optical will be here for quite a while. However the nature of the optics may well change, ie different light wavelengths, different way of accessing the data besides spinning disks... at some point it won't be cost effective to include the hardware to handle obsolete discs (how many PCs come with floppy drives today? fewer and fewer..) it is not unlikely that cd drives will be long, long dead before the 75 year mark is reached.
You know, I find it incredibly silly a bunch of people think they know everyting about everything (including genetics) because they know some computer programming. The biologists who've worked on this for years know far, far more than some dimwit on slashdot.
It's as if a secretary or a mechanic said AI researchers should stop researching AI because they saw the matrix and were afraid of what it could lead to. Leave the science to the scientists and the biologists who've made it their life work to ensure its safe, viable, and benefits the world.
Its one of those great FUD myths the anti-GM people like to spread. Monsanto at one time briefly studied whether including a gene that sterilized the plant to prevent it from reproducing after a generation. Thus a farmer would have to buy new seeds every year from them.. etc.
It was never actually made as it was considered infeasible and likely to piss off customers and it was officially terminated (pun intended) back in something like 1998.
you would think that the guy (burt rutan) who has devoted his life to novel aeronautic designs that challenge notions of what can be done regarding flight would be "more deserving" to win a space race than a guy who has programmed 3D graphics engines for just over a decade...
On a similar topic, today I attended a lecture by Tony Hoare on compilers that can generate verified code and tools that guide the human programmer into designing programs that can be easily validated (from the compiler's stance). One very good question raised afterwards was, well how do you know you can trust the compiler generating the verified program?
Though Dr. Hoare danced around that question a little, presumably that aspect of the project would have to be done by hand, a monumental task to say the least.
as far as autonomous robots go, the qrio isn't really very autonomous. Though its motion control systems are state of the art and very impressive.
A key part to truly autonomous robots is a sense of locality - that is, can it determine "where in the world am I?" with reasonable accuracy. And I don't necessarily mean in the GPS coordinate sense. I mean, can you turn the robot off, move it to the corner of a room and turn it back on and it will quickly look around and say "oh, i'm in the northwest corner". Or better yet, take it somewhere its never been before, it'll look and move around and map it out and try to correlate its new location with old ones.
That's one of the more interesting problems in robotics at the moment, and a great deal of progress has been made in solving it - mainly by using laser scanners which make mapping easy.
The QRIO on the other hand uses stereoscopic vision, and nobody (that I know of) has yet to mesh that piece of technology with localization. So its sense of localization is limited by the presence of special colored landmarks.
Lasers are kind of a stop-gap technology though between low resolution sonars and full stereoscopic vision systems. Unfortunately robot vision is really hard to do anything non-trivial and takes enormous amounts of computing power.
the internet was originally a military project to devise a computer network capable of surviving a nuclear war by routing around missing nodes.
the original version of it was eventually passed on to university researchers which later become what we have today, and a separate, more secure military one was created.
some early machines used CRT's with photodiodes mounted to the front of them to store bits. A dot on the screen would be seen by the diode, and then refreshed in a feedback loop.
i agree it would be a good idea, though pc's have multiple low voltages to deliver to components...5 and 12 are the ones i know off hand.
You'd need a special custom power connector for it, which would raise the price per unit some, if you changed from good ole' standard.
I think some machines have this already (didnt apple on the cube? maybe im wrong). But your sub-$300 pc is going to cut pennies wherever it can.
Re:AirForce saying: new engine makes possible new
on
NASA Tests X-43A
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· Score: 2, Insightful
with a scramjet you no longer need several million lbs of liquid oxygen to lift comparatively light space cargo off the ground.
most rockets in work by combining oxygen and hydrogen and detonating them. To launch sizeable craft from the ground to orbit though, you need alot of oxygen - and its quite heavy. However, if you use normal turbofans to get into the air, then fire a smaller rocket to get you to scramjet speed, and then use the scramjet to ride your way to the top of the atmosphere (where you'll fire one last set of small rockets to propel yourself into orbit), you still have a substantial weight savings over lifting off from the ground with several million lbs of LOX.
This basically means you can lift more cargo into space easier, cheaper, and more frequently.
The only way for the 'space plane' to become a true economic reality is through scramjets.
probably wouldnt need to. The speed it would impact the ocean would bash the hell out of it.
Scramjets are very simple (mechanically) devices. No moving parts. However, they are geometrically, extremely complex and precise. The speed it would hit the ocean would damage the combustion chamber to the extent it would be about as useful as a scramjet made from a tin can.
It puts all other image printing software to shame both in flexibility and technical superiority. It's interpolator is fantastic. And of course it supports monitor and printer profiles. Cheap, too (well worth the registration fee)
if you've actually read the book. its substantially different (and better) than the movie.
