Last *I* heard, eating the silicon chips from inside a flash disk was ALSO harmful to my health. Just like drinking the various chemicals used to produce them.
Okay, okay, it's a bit more complicated than that, but I have a hard time getting worried about nanotech just because it's nanotech. After all, the nanotech will be embedded within carrier material, just like all the current chips. Just as with most modern technology, the manufacturing process isn't necessarily safe for bystanders, and requires careful attention. Same for the disposal process.
Since this flight won't go into orbit (or anywhere close to far enough from Earth to ignore it's gravity), the weightlessness effect is simply a result of the flight trajectory including free-fall on re-entry.
Yep, this is more or less correct, but let's clarify one point. The only significant difference between this attempt (or any similar 100km up-then-down mission) and an orbit mission is how far you fall.
You can go a thousand kilometers straight up, and fall straight back down, and never go into orbit. You never can "ignore" gravity - even out at the lunar orbit distance, at hundreds of thousands of kilometers, gravity is still a factor. Fact is, that's what keeps the moon nearby.
An orbit is, essentially, simply falling in an arc that never intersects the ground (or atmosphere). You have to get a whole lot more energy into the vehicle so that the trajectory falls past the planet's "edge" - at which point you end up "falling" forever around the earth. (And yes, for you rocket science purists, you also have to expend some additional energy to reshape the path through which you fall, usually at the highest point of your trajectory, to make the orbit more circular - that's called an "orbit injection maneuver".) So it's not a matter of HEIGHT, it's a matter of which DIRECTION you expend the energy.
As a matter of fact, if the atmosphere and terrain were not an issue, you COULD do an orbit a hundred feet off the ground. And you could enter this orbit by going straight sideways. It just requires moving a lot faster than a higher orbit. Our current launch profiles are designed to minimize the fuel (and therefore change in energy, a.k.a. "delta-V") required.
So to wrap up the thought here, weightless is BECAUSE the vehicle trajectory is a free fall (one that's not being modified by expending energy or using winged lift or drag). Doesn't matter whether it's a complete orbit or one that will hit the ground before going around one complete time.
And here's the most relevant point to SpaceShip One - to achieve true orbit (a true free fall all the way around the earth), quite a bit more delta-V is required - which requires more fuel, which requires more vehicle structure, which increases vehicle weight, which requires more fuel to lift, which requires more structure... etc. (And let's not even THINK about reentry heating yet...) So as neat as this trick is, SpaceShip One and any other X-Prize vehicles are a LONG way from a viable orbital launch vehicle.
It's the turbulence that causes fatigue, not the action of unloading a lot of water at once. If you think about it, when you go flying in an airliner and you hit a bumpy patch of air, it's usually around clouds. The reason clouds usually form is that air (moist air) is rising, and carrying the water vapor up to a height where the temperature drops enough for the water to condense. The point is, the air is RISING. As the plane flies thru this rising air, the direction the wing is encountering the airflow suddenly changes slightly. Not a lot, but enough that the lift on the wings suddenly increases. The lift (the force that holds the plane up) is a function of angle of the airflow to the wing, as well as airspeed squared. So when you increase the angle of airflow, the lift increases. Now you have more lift than weight, so the plane bumps upwards. But the area of rising air is relatively small, so you get a short transient bump.
Over a fire, you've got LOTS of bumpy air - the fire is superheating patches of air, and it's all bumpy and roiling around. All that mess is rising rapidly into the sky, and fresh cold air is rushing in around the edges (remember Backdraft, the movie?), moving downward.
To be an effective air drop platform, you need to fly very low, so that the water doesn't disperse too much before it hits the target zone. So you're deliberately flying an airplane thru extremely unstable (rapidly rising and falling) patches of air, with very large vertical speeds (which means, larger changes in airflow direction, which means more severe turbulence).
As any materials engineer knows, and as most of us geeks know, if you bend something often enough, it breaks. And the further you bend it each time, the faster it breaks. An airplane wing is designed for a certain "fatigue life" - a certain number of cycles of bending. With the above primer on turbulence, you can imagine how drastically different from the design you will be using the airplane when you fly it 500 ft over a forest fire, compared to relatively smooth air at 38,000 ft.
So watch the amazing video from last year of a C130 losing its wings over a fire - it's a natural but hopefully rare consequence of abusing an airplane this way. The way the airplane owner SHOULD handle this is frequent and intensive inspections. That C130, as I recall, was NOT properly inspected and was well past its service life. You can read the NTSB report on that accident at http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2004/A04_29_33.pd f (PDF file). A particularly telling quote: "The rate that maneuver load factors between 2.0 and 2.4 were experienced by firefighting aircraft was almost 1,000 times that for aircraft flown as commercial transports." (Load factor is engineer-speak for "g-force" - 1g is normal gravity; most transports never exceed 1.4g except in severe turbulence.)
>You can even observe how the shape of the catenaries >elongates as the rotational speed stays constant but the >horizontal velocity increases.
Not quite.
The revolving wheel will ALWAYS travel the exact same distance per revolution.
For a circle, this travel distance is exactly the circumference of the shape. A square or other regular shape will travel a slightly different distance, but something around the circumference of a circle transcribed on the shortest diameter of the shape.
So speed will not elongage the catenaries.
Look at it another way - by this logic, moving very slowly would result in very small catenaries. Taken to extremes, that would become a comb-like surface, with the original wheel shape - not exactly possible.
Does a single refractive interface with the wafer submerged and therefore inside the lens help reduce diffraction?
It annoys me too, but for a different reason. The fact that things look bigger in water is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand - that is just an optical trick to our eyes (which are outside the water) when the water is contained in a round container (a flat container does not exhibit this effect!) and would make no difference to a lithography system.
Contrary to the parent comment's question, if the item is inside the water, the water is no longer acting as a lens - it is simply the refractive medium instead of air (or vacuum). To refract, you MUST have an interface between two substances with different refractive indices - water, air, glass, oil, vacuum, or even metal (for x-ray or gamma rays, for example).
The magnification of a lens is largely a function of the difference between the refractive indices.
Now diffraction is different - that's a function of waves bending around a barrier - like the resist patterns being used. It has NOTHING to do with an interface between two mediums (except the barrier).
Sorry. With Outlook Express, if you right click, the message STILL shows in the preview pane. You MUST disable the preview pane to prevent this kind of thing.
Same thing with web bugs - this is really not new in that respect. I've been using Outlook Express for several years now with no real problems, but I've had the preview pane off for exactly this reason.
Oh, and I also pay EmailSifter.com $35/month to filter my domain's email. They've been blocking around 70% spam on average, with 1% false positive rate, and only about 0.1% false negative rate, and have blocked about 800 virus-laden emails in one month...
Just bought one of each of these (Gyration Ultra) for our church - for remote presentation. Bought the 100 foot "Pro" version and the 30 foot version, for two differently sized rooms. Basically, they work exactly as advertised - tilt and yaw motions control the cursor. If you don't hold down the "trigger" on the bottom, nothing happens when in midair. That is good, because you can release the trigger and use just the buttons for forward/back slide control in PowerPoint, without moving the cursor around.
You can also use it on a desk as an optical. Shape's a little ackward for that - rather a tall but narrow mouse to accomodate the recess for the trigger underneath. Otherwise, works great. Even has a scrollwheel.
Surprisingly, it takes very little getting used to - as they state in the ads, you just move your hand naturally and the cursor follows your motions. But it is prone to overcontrol because moving your hand in midair is less precise than the tiny motions on the desktop (in my case, I move the desktop mouse about 3" for full left/right tracking).
Another couple points - it's got a recharging stand, so it doesn't eat batteries; both versions come with a second battery pack; the Pro version also has a separate charger for the backup battery, and the Pro version also includes a AA-battery pack for emergencies. And both include a USB-powered receiver. Finally, the things worked out of the box with WinXP - no drivers to install. Really a pleasure to hook up and use in seconds.
