Except that your 'slightly bigger copter' is 'not even fractionally as capable'
It exists. That's what an autonomous helicopter with onboard sensors can do as of a year or two ago.
Well, either you didn't actually watch the quadrotor video or you didn't actually watch the autonomous helicopter video. When you do so, you'll note not only the vast differences in performance between the two - you'll also note that the autonomous helicopter did no obstacle avoidance, no coordinated maneuvers with other autonomous helicopters, etc... etc... Nor did it do anything at all requiring onboard sensing of it's environment. (The onboard sensing of attitude, accelerations, and velocity is a different matter, and a long solved problem.) In fact, the autonomous helicopter didn't do anything particularly noteworthy as far as helicopter performance is concerned.
Environment sensing is coming along.
'Coming along' is an entirely different beast from 'actually existing'. But given your confusion between the performance of the two vehicles above, I can understand why I have to point out the blindingly obvious to you.
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping finally works.
No shit Sherlock. It's been 'finally working' since the 1970's. (When you actually familiarize yourself with current state of electronics, computing, and robotics, you'll learn the difference between 'working' and 'miniaturized'.)
All that fixed motion tracking gear is a debug environment.
If you go back and read my message and actually bother to exert the effort to understand it - you'll note I never claimed otherwise.
Kiribati has been inhabited for several thousand years or so by people who have managed to not overfish their waters, not cut down all the trees, not drive the local wildlife to extinction, and not overpopulate their lands.
Tiny population and lack of modern medicine will do that for you.
They KNOW how to live in harmony with one another and with their environment.
Horsecrap.
They have a complex system of protecting their own genetic stock that traditionally would not allow a young couple from the same island to mate.
*Yawn* Pretty much the same as many other tribes around the world. It doesn't take a genius to notice that interbreeding raises the chance of problems, but the trivial solution of not allowing people from the same island/tribe/whatever to mate doesn't mean they know anything about 'protecting genetic stock'.
They have no homeless, hungry people, or crime
The latter I can believe, as those are (relatively speaking) fair easy fixes - but no crime? No rapes, no thefts, no sociopaths, no psychopaths, etc... etc... Ain't buying it.
There is no "slick politics" going on in Kiribati, unlike many more developed but imho less civilized nations of the world.
ROTFLMAO. In any group of more than three people - there's politics, because you can't make all the people happy all the time.
You've been sold a bill of 'noble savage' goods, and you're stupid enough and uncritical enough to lap it right up.
Very nice. For research purposes, they're using a cheap copter and expensive fixed motion tracking gear. That saves money during debugging crashes. It doesn't have to be that way. With a slightly bigger copter they could carry around 3 axes of fibre-optic gyro, good accelerometers, and a good dynamic GPS.
Except that your 'slightly bigger copter' is 'not even fractionally as capable' - it's the motion capture gear (I.E. the environmental sensors) that make the quadrotor capable of performing the tricks it does, and your 'slightly bigger' version completely lacks any knowledge of it's environment. (But does have some nice buzzword gear.)
I've seen papers that have received three reviews, two that say it's good, and one that says it's nowhere near worthy of being published. You often question the outliers.
With such a small sample size - there's no such thing as an outlier. There is still selection bias and confirmation bias though, as you so aptly demonstrate.
First, like pretty much everyone he's very confused about what journalists do. Journalists write news stories, and the need to feed the public's (including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) unending gluttony for input. Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
Maybe this is widely accepted as being the case where you live, but here in the UK a great many people still cling to the belief in the concept of journalism.
This has to be one of the most laughable things I've read all week. You think you're saying that people in the UK are different, but you're actually saying they're exactly the same.
So why some unknown English paper did not check its facts might be a non-question to someone who has never heard of it (are you American?), but to many people in the UK it is an interesting question.
Do try and keep up - the Guardian was far from the only media outlet listed in the article.
Finally, if you have such a problem with the Slashdot demographic, then just leave. Delete your account and do not come back. Maybe you were just trolling for a million angry responses from the young people you describe, but if that is the case you should try and do more research about things first as the best trolls often know something about the subject.
ROTFLMAO. When you first demonstrate that I have failed to do my research, and second demonstrate at least a faint understanding of the discussion, then you can lecture me. So far, you've notably failed on both counts.
The full article was less about Haystack, and far more about the Guardian and BBC's coverage of Haystack. Both of these are widely respected news sources in the UK and hence this sort of basic journalism failing is actually worthy of comment, although maybe not to people outside the UK.
