Alternatively, you could ignore the root problem and deal with the immediate symptoms as suggested in the original post. I like the iceberg idea myself. Exactly how many icebergs does the US own?
The Kyoto agreement is, hopefully, the first small step in a long process which will fundamentally change the way in which we as a species interact with our environment. Now I'm not niave enough to believe that Kyoto will solve much, if anything, itself. I'm well aware that in evolutionary timescales the industrial revolution occured just 10 minutes ago and that it will take time for us to learn how best to use our marvelous (and I really mean marvelous) new technologies. However, if nothing else the Kyoto agreement stands as a acknowledgement of responsibility and a commitment for change.
The US (however it chooses to govern itself) has repeatedly failed to engage on this issue. As the supposed most powerful man on the planet, the failure of the US president even to acknowledge the problem doesn't represent much progress. Then again, I watch for 3 or 4 days as a quite horrific looking weather system closed in on the poor souls living in the Missippi delta and president Bush did precious little to save them. What chance then, that he will act on some less imminent or specific, but far more devistating scientific predictions?
Even living in the weather simplistic country of England (80% of the time it is just 'a bit nippy' and 'mostly cloudly') I am well aware that hurricanes are not a man made phenomenon. There is much evidence (see the IPCC website) to suggest that the increase in their rate of occurance and their severity are due to the increase in average sea temperatures. In the case of Katrina, most of the devistation was not due to the power of the moving air but the water which flooded the low lying land masses to the north of the Gulf of Mexico. The average water level in this region has risen significantly over the last century, due to increased global temperatures (see here either the IPCC or NOAA). There is strong evidence that man has had a dramatic effect on these issues.
Yes, the Kyoto agreement has weaknesses, but outside the US the failure of Bush administration to engage on this issue has made the agreement a symbol of Americas poor global awareness particularly when it comes to burning fossil fuels. These were nicely summarised by a recent television appearance by president Bush when he asked Americans "not to buy gas for their cars unnecessarily for the next few weeks", implying that after that time it would business as usual and you should buy all the unnecessary gas you desire. Well, it's probably in the constitution or something.
I remember thinking (not very hard) along these lines some years ago. I was doing a PhD in machine vision and we were using Doom/Quake engines to generate simulated environments for testing robot navigation algorithms.
My thought was that you would train an entity yourself in a series of one-on-one battles or training bouts. These could be staged or otherwise constructed to make mini-games e.g. perhaps testing your entity in predefined scenerios. Once you were happy with its performance you could dump it onto a USB stick and take it around your friends house or upload it to a server for an online game. The main game would put your entity in an arena against a number of other 'gladiators'. They fight it out etc. Online this could allow for 'spectators' who watch the game and potentially even bet on the winner. This might allow for prize money or other revenue stream to be introduced.
As it is about open source, can I download the scripts from anywhere and upload my own alterations? Are the scripts under any form of version control? Is there a link to ScriptForge?
Re:I code C# for a living
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One of the reasons that Fortran has such reusability is because everything was an array. It was eaasy to use some elses function I just had to re-organise the elements in my array (you soon build a library of functions to do this that you use a lot). The problem with OO languages is that you get complete ability to define clever objects which you (and me) always assume will be the focus of everyones life. It becomes very difficult to reuse stuff not from a coding point of view but because the object you have to work with is never exactly what you wanted.
George Lucas is releasing the Star Wars DVD box set early on September 21, 2004 due to piracy concerns.
A (fictional) conversation with GL...
George:"Hey everybody I've released the 97 versions of the SW films you love so much on DVD" SW Fans:"Fantastic! Heres my credit card details" George:"Thanks a bunch, here are you disks" SW Fans:"Hey George couldn't you have relased the original versions I saw when I was a kid?" George:"No sorry, but for various artistic reasons I just won't do that" SW Fans:"Oh but George watching my nice shiny 97 box set made me want to see all the changes you made in the glory by comparing to the originals rather than my foggy memory of what happened" George:"Well since you put it that way...."
George Lucas is releasing the Original Star Wars DVD box on May 21, 2007 due to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the relase of ANH and due to pressure from fans to be parted with yet more money
It could never look as good as that night when my dad took me to the cinema when I was just 7 back in 1977. Largely because, after the subsequent years of squinting at cathode ray tubes and tft screens, my eyes where better when I was 7!
I don't want storage on my pocket device, I just want it to collect and present information - voice, music, video, text, webpages.... I would be much happier if all the data was actually safely stored on central servers and nicely backed up.
