Whatever happened to just wearing a ski mask when committing a "crime"? I'm not sure I'd feel less silly painting my face than simply putting on a mask.
Actually, that one flew, albeit only for landing tests. (in Russian, but with better pictures) It's pretty much the Soviet Enterprise, only unlike ours, that one had four turbojets mounted on the back so it could take off.
A headline that vague leaves wide open to the reader what the lawmakers want to do with the shuttle. Are they asking for a working shuttle, or a decommissioned one? Do they want a launch pad for the next generation fo billionaires, or do they want a museum? Do they want the current shuttle, or do they actually want the vehicle that will replace it?
To someone with even a barely passing familiarity of the situation regarding the space shuttle program the answer to all these questions would be perfectly obvious.
I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?
Only if they have a lot of time to reconstruct one. While I do not know the ultimate fate of the Buran, but judging from the last photos, I suspect it's in a landfill. Such a shame.
I'm going to miss the shuttle. I watched the first one go up on television at five years old. I had a copy the local newspaper proclaiming the launch in my room for decades. It is/was not a rocket, but an actual honest to god space ship. Yes it has it's problem. Yes, the requirements were repeatedly changed and made more stupid. Yes, being able to return cargo from space wasn't really needed. It's a construction vehicle. And while I'm now critic of the manned space program[*], I'm going to miss it. It's like we've taken a big step backwards back 50 years. As someone said (and I really wish I could find the quote), "I always knew I'd see the first man step foot on the moon. I just never realized I'd see the last as well."
[*] Until there's a reason to send humans into space, why bother? It's far, inhospitable, and boring, and colonization is nigh-impossible and driven by pulp fiction fantasies and crass appeals to emotion, not reason. Astroid mining? Come back when iron and nickel are rare, or they find a solid gold nugget.
I've watched the video, and the only person to raise his voice was the cop. Sounds like he didn't think Racher was sufficiently deferential, and slapped him with a Contempt of Cop charge.
Trust who? Other cops or other people? Because they don't seem to trust anyone outside their group, and then defend the indefensible. Not writing tickets for certain individuals as "a professional courtesy" is corruption. No one is above the law.
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
So we should just use a crappy web interface when there are vastly superior stand alone applications, is that what you're saying?
Every time some protocol gets eliminated. Every time things move from the open to the closed, the proprietary, the world sucks just a bit more. Interaction quality goes down, and you end being able to do less and less.
Let me guess. Twitter is better than email right? After all, a 140 character statically allocated array is enough for everyone. Or are we supposed to all be sucking at the tit of Mark Zuckerman's stolen walled garden?
This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content.
Actually it's a price hike for everyone jackass. When cost stays the same, and service goes down, you're actually paying more for less. It's the oldest trick in the book. Haven't you noticed that your box of Wheaties is smaller, but costs the same?
I've said this for years. The population density argument is a canard put out by the telcos to excuse their transparent lack of investment. You don't have to wire up the land. You wire up the people. Population density is very high on the coasts, yet you don't see any improvement there. In fact, given AT&T's wireless problems in NYC, it's obvious the most dullard among us, that the problem is a lack of investment, not a lack of customers. People pretty much only live in two towns in Alaska. That's it. You don't need to wire Denali. You wire Juneau and Anchorage.
The market has failed. It's time to get the government involved. It's too important.
I know! I saw Fox News and they were saying that we could turn into them if we're not careful. I thought, "My God! We can't have that! Healthcare for all! Cheap and fast Internet access! Longer and healthier lifespans! Large breasted blond women everywhere you look!"
Thank god I live in the obese, sick, and exploited US of A!
As someone who knows a little about the Netflix Prize, metalearning is not crowdsourcing. It's not a prediction market. It's none of these things. It's essentially taking a weighted average to match some prior data and then using that for new predictions. It's machine learning. It's not magic. If you wanted to draw an analogy in the real world, it would be like asking, who do you believe more when predicting changes to the climate? Some know-nothing wingnut who never went to college, but listens to conspiracy AM talk radio and creationist programing? Or a climetologist with a PhD and years of experience? Oh sure, the wingnut *might* be right, but probably not.