The same goes for the book "Contact". Much better than the movie's lame avoidance of the whole religious debate the ensued in the book (presumably to avoid pissing off religious fundies)
the FDA has just as strict regulations regarding GM foods as they do any drug. It takes years and yes, billions, to get approval for use.
Take for example the infamous Starlink corn. It is GM modified and contained a compound *similar*, though not exactly, to a allergenic compound that about.01% of the US population was allergic to. Because of this the FDA only approved it for animal feed and not human consumption.
Then the accidental human test when some managed to get into taco bell shells later determined that it was, in fact, harmless.
That was several years ago. The science of allergies is rapidly advancing due to our growing knowledge of genetics. And it still requires strict FDA approval which takes years.
if the criticism is based on ignorance..
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 1
then it is damn well worthy of being refuted and mockery.
Whats sad is the public is woefully misinformed about GM crops. They're allowed to believe ridiculous untruths about them like GM corn is a superplant which can spread and never be stopped (utter nonsense, no human sustenance food crop can live for long without human care, we've bred them that way for thousands of years. juicy and tasty means nutrient demanding and very weak in the wild!) among other things.
I'm all for the public on being educated. Unfortunatly european MP's are more keen on scaring the public for political points.
As for 83% of the UK public, if we asked 83% of them if we should ban dihydrogen monoxide because it kills thousands per year, should it be done?
Will it have the terminator gene built in? Doesn't exist. Monsanto terminated the project.
Will it be producing its own roundup to dump into our water table?
uh, no? why would a plant generate a herbicide that would kill itself?
Will it kill people with peanut allergies?
Will peanuts? This is why we have these people called 'geneticists' and 'doctors' who study allergenic compounds to ensure that what is grown doesn't affect people with certain allergies.
Will it have a super strong resistance to antibiotics?
wtf? a plant resistant to antibiotics? do you know what these words mean?
Corn that produces its own pesticide is very bad - it will be laying down roundup when it isn't needed in an effort to put as much crap into the water table and promoting resistance at the same time.
First of all, roundup is a *herbicide*. It kills *plants* not insects. Second, did you know there are lots of plants out there which generate their own natural pest poisons? Usually they're directed toward one particular pest. By combining these genes into say, corn, you now have directed pest killing inherent in the corn. It doesn't get into the water table anymore than the plant it was spliced from does!
This means you don't have to spray general pesticide chemicals (which kills *all* insects even the good ones and stays in the environment for years) on the crops.
Maybe over plain copper wires. Phone company analog->digital sampling equipment (used between central office trunks) doesn't sample fast enough to allow speeds beyond 56K. Hence the reason there aren't any POTS modems beyond 56K anymore.
Was anyone trying to use stereoscopic vision for obstacle avoidance? It seems that would be a good way to identify obstacles across a wide view, as opposed to scanning with the laser.
I think i'd try using that to identify potential obstacles, then use that to direct a steerable laser rangefinder to analyze and determine the validity of the obstacle (in case the vision system misidentified a shadow or some such).
with some cleverness (meaning, you really know your math), you can make many non-linear problems work adequately with it. Though possibly non-optimal, "good enough".
The difficult problems need to be presented outright at first, so you don't invest too much time in something that can solve simple issues, but fails utterly at more complex ones.
The ultimate goal of autonomous robotics is to develop a system that interacts with the real world at least as well as human, if not better.
If you start off with a simple challenge, you will get simple answers. For the next challenge, you ramp up the challenge some, and most will just modify the simple system. At some point though, you can't modify what is fundamentally flawed, and you have to throw it all away and start over.
Thats a huge waste of time and resources. If the teams recognizes the *tough* challenges from the outset, they're more likely to come up with a system that is flexible enough to handle them when the time and ability comes. Granted, you may spend more time developing that framework before you solve simple issues, but its worth it in the end.
Now the teams know what real-world issues they face. Their future systems will be much better equipped to handle them as they come along.
I suspect DARPA was well aware that this challenge could not be met. But the teams and technology are better off for it.
people are not programs nor mathematical equations. The nice thing about human intelligence is its ability to see beyond what it already knows. aka "Creativity".
If one person among the teams discovers a better way to do things, and demonstrates its ability, then the better way will eventually win out, barring other unrelated issues like politics or egotistical ideologies. This is all the more likely to happen if its an environment of sharing and open minded thinking where new ideas aren't shunned. Practical autonomous robotics tends to be one of those areas (now theoretical, thats a different story...)