For me the key is permemant very high speed data with complete coverage. The PDA should just be a handheld portable terminal. I remember when mobile phone coverage in the UK was patch (one2one around the m25 and up the M1 only anyone?) but look how good it is now - virtually 99% of the population covered in the UK.
I used to use a palm but now I just keep all my addresses on Yahoo - I'm never that far away from a connected PC and my mobile can connect to Yahoo using wap if I really need to. Indeed my phone has most of my addresses in it anyway.
The smartphone will win over the connected pda because, for most people, it does the most important thing first and foremost - it connects. The market already has a hold on people with the mobile and they can just slowing increase the capability of the information it can process locally.
On a related point the analogue signal is due to be switch off here in the UK in 2010 (or there abouts). The BBC is heavily involved in a move over to digital transmission with Freeview. There is no monthly cost (above the license fee) for this system. Recently a company called TopUp TV has started to provide paid-for extra channels on freeview which require a decoding card to be perchased. This is something the BBC don't want as it starts to ask the question "do we really need a fixed license fee or could the BBC go paid-for viewing?" Fortunatley for the BBC there aren't (yet at least) many freeview boxes with the ability to use the decoding cards. Now if they also allow people to buy and download shows what production is left that can't be quantified and charged for? Radio? - its just a matter of time?...
Thanks for the interesting points people have raised.
I agree that the relatively low datarates can seem as though BT isn't appropriate for upload of images. However, as a couple of people mentioned the slow data transfer isn't necessarily a problem in all situations. For instance the camera might upload at night when quite frankly it can take as long as it likes (well, within reason).
It was interesting to note how quite a few posters seemed to take an either or view - that is BT versus USB etc. I would have assumed that BT would augment a technology such as USB. This would provide the best of both worlds. When I want the pictures now I can actively seek to recover them by plugging the thing into the computer (or whatever). The BT on the otherhand would be available to 'mop up' at other times when, say the memory is getting full or it has been a while since the pictures where uploaded. Also, again as some have suggested it might be useful for controlling the device or recovery of metadata. For sure, the idea of devices talking to each other during the night is not yet commonplace but I suspect in a few years many homes will have a multimedia system which spends the night in a standby state from which it might wish to interact with other devices - if only to check they where still in the house (robbery detection even?)
Once again thanks for the discussion and just to let you know I ended up buy a Canon A80 (which has no BT) but is an excellent little camera.
I doubt this audit will see beyond the financial cost of ownership. I have reservations regarding a single, closed source, foreign organisation providing all the infrastructure necessary to run Govermental organisations in this Country. To what level are Microsoft answerable to the British Government? The non-financial cost of ownership is more important than the cost of running MS Access/Word on a couple of thousand PC's.
This is not simply an issue of Money, as many have suggested here, as govermental office in the UK get substantial discounts on MS products (although obviously not as cheap as gettng them free). One of the real reasons for looking to open source products is the issue of control. If the tools of goverment are so complex and opaque that the goverment rely on an outside, foreign source, who really runs the country? In theory at least with an open source solution the Goverment could cut ties with the original developers and get another group to develop. ALso the goverment could employ its own developers to ensure the software is not full of "spyware" - in the original meaning of the word in this case!
Here in the UK the goverment is seriously looking into the introduction of ID cards. The infrastructure for this would be run on computers. I for one would be very concerned if a very large, very powerful, foreign (albeit allied) company was given the tender to install such a system. He who controls the information, controls the world....
I am glad to see that the Nobel Committee has finally awarded this. As a medical image analysist I have worked with MR for many years now. What the area needs to do now is move away from the idea of an MR scanner as something which produces pretty pictures and start to think of it as a measurement device. The scanner manufacturers focus on producing nice looking pictures for the clinicians to look at, often at the expense of reproducible, accurate measurements. I also doubt whether anyone will be receiving any awards for DICOM the industry standard format for getting data off the scanner. And you think your tax form is overly complex....
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Alternatively, you could ignore the root problem and deal with the immediate symptoms as suggested in the original post. I like the iceberg idea myself.
Exactly how many icebergs does the US own?
Ref: http://www.esajournals.org/esaonline/?request=get- document&issn=1540-9295&volume=003&issue=07&page=0 359
Note that not all water in this region is within the tidal delta.
Please provide references for "Global warming, worst case, is causing an infintesamal fraction".