The real question is whether prediction markets even work? The answer is, they don't. They're at best lagging indicators of existing knowledge, and at worst completely useless.
It's not a wearable device, and and doesn't need those finger caps. More importantly thoug, the use cases are completely different. SixthSense is for that very vague use case when you want a wearable, but don't need a HUD. This is tangible computing. And tangible computing is *much* cooler because it has a great potential to be an everyday interaction. Wearables are destined to serve in a niche space.
If a movie were to be filmed and then subsequently projected at 30 or 60 fps, for example, when you watched it, you'd come back with the feeling that it's "fake" or "poorly done." This isn't actually because that's the case, but rather because, as you've become accustomed to watching certain things at 24 fps such as movies and TV shows, and other things at 30 fps such as sports or the news, your brain makes the association that 24 fps content is "film" and 30 fps content is "live." The mystique behind film itself as an art relies on combining so many different factors together to create what you eventually see at the theater or on your home television, and even something as subtle as raising the frame rate by 25% can literally be enough to ruin your ability to enjoy a film.
[citation needed]
This sounds all sciencey, but I'm going to call bullshit. After you get beyond persistence of vision rates, frame rates are arbitrary. NTSC has a frame rate of 59.94 fps because it was originally 60 fps, but had to be backed down after color television was introduced to eliminate signal interference. 60 you may remember is is also the frequency of that North American line alternating current runs at. Compare this with PAL and SECAM which run at 50 fps. What frequency does electricity run at in PAL countries? If you guessed "50 Hz", you're correct.
Film didn't even standardize on 24 fps until the 20s, and during the hand cranked film era, it would frequently waver in the middle of the film due to human error. Also, film would frequently be shot at speeds as low as 16 fps, and then played back at around 24 fps.
But let's get back to adding some cultural baggage to frame rates. There's just nothing to that. Say you watched a movie in the theater, and then at home. It doesn't suddenly "look fake" at home. Yes, it's been transferred from 25 to say 60 fps, but the imperceptible flicker is what matters. Also, fiction and nonfiction (thus the basis of the the 24 fps vs 30 fps subconconcious "tell") are shot on the same cameras. There's just no difference. Yes, back in the 50s before recording directly to video, television shows (both fiction and nonfiction) were filmed at 24 fps, then aired at 60 fps. (This is not to be confused with kinescopes.)
A "hacker" wouldn't have a NAS in the living room.
You have to put it somewhere. Somewhere with a plug and ventilation, so a closet is right out. You can't listen to it when you go to sleep, so you can't keep in a bedroom. So tell me again, why wouldn't you put it with all the other electronics you own?
Most people don't have an HTPC as their only computer. They have a desktop and a HTPC. The desktop box is the file server, it doesn't need to be separate. Oh sure, if it's running Windows, then heavy activity may cause choking, but my desktop system runs Linux and I can be encoding video and building software while I'm streaming a DVD to my Xbox, without any stuttering.
It's a power and noise problem. It's not a "it can't be done" problem. There's no reason to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, if it spends 20 of those idle.
It doesn't have a drive (though it does have slots for one), and therefore it expects the user to either stream everything to it, or have a network drive mounted. Most people, even most hackers, don't have a separate file server. Seems like a very low powered, implementing wake on lan, would be good product. Yes, this is a nothing more than a NAS, but most NASs I've seen are loud and not exactly power efficient. (i.e. nothing you want in your living room)
I never played it, but when the pencil and paper RPG Torg came out, the publisher encouraged players to mail in the results of how their campaigns were proceeding, particularly how published adventures went. Based on this input, later editions would reflect these changes of the world. It was a cool idea, but I don't think it actually went anywhere in practice.
Yeah. I was a big fan of the Lone Wolf series. Read all the way up through the Magnakai Series. I figured the story was over then since the Big Bad was finally defeated, so I stopped. After a few years I found a later book, and thought it was kind of dumb to have even more books. The character was already super powerful, and it just seemed like one sequel to far.
But to answer your question, yes, they were like Choose Your Own Adventure, only every so often you'd have to fight, and then "If you win, turn to section 53." If you lost, you were dead, and would have to restart, or cheat. Occasionally there'd be something like, "If you have the Sommerswerd turn to section 13, otherwise turn to 93." But they were mostly just fancy CYOABs.