Once again, you delude yourself. The Guardian is held up as but one example among several, and actually receives very little of total verbiage.
The interesting thing about this article is how they calculated the digits. They broke the problem up into small pieces and had them calculated in parallel. This approach isn't something that's new or all the unique, but what is is applied to is. Most mathematical calculations are done in a near linear fashion, not in parallel. So for them to be able to do this is a big step forward in how we approach these types of problem in the future.
At least with regards to calculating Pi, it's isn't particularly new. They first used this parallel method back in the 1980's.
Journalists deal with people pushing stories and press releases every single day. Part of their job is to look through the claims and dig out the reality. That didn't happen for Haystack.
Today the press is reporting the opinion of computer security experts, why didn't they ask when the story first broke? The answer, I think comes in the form of The Myth of the Boy Wizard.
TFA's author misses the mark in two big ways;
First, like pretty much everyone he's very confused about what journalists do. Journalists write news stories, and the need to feed the public's (including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) unending gluttony for input. Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
The second miss is in understanding why the media leapt all over the story of Haystack. It has nothing to do with the Boy Wizard - and everything to do with the public's (especially[1] including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) uncritical desire to hear about anything related to 'fighting back' against Iran. Like a five year old with a bowl of ice cream, they stick their faces in it and pig out. And also like a five year old, you take away the half eaten bowl, give them a new bowl with a different flavor, and they go right back to pigging out - the old bowl forgotten with the first mouthful of the new.
[1] I single out the 'Slashdot demographic' (young, hip, wired) for especial scorn because they're the worst of the lot - ever willing to 'amplify the signal' because it makes them feel like they're Doing Something without actually having to do anything. They'll forward, share, and re-tweet endlessly because it makes them feel better. Until the next shiny outrage meme comes along, then whatever they were previously outraged against vanishes forever down the memory hole.
"Kemp has worked on his book for over two decades, sacrificing personal comfort and financial security"
So? Sacrifices don't make a book great, great content does. I've known a nut job that spent every night obsessively working out a tin foil hat theory, and did lose his job because he couldn't stay awake at it - but he was still a nut job and his theory still in tin foil hat territory when it was all done.
"Seems pretty silly for a game developer to just cut out a slice of their potential audience right from the start."
That depends on how much it costs (financially or in game play) to include that slice. One-size-fits-all also frequently means one-size-that-doesn't-quite-fit-anyone, and it's up to the designer and the bean counters to decide which works best.
Now, I'm not an expert but to me it seems like they're trying to create a more easily reusable first stage, using the railgun as little more than an ignition helper.
Even so, you still have massive impacts on the booster in the form of the structural reinforcement that will be required, additional insulation, etc... etc... The sums still don't add up.
Development: Uh, but won't that be ambigious - and since the majority of people who are going to care enough to read this are going to have more intelligence than a potted plant - and actually question how thick the glass will be... won't this make us look like a bunch of idiots?
No, only the pedantic types with an axe to grind, time on their hands, and karma to whore will actually ask how thick the sheet will be. The rest of us will assume "somewhere in the general vicinity of normal window or auto glass", since that's what the phrase "as thick as a sheet of glass" usually means.
he basic problem with a railgun is that it give only a fraction of the velocity required - and it does so only in one plane.
Maybe I'm missing something, but can't you point the railgun in any direction you want? Granted it's probably cheaper to run the track along the ground, but you could at least in principle aim it straight up, or diagonally, or any other direction..
It doesn't matter *where* you point it - you cannot reach a stable circular orbit with a single impulse from the Earth's surface, only an (unstable) elliptical orbit. You'll always need a rocket stage to convert that elliptical orbit into a stable circular orbit.
You can change the size of the required stage by altering your launcher systems's angle, but at the cost of vastly increasing the cost of your launcher system.
After all the hype that we've been hearing over the years about rail-guns and seeing a few military and hobbyist demos on video sites, this one piece of near-former sci-fi may be finally coming to fruition as a usable approach.
Nope, this piece of "near former sci-fi" is just as far from fruition as it ever was.
It's a great example of the sort of thing that had to wait for technological improvements and refinements, rather than a fundamental scientific or technological breakthrough, and is the convergence of several technologies.
It's a great example of people not learning from the past and re-inventing the square wheel because now they have the tech to make carbon fiber square wheels instead of those old fashioned wooden ones.
But they're still square wheels.