The Kyoto agreement is, hopefully, the first small step in a long process which will fundamentally change the way in which we as a species interact with our environment. Now I'm not niave enough to believe that Kyoto will solve much, if anything, itself. I'm well aware that in evolutionary timescales the industrial revolution occured just 10 minutes ago and that it will take time for us to learn how best to use our marvelous (and I really mean marvelous) new technologies. However, if nothing else the Kyoto agreement stands as a acknowledgement of responsibility and a commitment for change.
The US (however it chooses to govern itself) has repeatedly failed to engage on this issue. As the supposed most powerful man on the planet, the failure of the US president even to acknowledge the problem doesn't represent much progress. Then again, I watch for 3 or 4 days as a quite horrific looking weather system closed in on the poor souls living in the Missippi delta and president Bush did precious little to save them. What chance then, that he will act on some less imminent or specific, but far more devistating scientific predictions?
Even living in the weather simplistic country of England (80% of the time it is just 'a bit nippy' and 'mostly cloudly') I am well aware that hurricanes are not a man made phenomenon. There is much evidence (see the IPCC website) to suggest that the increase in their rate of occurance and their severity are due to the increase in average sea temperatures. In the case of Katrina, most of the devistation was not due to the power of the moving air but the water which flooded the low lying land masses to the north of the Gulf of Mexico. The average water level in this region has risen significantly over the last century, due to increased global temperatures (see here either the IPCC or NOAA). There is strong evidence that man has had a dramatic effect on these issues.
Yes, the Kyoto agreement has weaknesses, but outside the US the failure of Bush administration to engage on this issue has made the agreement a symbol of Americas poor global awareness particularly when it comes to burning fossil fuels. These were nicely summarised by a recent television appearance by president Bush when he asked Americans "not to buy gas for their cars unnecessarily for the next few weeks", implying that after that time it would business as usual and you should buy all the unnecessary gas you desire. Well, it's probably in the constitution or something.
You could just try and get your president to agree to the Kyoto agreement.
I'm British, therefore I whinge.
(I am British by the way, and I do love to whinge!)
I remember thinking (not very hard) along these lines some years ago. I was doing a PhD in machine vision and we were using Doom/Quake engines to generate simulated environments for testing robot navigation algorithms.
My thought was that you would train an entity yourself in a series of one-on-one battles or training bouts. These could be staged or otherwise constructed to make mini-games e.g. perhaps testing your entity in predefined scenerios. Once you were happy with its performance you could dump it onto a USB stick and take it around your friends house or upload it to a server for an online game. The main game would put your entity in an arena against a number of other 'gladiators'. They fight it out etc. Online this could allow for 'spectators' who watch the game and potentially even bet on the winner. This might allow for prize money or other revenue stream to be introduced.
probably quite true, I'm sure no fucker is reading mine!
As it is about open source, can I download the scripts from anywhere and upload my own alterations? Are the scripts under any form of version control? Is there a link to ScriptForge?
One of the reasons that Fortran has such reusability is because everything was an array. It was eaasy to use some elses function I just had to re-organise the elements in my array (you soon build a library of functions to do this that you use a lot). The problem with OO languages is that you get complete ability to define clever objects which you (and me) always assume will be the focus of everyones life. It becomes very difficult to reuse stuff not from a coding point of view but because the object you have to work with is never exactly what you wanted.
Two words: Call Center.
I have had the more aliased to less for ages...
George Lucas is releasing the Star Wars DVD box set early on September 21, 2004 due to piracy concerns.
A (fictional) conversation with GL...
George: "Hey everybody I've released the 97 versions of the SW films you love so much on DVD"
SW Fans: "Fantastic! Heres my credit card details"
George: "Thanks a bunch, here are you disks"
SW Fans: "Hey George couldn't you have relased the original versions I saw when I was a kid?"
George: "No sorry, but for various artistic reasons I just won't do that"
SW Fans: "Oh but George watching my nice shiny 97 box set made me want to see all the changes you made in the glory by comparing to the originals rather than my foggy memory of what happened"
George: "Well since you put it that way...."
George Lucas is releasing the Original Star Wars DVD box on May 21, 2007 due to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the relase of ANH and due to pressure from fans to be parted with yet more money
It could never look as good as that night when my dad took me to the cinema when I was just 7 back in 1977. Largely because, after the subsequent years of squinting at cathode ray tubes and tft screens, my eyes where better when I was 7!
I don't want storage on my pocket device, I just want it to collect and present information - voice, music, video, text, webpages.... I would be much happier if all the data was actually safely stored on central servers and nicely backed up.
