imagine if you could catch a virus from your computer
well, while we're suspending disbelief, then we might as well suspend disbelief in a variety of other things.... so the parent post is moot anyway... who cares if it would spread too fast? we're talking fiction here, anyway!
You notice that the IAB site doesn't have so much as one ad on it.... not a single 'punch the monkey', not one 'natural viagra' and not even a faux windows error.
If they expect everyone to use their super obtrusive template, you would think that they would at lease bother to ugly up their own pages with that crap. How do they expect people to take them seriously?
Even first world countries have long used kites for reconaissance. A lot of kiting development has taken place for military applications. Check this page for more details.
If you are having trouble, you are in luck living where you do. There are a large number of kite flyers living in Washington state. One of the best stunt kite makers are based out of Seattle. There are quite a few kite flyers in that area and an active kite club as well. These people will be more than happy to help you figure out what you are doing wrong, and better yet, will lend you there kites... the best of friends.
Re:What camera would you suggest attaching? :)
on
Kite Aerial Photography
·
· Score: 4, Informative
While it's a good idea to keep things light, it's not the over-riding factor. The kites being used for KAP are usually capable of lifting considerable weights. There are quite a few kites out there (in the $300 or more price range) that need about 250-300 pounds of sand anchors to be safely operated. I've heard of large inflatable show kites that will pull two dumpsters full of sand across the beach.
As for control, it's all R/C servos. It can be done with as little as one servo to pull the trigger but most people like to be able to at least pan some, so that's another servo. There are also some triggers out there that are just timer based... you set the timer, and hope you can get the rig up to altitude and pointing at the target by the time the trigger goes off... not flexible, but cheap and effective.
For those of you who don't remember the kite obelisk project, slashdot has run a couple of stories about it. It's basically an idea that ancient egyptians *could* have used kites to do some of their heavy lifting for them.
I run a kite site and am fanatical about the sport, so i should hope to have a little authority on the subject. While i haven't done any KAP myself, i've read extensively on the subject. There are some amazing photos coming back from people lofting cameras on their kites. There is also some interesting tech going into the works too. I've seem plans for radio controlled microcontrollers that will depress the camera trigger, hold it till a beep for the camera to focus, then press the trigger harder to take the photo. There are setups using small video cameras and transmitters that allow the user to see what he's about to take a photo of. There are a bunch of pan-rotate-zoom setups using servos and the like. It's mostly R/C tech, but still quite cool.
My fav site for KAP is here. My website (in sig) doesn't have much for KAP resources, but it is useful to look at to see some of the other spiffy stuff.
By the way, the kite obelisk folks are still at it, planning an even bigger lift, and with period materials. Should be exciting, but I don't have the full scoop, they are keeping it quiet until they pull it off.
It sounds cool, but might prove to be useless... the phenomenon will happen that popular sites will be the ones getting the most hits and just perpetuating that way just because they are popular. More useful but less popular sites will be overlooked because they haven't been looked at much.
You speak the truth in everything you say. And the guy who responded about the 'friggingly hot piece of coal' expanded very well. The mind is very much linked with the body.
But, you'll agree, the vast majority of our consciousness and thought processes happen in the brain. Given this, we can agree that the brain is the most important part of the process. When humans are even close to hacking this system, for sure the first thing we will develop (because it would be by far the easiest) will be the nanotech to replicate the body's signals to 'fool' the brain into thinking it's in a body. It's beyond our technology now, but it would be the next step before we do some serious brain hacking.
That's just what i was thinking.... most of the movies i've been to recently have been PACKED. And that's not only the blockbuster type movies... on a saturday night in a big city, just about every showing of every movie is packed.... i'm not believing they're not making money.
I used to live in Beijing... as an american there you would be astonished at the rate of piracy. We're used to maybe picking up a copy of photoshop from a buddy, or you know someone who will burn you a copy of windows.... there they sell about any commercial software product (not too long after release) on pressed CDs (with case and jacket) for about a buck in just about any open marketplace. Needless to say, there are not too many people with 'real' versions of the software running around.
The problem with these CDs is that they have been cracked (so people can use them) by who-knows-who and frequently have other 'things' floating around on the CDs and i'm sure there huge numbers of virii that are being distributed in this way. It's really easy to picture an 80% infection rate. It's kinda like a high school computer lab where all the kids trade floppy disks and there is no anti-virus protection.... everyone has it before long.
Quite true... your applications have to be designed specifically with multi-processing in mind otherwise your system will just end up wasting any potential performance gains on context switches and other overhead. Also, there are some data sets and types of processing that are better suited to multi-processing environments.
Since most applications have only one processor in mind, it's typical to see dual processor systems that don't have much performance gain.