So really, it works like it's advertised - perhaps even better - which is a rarity these days!
This has to do with "moment of inertia". Basically, the mass distribution of an object determines how a spinning motion precesses (the spin axis itself rotates around a different axis - you might think of this as "wobble", like a spinning top does over time).
Try it with a rectangular block of wood. You'll find the following simple fact to be true: you can create a sustained, non-wobbling rotation ONLY about the longest and the shortest axis. For a book shaped object, this would be either around a line thru from the front cover to the back (the short axis), or a line from the top center to the bottom center (the long axis). You CANNOT get a stable spin around the middle axis - in the case of a book, this would be the left-to-right axis.
The same holds true for any object - the tennis racket has a long axis (handle thru the tip) which you can spin it about easily, and a short axis (a flat-plate spin), but the middle axis, which is trying to flip it like a pancake-griddle-flip motion, simply WILL NOT STAY STABLE, no matter what you do.
Notice that a bullet (with an obvious long axis) stays pointed in the right direction even though it may spin millions of times before hitting its target. That's why.
The reasons have to do with the mass distribution, so if you have an object with uneven mass it won't be so simple. And it's easist to see with an object with three distinctly different dimensions, like a book or a block of wood. It's not so obvious at first glance with your tennis racket. And it's even more interesting when you get to a cube, where extremely small weight differences are not apparent to the naked eye - try spinning a die (dice) about its face... You'll discover that the "long axis" is really from corner to corner, so you can easily spin a die on a corner, but if you toss it in the air you won't be able to spin it about a face.
I don't recall the details offhand, as it has to do with rotational inertia and momentum and so forth, but essentially, when you try to flip something about the middle axis, the weight at the ends of the long axis wants to move outwards, and this disrupts the stable spin. This is easily and 100% repeatably demonstrated. Just another good science fact to get your kids interested in the natural world.
Latency sucks. I'm actively looking for an alternate (I can't get DSL, I can't get wireless, I can't get two-way cable). But I will say that DirecWay is MUCH better than a modem - in most cases.
Latency is not so much a problem for browsing, surprisingly, because if you're used to a modem, you wait longer by far for content to arrive. With the DirecWay software running (on a 3000/4000 box), or with the 6000 system, the thing is smart enough to ask for all the subitems on a page at once, so once the stuff starts arriving, it gets there pretty fast.
The real problem with latency, surprisingly, is EMAIL. As you know, it's a challenge/reply system, where it's necessarily linear - you can't multitask it. So every step takes 2 seconds - which means for checking about five POP3 mailboxes with a dozen saved messages each, and downloading a dozen new messages, can take upwards of 3 or 4 minutes. I usually hit my email button, walk away, and come back later. And when I'm home, I just leave it running all the time. Not worrying about dialing up is sweet.
Same thing with FTP - if you manage a web site, like I do, it can be REALLY painful working with FTP, since the linear nature of THAT transaction is also very slow with high latency connections. Uploading or downloading a hundred small files totalling 100K takes well near forever (10-20 minutes), even though you could do it over ethernet in a second or two.
Finally, browsing any secure site is very slow - since the system doesn't do its magic compression / multi-request with https. So there's really no browsing acceleration there. So each image, or.js file, or whatever, comes in with a 2 second lag. For complex sites (which is MOST commercial sites with https connections) it can be pretty slow. I simply use Mozilla's "block images from this server" trick most of the time.
Uploading anything is REALLY REALLY REALLY SLOW. You're better off uploading over a modem - no kidding. I usually see 2.8k upload speeds. Much worse than I used to see with a modem with decent software compresssion. And that's WITH DrTCP optimizations applied. Since I market software and must download 10Mb installers to my web site regularly, I've learned to just start them at bedtime, and check it in the morning to be sure it finished.
Downloading large files is amazing - nothing to complain about - 10 Mb downloads are painless and I don't even think twice about requesting them anymore, even via email.
I personally haven't yet hit the FAP limit once. So I have no complaints about the capping. Of course, I'm not downloading full Linux installs or anything - just an occasional 10 or 20Mb demo installer for some software. And I don't traffic in MP3s or other multimedia.
Installation was quite easy - I have a friend who's an installer, and he gave me the mount and cable ahead of time, so I ran my own cable and did the mount the way I like it (lots of roofing tar, extra heavy lag bolts, etc.) I couldn't do the dish install because of the FCC requirements, but after my own pre-installation, my friend was able to get the dish mounted and pointed within about 10 minutes. No problem. Be sure to account for TWO RG6QS cables - not just one - to carry both the send and receive modems.
I have had some difficulty with the "commissioning" - where the receiver downloads the adapter keys - when I turn the thing off for a week while I'm out of town, it typically takes an hour or two before it's up and running again. That can be very irritating while it's resolved.
As with other posters, I've only had a few instances of rain fade, and usually very brief.
I've never had a real problem with tech support - they're usually slow to answer the phone but once I get a person we usually have the problem resolved fairly quickly. There was one exception where the guy must have been from Pakistan, couldn't really speak English, and obviously didn't want to hear what I had to say, was just reading a scrip
LOVE the MX Duo - just got it for Christmas - with ONE reservation.
The response time is great - I don't even know I'm using a wireless device. I second the comments about battery life - no issue there yet.
The main issue I have is that the mouse has TWO AA batteries. It's therefore a bit too heavy for easy handling. I have to grab it a bit harder than I'm used to doing, when it's time to "recenter" the thing.
I love the buttons scattered around it too; out-of-the-box (no extra drivers beyond WinXP's built-in drivers) they do forward/back on browsing, and continuous-scrolling up/down. The fifth extra button does nothing without extra drivers, but it's too out-of-the-way to use easily anyway.
The keyboard, too, has a great set of useful buttons - like media (opens the default audio program), mute, play, stop, rewind, open email, open web, etc. Even has a rotary volume knob. Again, all these work without any extra custom drivers loaded.
I'll keep it, thank you very much, and my wife already wants one for herself.
They didn't have to use a web bug to prove anything in court - they only had to prove to a judge that there was probable cause for a search warrant of the guy's house, whereupon they could get MORE than enough evidence from seizing his computer and picking off all the email from it, plus whatever other evidence happened to be laying around his desk, etc.
Seems to me that a web bug or similar tactics providing an IP address of an individual's computer would be MORE than enough to convince any reasonable judge to issue a search warrant.
And if the search turned up nothing, because he DID spoof or hide his tracks, they apologize to the surprised and innocent homeowner, and try something else.
In 1990 I interviewed for an aerospace engineering job with the then-named Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Warminster, PA. I stood right outside the centrifuge they were using to train Navy pilots for high-g flight, and was told about this exact kind of capability. Later during the interview, I heard the loud WhooooSH-WhoooSH-WhoooSH as the thing whirled away right beneath the office we were using.
In the NADC centrifuge, as in the Swedish model, the pilot controls the g-forces by maneuvering the "airplane" with a typical set of fighter jet controls, and watches the various instruments in front of him respond appropriately. I don't know whether there are currently graphics capabilities, but as an aircraft simulator test engineer, I can tell you with authority that visuals are NOT required for a good simulation, depending on the goal of the simulator.
So, this has basically been done for at LEAST 13 years if not quite a bit longer (the NADC centrifuge first opened in 1952). And oh, by the way, this centrifuge also does at least 9g. So unless someone else has some explanation of what's different about this new Swedish device, the only difference I can see is that it's been built by a commercial entity, instead of the US Government.
Here are a couple links, in case you'd like to read about this specific simulator/centrifuge (the first link is an excellent discussion of G-LOC effects in general; the second shows no less than four sites where such training is conducted for the US Government):
Just last weekend... this mea culpa might save someone in/. land some pain.