For me the key is permemant very high speed data with complete coverage. The PDA should just be a handheld portable terminal. I remember when mobile phone coverage in the UK was patch (one2one around the m25 and up the M1 only anyone?) but look how good it is now - virtually 99% of the population covered in the UK.
I used to use a palm but now I just keep all my addresses on Yahoo - I'm never that far away from a connected PC and my mobile can connect to Yahoo using wap if I really need to. Indeed my phone has most of my addresses in it anyway.
The smartphone will win over the connected pda because, for most people, it does the most important thing first and foremost - it connects. The market already has a hold on people with the mobile and they can just slowing increase the capability of the information it can process locally.
Sorry a bit muddled but then so am I
... but there is still a 2 hour checkin
On a related point the analogue signal is due to be switch off here in the UK in 2010 (or there abouts). The BBC is heavily involved in a move over to digital transmission with Freeview. There is no monthly cost (above the license fee) for this system. Recently a company called TopUp TV has started to provide paid-for extra channels on freeview which require a decoding card to be perchased. This is something the BBC don't want as it starts to ask the question "do we really need a fixed license fee or could the BBC go paid-for viewing?" Fortunatley for the BBC there aren't (yet at least) many freeview boxes with the ability to use the decoding cards. Now if they also allow people to buy and download shows what production is left that can't be quantified and charged for? Radio? - its just a matter of time? ...
Thanks for the interesting points people have raised.
I agree that the relatively low datarates can seem as though BT isn't appropriate for upload of images. However, as a couple of people mentioned the slow data transfer isn't necessarily a problem in all situations. For instance the camera might upload at night when quite frankly it can take as long as it likes (well, within reason).
It was interesting to note how quite a few posters seemed to take an either or view - that is BT versus USB etc. I would have assumed that BT would augment a technology such as USB. This would provide the best of both worlds. When I want the pictures now I can actively seek to recover them by plugging the thing into the computer (or whatever). The BT on the otherhand would be available to 'mop up' at other times when, say the memory is getting full or it has been a while since the pictures where uploaded. Also, again as some have suggested it might be useful for controlling the device or recovery of metadata. For sure, the idea of devices talking to each other during the night is not yet commonplace but I suspect in a few years many homes will have a multimedia system which spends the night in a standby state from which it might wish to interact with other devices - if only to check they where still in the house (robbery detection even?)
Once again thanks for the discussion and just to let you know I ended up buy a Canon A80 (which has no BT) but is an excellent little camera.
Isn't this story just a reprint of the slightly older HP, Princeton Develop New Memory Material story?
I could see this kind of thing working as a try before you buy market - use the code and pay when you release the product.
I doubt this audit will see beyond the financial cost of ownership. I have reservations regarding a single, closed source, foreign organisation providing all the infrastructure necessary to run Govermental organisations in this Country. To what level are Microsoft answerable to the British Government? The non-financial cost of ownership is more important than the cost of running MS Access/Word on a couple of thousand PC's.
This is not simply an issue of Money, as many have suggested here, as govermental office in the UK get substantial discounts on MS products (although obviously not as cheap as gettng them free). One of the real reasons for looking to open source products is the issue of control. If the tools of goverment are so complex and opaque that the goverment rely on an outside, foreign source, who really runs the country? In theory at least with an open source solution the Goverment could cut ties with the original developers and get another group to develop. ALso the goverment could employ its own developers to ensure the software is not full of "spyware" - in the original meaning of the word in this case!
Here in the UK the goverment is seriously looking into the introduction of ID cards. The infrastructure for this would be run on computers. I for one would be very concerned if a very large, very powerful, foreign (albeit allied) company was given the tender to install such a system. He who controls the information, controls the world....
If I leave my book on the train I'm just upset about loosing my place. But if I left an e-book reader on the train I would morn the cost more...
I am glad to see that the Nobel Committee has finally awarded this. As a medical image analysist I have worked with MR for many years now. What the area needs to do now is move away from the idea of an MR scanner as something which produces pretty pictures and start to think of it as a measurement device. The scanner manufacturers focus on producing nice looking pictures for the clinicians to look at, often at the expense of reproducible, accurate measurements. I also doubt whether anyone will be receiving any awards for DICOM the industry standard format for getting data off the scanner. And you think your tax form is overly complex....
So soon I'll have a good idea how often I use Google. Then I realise it is very valuable. Then I'm more nclinced to start to pay for it....
I'm scared.