The distributed systems (SETI, GIMPS and others) are very well suited to multi-processor environments... and this is taken to extremes by having the multi-processing done on entirely different machines with some 'master' computers that handle the overhead of reassembling the multiple datasets into something coherent for the whole system. It's actually an amazing thing when you get to thinking about it.
This is a very good article to read for those who are not really familiar with how a processor actually does it's work. The first three pages or so are generally what a senior-level college OS course will teach you.
The distinction between a program in memory and a process in execution is important. It is also important to understand the illusion of simultaneous execution that is acheived through concurrent processes using context switches.
Given all that, the article makes it easy to understand where your performance gains (and losses) happen having multi-processors, and indeed in having multi-processing on the same chip.
Yes, and that's fine for people doing trouble shooting and tune-ups... but it also allows street racers and other performance minded folks to pump up their air-fuel mixtures and screw up emission controls. With the wrong settings, it's also conceivable if someone doesn't know what they are doing to cause engine fires with all the associated hollywood-type explosions.
Really, is it THAT good of an idea to let people hack their car's computers? Sure, i go with the whole idea that if someone wants to blow himself up, then have at it... but in a car, that's potentially putting other people at risk... and that ain't cool.
Maybe someone else saw the recent issue of Wired magazine (maybe a month or two back) where some mad scientist-type was able to wire a camera up to a blind patients brain, and through the use of a program that would 'learn' what effects certain signals it would put out on the guys visual cortex had, could then begin to replicate a pretty decent field of vision (albeit at very low resolution).
Well, it seems that scientists are getting somewhat proficient at interpreting brain signals and even providing direct-to-brain feedback. The reality of this is actually amazing. It's the stuff of science fiction, but immersive systems (the Matrix, anyone?) might not be so far fetched anymore. The stuff from 80's cyberpunk fiction where everyone is walking around with jacks in their heads might not be so far off. But then again, flying cars shouldn't be so far off either but you don't see many of those either.
One concept that many creationists seem to have a problem with is that of VERY LARGE NUMBERS. This is actually a common problem with people.... it's difficult to imagine just how many a 'million' is... it's easy to picture one or two apples, but how large of a pile would a million piles make? How 'bout a billion? A hundred billion? Most people can't really think of really large numbers. A common exercise to show people the idea of large numbers is this: Imagine an infinite number of monkeys (in an infinite space) sitting at an infinite number of typewriters typing away randomly for an infinite amount of time. If you could wait long enough, one of them would eventually type the entire text of War & Peace cover to cover and get all the punctuation correct, without any typos. This isn't just a mental exercise... if the hypothetical case could happen, the result WOULD happen. It's a mathematical fact. Even if the odds of some monkey randomly typing such a thing were one in 10^100000000000, it would happen. Events that are one in a million (to us -- very rare), happen 250 times a day in the US alone.
Now to apply this to evolution. No one is saying that a monkey suddenly had a human baby and it only survived because monkeys had tried all the other possible types of offspring. Evolutionary steps are much more subtle. On step might have a few offspring of a base genera coming out a bit taller. A few offspring of of those maybe have a bit less hair. A few generations later maybe a bit lighter skin. Apply this across a hundred million years (and countless generations) it's possible that the offspring might start to look a little more human-like.
Human history is short, we can't have possibly observed any evolution... or have we? It hasn't been so long since the average human height was nothing but 4'6" or so. What does it say that average height is getting taller? Maybe in a million years there is a breed of post-humans that are REALLY tall (with other differences) and can't interbreed with the 'short ones'... those that didn't experience these changes.
For your second question, see the post above talking about the differences in the use of the word 'theory'. Something like the 'Theory of amplified speakers' isn't really a hypothesis or something to be tested... it's a collection of facts that form a larger body, referred to as 'theory'. There are many details about evolution that we do not know or totally understand, but the greater concept is a fact. To refute evoltuion since all the details aren't worked out is missing the forest for all the trees.
The winners include a robotics researcher from Dartmouth studying robotics, and a paleoethnobotanist from Penn State studying the ancient plants and foods of prehistoric peoples."
Ok, i can see why they would need to tell us what a robotics researcher does, but sheesh, who in the world doesn't know what a paleoethnobotanist does??
Bandwidth vs. Latency is always a big tradeoff in CS technologies. Sure you can ship larger packets (err... packages) via snail mail, but latency is still a big issue. An equivalent to a ping in mail might take two weeks using letters.
Cost is also an issue, next-day mail is REALLY expensive... shooting bits across the net is really cheap, and in comparison almost free.
Slashdot Mirror
They're called rice cakes.
but spicy!
er.... well, rice cakes with tobasco sauce...