The basic problem with a railgun is that it give only a fraction of the velocity required - and it does so only in one plane. (Orbital velocity has both a horizontal and a vertical component, railguns provide velocity only in the horizontal, cannons only in the vertical.) So you end up still needing a substantial rocket stage in order to provide the missing velocity - but now that rocket stage needs to be reinforced (thus increasing parasitic mass) in order to stand the stresses of being handled (while fueled) horizontally and of having to maneuver while still deep in the atmosphere[1] and insulated against structural heating from friction due to it's high speed low in the atmosphere... You end up not gaining anything over the conventional approach.
Railguns don't work because we lack some wonder technology for the gun - they don't work because the structural sums don't add up for the booster. Any materials improvement that you could apply to a railgun boosted launcher, you can also apply to a conventional launcher, which still leaves the railgun launcher trailing in performance and cost.
Railguns and a host of other alternative launch schemes look so simple and obvious that people simply cannot convince themselves that they don't work. So, they keep throwing money and tech at the problem convinced that this time it will work, it's so simple it just has to work. So NASA will waste a couple of hundred million dollars dicking around with the new gun - and then they'll discover the problem of booster design (again). And just like the last dozen times they've done this, the project will quietly be dropped.
Until the next time someone comes up with a PowerPoint presentation showing how this time it will be different.
[1] If you ever watch a rocket launch, you'll notice it goes more-or-less straight up for a couple of miles before starting to pitch over - there's a reason for that.
The speed of evolution in Broadband technology prevents the bill from dropping.
Yet somehow the faster speed of CPU evolution (Moore's "law") and hard drive evolution has allowed those things to become both cheaper and much more powerful.
So? Apples and oranges. You might as well compare the speed of evolution in broadband technology to the sales of pink bubblegum - because it's just as relevant.
And don't tell me that investing in a new fab or retooling an existing fab is cheap, 'cuz it ain't.
Compared to upgrading a broadband network (which can include replacing miles of cable) while maintaining existing service... A new or retooled fab costs peanuts.
It is a bit like the piracy debate, make it a pain to buy legitimate content and suddenly piracy is attractive. Make the legitimate content easier to buy and give no advantage to piracy other than the price and then piracy isn't that big of a deal.
The flaw in your logic is that it bears no relation to the real world. 99.99% of legitimate content can be trivially purchased at either your local big box store or your favorite online retailer. Yet it's pirated anyway.
It's not just about power - it's also about selling the cards in [Wal-Mart's] brick-and-mortar and online stores gets your eyeballs on their other offerings.
Yep. Cancers have been with us, and people have been dying from them, for a very long time. We see more of it nowadays because a) we can diagnose cancers that would have been invisible before (like brain tumors), and b) because we live long enough for more cancers to grow.
One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food.
To put it simply, it makes no sense to you because you hold false beliefs and it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you just might be wrong.
"Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print. This month is the 50th anniversary of that article."
In other words, it's not the first time the word appears in print - but we're celebrating as if it were anyhow.
"To commemorate, a group of writers and artists have gotten together to create 50 Post About Cyborgs."
And why, exactly, am I supposed to care that a bunch of random bloggers I've never heard of are using a barely readable website to publish their opinions on cyborgs?
No, it isn't. Maybe you should read them yourself, a little more closely. Both OP and TFA did say that the case involves alleged download and distribution. But the judge's RULING, as described in those sources, does not.
Read the fucking article. A company subpoenaed an ISP to obtain the identity of people suspected of distributing files, and some users of said ISP sued to prevent their identities from being revealed claiming they had a right to privacy. This ruling is in response to that second suit, and thus *does* deal with downloading and distribution.
"Then they aren't common carriers."
I don't have any objection to you essentially repeating what I wrote, but I have to wonder why. I think it is pretty obvious that I used "common carrier" for the sake of analogy... and specifically stated that the law says otherwise.
Because your analogy was incorrect, yet you acted as though it was correct. Duh.
No, it is actually your analogy that is the bad one.
Go read the article and the ruling - and nowhere in it will you find the ISP required to provide anything but the identity associated with an adress, it does not allow them to give up the contents of your communications.
"That would pretty much be because you're utterly and completely clueless."
Its funny how the vast majority of people here on Slashdot who have written things like that have ended up being wrong. I hope you have fun as a new member of the club.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, was see that right on Slashdot with Microsoft/Google or closed source/open source, on a daily basis.