Slashdot Mirror
optical will be here for quite a while. However the nature of the optics may well change, ie different light wavelengths, different way of accessing the data besides spinning disks... at some point it won't be cost effective to include the hardware to handle obsolete discs (how many PCs come with floppy drives today? fewer and fewer..) it is not unlikely that cd drives will be long, long dead before the 75 year mark is reached.
there used to be a time, even among industry engineers and academics that slashdot was a respectable site with neat interesting news and discussion.
If you mention "so i saw this slashdot story and discussion.." today among those circles, you'll get a rolled eye and a snort.
You know, I find it incredibly silly a bunch of people think they know everyting about everything (including genetics) because they know some computer programming. The biologists who've worked on this for years know far, far more than some dimwit on slashdot.
It's as if a secretary or a mechanic said AI researchers should stop researching AI because they saw the matrix and were afraid of what it could lead to. Leave the science to the scientists and the biologists who've made it their life work to ensure its safe, viable, and benefits the world.
Its one of those great FUD myths the anti-GM people like to spread. Monsanto at one time briefly studied whether including a gene that sterilized the plant to prevent it from reproducing after a generation. Thus a farmer would have to buy new seeds every year from them.. etc.
It was never actually made as it was considered infeasible and likely to piss off customers and it was officially terminated (pun intended) back in something like 1998.
you would think that the guy (burt rutan) who has devoted his life to novel aeronautic designs that challenge notions of what can be done regarding flight would be "more deserving" to win a space race than a guy who has programmed 3D graphics engines for just over a decade...
Though Dr. Hoare danced around that question a little, presumably that aspect of the project would have to be done by hand, a monumental task to say the least.
as far as autonomous robots go, the qrio isn't really very autonomous. Though its motion control systems are state of the art and very impressive.
A key part to truly autonomous robots is a sense of locality - that is, can it determine "where in the world am I?" with reasonable accuracy. And I don't necessarily mean in the GPS coordinate sense. I mean, can you turn the robot off, move it to the corner of a room and turn it back on and it will quickly look around and say "oh, i'm in the northwest corner". Or better yet, take it somewhere its never been before, it'll look and move around and map it out and try to correlate its new location with old ones.
That's one of the more interesting problems in robotics at the moment, and a great deal of progress has been made in solving it - mainly by using laser scanners which make mapping easy.
The QRIO on the other hand uses stereoscopic vision, and nobody (that I know of) has yet to mesh that piece of technology with localization. So its sense of localization is limited by the presence of special colored landmarks.
Lasers are kind of a stop-gap technology though between low resolution sonars and full stereoscopic vision systems. Unfortunately robot vision is really hard to do anything non-trivial and takes enormous amounts of computing power.
heh the other day i found my old floppy of full-version Mod4Win. I think it cost $20, one of the few softwares my 13 year old self saved up to buy..
the internet was originally a military project to devise a computer network capable of surviving a nuclear war by routing around missing nodes.
the original version of it was eventually passed on to university researchers which later become what we have today, and a separate, more secure military one was created.
some early machines used CRT's with photodiodes mounted to the front of them to store bits. A dot on the screen would be seen by the diode, and then refreshed in a feedback loop.
You'd need a special custom power connector for it, which would raise the price per unit some, if you changed from good ole' standard.
I think some machines have this already (didnt apple on the cube? maybe im wrong). But your sub-$300 pc is going to cut pennies wherever it can.
with a scramjet you no longer need several million lbs of liquid oxygen to lift comparatively light space cargo off the ground.
most rockets in work by combining oxygen and hydrogen and detonating them. To launch sizeable craft from the ground to orbit though, you need alot of oxygen - and its quite heavy. However, if you use normal turbofans to get into the air, then fire a smaller rocket to get you to scramjet speed, and then use the scramjet to ride your way to the top of the atmosphere (where you'll fire one last set of small rockets to propel yourself into orbit), you still have a substantial weight savings over lifting off from the ground with several million lbs of LOX.
This basically means you can lift more cargo into space easier, cheaper, and more frequently.
The only way for the 'space plane' to become a true economic reality is through scramjets.
probably wouldnt need to. The speed it would impact the ocean would bash the hell out of it.
Scramjets are very simple (mechanically) devices. No moving parts. However, they are geometrically, extremely complex and precise. The speed it would hit the ocean would damage the combustion chamber to the extent it would be about as useful as a scramjet made from a tin can.
if you're even into amateur printing, use QImage.
It puts all other image printing software to shame both in flexibility and technical superiority. It's interpolator is fantastic. And of course it supports monitor and printer profiles. Cheap, too (well worth the registration fee)
support for something as basic as color profiles.
if you've actually read the book. its substantially different (and better) than the movie.