Had a form.pl script handling all form submissions on our web site. The form submitted its info via sendmail, as well as logging to text files. While the address checking was pretty robust, someone figured out how to overload the contents in a manner that fooled the sendmail into thinking that the contents contained BCC: data.
Fortunately I caught it within about five minutes, thanks to the fact that all submissions are CC:'d to a real address, thus starting a flood of mail. I saw the classic pattern: a test message, a couple revisions, a final draft test message, then the flood of "real" messages. Since I saw it start, I was able to shut down the script (I just killed the Execute permissions).
After the initial test messages, I saw submissions from dozens of different IPs - I assume zombied PCs. It seems that the zombies were programmed to relay form POST submissions, instead of trying to relay mail directly. Smart, since that puts the mail load on a fast server, not a slow dialup PC.
But the really interesting thing was, even after shutting down the script, the flood of submissions continued. I tweaked the form.pl to bounce the requests to another page but the bounce was never followed - indicating to me that the program didn't bother to check the server response to the submission, even for a 404 or 302 response! This continued for around 14 hours, at a rate of about 20-40 hits per minute. Based on the first messages that got through, several hundred addresses were included in each BCC: field.
Suddenly at about T+14 hours, it simply stopped - cold. For the next several hours a few sporadic hits popped up. Haven't seen any since about T+18 hours.
Apparently the spammer assumed his script would succeed once it was successfully started (it WOULD have unless I'd been at the PC). He obviously ran through his entire mailing list "blind". I'm happy to say 13.8 of those 14 hours were wasted, preventing about 7 million spams (14 hrs, 40/minute, 200 addresses each).
As lessons learned, although I'm sure this is old news to most of the/. folks, I'd like to pass along some tips based on my experience. 1) The spammer used our web site's form to build his attack, but then took it to another machine. All subsequent submissions were using a POST method but not from our site's page. No surprise there, but simply checking $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} could have prevented 99% of this attack - if not making it pointless to begin with. 2) Sendmail can be fooled into reading BCC: addresses from information after the start of the message body. I don't understand the details, but an obvious preventative is to =~ s/bcc://gi on the message before sendmail gets it. Probably wouldn't hurt to do the same to To: and CC:. 3) Sendmail can be fooled into sending encoded text from an otherwise text-only form. Filter out "Content-Type:" or "Content-Transfer-Encoding:" or "multipart/mixed" or "text/html" before sendmail gets it. 4) If you're watching for abuse, don't rely on looking for multiple hits from one IP - it seems that once you become a target you will likely get a distributed attack. 5) Consider replacing all @ signs... do a s/@/-at-/g on all message fields before sending to sendmail (except of course whatever hard-coded To: is at the start of the message). If all other measures fail, at least you won't get blacklisted, although you might get 7 million "undeliverable" replies.
It's impossible to state the range (1200nm), and then later in the same paragraph, to state that the usable fuel capacity is "to be determined". Fuel capacity determines the range. (Gee, thanks, Sherlock... that's true of any vehicle.) But in an airplane, it's even more critical, because fuel capacity determines structural weight (more fuel requires more structure, which in turn demands more fuel to move it, which demands more structure, etc.). Until they've nailed down the fuel load, this thing is hardly an aerodynamically developed system.
This thing is a pipe dream - if you read the FAQs, there are far more "to be determined" than details.
I purchased a DLP project (an InFocus) about a year ago. While it's a GREAT projector for the cost, about $1200 for a 1500-lumen SVGA unit, I've found it's not very well suited for video.
The problem is that the update frequency on the DLP, combined with the color wheel technology, means that when you look from one area of the image to another, and the image contains any high-contrast vertical edges, you'll catch an afterimage of vertical red, green and blue bars on the margin of the edge. Essentially, your eye catches the sequential flashing of R, G and B used to form white or any bright color.
The problem is obvious even with still content - like a powerpoint slide presentation or a DVD menu - because even though the content isn't moving, the DLP still has to mix RGB to get white, and the mirrors and color wheel are rotating thru the colors constantly.
The problem gets more apparent the closer you get to the screen, because your eyes have to move farther to see various parts of the image - if the action suddenly changes from the left edge of the screen to the right edge, you look to follow the action. Up close, your peripheral vision is more tasked, so you tend to look back and forth a lot. When you're further from the screen you don't need to move your eyes as often.
So while it's great for slow content like a powerpoint slide show, and it's fine if you're a long way from the screen (like in a big presentation), when you try to use it as a video projector in a smallish living room setting, it's VERY distracting.
This may not be true for all DLPs. But the moral of the story is TRY IT before you buy it. Specifically, stand close to the screen, set up some still image with a vertical white line, or white-on-black text, and look back and forth across the screen. If you see color bars, you'll see them just the same in your dark living room watching a movie.
This is probably a troll, but the parent got modded up, so I hope this could be considered part of the discussion here. I've tried to discuss this WITHOUT any hint of personal belief, so it can be absorbed by both sides of this issue.
Please note that science frequently requires as much faith as religion does.
You make a large number of statements that you posit as "fact" without any backing behind them. For example, evolution is NOT practically common sense. Quite the contrary, there are many SCIENTISTS (not religious nuts) who have serious problems with fitting Darwin's theories with observed facts. For example, the idea that DNA could self-organize from bare chemicals is difficult to support, when there are ZERO examples of lower-level compounds that appear to be precursors of DNA; this casts a certain pall on the entire concept of life-as-we-know-it-evolving-from-primoridal-goop. Many people I know actually believe in some middle-ground - like God-directed evolution, where God somehow sparked things off and put certain structures in place.
One problem many scientists willingly admit is that there are few rigorous examples of "macro-evolution" - huge-scale evolution between species. There are numerous examples of microevolution such as moths changing color in sooty areas of England, etc. But the fossil record, often used to "prove" evolution, contains HUGE gaps that cannot be explained (at this point). If you look at a realistic evolutionary species tree, you'll see lots of question marks and dashed or dotted lines. Granted, these may be simply a lack of having found the right fossil yet - but then again, whichever way you see THAT is a matter of faith, isn't it?
Much of the things you propose are myth or symbolic imply a disbelief in any deity. Be honest - that sort of invalidates you as capable of accurately evaluating a theological work from a theological perspective. To narrow that statement down, if you DO believe in God, it's not a far stretch to believe that God (by definition all-powerful) is easily capable of using natural phenomenon such as lightning or flood or earthquake or supernova to do his work. If he exists, and is all-powerful, and decided to create enough water to cover the earth, why not? The only reason it seems impossible to you is because you START from the viewpoint that there is no deity. That's a logical fallacy.
One interesting quandry for a scientific-thinking believer in God is "what did God choose to create?" Many creationists belive God created the fossil record, intact. Some believe that the record was created during Noah's flood. But you can also find people, quite intelligent people, who think that God chooses to use geology, cosmology, evolution etc. as tools to shape the world as we know it. Why not, after all? Why should any rational person try to limit a deity to a particular method of creation (such as the "ex nihilo", or instantaneous out-of-nothing creation)? (BTW, many Christian fundamentalists believe that if you don't believe in a literal King-James-Version interpretation of the Bible's story of a six-day creation, you throw away Truth as a concept. But others see more wiggle-room in the Genesis account - arguing that the original-language word for "day" actually is better translated "time", implying an epoch instead.)
As to the Big Bang, again, we have no comprehension whatsoever (scientifically) about why such an event would ever happen. Can you PROVE that such an event wasn't sparked by a deity? I don't believe so, any more than a deist could PROVE it was. So you operate on a certain level of faith, while the deist operates on a similar level - just in a different deity.
For these, and many more reasons, I find it foolish to make absolute statements about cause-and-effect of the universe in a public forum. We simply don't know enough, either way.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this comment will burn some karma, but I'm willing to take a stand instead of posting Anonymous. This story is nothing but a a huge troll compared to most of the comments so moderated. For that matter it's awful close to flamebait. When will we get story moderation points?
Doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, the only thing that even comes CLOSE to making this worthy of a Slashdot front page story is having the phrase "Recording Industry Association of America" in it. Geez, just for typing that into my post, I should get "+5 Insightful", if the editorial tendency is to become policy here.
Come on, editors, cut out the political grandstanding, and stick with the tagline splashed huge across the top of the page - NEWS for nerds, stuff that MATTERS.
>>I fail to see why anyone would register through Verisign >>when you have places like GoDaddy that will give you a >>domain for less than $20 for two years.
>Well, I used one of those discount registrars for a group >of addresses, and I deeply regretted the decision.
There are "discount" registrars, then there's GoDaddy.
I *had* been a committed customer with NS/Verisign for about six years, thinking that they would be more stable, reliable, etc., but when I signed up a couple new domain names a couple years ago, I tried GoDaddy. I've been very pleased with their service over the last two years, and less and less pleased with NS. When this fiasco over SiteFinder broke, I pulled my original name from NS/Verisign and moved to GoDaddy. I'm pleased to say the transfer went flawlessly, and I called NS to let them know exactly why I moved.
Sorry, but I don't consider GoDaddy to be a "discount" registrar - they're a sizable, honest business with much better prices than the monopoly-minded NS/Verisign. My experience with GoDaddy leads me to believe that they understand customer service much better than NS.
The "gallery" is "pending" - no photos there! If you want to sell a product, get the web site complete first! Urf.
The only thing really useful here is the color-combining software, and anyone reasonably competent with a good image editing program can do it manually.
I've been taking crossed-eye stereograms for years - take a photo, move sideways a few inches, take another, then place the images side-by-side and cross your eyes until you see one combined stereoscopic image. The main problem with this method (as with the kit being discussed in this story) is the delay between shots - fine for still life, lousy for action shots (or even still life with moving stuff like wind-blown trees, or running water).
Turns out those old stereo viewers are quite useful:
http://www.threedview.com/Images/showstereo.jpg
They may be antiques, but they really work well, as long as you're content with a 3x3 image (which works just fine for most shots). And you can print a pretty high-quality image pair on any inkjet printer these days.
The TRUE benefit of stereo viewers that don't depend on color shifting is that the colors look completely natural, and they're a lot easier on the eyes than color mixing.
But you can get the same effect with crossed-eye stereograms, with ZERO equipment, as long as you're physically capable of crossing your eyes and refocusing.
Get your facts straight before you flame...
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>similar to pointing out that a man can't really be suspended >on a cross by nails through his hands.
I believe that any careful study of Roman history will discover that this practice was NOT related solely to Jesus' death. The Romans slaughtered thousands of criminals this way, and it's VERY well documented.
Even more importantly, very few Biblical scholars believe "hands" means "palms". Most believe that the nails were placed just above the wrist, between the two arm bones. Very good support, and excruciatingly painful (which was the entire point).
Get your facts straight before you flame more than half of the United States population.
Have you ever READ the WSJ copyright statement? Or most others, for that matter? If you have, they usually EXPLICITLY forbid unauthorized duplication - physical or electronic or otherwise - and authorized usually means "in writing". If you make a copy for your "personal viewing pleasure", you're making an UNAUTHORIZED copy, whether or not it's protected from unauthorized access.
Yes, there's fair use. But true, legal fair use is actually very limited in its application.
Look, no matter how much we geeks LIKE the idea of freedom of use of information, there ARE laws and regulations. Just not agreeing with a law doesn't make it NOT a law. You can't run a stop sign just because you don't like the law. Doing so affects other people negatively. Same with copyright violations - you can't ignore them just because you don't like the law. Doing so ultimately impacts someone else negatively - if you studiously followed the requirements of the copyright law, you'd be paying the various companies more money for the privileges you apparently believe are yours by birthright. So in the end, it's ultimately theft of money from the copyright owner, no matter how much you don't think it's theft. And when an officer of the law comes after you, there's no defense that reads "I didn't think the law was valid."
If we don't like the law, we need to change it using established means in the courts and the legislatures. But until then, like it or not, it's still the law.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that we Americans are so individualistic and privileged that we tend to get looney ideas about right and wrong that look flat-out stupid to outside observers.
>>It's a sure bet that 99.9% of the pirated copies being sold >>are bit-for-bit identical to the original.
>If that's the case, then those users wouldn't be having problems.
Well, I'd like to see some statistics here about "problems". If you read the GlobeTechnology article, it has exactly two quotes about this: 1) "The company estimates at least 3.6-million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually, causing headaches both for Symantec and unsuspecting buyers, who find out too late that the software isn't doing the job." 2)"What consumers don't understand is that while those units may appear to be legitimate, there are a number of risks associated with pirated software... including the likelihood that it really isn't protecting their PC," Mr. Smith said.
What does "doing the job" mean?
It appears to me, based on background knowledge of the basics of antivirus software (namely, that the definitions must be kept updated to make the software useful) and the rather limited quotes above, that not enough detail is given in this story to assume that any users are having problems with the delivered pirated product. I would bet that most consumers install it, and it runs just fine and does exactly what Symantec advertises - right up until they try to update the definitions or purchase an upgrade.
The real headache for any big software company is not raw sales. Those happen just because it's good software. But the money goes out in tech support. I firmly believe that the real problem Symantec is trying to handle here is to reduce their tech support costs, dealing with unsuspecting dupes who bought pirated copies, and are furious that they cannot get it to update as they expected.
This argument looks suspiciously like a SMOKE SCREEN for Symantec, trying to make the USER'S problems sound worse than reality. Now, I agree that piracy is a real problem. Hey, I write and sell my own software, and I have the same questions and concerns. But the chances that some pirates out there are mangling copies of NAV and selling versions which don't work are pretty small, when it's far easier to sell a mere duplicate copy.
So as I see it, the entire issue about "protecting the consumer" here is NOT about protecting them from broken software, but rather protecting their ability to keep that software up to date. And it naturally has the side benefit for Symantect that more users will actually PAY for the software.
You missed the point of product activation. It's a sure bet that 99.9% of the pirated copies being sold are bit-for-bit identical to the original. Ergo, any MD5 sums would match anyway, convincing the poor sap who purchased the pirated version that he/she was okay. Software doesn't have to be modified to be pirated.
By contrast, product activation seeks to ensure that users register their copy with the manufacturer, and that only one copy is in use at any time. This (sort of) effectively prevents selling duplicates of a CD, and (if properly managed) prevents selling duplicates of a registration number too.
Autotuners are not solely used for pitch correction. I spent some time playing with one particularly nice unit a year or so ago - about $300 for the box. In addition to pitch correction (which was WAY cool to play with, by the way), it also offered harmonization. If the unit were hooked up to a MIDI keyboard or sequencer and it could determine which chords were being played, it would automatically add harmony to the main note being sung. The amount of pitch correction, harmony, and original (uncorrected) vocals could be mixed on the console. The harmony is based on the original voice, so how good it sounds is largely a function of how good the performer sounds by themself - it's not exactly a crutch.
Okay, I'll instantly agree that the pitch correction can be horribly abused. I got a real shocking lesson in this while in college, going to see a pop band whose albums I adored. Well, in person they flat-out stunk. After a fashion I lost my innocence that night.
But the harmonizer has an interesting use. In a small performance setting, i.e., one guy and a guitar and a drum machine/sequencer, the harmonizer can enable him to put on a very rich concert without backup singers. This is great for some classes of performers - especially the travelling small artist who does coffeehouse-style playing. They can do live original music, even taking requests, and the audience is treated to a very rich sonic experience, knowing that in the end it's still the artist's skill - if he can't appropriately handle the hardware, it won't sound good, no matter how expensive it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Last *I* heard, eating the silicon chips from inside a flash disk was ALSO harmful to my health. Just like drinking the various chemicals used to produce them.
