading at a snail-like 382Bps.
I'm on a T1, and their sample MPG http://freecache.org/http://movies03.archive.org/
Yes, bytes per second, not Kbytes per second.
Estimated time to download the 9.71MB file is 2hr 44minutes.
Caching like that, I can live without.
Psychological state and mood effects of steroidal chemosignals in women and men.
Jacob S, McClintock MK.
Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
We tested the hypothesis that isolated steroids, claimed to act like pheromones, affect human psychological state or mood. In the first experiment, we established that two steroids, Delta4, 16-androstadien-3-one and 1,3,5(10)16-estratetraen-3-ol, modulated emotional states within 6 min of exposure. In men and women, neither steroid had specific effects on states of alertness or negative-confused mood. However, both steroids increased positive stimulated mood state in women but decreased it in men. These psychological findings do not parallel the reported sexually specific effects of these two steroids on the surface potential activity of putative vomeronasal epithelium. In a second experiment on women, we replicated that Delta4,16-androstadien-3-one modulated their general mood state, even when women were not aware of its odor and gave identical olfactory descriptions for the steroid and the control carrier solutions. In this within-subjects, repeated-measures experiment, androstadienone prevented the deterioration in general mood which occurred during exposure to the clove oil carrier solution in the laboratory environment. Thus, androstadienone appears to modulate affect, rather than releasing stereotyped behaviors or emotions. It is premature to call these steroids human pheromones. They are nonetheless psychologically potent, mandating future work delineating their function-i.e., whether these steroids are communicative chemosignals, context specific, or related to unconscious associations. In light of these modulatory effects and the complexity of human behavior, the function of chemosignals and pheromonal systems in a variety of species may need to be expanded to include the concept of modulators, as well as the traditional releasers, primers, and signaling compounds. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.
I actually found this reference on the site of a company that sells pheromone cologne, in a section describing the basis for their product claims. They're implying at least that they sell either the same pheromones mentioned in that study, or something with similar results.
Makes me curious...
The Naval Research Labs has an answer for you (from their extensive 2002 report "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D20 System")
... many "skeptics" rejected the anomalous behavior of the polarized Pd/D system as a matter of conviction, i.e. without analyzing the presented material and always asking "where are the neutrons?" Funding or research quickly dried up as anything related to "Cold Fusion" was portrayed as a hoax and not worthy of funding. The term "Cold Fusion" took on a new definition much as the Ford Edsel had done years earlier.
...
We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this research.
What privacy advocates have objected to about Gmail is that, by scanning mail and displaying an ad next to it, the service reduces the "expectation of privacy".
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term which, among other things, influences what the courts allow the government to do when snooping on people without a warrent.
For examples of this, look for instance at the case law surrounding trash.
The courts have ruled that it's perfectly OK for law enforcement agencies to pick through your trash because people do not have an "expectation of privacy" when they throw things away.
The danger with Gmail is that it starts to erode the generally-held idea that it is wrong for anyone to read someone else's email. Sure, it's just software and sure, no one is actually reading it. But the contextual ads may give the impression that the mail is read, therefore allowing the courts to rule later that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in email, and allowing the government to snoop through your mail at will.
This isn't coming tomorrow, but it's one of the main objections privacy advocates have to Gmail. Similar sentiments from other privacy advocacy groups are expressed in this article
akebono.stanford.edu
By quoting the co-founder, I may have given the impression that this is just an RFID for paper.
Actually, they say they could print this on all kinds of materials, so it could be sprayed onto products before they are painted, etc.
I kind of doubt you could deactivate them by overloading them, as you can other RFIDs.
This could be a rather invasive and hard to counteract development...
Opera's interaction with the Google ad system:
visiting and your IP address (with the exceptions Opera filters
out -- see below)
IP address, to better target the ads
is on that page
and the Web page accessed
It's a great book.
By John Brunner. Science fiction. A real classic taking place about now.
Some copies are available here.
> Disney is in a position that IBM found itself in years ago, and Coca-Cola found itself in when Pepsi came on the market.
Back in 1903, you mean? That's when the Pepsi-Cola name was trademarked.
Or are you referring to their big "Nickel Nickel" radio ad campaign of 1940?
It's amazing how little you know, and how authoritatively you post.
In fact, the People's Republic of China does not recognise patents of other countries, and does basically no patent enforcement at all. It also requires a patent holder to grant a license to anyone who wants one, and gives a judge the right to make up the terms.
It's well known, in fact, that there's no point in applying for a patent in the PRC because it gets you nowhere.
A good summary of the situation can be found here.
Do you always mouth off about things you have no knowledge of? Maybe now's a good time to stop.
This is completely false. Obviously you've never applied for a patent.
When you apply for a U.S. patent, what you get (if anything) is a patent enforcable for things which are made or sold in the USA. That's it.
In order to apply for any other patents, you have to first file a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application (about $5000 extra) with the USPTO. This gives you the RIGHT to file additional international patents within the next 36 months.
