Well, this was actually the first thing I thought of when I read the question -- a harness, sorta like those old 'jolly jumper' things kids like to bounce around in. (There's your jumping problem solved right there.) But instead of a virtual ground, I figured we'd combine the harness with the idea of rolling balls on the ground -- except that the balls aren't wired to anything. You can walk, you can run, you'll stay in the same place, but leg movement is tracked. Well, movement of the soles of your shoes.
Just measure how fast they would be running (i.e. how fast they move when on the rolling balls), which gives you your speed. Then keep inertia in mind for when they're running (and thusly have both feet off the ground). If they bend both their legs without leaping first (and are thusly off the ground when they shouldn't be), reduce spring tension -- now they can crouch (as you mentioned), and will even feel like they're crouching, cos the reduced tension will let them have their feet on the ground still. From there, it's just a simple matter of tracking arm, head, and torso movement.
Turning might be more of a problem (would the sensors be able to pick up minute increses and decreases in the amount of time a single foot spends on the ground, and translate that into an accurate turn?), but maybe if you give them conductive soles and send some kind of charge up into their feet via the bearings, you'd get a more accurate picture of how long their feet remain on the ground.
This is all well and good, but ...
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
Businesses plan on a five-year cycle - if something isn't forecast to make a return on investment in five years, it doesn't get done.
Don't get me wrong; I'm very much a supporter of this. I may not know a huge amount about it, but I try, and I have my opinions anyway.:) But a question was brought up after I brought this topic up with some friends: What about the personal copyrights?
Now I know I said I don't know much about this, and the article said that copyright wasn't an innate right, and so maybe I'm missing something.. but if I were to make a comic, say (ignoring the fact that I can't draw worth a damn), and I wanted to continue to own my comic even after these five years, or the 28 years of the original copyrights -- or heck, say I wanted to own it when I was sixty, so I could keep working on it and control its progress -- where does that leave me?
Just hoping I could get some answers, cos I really do wonder about this, and I wanna get it figured out, cos it sorta pokes its head through my own little bit of cheering for this nice essay, and bothers me.
One of the reasons that Americans so value their privacy is because of distrust of government.
I read this, and it seemed to ring true to me, but then again, I'm not an American. Still, if this is true, then frankly, we've got things totally backwards...
Your system basically has the citizens all distrusting the government, and yet nobody seems to cry out when the government agencies breathe down their neck and watch their every move.
Meanwhile, here in Canada, I suppose we trust our government more. Well, trust them to be morons^Wpoliticians, at least.:) But in Ontario, for all their faults (which every government has, and which I won't go into, lest I be accused of spreading flamebait), our provincial government is actually encouraging us to use encryption. I suppose it's a sort of mutual business-minding -- "You mind your business, we'll mind ours, and we'll all use encryption to that end."
So I guess what I'm asking is, does it seem to anyone else that we've got our trust-policy and privacy-policy wires crossed here?:)
(Okay, so I guess I'm verging on offtopic here. Oh well, I've said what I came to say.):)
I feel I have to agree.. both with this post, and with the previous ones regarding how they're simply comparing one area's DSL and cable. Here, the rates are actually identical, rather than the four- or six-fold price ratio they give, and we get 1Mbps to boot.
It really does depend on where you are, and who your providers are. If my local cable company had the 600Mbps cap ('where cable is king'?) that they mention in the article (which I'm not sure about, myself, because my cable company don't give specs, just vague claims, supposedly in the interest of keeping it non-techie), my DSL would be faster than cable, and dedicated.
Additionally -- and maybe I'm just being anal now -- I did notice some odd discrepancies, and outright misunderstandings. For one, sure I share my bandwidth with everyone else on the net, but when we get out there, we're talking T3's and fibre-optic links and whatnot. I don't think you can really feasibly say, for example, that a 56k modem's relatively low speed (compared to ADSL et al) is due to everyone else using the Internet.:) Plus, I noticed that at one point, they say that some cable modems aren't like hubs, but rather, "like 'bridges' or 'switches'" (a good use of the terms). Yet later on, they say that the Bell Atlantic DSL modem 'is configured as a "bridge"', and somehow this means that they don't filter, leaving 253 people open to attack each other.