The same goes for the book "Contact". Much better than the movie's lame avoidance of the whole religious debate the ensued in the book (presumably to avoid pissing off religious fundies)
the FDA has just as strict regulations regarding GM foods as they do any drug. It takes years and yes, billions, to get approval for use.
.01% of the US population was allergic to. Because of this the FDA only approved it for animal feed and not human consumption.
Take for example the infamous Starlink corn. It is GM modified and contained a compound *similar*, though not exactly, to a allergenic compound that about
Then the accidental human test when some managed to get into taco bell shells later determined that it was, in fact, harmless.
That was several years ago. The science of allergies is rapidly advancing due to our growing knowledge of genetics. And it still requires strict FDA approval which takes years.
then it is damn well worthy of being refuted and mockery.
Whats sad is the public is woefully misinformed about GM crops. They're allowed to believe ridiculous untruths about them like GM corn is a superplant which can spread and never be stopped (utter nonsense, no human sustenance food crop can live for long without human care, we've bred them that way for thousands of years. juicy and tasty means nutrient demanding and very weak in the wild!) among other things.
I'm all for the public on being educated. Unfortunatly european MP's are more keen on scaring the public for political points.
As for 83% of the UK public, if we asked 83% of them if we should ban dihydrogen monoxide because it kills thousands per year, should it be done?
Will it have the terminator gene built in?
Doesn't exist. Monsanto terminated the project.
Will it be producing its own roundup to dump into our water table?
uh, no? why would a plant generate a herbicide that would kill itself?
Will it kill people with peanut allergies?
Will peanuts? This is why we have these people called 'geneticists' and 'doctors' who study allergenic compounds to ensure that what is grown doesn't affect people with certain allergies.
Will it have a super strong resistance to antibiotics?
wtf? a plant resistant to antibiotics? do you know what these words mean?
Corn that produces its own pesticide is very bad - it will be laying down roundup when it isn't needed in an effort to put as much crap into the water table and promoting resistance at the same time.
First of all, roundup is a *herbicide*. It kills *plants* not insects. Second, did you know there are lots of plants out there which generate their own natural pest poisons? Usually they're directed toward one particular pest. By combining these genes into say, corn, you now have directed pest killing inherent in the corn. It doesn't get into the water table anymore than the plant it was spliced from does!
This means you don't have to spray general pesticide chemicals (which kills *all* insects even the good ones and stays in the environment for years) on the crops.
Maybe over plain copper wires. Phone company analog->digital sampling equipment (used between central office trunks) doesn't sample fast enough to allow speeds beyond 56K. Hence the reason there aren't any POTS modems beyond 56K anymore.
so many flaws... cant resist.
open your wireless-enabled latop
and if you don't have one? (i dont)
Google a line of the lyrics to get the artist's and song name
You know, not all music (including most played at a place like starbucks) has lyrics.
And of course, you'd still have to pay starbucks' overpriced wireless charge to get on their network at all.
Was anyone trying to use stereoscopic vision for obstacle avoidance? It seems that would be a good way to identify obstacles across a wide view, as opposed to scanning with the laser.
I think i'd try using that to identify potential obstacles, then use that to direct a steerable laser rangefinder to analyze and determine the validity of the obstacle (in case the vision system misidentified a shadow or some such).
with some cleverness (meaning, you really know your math), you can make many non-linear problems work adequately with it. Though possibly non-optimal, "good enough".
The difficult problems need to be presented outright at first, so you don't invest too much time in something that can solve simple issues, but fails utterly at more complex ones.
The ultimate goal of autonomous robotics is to develop a system that interacts with the real world at least as well as human, if not better.
If you start off with a simple challenge, you will get simple answers. For the next challenge, you ramp up the challenge some, and most will just modify the simple system. At some point though, you can't modify what is fundamentally flawed, and you have to throw it all away and start over.
Thats a huge waste of time and resources. If the teams recognizes the *tough* challenges from the outset, they're more likely to come up with a system that is flexible enough to handle them when the time and ability comes. Granted, you may spend more time developing that framework before you solve simple issues, but its worth it in the end.
Now the teams know what real-world issues they face. Their future systems will be much better equipped to handle them as they come along.
I suspect DARPA was well aware that this challenge could not be met. But the teams and technology are better off for it.
people are not programs nor mathematical equations. The nice thing about human intelligence is its ability to see beyond what it already knows. aka "Creativity".
If one person among the teams discovers a better way to do things, and demonstrates its ability, then the better way will eventually win out, barring other unrelated issues like politics or egotistical ideologies. This is all the more likely to happen if its an environment of sharing and open minded thinking where new ideas aren't shunned. Practical autonomous robotics tends to be one of those areas (now theoretical, thats a different story...)