Well, either you didn't actually watch the quadrotor video or you didn't actually watch the autonomous helicopter video. When you do so, you'll note not only the vast differences in performance between the two - you'll also note that the autonomous helicopter did no obstacle avoidance, no coordinated maneuvers with other autonomous helicopters, etc... etc... Nor did it do anything at all requiring onboard sensing of it's environment. (The onboard sensing of attitude, accelerations, and velocity is a different matter, and a long solved problem.) In fact, the autonomous helicopter didn't do anything particularly noteworthy as far as helicopter performance is concerned.
'Coming along' is an entirely different beast from 'actually existing'. But given your confusion between the performance of the two vehicles above, I can understand why I have to point out the blindingly obvious to you.
No shit Sherlock. It's been 'finally working' since the 1970's. (When you actually familiarize yourself with current state of electronics, computing, and robotics, you'll learn the difference between 'working' and 'miniaturized'.)
If you go back and read my message and actually bother to exert the effort to understand it - you'll note I never claimed otherwise.
Tiny population and lack of modern medicine will do that for you.
Horsecrap.
*Yawn* Pretty much the same as many other tribes around the world. It doesn't take a genius to notice that interbreeding raises the chance of problems, but the trivial solution of not allowing people from the same island/tribe/whatever to mate doesn't mean they know anything about 'protecting genetic stock'.
The latter I can believe, as those are (relatively speaking) fair easy fixes - but no crime? No rapes, no thefts, no sociopaths, no psychopaths, etc... etc... Ain't buying it.
ROTFLMAO. In any group of more than three people - there's politics, because you can't make all the people happy all the time.
You've been sold a bill of 'noble savage' goods, and you're stupid enough and uncritical enough to lap it right up.
Except that your 'slightly bigger copter' is 'not even fractionally as capable' - it's the motion capture gear (I.E. the environmental sensors) that make the quadrotor capable of performing the tricks it does, and your 'slightly bigger' version completely lacks any knowledge of it's environment. (But does have some nice buzzword gear.)
With such a small sample size - there's no such thing as an outlier. There is still selection bias and confirmation bias though, as you so aptly demonstrate.
This has to be one of the most laughable things I've read all week. You think you're saying that people in the UK are different, but you're actually saying they're exactly the same.
Do try and keep up - the Guardian was far from the only media outlet listed in the article.
ROTFLMAO. When you first demonstrate that I have failed to do my research, and second demonstrate at least a faint understanding of the discussion, then you can lecture me. So far, you've notably failed on both counts.
Once again, you delude yourself. The Guardian is held up as but one example among several, and actually receives very little of total verbiage.
At least with regards to calculating Pi, it's isn't particularly new. They first used this parallel method back in the 1980's.
From TFA:
TFA's author misses the mark in two big ways;
First, like pretty much everyone he's very confused about what journalists do. Journalists write news stories, and the need to feed the public's (including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) unending gluttony for input. Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
The second miss is in understanding why the media leapt all over the story of Haystack. It has nothing to do with the Boy Wizard - and everything to do with the public's (especially[1] including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) uncritical desire to hear about anything related to 'fighting back' against Iran. Like a five year old with a bowl of ice cream, they stick their faces in it and pig out. And also like a five year old, you take away the half eaten bowl, give them a new bowl with a different flavor, and they go right back to pigging out - the old bowl forgotten with the first mouthful of the new.
[1] I single out the 'Slashdot demographic' (young, hip, wired) for especial scorn because they're the worst of the lot - ever willing to 'amplify the signal' because it makes them feel like they're Doing Something without actually having to do anything. They'll forward, share, and re-tweet endlessly because it makes them feel better. Until the next shiny outrage meme comes along, then whatever they were previously outraged against vanishes forever down the memory hole.
Indeed - I use twitter to follow photographers, and anything that makes external images and media easier to view is a Good Thing.
"Kemp has worked on his book for over two decades, sacrificing personal comfort and financial security"
So? Sacrifices don't make a book great, great content does. I've known a nut job that spent every night obsessively working out a tin foil hat theory, and did lose his job because he couldn't stay awake at it - but he was still a nut job and his theory still in tin foil hat territory when it was all done.
"Seems pretty silly for a game developer to just cut out a slice of their potential audience right from the start."
That depends on how much it costs (financially or in game play) to include that slice. One-size-fits-all also frequently means one-size-that-doesn't-quite-fit-anyone, and it's up to the designer and the bean counters to decide which works best.
Even so, you still have massive impacts on the booster in the form of the structural reinforcement that will be required, additional insulation, etc... etc... The sums still don't add up.
