In other countries, I could talk about a faux coup d'etat all day long (although not necessarily about planning one) and the government would not care a damn.
Thinking of your enemies as roaches is a serious misconception which will cause flawed decisions. Unless they are actual roaches and you work in pest control. However wicked and crazy they might be, terrorists and even hackers are human beings and you better keep that in mind if you don't want them to catch you pants down, just because you underestimated them to be some kind of dumb animal.
no one claimed it was autonomous or intelligent or whatever. just a demonstrator for a mode of locomotion: a small wheeled vehicle that jumps really high and doesn't break in the process. Autonomously navigating that thing would pose one major problem: how is it supposed to know where it is going when jumping onto higher terrain? Like, the roof in the video, how could it see there was in fact a roof and not a bottomless pit? it could possibly team up with an airborne unit relaying its extended field of view. Or, you could make these things real cheap, and let them "lemming" into unknown terrain on the basis of trial-and-error and swarm intelligence.
Legged locomotion is incredibly difficult to engineer with weakly defined benefits. Use some wheels, and when the obstacle is to big, just jump. I really like that, that might be the one way to do it. That is: for small drones, operating outdoors. However, it may not translate so well to indoors environments, or to larger robots, or load-carrying ones.
regardless of a watercannon of that caliber being mostly harmless and regardless of the fact the PETA is a bunch of annoying morons, this might actually qualify as illegal cruelty to animals under your local jurisdiction.
The discussion about who cracked the one Enigma code is moot as there never was such a thing, but several models with varying complexity, and several times introducing new cryptographical faults. At one such change in the 1940ies, the problem space was increased dramatically so that the British temporarily lost their already established ability to decode the German navy code, which would have had dramatic consequences on the course of the war if the Bletchley Park team would not have been able to overcome that new challenge in time. I recommend "Alan Turing - the Enigma" by Andrew Hodges. IMHO, Hodges is not only an able writer and a meticulous biographer, but as a mathematician also has a profound understanding of cryptographical concepts, the latter being sadly absent from many productions on the topic.
it took me - as a total astrophysical layman - about 10 minutes parsing the relevant wikipedia articles to find reference images telling me what this is: a so called "filament cavity", a bubble of relatively cold gas, that will turn into a coronal eruption eventually. It didn't take me by surprise that I could not get this info through to the doomers and general smegheads on youtube, but from a slashdot story I would expect that they do at least 10 minutes of research before occupying the world with ill-understood youtube videos. especially since there has been - on youtube, and since yesterday - an official nasa response explaining the phenomenon for those with limited literacy. Oh and its no triangle it is a freaking sphere.
There wasn't money in the IT budget to hire professional software engineers. Instead, they created a program to hire computer science savvy interns to work on the project.
There's not much to comment on that quote, really. I'm certainly not one of those USA-haters, but as an IT professional, when I read such a thing, I sincerely hope their whole intern-built systems crash on them in the worst possible moment. The president of the (probably still) most powerful nation on earth has its IT done by interns? What kind of example does that set? They deserve a lesson for that.
in terms of markets, open source is the ideal regulated economy, where the price for source code is regulated to be zero. From that, the wage most open source programmers get for their work is zero, too. Unless they have a product that combines open source with another commodity that pays more and thus generates income for them.
A marvelous collection of humorous SF short stories revolving around two advanced robotic beings who are some kind of intergalactic engineers. Contains probably the worlds only love poem using vocabulary from higher mathematics.
This type of hardware may be useful to implement e.g. limbs or fingers within a more complex system. For autonomus entities, the behavioural, force-feedback AI approach a la Braitenberg is a little dated. I think it does not allow to implement behavioural patterns complex enough to be of any practical use.
... correlates with how stupid and high-handed these rules are. Make sane rules, and you only have to defend against a handful of criminals. On the other hand, impose some utter crap on people, and you face a whole legion of righteous adversaries. Good luck, Sony...
With the little tree, and the little leaves, and the nice little sun, and it is all very simple and friendly with lots of colours? Even the voice of this guy has this monotone, almost hypnotising Bob Ross quality, and it looks all very harmless and friendly, but somehow you get the feeling that you can't take it too serious and that the method is fine for him and his little tree, but that you couldn't use it to make anything much different.
Slashdot Mirror
... I am more suprised by the fact that they made a camera that can "see" at all. Mine doesn't, it just stores digitized pictures on a memory card.
In other countries, I could talk about a faux coup d'etat all day long (although not necessarily about planning one) and the government would not care a damn.