While I know that many high-tech columnists aren't the heavy techie/geek type and thusly might overlook some of these things, and how it may have been hard for them to find one willing to do the article, I do think that they should at least have someone knowledgeable look the column over before it went out. Heck, I bet many of these things could be caught by your average meticulous proofreader. Peer scrutiny, especially in such fields as journalism and whatnot, is always a bonus.:)
It could just be me, but what I see here is M$ taking over a company that tries to bridge the gap between Unix and NT, but not 'to meet the needs of customers' as they would have us believe. Thing is, now, even if the workers have been telling the PHBs 'No, we can't switch, our code has to run under Unix' for months, suddenly, there's a way to turn the impossible into just the unwise. Suddenly, if someone wants a supposedly certified solution, or someone feels you can't go wrong for selecting M$, they have an option.
However, what really worries me is that I think this very much links in with the previous article about M$'s new academic strategy against Linux et al. Give universities free NT licenses, then stuff to let them port stuff to NT... maybe it's just coincidence, but maybe this is their sorta alpha-strike against Unix itself.
Then again, I'm not sure if this worries me or just makes me chuckle. I think I'll continue to laugh at them until one side wins, at which point I'll face the music. I'm not sure if I can really handle the idea that they might actually be good enough tactitions to manage something like that.
In any case, we've continuously said that they'd have to be stupid not to see what's going on. I'm not sure I like the attention we're getting, though.:)
You know.. the thought occured to me, while I was reading this stuff.. I wonder if maybe we're going about this all backwards. Should we really be trying to get a computer to write in a language it knows nothing about, using only pre-programmed thoughts and phrases? Many people talk about how the machine needs to understand us before it can write about us. But do you really expect someone who has never had exposure to human culture to write a believable story, if all you teach them is how to write?
At best, you'd get something decidedly inhuman.
Maybe our order is a bit backwards. What if we were to teach a machine to read instead, and keep track of not just the states of the characters, but also what's going on inside their head, and thus their *motives* for doing things. If your AI thusly learns that someone jumps when startled, smiles when pleased, etc., it'll have a better understanding of the human mind. Better than we could teach it, in fact, if you feed it enough input data; who can tell that person who has been isolated from society everything they need to know about the world? We'll overlook something.
I guess it seems kinda silly to say all this, cos I suppose that's pretty much the essense of artificial intelligence in itself. But then I guess what I'm really saying is, isn't this a bit premature?
What I find most interesting is this: this article is about the Philippines. Not the U.S., Europe, or Australia. The Philippines. And it found its way on/.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here.. I've seen at least one posting from someone who lives there, and I've got my score limit set relatively high, so there are most likely others from said country who're posting as well. I won't debate the merit of the article itself (except to say that I think the 'from the... dept' byline was a bit hasty), but I think that it has brought some interesting issues up, and I don't see why the fact that it doesn't come from some recognised 'big country' makes it all that unimportant to some.
You're the one behind the console; if you look at an article and can easily decide that it has no effect on you, you don't hafta read it. The sports page in the newspaper doesn't affect me whatsoever, but that doesn't mean I write to my editor to ask it removed. I don't want Slashdot to try to decide what I want to read; the papers already try that, and they fail abysmally.
I apologise; I know this is offtopic, but I felt it needed to be said. As for the issue itself, I'm not sure what it's really about. Truancy (the story), drug dealers and stuff (another part of the story), censorship (a possible implication), or anything else. But I really do wonder (not to be cynical, just curious) why their Internet Cafes are such a truancy problem. I know that here, a call goes home to the parents immediately upon the student's first skipped class, and as a result, very few students skip regularly. Actually, very few as of last year; that policy just went into place this year now, and it would seem that the result is that I see certain regular skippers from last year actually in class these days. Wow.
In retrospect, I think the title of this thread is actually somewhat fitting. We seem to have solved our truancy problem without resorting to this kind of thing, and via a system that doesn't take too much effort to implement, or too much skill to come up with. And it doesn't involve banning certain media, either.
Sorta makes you wonder what they're really up to, doesn't it?
Re:RMS should read the GPL
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 1
I'll start by saying that personally, I'm sorta opposed to the whole "GNU/Linux" thing. True, they deserve credit for what they've done, but IMO, that doesn't mean the name should be changed to suit them. The 'GNU inside' thing sounds great, if a bit silly (maybe that's just me), but I also don't think RMS is going against the GPL by doing what he is doing. Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention (because I haven't paid much -- just goes to show what I think of the issue), but I don't see RMS pulling out lawyers and trying to fight, based on the terms of the GPL, for this change. What I see him doing is asking, if not in a particularly polite manner, that the FSF get credit for their part in Linux.