Definately correct.
imagine if you could catch a virus from your computer
well, while we're suspending disbelief, then we might as well suspend disbelief in a variety of other things.... so the parent post is moot anyway... who cares if it would spread too fast? we're talking fiction here, anyway!
You notice that the IAB site doesn't have so much as one ad on it.... not a single 'punch the monkey', not one 'natural viagra' and not even a faux windows error.
If they expect everyone to use their super obtrusive template, you would think that they would at lease bother to ugly up their own pages with that crap. How do they expect people to take them seriously?
Especially when, being close to the other person, our putting "6'4", looks like Brad Pitt" on the device won't work any more...
Even first world countries have long used kites for reconaissance. A lot of kiting development has taken place for military applications. Check this page for more details.
If you are having trouble, you are in luck living where you do. There are a large number of kite flyers living in Washington state. One of the best stunt kite makers are based out of Seattle. There are quite a few kite flyers in that area and an active kite club as well. These people will be more than happy to help you figure out what you are doing wrong, and better yet, will lend you there kites... the best of friends.
Try this.
While it's a good idea to keep things light, it's not the over-riding factor. The kites being used for KAP are usually capable of lifting considerable weights. There are quite a few kites out there (in the $300 or more price range) that need about 250-300 pounds of sand anchors to be safely operated. I've heard of large inflatable show kites that will pull two dumpsters full of sand across the beach.
As for control, it's all R/C servos. It can be done with as little as one servo to pull the trigger but most people like to be able to at least pan some, so that's another servo. There are also some triggers out there that are just timer based... you set the timer, and hope you can get the rig up to altitude and pointing at the target by the time the trigger goes off... not flexible, but cheap and effective.
For those of you who don't remember the kite obelisk project, slashdot has run a couple of stories about it. It's basically an idea that ancient egyptians *could* have used kites to do some of their heavy lifting for them.
I run a kite site and am fanatical about the sport, so i should hope to have a little authority on the subject. While i haven't done any KAP myself, i've read extensively on the subject. There are some amazing photos coming back from people lofting cameras on their kites. There is also some interesting tech going into the works too. I've seem plans for radio controlled microcontrollers that will depress the camera trigger, hold it till a beep for the camera to focus, then press the trigger harder to take the photo. There are setups using small video cameras and transmitters that allow the user to see what he's about to take a photo of. There are a bunch of pan-rotate-zoom setups using servos and the like. It's mostly R/C tech, but still quite cool.
My fav site for KAP is here.
My website (in sig) doesn't have much for KAP resources, but it is useful to look at to see some of the other spiffy stuff.
By the way, the kite obelisk folks are still at it, planning an even bigger lift, and with period materials. Should be exciting, but I don't have the full scoop, they are keeping it quiet until they pull it off.
It sounds cool, but might prove to be useless... the phenomenon will happen that popular sites will be the ones getting the most hits and just perpetuating that way just because they are popular. More useful but less popular sites will be overlooked because they haven't been looked at much.
You speak the truth in everything you say. And the guy who responded about the 'friggingly hot piece of coal' expanded very well. The mind is very much linked with the body.
But, you'll agree, the vast majority of our consciousness and thought processes happen in the brain. Given this, we can agree that the brain is the most important part of the process. When humans are even close to hacking this system, for sure the first thing we will develop (because it would be by far the easiest) will be the nanotech to replicate the body's signals to 'fool' the brain into thinking it's in a body. It's beyond our technology now, but it would be the next step before we do some serious brain hacking.
That's just what i was thinking.... most of the movies i've been to recently have been PACKED. And that's not only the blockbuster type movies... on a saturday night in a big city, just about every showing of every movie is packed.... i'm not believing they're not making money.
I used to live in Beijing... as an american there you would be astonished at the rate of piracy. We're used to maybe picking up a copy of photoshop from a buddy, or you know someone who will burn you a copy of windows.... there they sell about any commercial software product (not too long after release) on pressed CDs (with case and jacket) for about a buck in just about any open marketplace. Needless to say, there are not too many people with 'real' versions of the software running around.
The problem with these CDs is that they have been cracked (so people can use them) by who-knows-who and frequently have other 'things' floating around on the CDs and i'm sure there huge numbers of virii that are being distributed in this way. It's really easy to picture an 80% infection rate. It's kinda like a high school computer lab where all the kids trade floppy disks and there is no anti-virus protection.... everyone has it before long.
Quite true... your applications have to be designed specifically with multi-processing in mind otherwise your system will just end up wasting any potential performance gains on context switches and other overhead. Also, there are some data sets and types of processing that are better suited to multi-processing environments.
Since most applications have only one processor in mind, it's typical to see dual processor systems that don't have much performance gain.