If you DO want to file international patents you have to file EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY in the country you want it filed. Each one has to be translated into that country's language and must be put into their particular format.
If you decide to file in every country, it will end up costing perhaps $200K or so more (depending on the length of the patent and therefore translation fees). But some countries (notably Taiwan) are not signers to the PCT, and have to be filed entirely separately.
The U.S. does not rule the world yet, and U.S. patents are not valid everywhere.
I'm not sure why this "discovery" of water by Mars Express is getting so much press.
The U.S. Viking craft saw water really clearly back in the 70s, in the form of frost.
There are a number of photos, including this one, and this one.
The Viking 2 lander site was covered with frost for about 100 days per year.
It's obviously the shadow of a mini-horse.
The mini-horses of Mars have stampeeded and trampled the rover!
Seems as if you didn't read the article.
Millipede does have moving parts. The polymer moves under the needles, which read and write to it through heat.
They also mention that they've designed it to be resistant to external vibrations. Which implies that it could be adversely affected by some types of vibrations.
It also has an ability to be rewritten only about 100,000 times, apparently, making it not suitable as a hard disk replacement.
It seems as if this tech at least initially will be good for what IBM is saying it's good for: as a FLASH replacement, at least for some applications. It doesn't appear to be useful as a general-purpose storage device.
Hard drives aren't going bye-bye all that soon, it seems.
None of those were search terms which generate substatial Adwords revenue.
They only put the filters on terms that will generate them more cash.
If you do some research and reading, it doesn't seem to be true that Google has applied a SPAM filter.
Many of the sites which have disappeared from normal search results were not Spammers and had no particular optimizations.
Rather, they were businesses who had obtained their ranking through legitimate use of descriptive text and through obtaining pagerank from their links. Many of these are now gone completely from results, forcing them to buy Adwords ads or not appear at all on Google.
There are really only two alternative explanations for this:
1) Google tried to apply some kind of filter with good intentions but it's really buggy and is banning thousands of sites who did nothing wrong.
2) Google is cynically banning thousands of sites in hopes that their Adwords revenue will jump pre-IPO.
Take your choice. Neither alternative is great.
In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.
It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.
What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.
Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/.
This message has some good data and a summary of the argument.
What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.
Farewell Google. We hardly knew ye.
The article says that all PCs, not just TVs, etc. will be required to include DRM which enforces these restrictions.
If the DRM software uses licensed tech which costs money, and every copy of Linux is required to have this, doesn't that have a destructive effect on the whole free software model?
OOPS
You're right. It was EISA.
I had a memory glitch. Sorry.
VLB followed a couple of years later.
Actually, what happened with MicroChannel was that IBM tried to set a new standard, which actually was much better than the old PC-AT slot standard. It included automatic configuration of interrupts, better mechanical characteristics, etc.
The problems were:
a) IBM wanted to charge a rather high fee for anyone to license the new bus, both to clone manufacturers and to card manufacturers.
b) Card manufacturers found it more expensive to make cards for the new bus, partly because the traces required for the slot contacts had such a tight tolerance requirement.
This spurred the industry to create their own new standard, the VESA bus, which was then superceded when Intel successfully forced the industry to adopt the PCI bus. But that's another story.
This is obviously another application of RFID.
Whether it's approved or not, RFID will probably be in every car eventually, and if it's keyed to the Vehicle Identification Number which is in every automobile registration, it will be trivial to know who each car belongs to.
Put a few RFID detectors by the side of the road (or embedded in the road), measure the time it takes to go between two of them and you have the system described in the article.
I agree.
The ISPs are negligent in failing to filter out the viruses.
Virus filtering software for email servers has been available for years. The fact that they don't implement these is clearly just because they don't feel like spending the money.
I think this is a false economy for them, and certainly for the world in general.
For the ISPs, getting rid of the viruses would mean:
- a reduced amount of mail traffic hitting their servers (since they wouldn't have thousands of infected users sending millions of messages).
- reduced number of tech support calls from users trying to figure out what to do.
For the world in general it would mean:
- less lost time
- less time taken in eradicating viruses
- less lost data
etc.
A few successful lawsuits or some legislation would force the ISPs to install this software, and that would basically be the end of the Email virus.
One major problem older people have is balance.
Balance is both a neurological and muscular issue. To balance you need:
- A set of clear inputs from your feet telling you about the surface you're trying to stand on, its angles, its texture, etc.
- Inputs from your inner ear, telling you what angle you are standing at.
- Other proprioception to accurately judge joint angles.
- The ability to integrate these inputs.
- Output to your muscles to maintain balance, especially while walking or when stepping onto something uneven.
This exoskeleton appears to amplify only a few muscle movements. Those connected with balance requiring strength in the ankle joints, the feet, etc. as well as angular motions of the knees don't appear to be covered in this device. Nor does it appear to help with balance.
For such a device to be really practical for disabled elderly, it needs to be able to balance on its own. I'm sure that's coming eventually but this device doesn't appear to be it.