Maybe there's a highly-elevated thinly-veiled sense of personal worth in this; maybe there's a sense of jealousy for not thinking of calling his work 'Stallmax' or the like (even if 'Linux' wasn't Linus' idea anyway); maybe he's misguided; maybe he's right. I won't try to judge. But I think that saying that this is hypocracy is a bit far-fetched, since I don't really see the GPL coming into play.
All the same, I'd like to see some conclusion made here. For heaven's sake, give him the stickers if it makes him happy, and let's all get back to fighting the real enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this was actually the first thing I thought of when I read the question -- a harness, sorta like those old 'jolly jumper' things kids like to bounce around in. (There's your jumping problem solved right there.) But instead of a virtual ground, I figured we'd combine the harness with the idea of rolling balls on the ground -- except that the balls aren't wired to anything. You can walk, you can run, you'll stay in the same place, but leg movement is tracked. Well, movement of the soles of your shoes.
Just measure how fast they would be running (i.e. how fast they move when on the rolling balls), which gives you your speed. Then keep inertia in mind for when they're running (and thusly have both feet off the ground). If they bend both their legs without leaping first (and are thusly off the ground when they shouldn't be), reduce spring tension -- now they can crouch (as you mentioned), and will even feel like they're crouching, cos the reduced tension will let them have their feet on the ground still. From there, it's just a simple matter of tracking arm, head, and torso movement.
Turning might be more of a problem (would the sensors be able to pick up minute increses and decreases in the amount of time a single foot spends on the ground, and translate that into an accurate turn?), but maybe if you give them conductive soles and send some kind of charge up into their feet via the bearings, you'd get a more accurate picture of how long their feet remain on the ground.
Businesses plan on a five-year cycle - if something isn't forecast to make a return on investment in five years, it doesn't get done.
Don't get me wrong; I'm very much a supporter of this. I may not know a huge amount about it, but I try, and I have my opinions anyway. :) But a question was brought up after I brought this topic up with some friends: What about the personal copyrights?
Now I know I said I don't know much about this, and the article said that copyright wasn't an innate right, and so maybe I'm missing something.. but if I were to make a comic, say (ignoring the fact that I can't draw worth a damn), and I wanted to continue to own my comic even after these five years, or the 28 years of the original copyrights -- or heck, say I wanted to own it when I was sixty, so I could keep working on it and control its progress -- where does that leave me?
Just hoping I could get some answers, cos I really do wonder about this, and I wanna get it figured out, cos it sorta pokes its head through my own little bit of cheering for this nice essay, and bothers me.
I read this, and it seemed to ring true to me, but then again, I'm not an American. Still, if this is true, then frankly, we've got things totally backwards...
Your system basically has the citizens all distrusting the government, and yet nobody seems to cry out when the government agencies breathe down their neck and watch their every move.
Meanwhile, here in Canada, I suppose we trust our government more. Well, trust them to be morons^Wpoliticians, at least. :) But in Ontario, for all their faults (which every government has, and which I won't go into, lest I be accused of spreading flamebait), our provincial government is actually encouraging us to use encryption. I suppose it's a sort of mutual business-minding -- "You mind your business, we'll mind ours, and we'll all use encryption to that end."
So I guess what I'm asking is, does it seem to anyone else that we've got our trust-policy and privacy-policy wires crossed here? :)
(Okay, so I guess I'm verging on offtopic here. Oh well, I've said what I came to say.) :)
Ack. I meant 600Kbps, not Mbps. Yes, proofreading is a bonus. :> (But at least I wasn't writing a column.) :)
It really does depend on where you are, and who your providers are. If my local cable company had the 600Mbps cap ('where cable is king'?) that they mention in the article (which I'm not sure about, myself, because my cable company don't give specs, just vague claims, supposedly in the interest of keeping it non-techie), my DSL would be faster than cable, and dedicated.
Additionally -- and maybe I'm just being anal now -- I did notice some odd discrepancies, and outright misunderstandings. For one, sure I share my bandwidth with everyone else on the net, but when we get out there, we're talking T3's and fibre-optic links and whatnot. I don't think you can really feasibly say, for example, that a 56k modem's relatively low speed (compared to ADSL et al) is due to everyone else using the Internet. :) Plus, I noticed that at one point, they say that some cable modems aren't like hubs, but rather, "like 'bridges' or 'switches'" (a good use of the terms). Yet later on, they say that the Bell Atlantic DSL modem 'is configured as a "bridge"', and somehow this means that they don't filter, leaving 253 people open to attack each other.