The distributed systems (SETI, GIMPS and others) are very well suited to multi-processor environments... and this is taken to extremes by having the multi-processing done on entirely different machines with some 'master' computers that handle the overhead of reassembling the multiple datasets into something coherent for the whole system. It's actually an amazing thing when you get to thinking about it.
This is a very good article to read for those who are not really familiar with how a processor actually does it's work. The first three pages or so are generally what a senior-level college OS course will teach you.
The distinction between a program in memory and a process in execution is important. It is also important to understand the illusion of simultaneous execution that is acheived through concurrent processes using context switches.
Given all that, the article makes it easy to understand where your performance gains (and losses) happen having multi-processors, and indeed in having multi-processing on the same chip.
All in all a good read.
This is a good point... but, you realize, you've just boiled it down to the whole "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" argument.
Yes, and that's fine for people doing trouble shooting and tune-ups... but it also allows street racers and other performance minded folks to pump up their air-fuel mixtures and screw up emission controls. With the wrong settings, it's also conceivable if someone doesn't know what they are doing to cause engine fires with all the associated hollywood-type explosions.
All your custom engines are belong to us...
Really, is it THAT good of an idea to let people hack their car's computers? Sure, i go with the whole idea that if someone wants to blow himself up, then have at it... but in a car, that's potentially putting other people at risk... and that ain't cool.
Maybe someone else saw the recent issue of Wired magazine (maybe a month or two back) where some mad scientist-type was able to wire a camera up to a blind patients brain, and through the use of a program that would 'learn' what effects certain signals it would put out on the guys visual cortex had, could then begin to replicate a pretty decent field of vision (albeit at very low resolution).
Well, it seems that scientists are getting somewhat proficient at interpreting brain signals and even providing direct-to-brain feedback. The reality of this is actually amazing. It's the stuff of science fiction, but immersive systems (the Matrix, anyone?) might not be so far fetched anymore. The stuff from 80's cyberpunk fiction where everyone is walking around with jacks in their heads might not be so far off. But then again, flying cars shouldn't be so far off either but you don't see many of those either.
One concept that many creationists seem to have a problem with is that of VERY LARGE NUMBERS. This is actually a common problem with people.... it's difficult to imagine just how many a 'million' is... it's easy to picture one or two apples, but how large of a pile would a million piles make? How 'bout a billion? A hundred billion? Most people can't really think of really large numbers. A common exercise to show people the idea of large numbers is this: Imagine an infinite number of monkeys (in an infinite space) sitting at an infinite number of typewriters typing away randomly for an infinite amount of time. If you could wait long enough, one of them would eventually type the entire text of War & Peace cover to cover and get all the punctuation correct, without any typos. This isn't just a mental exercise... if the hypothetical case could happen, the result WOULD happen. It's a mathematical fact. Even if the odds of some monkey randomly typing such a thing were one in 10^100000000000, it would happen. Events that are one in a million (to us -- very rare), happen 250 times a day in the US alone.
Now to apply this to evolution. No one is saying that a monkey suddenly had a human baby and it only survived because monkeys had tried all the other possible types of offspring. Evolutionary steps are much more subtle. On step might have a few offspring of a base genera coming out a bit taller. A few offspring of of those maybe have a bit less hair. A few generations later maybe a bit lighter skin. Apply this across a hundred million years (and countless generations) it's possible that the offspring might start to look a little more human-like.
Human history is short, we can't have possibly observed any evolution... or have we? It hasn't been so long since the average human height was nothing but 4'6" or so. What does it say that average height is getting taller? Maybe in a million years there is a breed of post-humans that are REALLY tall (with other differences) and can't interbreed with the 'short ones'... those that didn't experience these changes.
For your second question, see the post above talking about the differences in the use of the word 'theory'. Something like the 'Theory of amplified speakers' isn't really a hypothesis or something to be tested... it's a collection of facts that form a larger body, referred to as 'theory'. There are many details about evolution that we do not know or totally understand, but the greater concept is a fact. To refute evoltuion since all the details aren't worked out is missing the forest for all the trees.
Drop your threshold to 0 and look for the AC post 'Googlized Link'.
The winners include a robotics researcher from Dartmouth studying robotics, and a paleoethnobotanist from Penn State studying the ancient plants and foods of prehistoric peoples."
Ok, i can see why they would need to tell us what a robotics researcher does, but sheesh, who in the world doesn't know what a paleoethnobotanist does??
Bandwidth vs. Latency is always a big tradeoff in CS technologies. Sure you can ship larger packets (err... packages) via snail mail, but latency is still a big issue. An equivalent to a ping in mail might take two weeks using letters.
Cost is also an issue, next-day mail is REALLY expensive... shooting bits across the net is really cheap, and in comparison almost free.