So, a woman manages to overcome all the dificulties it represents to move in a male-dominated environment, doing what few women have done in the past, struggling not only to accomplish her main mission in space but also to destroy those obsolete, yet still in place, ideas that certain areas belong to men only, and here comes some idiotic designer saying "a girl has to be pretty"?!
Most women can do both. Just because they can do anything a man can do, doesn't mean they can't be feminine. To imply that femininity necessitates lesser performance is down right sexist.
This is not the kind of problem Apple does well on. Apple is brilliant at honing user interfaces. Search is hard work and takes massive data crunching. It's the kind of work Apple traditionally farms out.
Hold on. What do you mean that Apple doesn't do well on these problems? They've never worked on them. They've never even farmed that work out because they haven't done analytical research. EVER! You're trying to sound like an expert, but there's no content here. It's like saying "Brain surgery isn't something Elwinc traditionally does well." It's a meaningless statement since it's predicated on a track record that doesn't exist.
Could Apple do well in this? There's a lot of smart people in The Valley, and with Yahoo Search getting kneecapped by the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, there's a lot of expertise to be had at reasonable prices.
The real innovation in search isn't now in relevancy scores and the like. It's in HCIR, which is all about building good search interfaces for humans. It's in desktop and enterprise search. (Which is MUCH harder than web search.) It's about making people's lives easier and better, and that exactly what Apple does best.
They already have a search engine available on iPhones - Apple won't block it for fear of antitrust litigation.
They don't have to block it. They won't block someone navigating to google.com . They simply change the default engine, and take 98% if the traffic. Antitrust? I'm sorry, Apple has nowhere near the market share to even come close to becoming a trust.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to just wearing a ski mask when committing a "crime"? I'm not sure I'd feel less silly painting my face than simply putting on a mask.
Not just any mask...
While you're technically correct, no one thinks of a tin can mounted on a rocket when they hear "spaceship."
When did a Soyuz move beyond LEO?
THANKS!
Actually, that one flew, albeit only for landing tests. (in Russian, but with better pictures) It's pretty much the Soviet Enterprise, only unlike ours, that one had four turbojets mounted on the back so it could take off.
A headline that vague leaves wide open to the reader what the lawmakers want to do with the shuttle. Are they asking for a working shuttle, or a decommissioned one? Do they want a launch pad for the next generation fo billionaires, or do they want a museum? Do they want the current shuttle, or do they actually want the vehicle that will replace it?
To someone with even a barely passing familiarity of the situation regarding the space shuttle program the answer to all these questions would be perfectly obvious.
Oh wait. I get it it. You were trolling. Sorry.
I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?
Only if they have a lot of time to reconstruct one. While I do not know the ultimate fate of the Buran, but judging from the last photos, I suspect it's in a landfill. Such a shame.
I'm going to miss the shuttle. I watched the first one go up on television at five years old. I had a copy the local newspaper proclaiming the launch in my room for decades. It is/was not a rocket, but an actual honest to god space ship. Yes it has it's problem. Yes, the requirements were repeatedly changed and made more stupid. Yes, being able to return cargo from space wasn't really needed. It's a construction vehicle. And while I'm now critic of the manned space program[*], I'm going to miss it. It's like we've taken a big step backwards back 50 years. As someone said (and I really wish I could find the quote), "I always knew I'd see the first man step foot on the moon. I just never realized I'd see the last as well."
[*] Until there's a reason to send humans into space, why bother? It's far, inhospitable, and boring, and colonization is nigh-impossible and driven by pulp fiction fantasies and crass appeals to emotion, not reason. Astroid mining? Come back when iron and nickel are rare, or they find a solid gold nugget.
I've watched the video, and the only person to raise his voice was the cop. Sounds like he didn't think Racher was sufficiently deferential, and slapped him with a Contempt of Cop charge.
Trust who? Other cops or other people? Because they don't seem to trust anyone outside their group, and then defend the indefensible. Not writing tickets for certain individuals as "a professional courtesy" is corruption. No one is above the law.