Okay, okay, it's a bit more complicated than that, but I have a hard time getting worried about nanotech just because it's nanotech. After all, the nanotech will be embedded within carrier material, just like all the current chips. Just as with most modern technology, the manufacturing process isn't necessarily safe for bystanders, and requires careful attention. Same for the disposal process.
Nothing new here.
Yep, this is more or less correct, but let's clarify one point. The only significant difference between this attempt (or any similar 100km up-then-down mission) and an orbit mission is how far you fall.
You can go a thousand kilometers straight up, and fall straight back down, and never go into orbit. You never can "ignore" gravity - even out at the lunar orbit distance, at hundreds of thousands of kilometers, gravity is still a factor. Fact is, that's what keeps the moon nearby.
An orbit is, essentially, simply falling in an arc that never intersects the ground (or atmosphere). You have to get a whole lot more energy into the vehicle so that the trajectory falls past the planet's "edge" - at which point you end up "falling" forever around the earth. (And yes, for you rocket science purists, you also have to expend some additional energy to reshape the path through which you fall, usually at the highest point of your trajectory, to make the orbit more circular - that's called an "orbit injection maneuver".) So it's not a matter of HEIGHT, it's a matter of which DIRECTION you expend the energy.
As a matter of fact, if the atmosphere and terrain were not an issue, you COULD do an orbit a hundred feet off the ground. And you could enter this orbit by going straight sideways. It just requires moving a lot faster than a higher orbit. Our current launch profiles are designed to minimize the fuel (and therefore change in energy, a.k.a. "delta-V") required.
So to wrap up the thought here, weightless is BECAUSE the vehicle trajectory is a free fall (one that's not being modified by expending energy or using winged lift or drag). Doesn't matter whether it's a complete orbit or one that will hit the ground before going around one complete time.
And here's the most relevant point to SpaceShip One - to achieve true orbit (a true free fall all the way around the earth), quite a bit more delta-V is required - which requires more fuel, which requires more vehicle structure, which increases vehicle weight, which requires more fuel to lift, which requires more structure... etc. (And let's not even THINK about reentry heating yet...) So as neat as this trick is, SpaceShip One and any other X-Prize vehicles are a LONG way from a viable orbital launch vehicle.
It's the turbulence that causes fatigue, not the action of unloading a lot of water at once. If you think about it, when you go flying in an airliner and you hit a bumpy patch of air, it's usually around clouds. The reason clouds usually form is that air (moist air) is rising, and carrying the water vapor up to a height where the temperature drops enough for the water to condense. The point is, the air is RISING. As the plane flies thru this rising air, the direction the wing is encountering the airflow suddenly changes slightly. Not a lot, but enough that the lift on the wings suddenly increases. The lift (the force that holds the plane up) is a function of angle of the airflow to the wing, as well as airspeed squared. So when you increase the angle of airflow, the lift increases. Now you have more lift than weight, so the plane bumps upwards. But the area of rising air is relatively small, so you get a short transient bump.
Over a fire, you've got LOTS of bumpy air - the fire is superheating patches of air, and it's all bumpy and roiling around. All that mess is rising rapidly into the sky, and fresh cold air is rushing in around the edges (remember Backdraft, the movie?), moving downward.
To be an effective air drop platform, you need to fly very low, so that the water doesn't disperse too much before it hits the target zone. So you're deliberately flying an airplane thru extremely unstable (rapidly rising and falling) patches of air, with very large vertical speeds (which means, larger changes in airflow direction, which means more severe turbulence).
As any materials engineer knows, and as most of us geeks know, if you bend something often enough, it breaks. And the further you bend it each time, the faster it breaks. An airplane wing is designed for a certain "fatigue life" - a certain number of cycles of bending. With the above primer on turbulence, you can imagine how drastically different from the design you will be using the airplane when you fly it 500 ft over a forest fire, compared to relatively smooth air at 38,000 ft.
So watch the amazing video from last year of a C130 losing its wings over a fire - it's a natural but hopefully rare consequence of abusing an airplane this way. The way the airplane owner SHOULD handle this is frequent and intensive inspections. That C130, as I recall, was NOT properly inspected and was well past its service life. You can read the NTSB report on that accident at http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2004/A04_29_33.pd f (PDF file). A particularly telling quote: "The rate that maneuver load factors between 2.0 and 2.4 were experienced by firefighting aircraft was almost 1,000 times that for aircraft flown as commercial transports." (Load factor is engineer-speak for "g-force" - 1g is normal gravity; most transports never exceed 1.4g except in severe turbulence.)
>Isn't that a man's hand holding the mirror to allow
>lipstick to be applied to a woman's face??
It had BETTER be a different person, or they have two left hands...
*grin*
>You can even observe how the shape of the catenaries
>elongates as the rotational speed stays constant but the
>horizontal velocity increases.
Not quite.
The revolving wheel will ALWAYS travel the exact same distance per revolution.
For a circle, this travel distance is exactly the circumference of the shape. A square or other regular shape will travel a slightly different distance, but something around the circumference of a circle transcribed on the shortest diameter of the shape.
So speed will not elongage the catenaries.
Look at it another way - by this logic, moving very slowly would result in very small catenaries. Taken to extremes, that would become a comb-like surface, with the original wheel shape - not exactly possible.
It annoys me too, but for a different reason. The fact that things look bigger in water is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand - that is just an optical trick to our eyes (which are outside the water) when the water is contained in a round container (a flat container does not exhibit this effect!) and would make no difference to a lithography system.
Contrary to the parent comment's question, if the item is inside the water, the water is no longer acting as a lens - it is simply the refractive medium instead of air (or vacuum). To refract, you MUST have an interface between two substances with different refractive indices - water, air, glass, oil, vacuum, or even metal (for x-ray or gamma rays, for example).
The magnification of a lens is largely a function of the difference between the refractive indices.
Now diffraction is different - that's a function of waves bending around a barrier - like the resist patterns being used. It has NOTHING to do with an interface between two mediums (except the barrier).
Here's a great primer on Diffraction, Refraction, and Reflection.
Sorry. With Outlook Express, if you right click, the message STILL shows in the preview pane. You MUST disable the preview pane to prevent this kind of thing.
Same thing with web bugs - this is really not new in that respect. I've been using Outlook Express for several years now with no real problems, but I've had the preview pane off for exactly this reason.
Oh, and I also pay EmailSifter.com $35/month to filter my domain's email. They've been blocking around 70% spam on average, with 1% false positive rate, and only about 0.1% false negative rate, and have blocked about 800 virus-laden emails in one month...
Just bought one of each of these (Gyration Ultra) for our church - for remote presentation. Bought the 100 foot "Pro" version and the 30 foot version, for two differently sized rooms. Basically, they work exactly as advertised - tilt and yaw motions control the cursor. If you don't hold down the "trigger" on the bottom, nothing happens when in midair. That is good, because you can release the trigger and use just the buttons for forward/back slide control in PowerPoint, without moving the cursor around.
You can also use it on a desk as an optical. Shape's a little ackward for that - rather a tall but narrow mouse to accomodate the recess for the trigger underneath. Otherwise, works great. Even has a scrollwheel.
Surprisingly, it takes very little getting used to - as they state in the ads, you just move your hand naturally and the cursor follows your motions. But it is prone to overcontrol because moving your hand in midair is less precise than the tiny motions on the desktop (in my case, I move the desktop mouse about 3" for full left/right tracking).
Another couple points - it's got a recharging stand, so it doesn't eat batteries; both versions come with a second battery pack; the Pro version also has a separate charger for the backup battery, and the Pro version also includes a AA-battery pack for emergencies. And both include a USB-powered receiver. Finally, the things worked out of the box with WinXP - no drivers to install. Really a pleasure to hook up and use in seconds.