No, only the pedantic types with an axe to grind, time on their hands, and karma to whore will actually ask how thick the sheet will be. The rest of us will assume "somewhere in the general vicinity of normal window or auto glass", since that's what the phrase "as thick as a sheet of glass" usually means.
However, if you want to remain cash only and off the radar - New York has few marketable skills, few places you'd really want to live, etc... etc...
It doesn't matter *where* you point it - you cannot reach a stable circular orbit with a single impulse from the Earth's surface, only an (unstable) elliptical orbit. You'll always need a rocket stage to convert that elliptical orbit into a stable circular orbit.
You can change the size of the required stage by altering your launcher systems's angle, but at the cost of vastly increasing the cost of your launcher system.
Nope, this piece of "near former sci-fi" is just as far from fruition as it ever was.
It's a great example of people not learning from the past and re-inventing the square wheel because now they have the tech to make carbon fiber square wheels instead of those old fashioned wooden ones.
But they're still square wheels.
The basic problem with a railgun is that it give only a fraction of the velocity required - and it does so only in one plane. (Orbital velocity has both a horizontal and a vertical component, railguns provide velocity only in the horizontal, cannons only in the vertical.) So you end up still needing a substantial rocket stage in order to provide the missing velocity - but now that rocket stage needs to be reinforced (thus increasing parasitic mass) in order to stand the stresses of being handled (while fueled) horizontally and of having to maneuver while still deep in the atmosphere[1] and insulated against structural heating from friction due to it's high speed low in the atmosphere... You end up not gaining anything over the conventional approach.
Railguns don't work because we lack some wonder technology for the gun - they don't work because the structural sums don't add up for the booster. Any materials improvement that you could apply to a railgun boosted launcher, you can also apply to a conventional launcher, which still leaves the railgun launcher trailing in performance and cost.
Railguns and a host of other alternative launch schemes look so simple and obvious that people simply cannot convince themselves that they don't work. So, they keep throwing money and tech at the problem convinced that this time it will work, it's so simple it just has to work. So NASA will waste a couple of hundred million dollars dicking around with the new gun - and then they'll discover the problem of booster design (again). And just like the last dozen times they've done this, the project will quietly be dropped.
Until the next time someone comes up with a PowerPoint presentation showing how this time it will be different.
[1] If you ever watch a rocket launch, you'll notice it goes more-or-less straight up for a couple of miles before starting to pitch over - there's a reason for that.
So? Apples and oranges. You might as well compare the speed of evolution in broadband technology to the sales of pink bubblegum - because it's just as relevant.
Compared to upgrading a broadband network (which can include replacing miles of cable) while maintaining existing service... A new or retooled fab costs peanuts.
The flaw in your logic is that it bears no relation to the real world. 99.99% of legitimate content can be trivially purchased at either your local big box store or your favorite online retailer. Yet it's pirated anyway.
It's not just about power - it's also about selling the cards in [Wal-Mart's] brick-and-mortar and online stores gets your eyeballs on their other offerings.
Sorry, as I've matured, I find my tastes have become a bit more discerning. When you grow up, yours probably will too.
Yep. Cancers have been with us, and people have been dying from them, for a very long time. We see more of it nowadays because a) we can diagnose cancers that would have been invisible before (like brain tumors), and b) because we live long enough for more cancers to grow.
To put it simply, it makes no sense to you because you hold false beliefs and it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you just might be wrong.
"Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print. This month is the 50th anniversary of that article."
In other words, it's not the first time the word appears in print - but we're celebrating as if it were anyhow.
"To commemorate, a group of writers and artists have gotten together to create 50 Post About Cyborgs."
And why, exactly, am I supposed to care that a bunch of random bloggers I've never heard of are using a barely readable website to publish their opinions on cyborgs?
Read the fucking article. A company subpoenaed an ISP to obtain the identity of people suspected of distributing files, and some users of said ISP sued to prevent their identities from being revealed claiming they had a right to privacy. This ruling is in response to that second suit, and thus *does* deal with downloading and distribution.
Because your analogy was incorrect, yet you acted as though it was correct. Duh.
Go read the article and the ruling - and nowhere in it will you find the ISP required to provide anything but the identity associated with an adress, it does not allow them to give up the contents of your communications.
ROTFLMAO.
And not having a lawyer is even more expensive.
Balanced against the potential of a lifetime of not being employed in one's field because one was fired for cause... A years wages seem pretty cheap.