While I know that many high-tech columnists aren't the heavy techie/geek type and thusly might overlook some of these things, and how it may have been hard for them to find one willing to do the article, I do think that they should at least have someone knowledgeable look the column over before it went out. Heck, I bet many of these things could be caught by your average meticulous proofreader. Peer scrutiny, especially in such fields as journalism and whatnot, is always a bonus. :)
It could just be me, but what I see here is M$ taking over a company that tries to bridge the gap between Unix and NT, but not 'to meet the needs of customers' as they would have us believe. Thing is, now, even if the workers have been telling the PHBs 'No, we can't switch, our code has to run under Unix' for months, suddenly, there's a way to turn the impossible into just the unwise. Suddenly, if someone wants a supposedly certified solution, or someone feels you can't go wrong for selecting M$, they have an option.
However, what really worries me is that I think this very much links in with the previous article about M$'s new academic strategy against Linux et al. Give universities free NT licenses, then stuff to let them port stuff to NT... maybe it's just coincidence, but maybe this is their sorta alpha-strike against Unix itself.
Then again, I'm not sure if this worries me or just makes me chuckle. I think I'll continue to laugh at them until one side wins, at which point I'll face the music. I'm not sure if I can really handle the idea that they might actually be good enough tactitions to manage something like that.
In any case, we've continuously said that they'd have to be stupid not to see what's going on. I'm not sure I like the attention we're getting, though. :)
At best, you'd get something decidedly inhuman.
Maybe our order is a bit backwards. What if we were to teach a machine to read instead, and keep track of not just the states of the characters, but also what's going on inside their head, and thus their *motives* for doing things. If your AI thusly learns that someone jumps when startled, smiles when pleased, etc., it'll have a better understanding of the human mind. Better than we could teach it, in fact, if you feed it enough input data; who can tell that person who has been isolated from society everything they need to know about the world? We'll overlook something.
I guess it seems kinda silly to say all this, cos I suppose that's pretty much the essense of artificial intelligence in itself. But then I guess what I'm really saying is, isn't this a bit premature?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here.. I've seen at least one posting from someone who lives there, and I've got my score limit set relatively high, so there are most likely others from said country who're posting as well. I won't debate the merit of the article itself (except to say that I think the 'from the ... dept' byline was a bit hasty), but I think that it has brought some interesting issues up, and I don't see why the fact that it doesn't come from some recognised 'big country' makes it all that unimportant to some.
You're the one behind the console; if you look at an article and can easily decide that it has no effect on you, you don't hafta read it. The sports page in the newspaper doesn't affect me whatsoever, but that doesn't mean I write to my editor to ask it removed. I don't want Slashdot to try to decide what I want to read; the papers already try that, and they fail abysmally.
I apologise; I know this is offtopic, but I felt it needed to be said. As for the issue itself, I'm not sure what it's really about. Truancy (the story), drug dealers and stuff (another part of the story), censorship (a possible implication), or anything else. But I really do wonder (not to be cynical, just curious) why their Internet Cafes are such a truancy problem. I know that here, a call goes home to the parents immediately upon the student's first skipped class, and as a result, very few students skip regularly. Actually, very few as of last year; that policy just went into place this year now, and it would seem that the result is that I see certain regular skippers from last year actually in class these days. Wow.
In retrospect, I think the title of this thread is actually somewhat fitting. We seem to have solved our truancy problem without resorting to this kind of thing, and via a system that doesn't take too much effort to implement, or too much skill to come up with. And it doesn't involve banning certain media, either.
Sorta makes you wonder what they're really up to, doesn't it?
Maybe there's a highly-elevated thinly-veiled sense of personal worth in this; maybe there's a sense of jealousy for not thinking of calling his work 'Stallmax' or the like (even if 'Linux' wasn't Linus' idea anyway); maybe he's misguided; maybe he's right. I won't try to judge. But I think that saying that this is hypocracy is a bit far-fetched, since I don't really see the GPL coming into play.
All the same, I'd like to see some conclusion made here. For heaven's sake, give him the stickers if it makes him happy, and let's all get back to fighting the real enemy.