So really, it works like it's advertised - perhaps even better - which is a rarity these days!
This has to do with "moment of inertia". Basically, the mass distribution of an object determines how a spinning motion precesses (the spin axis itself rotates around a different axis - you might think of this as "wobble", like a spinning top does over time).
Try it with a rectangular block of wood. You'll find the following simple fact to be true: you can create a sustained, non-wobbling rotation ONLY about the longest and the shortest axis. For a book shaped object, this would be either around a line thru from the front cover to the back (the short axis), or a line from the top center to the bottom center (the long axis). You CANNOT get a stable spin around the middle axis - in the case of a book, this would be the left-to-right axis.
The same holds true for any object - the tennis racket has a long axis (handle thru the tip) which you can spin it about easily, and a short axis (a flat-plate spin), but the middle axis, which is trying to flip it like a pancake-griddle-flip motion, simply WILL NOT STAY STABLE, no matter what you do.
Notice that a bullet (with an obvious long axis) stays pointed in the right direction even though it may spin millions of times before hitting its target. That's why.
The reasons have to do with the mass distribution, so if you have an object with uneven mass it won't be so simple. And it's easist to see with an object with three distinctly different dimensions, like a book or a block of wood. It's not so obvious at first glance with your tennis racket. And it's even more interesting when you get to a cube, where extremely small weight differences are not apparent to the naked eye - try spinning a die (dice) about its face... You'll discover that the "long axis" is really from corner to corner, so you can easily spin a die on a corner, but if you toss it in the air you won't be able to spin it about a face.
I don't recall the details offhand, as it has to do with rotational inertia and momentum and so forth, but essentially, when you try to flip something about the middle axis, the weight at the ends of the long axis wants to move outwards, and this disrupts the stable spin. This is easily and 100% repeatably demonstrated. Just another good science fact to get your kids interested in the natural world.
My personal experiences...
.js file, or whatever, comes in with a 2 second lag. For complex sites (which is MOST commercial sites with https connections) it can be pretty slow. I simply use Mozilla's "block images from this server" trick most of the time.
Latency sucks. I'm actively looking for an alternate (I can't get DSL, I can't get wireless, I can't get two-way cable). But I will say that DirecWay is MUCH better than a modem - in most cases.
Latency is not so much a problem for browsing, surprisingly, because if you're used to a modem, you wait longer by far for content to arrive. With the DirecWay software running (on a 3000/4000 box), or with the 6000 system, the thing is smart enough to ask for all the subitems on a page at once, so once the stuff starts arriving, it gets there pretty fast.
The real problem with latency, surprisingly, is EMAIL. As you know, it's a challenge/reply system, where it's necessarily linear - you can't multitask it. So every step takes 2 seconds - which means for checking about five POP3 mailboxes with a dozen saved messages each, and downloading a dozen new messages, can take upwards of 3 or 4 minutes. I usually hit my email button, walk away, and come back later. And when I'm home, I just leave it running all the time. Not worrying about dialing up is sweet.
Same thing with FTP - if you manage a web site, like I do, it can be REALLY painful working with FTP, since the linear nature of THAT transaction is also very slow with high latency connections. Uploading or downloading a hundred small files totalling 100K takes well near forever (10-20 minutes), even though you could do it over ethernet in a second or two.
Finally, browsing any secure site is very slow - since the system doesn't do its magic compression / multi-request with https. So there's really no browsing acceleration there. So each image, or
Uploading anything is REALLY REALLY REALLY SLOW. You're better off uploading over a modem - no kidding. I usually see 2.8k upload speeds. Much worse than I used to see with a modem with decent software compresssion. And that's WITH DrTCP optimizations applied. Since I market software and must download 10Mb installers to my web site regularly, I've learned to just start them at bedtime, and check it in the morning to be sure it finished.
Downloading large files is amazing - nothing to complain about - 10 Mb downloads are painless and I don't even think twice about requesting them anymore, even via email.
I personally haven't yet hit the FAP limit once. So I have no complaints about the capping. Of course, I'm not downloading full Linux installs or anything - just an occasional 10 or 20Mb demo installer for some software. And I don't traffic in MP3s or other multimedia.
Installation was quite easy - I have a friend who's an installer, and he gave me the mount and cable ahead of time, so I ran my own cable and did the mount the way I like it (lots of roofing tar, extra heavy lag bolts, etc.) I couldn't do the dish install because of the FCC requirements, but after my own pre-installation, my friend was able to get the dish mounted and pointed within about 10 minutes. No problem. Be sure to account for TWO RG6QS cables - not just one - to carry both the send and receive modems.
I have had some difficulty with the "commissioning" - where the receiver downloads the adapter keys - when I turn the thing off for a week while I'm out of town, it typically takes an hour or two before it's up and running again. That can be very irritating while it's resolved.
As with other posters, I've only had a few instances of rain fade, and usually very brief.
I've never had a real problem with tech support - they're usually slow to answer the phone but once I get a person we usually have the problem resolved fairly quickly. There was one exception where the guy must have been from Pakistan, couldn't really speak English, and obviously didn't want to hear what I had to say, was just reading a scrip
LOVE the MX Duo - just got it for Christmas - with ONE reservation.
The response time is great - I don't even know I'm using a wireless device. I second the comments about battery life - no issue there yet.
The main issue I have is that the mouse has TWO AA batteries. It's therefore a bit too heavy for easy handling. I have to grab it a bit harder than I'm used to doing, when it's time to "recenter" the thing.
I love the buttons scattered around it too; out-of-the-box (no extra drivers beyond WinXP's built-in drivers) they do forward/back on browsing, and continuous-scrolling up/down. The fifth extra button does nothing without extra drivers, but it's too out-of-the-way to use easily anyway.
The keyboard, too, has a great set of useful buttons - like media (opens the default audio program), mute, play, stop, rewind, open email, open web, etc. Even has a rotary volume knob. Again, all these work without any extra custom drivers loaded.
I'll keep it, thank you very much, and my wife already wants one for herself.
They didn't have to use a web bug to prove anything in court - they only had to prove to a judge that there was probable cause for a search warrant of the guy's house, whereupon they could get MORE than enough evidence from seizing his computer and picking off all the email from it, plus whatever other evidence happened to be laying around his desk, etc.
Seems to me that a web bug or similar tactics providing an IP address of an individual's computer would be MORE than enough to convince any reasonable judge to issue a search warrant.
And if the search turned up nothing, because he DID spoof or hide his tracks, they apologize to the surprised and innocent homeowner, and try something else.
In the NADC centrifuge, as in the Swedish model, the pilot controls the g-forces by maneuvering the "airplane" with a typical set of fighter jet controls, and watches the various instruments in front of him respond appropriately. I don't know whether there are currently graphics capabilities, but as an aircraft simulator test engineer, I can tell you with authority that visuals are NOT required for a good simulation, depending on the goal of the simulator.
So, this has basically been done for at LEAST 13 years if not quite a bit longer (the NADC centrifuge first opened in 1952). And oh, by the way, this centrifuge also does at least 9g. So unless someone else has some explanation of what's different about this new Swedish device, the only difference I can see is that it's been built by a commercial entity, instead of the US Government.
Here are a couple links, in case you'd like to read about this specific simulator/centrifuge (the first link is an excellent discussion of G-LOC effects in general; the second shows no less than four sites where such training is conducted for the US Government):
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1990/artic les/april_90/apra_90.html
h tm
http://www.nomi.med.navy.mil/STD/ASTCPax/initial.
Just last weekend... this mea culpa might save someone in /. land some pain.
/. folks, I'd like to pass along some tips based on my experience.
