Would you know simply by looking at the photos without the sign that this was not say the grand canyon?
Yes, because the GC doesn't have so much vegetation growing down the sides.
The whole correct to 200 km aspect is troublesome when the state of the art in computer vision cannot yet even answer that this is a picture of a canyon.
The two things arn't related. You don't need to know it's a canyon to be able to locate it - you just find the closest match in your database and give that as the location. You only need to be able to assess degree of similarity. No need to start reading signs or logically analysing the picture for clues.
Getting the location right to 200 km doesn't really say anything about the accuracy of your matching algotithm - it just says that:
a) You have a database with at least one picture per 200Km radius
b) Enough locations (at least in your database) look sufficiently distinct that "distant but similar" matches occur infrequently enough not to drag your success rate below 16%
Nope - if you really RTFA, it says that downgrade (to XP Pro) rights are included in the Microsoft licence for Vista Business & Ultimate, and that for *most* models Dell therefore don't charge you extra for this.
For some unknown reason Dell is charging for this downgrade option for the Vostro models, but it would appear to be nothing to do with the fact that you get both since that it true for any model that you choose to downgrade.
Maybe the Microsoft Vista licence downgrade provision is for some reason only valid for high end models?
They're not changing what these microbes eat - they are changing what they shit.
No doubt they would escape into the wild, and the effects of that are hard to guess, but there's no reason to worry specifically about anything getting eaten that isn't already getting eaten. There's plenty else to worry about though!
That makes no sense at all - if crude supply exceeds demand, then why are prices so high? If the problem is lack of refineries rather than lack of oil, then why is Bush begging the Saudis for more oil rather than giving tax breaks to his buddies to build more oil refineries?
The real problem here is indeed oil - partly because demand is up from China, and partly because Iraq is currently producing about 2.5 Mbbls a day less than it was before Bush invaded (a discrepency which the short-term 0.5 Mbbls increase the Saudis are **hoping** to provide will do little to offset).
It would be a perteptual motion machine - it violates the conservation of matter/energy.
H2O ---seperate--> 2H + O ---burn--> H2O + energy
Keep cycling the H2O around and you get a continuous supply of energy without ever using up your water, eh?
You don't need to know how the seperation is being done to realize that the only way this can work is if at least as much energy is put into the seperation process as is being extracted from the burning.
Also, since the water is never used up (it gets recreated in the burning), it's hardly the fuel! The fuel is the thing that gets used up, which in this case would be the energy source used to seperate the water.
It also means we can expect almost any planet anywhere to have _some_ of the building blocks, and evolve life, if the conditions and timing are right.
We already know that amino acids form naturally in early earth conditions - it's been replicated in the lab, so that is not news. The emergence of life is a whole other story and a couple of simple organic molecules on a meteorite does precisely ZERO to inform us of the how often that is likely to occur given the right conditions and enough time.
Based on the results of PetaVision's inaugural trials, Los Alamos researchers believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex--arguably a human being's most important sensory apparatus.
What the hell does that mean???
I'm guessing it just means that this peta-beast has the oomph to run their model in real-time. They seem to want you to assume that the model actually achieves something human-like and/or never-done-by-a-computer-before, but seeing as they don't actually come out and make that claim, I think it really means it just ran their model (which may be a steaming pile of dingo droppings) DAMN FAST. Yawn.
Speciation is just as inevitable as evolution - whenever two populations evolutionally diverge past the point of inability to interbreed, then you have two species rather than one.
There are many people who confuse the origin of life with the theory of evolution. While evolution could cause organic chemistry to begat bio chemistry, it doesn't have to be so. Biochemistry could have come from anywhere, but evolution and speciation from that point (or points - although the DNA evidence is that all still extant species do have a common root) will have inevitably ensued.
You should read Stuart Kauffman's book "At home in the universe".
Briefly:
In the right conditions - chemical ingredients, energy source, mixing, etc (i.e. early early with water, geothermal heat, lightening, etc, the chemical complexity of the envorinment will inevitably increase as new compounds form and inter-react.
Some chemical reactions lead to rection products that will themselves react, etc, etc. Some chemicals will act as catalysts for other reactions.
As the chemical complexity builds, at a certain point you will start to get some circular chain reactions. These are the most rudimentary beginnings of bio chemistry. It is the inevitability of these occuring in the right conditions that makes us/life "at home in the universe".
The earlist form of reproduction will have been physical division - think of chemical solutions mixed with oily froth whipped up on the seashore, with "reporoduction" of chain chemical reaction constituents being via large bubbles broken up into many smaller ones.
The path to DNA is via chemicals which direct the reactions of other chemical reactions, such as simple catalysts. If you have a cyclic reaction that can produce the oily lipids (which initially would just have been part of the environment) neceessary to form the membranes of these rudimentaty cells/bubbles, then you have the beginnings of cells that can self-create and reproduce, and evolutionary forces will make the ones more successful at self-defining and reproducing become numerically dominant.
The hardest part of evolution would appear to have been the evolution of catalysts / DNA precursors that cause structure/asymmetry within the bubble to be created (or perhaps to be more likely to randomly occur), given the huge amount of time that passed from single cellular to multicellular life.