Thinking of your enemies as roaches is a serious misconception which will cause flawed decisions. Unless they are actual roaches and you work in pest control. However wicked and crazy they might be, terrorists and even hackers are human beings and you better keep that in mind if you don't want them to catch you pants down, just because you underestimated them to be some kind of dumb animal.
no one claimed it was autonomous or intelligent or whatever. just a demonstrator for a mode of locomotion: a small wheeled vehicle that jumps really high and doesn't break in the process. Autonomously navigating that thing would pose one major problem: how is it supposed to know where it is going when jumping onto higher terrain? Like, the roof in the video, how could it see there was in fact a roof and not a bottomless pit? it could possibly team up with an airborne unit relaying its extended field of view. Or, you could make these things real cheap, and let them "lemming" into unknown terrain on the basis of trial-and-error and swarm intelligence.
Legged locomotion is incredibly difficult to engineer with weakly defined benefits. Use some wheels, and when the obstacle is to big, just jump. I really like that, that might be the one way to do it. That is: for small drones, operating outdoors. However, it may not translate so well to indoors environments, or to larger robots, or load-carrying ones.
is there any kind of problem a yankee can not solve with a firearm? i love the social creativity of your society.
regardless of a watercannon of that caliber being mostly harmless and regardless of the fact the PETA is a bunch of annoying morons, this might actually qualify as illegal cruelty to animals under your local jurisdiction.
The discussion about who cracked the one Enigma code is moot as there never was such a thing, but several models with varying complexity, and several times introducing new cryptographical faults. At one such change in the 1940ies, the problem space was increased dramatically so that the British temporarily lost their already established ability to decode the German navy code, which would have had dramatic consequences on the course of the war if the Bletchley Park team would not have been able to overcome that new challenge in time. I recommend "Alan Turing - the Enigma" by Andrew Hodges. IMHO, Hodges is not only an able writer and a meticulous biographer, but as a mathematician also has a profound understanding of cryptographical concepts, the latter being sadly absent from many productions on the topic.
unsurprisingly, politically biased comments don't go well with the IT crowd, unless they fit the ultra-liberal template :(
it took me - as a total astrophysical layman - about 10 minutes parsing the relevant wikipedia articles to find reference images telling me what this is: a so called "filament cavity", a bubble of relatively cold gas, that will turn into a coronal eruption eventually. It didn't take me by surprise that I could not get this info through to the doomers and general smegheads on youtube, but from a slashdot story I would expect that they do at least 10 minutes of research before occupying the world with ill-understood youtube videos. especially since there has been - on youtube, and since yesterday - an official nasa response explaining the phenomenon for those with limited literacy. Oh and its no triangle it is a freaking sphere.
There wasn't money in the IT budget to hire professional software engineers. Instead, they created a program to hire computer science savvy interns to work on the project.
There's not much to comment on that quote, really. I'm certainly not one of those USA-haters, but as an IT professional, when I read such a thing, I sincerely hope their whole intern-built systems crash on them in the worst possible moment. The president of the (probably still) most powerful nation on earth has its IT done by interns? What kind of example does that set? They deserve a lesson for that.
in terms of markets, open source is the ideal regulated economy, where the price for source code is regulated to be zero. From that, the wage most open source programmers get for their work is zero, too. Unless they have a product that combines open source with another commodity that pays more and thus generates income for them.
are not the solution to each and every economic problem
Protectionism is not "wrong" in any moral sense, just "wrong" according to economic theory.
... because protectionism is not "wrong according to economic theory", but wrong according to _an_ economic theory.
Protectionism is wrong
herppolitics is derp.
... up to a point were the whole US is populated only by prison inmates, guards, and lawyers. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.
We need to do that with people at marketing agencys to honor their good ideas.
A marvelous collection of humorous SF short stories revolving around two advanced robotic beings who are some kind of intergalactic engineers. Contains probably the worlds only love poem using vocabulary from higher mathematics.
make that at least three, including the one you mentioned. Including planets and all.
This type of hardware may be useful to implement e.g. limbs or fingers within a more complex system. For autonomus entities, the behavioural, force-feedback AI approach a la Braitenberg is a little dated. I think it does not allow to implement behavioural patterns complex enough to be of any practical use.
... correlates with how stupid and high-handed these rules are. Make sane rules, and you only have to defend against a handful of criminals. On the other hand, impose some utter crap on people, and you face a whole legion of righteous adversaries. Good luck, Sony...
Truly a great game, although an "adventure" rather than an rpg .
with over 90% of the building hollow
That holds for most buildings in the world except some military bunkers
With the little tree, and the little leaves, and the nice little sun, and it is all very simple and friendly with lots of colours? Even the voice of this guy has this monotone, almost hypnotising Bob Ross quality, and it looks all very harmless and friendly, but somehow you get the feeling that you can't take it too serious and that the method is fine for him and his little tree, but that you couldn't use it to make anything much different.