Had a form.pl script handling all form submissions on our web site. The form submitted its info via sendmail, as well as logging to text files. While the address checking was pretty robust, someone figured out how to overload the contents in a manner that fooled the sendmail into thinking that the contents contained BCC: data.
Fortunately I caught it within about five minutes, thanks to the fact that all submissions are CC:'d to a real address, thus starting a flood of mail. I saw the classic pattern: a test message, a couple revisions, a final draft test message, then the flood of "real" messages. Since I saw it start, I was able to shut down the script (I just killed the Execute permissions).
After the initial test messages, I saw submissions from dozens of different IPs - I assume zombied PCs. It seems that the zombies were programmed to relay form POST submissions, instead of trying to relay mail directly. Smart, since that puts the mail load on a fast server, not a slow dialup PC.
But the really interesting thing was, even after shutting down the script, the flood of submissions continued. I tweaked the form.pl to bounce the requests to another page but the bounce was never followed - indicating to me that the program didn't bother to check the server response to the submission, even for a 404 or 302 response! This continued for around 14 hours, at a rate of about 20-40 hits per minute. Based on the first messages that got through, several hundred addresses were included in each BCC: field.
Suddenly at about T+14 hours, it simply stopped - cold. For the next several hours a few sporadic hits popped up. Haven't seen any since about T+18 hours.
Apparently the spammer assumed his script would succeed once it was successfully started (it WOULD have unless I'd been at the PC). He obviously ran through his entire mailing list "blind". I'm happy to say 13.8 of those 14 hours were wasted, preventing about 7 million spams (14 hrs, 40/minute, 200 addresses each).
As lessons learned, although I'm sure this is old news to most of the
1) The spammer used our web site's form to build his attack, but then took it to another machine. All subsequent submissions were using a POST method but not from our site's page. No surprise there, but simply checking $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} could have prevented 99% of this attack - if not making it pointless to begin with.
2) Sendmail can be fooled into reading BCC: addresses from information after the start of the message body. I don't understand the details, but an obvious preventative is to =~ s/bcc://gi on the message before sendmail gets it. Probably wouldn't hurt to do the same to To: and CC:.
3) Sendmail can be fooled into sending encoded text from an otherwise text-only form. Filter out "Content-Type:" or "Content-Transfer-Encoding:" or "multipart/mixed" or "text/html" before sendmail gets it.
4) If you're watching for abuse, don't rely on looking for multiple hits from one IP - it seems that once you become a target you will likely get a distributed attack.
5) Consider replacing all @ signs... do a s/@/-at-/g on all message fields before sending to sendmail (except of course whatever hard-coded To: is at the start of the message). If all other measures fail, at least you won't get blacklisted, although you might get 7 million "undeliverable" replies.
IAAAE (I AM an aero engineer)...
It's impossible to state the range (1200nm), and then later in the same paragraph, to state that the usable fuel capacity is "to be determined". Fuel capacity determines the range. (Gee, thanks, Sherlock... that's true of any vehicle.) But in an airplane, it's even more critical, because fuel capacity determines structural weight (more fuel requires more structure, which in turn demands more fuel to move it, which demands more structure, etc.). Until they've nailed down the fuel load, this thing is hardly an aerodynamically developed system.
This thing is a pipe dream - if you read the FAQs, there are far more "to be determined" than details.
I purchased a DLP project (an InFocus) about a year ago. While it's a GREAT projector for the cost, about $1200 for a 1500-lumen SVGA unit, I've found it's not very well suited for video.
The problem is that the update frequency on the DLP, combined with the color wheel technology, means that when you look from one area of the image to another, and the image contains any high-contrast vertical edges, you'll catch an afterimage of vertical red, green and blue bars on the margin of the edge. Essentially, your eye catches the sequential flashing of R, G and B used to form white or any bright color.
The problem is obvious even with still content - like a powerpoint slide presentation or a DVD menu - because even though the content isn't moving, the DLP still has to mix RGB to get white, and the mirrors and color wheel are rotating thru the colors constantly.
The problem gets more apparent the closer you get to the screen, because your eyes have to move farther to see various parts of the image - if the action suddenly changes from the left edge of the screen to the right edge, you look to follow the action. Up close, your peripheral vision is more tasked, so you tend to look back and forth a lot. When you're further from the screen you don't need to move your eyes as often.
So while it's great for slow content like a powerpoint slide show, and it's fine if you're a long way from the screen (like in a big presentation), when you try to use it as a video projector in a smallish living room setting, it's VERY distracting.
This may not be true for all DLPs. But the moral of the story is TRY IT before you buy it. Specifically, stand close to the screen, set up some still image with a vertical white line, or white-on-black text, and look back and forth across the screen. If you see color bars, you'll see them just the same in your dark living room watching a movie.
This is probably a troll, but the parent got modded up, so I hope this could be considered part of the discussion here. I've tried to discuss this WITHOUT any hint of personal belief, so it can be absorbed by both sides of this issue.
Please note that science frequently requires as much faith as religion does.
You make a large number of statements that you posit as "fact" without any backing behind them. For example, evolution is NOT practically common sense. Quite the contrary, there are many SCIENTISTS (not religious nuts) who have serious problems with fitting Darwin's theories with observed facts. For example, the idea that DNA could self-organize from bare chemicals is difficult to support, when there are ZERO examples of lower-level compounds that appear to be precursors of DNA; this casts a certain pall on the entire concept of life-as-we-know-it-evolving-from-primoridal-goop. Many people I know actually believe in some middle-ground - like God-directed evolution, where God somehow sparked things off and put certain structures in place.
One problem many scientists willingly admit is that there are few rigorous examples of "macro-evolution" - huge-scale evolution between species. There are numerous examples of microevolution such as moths changing color in sooty areas of England, etc. But the fossil record, often used to "prove" evolution, contains HUGE gaps that cannot be explained (at this point). If you look at a realistic evolutionary species tree, you'll see lots of question marks and dashed or dotted lines. Granted, these may be simply a lack of having found the right fossil yet - but then again, whichever way you see THAT is a matter of faith, isn't it?
Much of the things you propose are myth or symbolic imply a disbelief in any deity. Be honest - that sort of invalidates you as capable of accurately evaluating a theological work from a theological perspective. To narrow that statement down, if you DO believe in God, it's not a far stretch to believe that God (by definition all-powerful) is easily capable of using natural phenomenon such as lightning or flood or earthquake or supernova to do his work. If he exists, and is all-powerful, and decided to create enough water to cover the earth, why not? The only reason it seems impossible to you is because you START from the viewpoint that there is no deity. That's a logical fallacy.
One interesting quandry for a scientific-thinking believer in God is "what did God choose to create?" Many creationists belive God created the fossil record, intact. Some believe that the record was created during Noah's flood. But you can also find people, quite intelligent people, who think that God chooses to use geology, cosmology, evolution etc. as tools to shape the world as we know it. Why not, after all? Why should any rational person try to limit a deity to a particular method of creation (such as the "ex nihilo", or instantaneous out-of-nothing creation)? (BTW, many Christian fundamentalists believe that if you don't believe in a literal King-James-Version interpretation of the Bible's story of a six-day creation, you throw away Truth as a concept. But others see more wiggle-room in the Genesis account - arguing that the original-language word for "day" actually is better translated "time", implying an epoch instead.)
As to the Big Bang, again, we have no comprehension whatsoever (scientifically) about why such an event would ever happen. Can you PROVE that such an event wasn't sparked by a deity? I don't believe so, any more than a deist could PROVE it was. So you operate on a certain level of faith, while the deist operates on a similar level - just in a different deity.
For these, and many more reasons, I find it foolish to make absolute statements about cause-and-effect of the universe in a public forum. We simply don't know enough, either way.
News, this ain't. Matters, it doesn't.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this comment will burn some karma, but I'm willing to take a stand instead of posting Anonymous. This story is nothing but a a huge troll compared to most of the comments so moderated. For that matter it's awful close to flamebait. When will we get story moderation points?
Doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, the only thing that even comes CLOSE to making this worthy of a Slashdot front page story is having the phrase "Recording Industry Association of America" in it. Geez, just for typing that into my post, I should get "+5 Insightful", if the editorial tendency is to become policy here.
Come on, editors, cut out the political grandstanding, and stick with the tagline splashed huge across the top of the page - NEWS for nerds, stuff that MATTERS.
>>I fail to see why anyone would register through Verisign
>>when you have places like GoDaddy that will give you a
>>domain for less than $20 for two years.
>Well, I used one of those discount registrars for a group
>of addresses, and I deeply regretted the decision.
There are "discount" registrars, then there's GoDaddy.
I *had* been a committed customer with NS/Verisign for about six years, thinking that they would be more stable, reliable, etc., but when I signed up a couple new domain names a couple years ago, I tried GoDaddy. I've been very pleased with their service over the last two years, and less and less pleased with NS. When this fiasco over SiteFinder broke, I pulled my original name from NS/Verisign and moved to GoDaddy. I'm pleased to say the transfer went flawlessly, and I called NS to let them know exactly why I moved.
Sorry, but I don't consider GoDaddy to be a "discount" registrar - they're a sizable, honest business with much better prices than the monopoly-minded NS/Verisign. My experience with GoDaddy leads me to believe that they understand customer service much better than NS.
The only thing really useful here is the color-combining software, and anyone reasonably competent with a good image editing program can do it manually.
I've been taking crossed-eye stereograms for years - take a photo, move sideways a few inches, take another, then place the images side-by-side and cross your eyes until you see one combined stereoscopic image. The main problem with this method (as with the kit being discussed in this story) is the delay between shots - fine for still life, lousy for action shots (or even still life with moving stuff like wind-blown trees, or running water).
Turns out those old stereo viewers are quite useful: http://www.threedview.com/Images/showstereo.jpg They may be antiques, but they really work well, as long as you're content with a 3x3 image (which works just fine for most shots). And you can print a pretty high-quality image pair on any inkjet printer these days.
The TRUE benefit of stereo viewers that don't depend on color shifting is that the colors look completely natural, and they're a lot easier on the eyes than color mixing.
But you can get the same effect with crossed-eye stereograms, with ZERO equipment, as long as you're physically capable of crossing your eyes and refocusing.
Here's an excellent primer on setting up and viewing crossed-eye stereograms. http://www.angelfire.com/ca/erker/freeview.html
>similar to pointing out that a man can't really be suspended
>on a cross by nails through his hands.
I believe that any careful study of Roman history will discover that this practice was NOT related solely to Jesus' death. The Romans slaughtered thousands of criminals this way, and it's VERY well documented.
Even more importantly, very few Biblical scholars believe "hands" means "palms". Most believe that the nails were placed just above the wrist, between the two arm bones. Very good support, and excruciatingly painful (which was the entire point).
Get your facts straight before you flame more than half of the United States population.
Have you ever READ the WSJ copyright statement? Or most others, for that matter? If you have, they usually EXPLICITLY forbid unauthorized duplication - physical or electronic or otherwise - and authorized usually means "in writing". If you make a copy for your "personal viewing pleasure", you're making an UNAUTHORIZED copy, whether or not it's protected from unauthorized access.
Yes, there's fair use. But true, legal fair use is actually very limited in its application.
Look, no matter how much we geeks LIKE the idea of freedom of use of information, there ARE laws and regulations. Just not agreeing with a law doesn't make it NOT a law. You can't run a stop sign just because you don't like the law. Doing so affects other people negatively. Same with copyright violations - you can't ignore them just because you don't like the law. Doing so ultimately impacts someone else negatively - if you studiously followed the requirements of the copyright law, you'd be paying the various companies more money for the privileges you apparently believe are yours by birthright. So in the end, it's ultimately theft of money from the copyright owner, no matter how much you don't think it's theft. And when an officer of the law comes after you, there's no defense that reads "I didn't think the law was valid."
If we don't like the law, we need to change it using established means in the courts and the legislatures. But until then, like it or not, it's still the law.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that we Americans are so individualistic and privileged that we tend to get looney ideas about right and wrong that look flat-out stupid to outside observers.
>>It's a sure bet that 99.9% of the pirated copies being sold
... including the likelihood that it really isn't protecting their PC," Mr. Smith said.
>>are bit-for-bit identical to the original.
>If that's the case, then those users wouldn't be having problems.
Well, I'd like to see some statistics here about "problems". If you read the GlobeTechnology article, it has exactly two quotes about this:
1) "The company estimates at least 3.6-million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually, causing headaches both for Symantec and unsuspecting buyers, who find out too late that the software isn't doing the job."
2)"What consumers don't understand is that while those units may appear to be legitimate, there are a number of risks associated with pirated software
What does "doing the job" mean?
It appears to me, based on background knowledge of the basics of antivirus software (namely, that the definitions must be kept updated to make the software useful) and the rather limited quotes above, that not enough detail is given in this story to assume that any users are having problems with the delivered pirated product. I would bet that most consumers install it, and it runs just fine and does exactly what Symantec advertises - right up until they try to update the definitions or purchase an upgrade.
The real headache for any big software company is not raw sales. Those happen just because it's good software. But the money goes out in tech support. I firmly believe that the real problem Symantec is trying to handle here is to reduce their tech support costs, dealing with unsuspecting dupes who bought pirated copies, and are furious that they cannot get it to update as they expected.
This argument looks suspiciously like a SMOKE SCREEN for Symantec, trying to make the USER'S problems sound worse than reality. Now, I agree that piracy is a real problem. Hey, I write and sell my own software, and I have the same questions and concerns. But the chances that some pirates out there are mangling copies of NAV and selling versions which don't work are pretty small, when it's far easier to sell a mere duplicate copy.
So as I see it, the entire issue about "protecting the consumer" here is NOT about protecting them from broken software, but rather protecting their ability to keep that software up to date. And it naturally has the side benefit for Symantect that more users will actually PAY for the software.
You missed the point of product activation. It's a sure bet that 99.9% of the pirated copies being sold are bit-for-bit identical to the original. Ergo, any MD5 sums would match anyway, convincing the poor sap who purchased the pirated version that he/she was okay. Software doesn't have to be modified to be pirated.
By contrast, product activation seeks to ensure that users register their copy with the manufacturer, and that only one copy is in use at any time. This (sort of) effectively prevents selling duplicates of a CD, and (if properly managed) prevents selling duplicates of a registration number too.
Autotuners are not solely used for pitch correction. I spent some time playing with one particularly nice unit a year or so ago - about $300 for the box. In addition to pitch correction (which was WAY cool to play with, by the way), it also offered harmonization. If the unit were hooked up to a MIDI keyboard or sequencer and it could determine which chords were being played, it would automatically add harmony to the main note being sung. The amount of pitch correction, harmony, and original (uncorrected) vocals could be mixed on the console. The harmony is based on the original voice, so how good it sounds is largely a function of how good the performer sounds by themself - it's not exactly a crutch.
Okay, I'll instantly agree that the pitch correction can be horribly abused. I got a real shocking lesson in this while in college, going to see a pop band whose albums I adored. Well, in person they flat-out stunk. After a fashion I lost my innocence that night.
But the harmonizer has an interesting use. In a small performance setting, i.e., one guy and a guitar and a drum machine/sequencer, the harmonizer can enable him to put on a very rich concert without backup singers. This is great for some classes of performers - especially the travelling small artist who does coffeehouse-style playing. They can do live original music, even taking requests, and the audience is treated to a very rich sonic experience, knowing that in the end it's still the artist's skill - if he can't appropriately handle the hardware, it won't sound good, no matter how expensive it is.