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
So we should just use a crappy web interface when there are vastly superior stand alone applications, is that what you're saying?
Every time some protocol gets eliminated. Every time things move from the open to the closed, the proprietary, the world sucks just a bit more. Interaction quality goes down, and you end being able to do less and less.
Let me guess. Twitter is better than email right? After all, a 140 character statically allocated array is enough for everyone. Or are we supposed to all be sucking at the tit of Mark Zuckerman's stolen walled garden?
This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content.
Actually it's a price hike for everyone jackass. When cost stays the same, and service goes down, you're actually paying more for less. It's the oldest trick in the book. Haven't you noticed that your box of Wheaties is smaller, but costs the same?
I've said this for years. The population density argument is a canard put out by the telcos to excuse their transparent lack of investment. You don't have to wire up the land. You wire up the people. Population density is very high on the coasts, yet you don't see any improvement there. In fact, given AT&T's wireless problems in NYC, it's obvious the most dullard among us, that the problem is a lack of investment, not a lack of customers. People pretty much only live in two towns in Alaska. That's it. You don't need to wire Denali. You wire Juneau and Anchorage.
The market has failed. It's time to get the government involved. It's too important.
I know! I saw Fox News and they were saying that we could turn into them if we're not careful. I thought, "My God! We can't have that! Healthcare for all! Cheap and fast Internet access! Longer and healthier lifespans! Large breasted blond women everywhere you look!"
Thank god I live in the obese, sick, and exploited US of A!
Same for me! Right up until I realized the kid was 9....
So that means we should try him as an adult, right? *snark*
As someone who knows a little about the Netflix Prize, metalearning is not crowdsourcing. It's not a prediction market. It's none of these things. It's essentially taking a weighted average to match some prior data and then using that for new predictions. It's machine learning. It's not magic. If you wanted to draw an analogy in the real world, it would be like asking, who do you believe more when predicting changes to the climate? Some know-nothing wingnut who never went to college, but listens to conspiracy AM talk radio and creationist programing? Or a climetologist with a PhD and years of experience? Oh sure, the wingnut *might* be right, but probably not.
The real question is whether prediction markets even work? The answer is, they don't. They're at best lagging indicators of existing knowledge, and at worst completely useless.
The hand gestures aren't really needed beyond simple interaction like touch, drag, and swipe. This is much more along the lines of skinput.
It's not a wearable device, and and doesn't need those finger caps. More importantly thoug, the use cases are completely different. SixthSense is for that very vague use case when you want a wearable, but don't need a HUD. This is tangible computing. And tangible computing is *much* cooler because it has a great potential to be an everyday interaction. Wearables are destined to serve in a niche space.
It's a real shame they don't live in a democracy.
Oh snap! They do!
If a movie were to be filmed and then subsequently projected at 30 or 60 fps, for example, when you watched it, you'd come back with the feeling that it's "fake" or "poorly done." This isn't actually because that's the case, but rather because, as you've become accustomed to watching certain things at 24 fps such as movies and TV shows, and other things at 30 fps such as sports or the news, your brain makes the association that 24 fps content is "film" and 30 fps content is "live." The mystique behind film itself as an art relies on combining so many different factors together to create what you eventually see at the theater or on your home television, and even something as subtle as raising the frame rate by 25% can literally be enough to ruin your ability to enjoy a film.
[citation needed]
This sounds all sciencey, but I'm going to call bullshit. After you get beyond persistence of vision rates, frame rates are arbitrary. NTSC has a frame rate of 59.94 fps because it was originally 60 fps, but had to be backed down after color television was introduced to eliminate signal interference. 60 you may remember is is also the frequency of that North American line alternating current runs at. Compare this with PAL and SECAM which run at 50 fps. What frequency does electricity run at in PAL countries? If you guessed "50 Hz", you're correct.
Film didn't even standardize on 24 fps until the 20s, and during the hand cranked film era, it would frequently waver in the middle of the film due to human error. Also, film would frequently be shot at speeds as low as 16 fps, and then played back at around 24 fps.
But let's get back to adding some cultural baggage to frame rates. There's just nothing to that. Say you watched a movie in the theater, and then at home. It doesn't suddenly "look fake" at home. Yes, it's been transferred from 25 to say 60 fps, but the imperceptible flicker is what matters. Also, fiction and nonfiction (thus the basis of the the 24 fps vs 30 fps subconconcious "tell") are shot on the same cameras. There's just no difference. Yes, back in the 50s before recording directly to video, television shows (both fiction and nonfiction) were filmed at 24 fps, then aired at 60 fps. (This is not to be confused with kinescopes.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate
http://www.kropla.com/electric2.htm
http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm
A "hacker" wouldn't have a NAS in the living room.
You have to put it somewhere. Somewhere with a plug and ventilation, so a closet is right out. You can't listen to it when you go to sleep, so you can't keep in a bedroom. So tell me again, why wouldn't you put it with all the other electronics you own?
Most people don't have an HTPC as their only computer. They have a desktop and a HTPC. The desktop box is the file server, it doesn't need to be separate. Oh sure, if it's running Windows, then heavy activity may cause choking, but my desktop system runs Linux and I can be encoding video and building software while I'm streaming a DVD to my Xbox, without any stuttering.
It's a power and noise problem. It's not a "it can't be done" problem. There's no reason to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, if it spends 20 of those idle.
It doesn't have a drive (though it does have slots for one), and therefore it expects the user to either stream everything to it, or have a network drive mounted. Most people, even most hackers, don't have a separate file server. Seems like a very low powered, implementing wake on lan, would be good product. Yes, this is a nothing more than a NAS, but most NASs I've seen are loud and not exactly power efficient. (i.e. nothing you want in your living room)
Anyone have any suggestions for this problem?
I never played it, but when the pencil and paper RPG Torg came out, the publisher encouraged players to mail in the results of how their campaigns were proceeding, particularly how published adventures went. Based on this input, later editions would reflect these changes of the world. It was a cool idea, but I don't think it actually went anywhere in practice.
Yeah. I was a big fan of the Lone Wolf series. Read all the way up through the Magnakai Series. I figured the story was over then since the Big Bad was finally defeated, so I stopped. After a few years I found a later book, and thought it was kind of dumb to have even more books. The character was already super powerful, and it just seemed like one sequel to far.
But to answer your question, yes, they were like Choose Your Own Adventure, only every so often you'd have to fight, and then "If you win, turn to section 53." If you lost, you were dead, and would have to restart, or cheat. Occasionally there'd be something like, "If you have the Sommerswerd turn to section 13, otherwise turn to 93." But they were mostly just fancy CYOABs.
So, a woman manages to overcome all the dificulties it represents to move in a male-dominated environment, doing what few women have done in the past, struggling not only to accomplish her main mission in space but also to destroy those obsolete, yet still in place, ideas that certain areas belong to men only, and here comes some idiotic designer saying "a girl has to be pretty"?!
Most women can do both. Just because they can do anything a man can do, doesn't mean they can't be feminine.
To imply that femininity necessitates lesser performance is down right sexist.
This is not the kind of problem Apple does well on. Apple is brilliant at honing user interfaces. Search is hard work and takes massive data crunching. It's the kind of work Apple traditionally farms out.
Hold on. What do you mean that Apple doesn't do well on these problems? They've never worked on them. They've never even farmed that work out because they haven't done analytical research. EVER! You're trying to sound like an expert, but there's no content here. It's like saying "Brain surgery isn't something Elwinc traditionally does well." It's a meaningless statement since it's predicated on a track record that doesn't exist.
Could Apple do well in this? There's a lot of smart people in The Valley, and with Yahoo Search getting kneecapped by the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, there's a lot of expertise to be had at reasonable prices.
The real innovation in search isn't now in relevancy scores and the like. It's in HCIR, which is all about building good search interfaces for humans. It's in desktop and enterprise search. (Which is MUCH harder than web search.) It's about making people's lives easier and better, and that exactly what Apple does best.
They already have a search engine available on iPhones - Apple won't block it for fear of antitrust litigation.
They don't have to block it. They won't block someone navigating to google.com . They simply change the default engine, and take 98% if the traffic. Antitrust? I'm sorry, Apple has nowhere near the market share to even come close to becoming a trust.