DNA is of course massively complex, but once you have the underpinnings of evolution in place (starting with something like catalysts that guide other reactions), complexity will develop.
No - it would make no difference. Genetic variation is the driver of evolution, but the source of that variation does not matter - it may be normal sexual reproduction, errors during reproduction, genetic defects due to environmental facts, genetic material absorbed from the environment (e.g. viruses).
Note also that this capability did not appear in a single generation - it took a further 10,000+ generations (generations 20,000 to 31,500) for some initially unnoticable change to evolve into an ability to metabolise citrate.
Evolution is not a theory. It's an inavoidable logical consequence of known facts.
a) IF traits are hereditory, AND b) IF traits affect fittness (likelyhood to leave descendends, or can be thought of as degree of adaptation to the pervailing environment)
THEN
Successive generations will become fitter (better adapted) than preceding ones
***
Now, b) is trivially true - bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, more attractive, more disease resistant, etc, etc are all gentically defined traits that to some degree affect ability to survive, win mates, compete for food, raise and protect young.
a) is also true - traits are genetically encoded by DNA and propagated via reproduction. In Darwinn's time this was a theory, but nowadays it's a known fact.
The result is that evolution is indeed a fact. Not a theory. Get over it.
Agreed - you don't really want to have mutiple people editing the same file at the same time! If you really need that (two changes for the same release that impact the same file) then edit two different branches under source control and then merge them, but if you find yourself doing this a lot it may be a reflection of a poorly modularized/segmented design.
Or to totally spell it out for the geo-politically impaired :
United Kingdom - passport issuing union of four countries (and their minor island possessions)
England
Scotland
Wales
Northern Ireland
Great Britain - an island comprising three countries
England
Scotland
Wales
Ireland - an island comprising two countries
Northern Ireland
Ireland (aka Republic of Ireland)
Note that someone born in England is likely to identify themselves as English or British (born on the island of Great Britain) rather than as "citizen of the UK". AFAIK there's not even a word to identify yourself as a "United Kingdomer".
I've been programming professionally since 1982, and while I havn't personally paid a penny for software tools for about a decade (since RedHat 5.0), I can say that the declining/disappearing market for software tools predates that, and I see the reason as being integrated IDEs starting with Borland Turbo Pascal.
In the early days I remember paying a lot of money for tools like Watcom-C (32 bit DOS/4GW development - $895 - the hottest optimizing compiler of the day), Instant-C (C interpreter for rapid prototyping/debugging - $695?), BRIEF ($195 - one of the best commercial editors ever - I still use BRIEF-compatible Emacs key assignments), some profiler I can't even remember the name of, etc, etc.
When Borland Turbo Pascal was introduced it completely changed the software tool pricing landscape. This was a very high performing comiler, with an IDE that included tools that would otherwise have been seperate (editor, debugger, profiler), all for a ridiculously low price (WikiPedia says $49.99 - I'd forgotten). While the integrated editor/etc may not have been as good as stand-alone alternatives, it was good enough for many people and pretty much spelt the death of multi-hundred dollar a la carte tools. The performance of the Borland compiler also forced Microsoft (who's optimization in the early days wasn't very good) to up their game which also helped kill the market for non-IDE optimizing compilers.
More recently of course Linux and open source tools have kept some competetive pressure on the tools market, but I really see Borland as being the start of the end for a market for software tools at prices that make them an attractive proposition for dedicated tools vendors.
If its an instrument failure, fortunately they have 7 other "ovens" to try. Redundancy is nice.
OTOH if it's a design failure, they're fucked.
Gotta wonder what made them go with such a tiny diameter oven and tiny admission size sieve. Would it have been so difficult to get a larger more clump/flow tolerant design to work?
Being 1st degree or 2nd degree isn't a matter of whether you have any sympathy for him - it's a matter of whether it was premeditated (planned) - 1st degree - or unplanned in the heat of the moment (2nd degree).
The evidence one hears in the press of her blood in the car, the front seat mysteriously gone missing with no explanation, and the car hosed down inside, all might tend to point to something that was perhaps unplanned (you'd think a nerd could plan it better), but OTOH we didn't hear all the evidence, and the jury that did hear it apparently thought it was planned (maybe for the exact reasons you suggest).
You're basically turning Netflix's 3-a-time plan into a N-a-time plan, but the only advantage of having them all to hand at the same time is if you want to watch them a second time. Either you've got a huge appetite for re-runs, or you are wasting your time ripping and filling drives with movies that you'll only ever rewatch a tiny fraction of.
I think you're confusing the download & model building speed (slow) with the rendering & display speed (real-time rotation - SUPER fast)
Zoom in as far as you can go, tilt the model as far close to horizontal as it will go, then spin the model around it's center point by dragging the compass dial in a circle - you can do this even as the model continues to download and refine itself.
This hitta.se 3-D seems to first be buiding a 3-D model, skinning it with photos (maybe tranformed on the server?), then displaying it with D3D or OpenGL. The graphics part of it is ligtening fast - try getting in close to the ground at a low angle (i.e. where you can really see the 3-D model) then rotating the 3-D world with the dial-thingy... I have an old Radeon 9200 card and it still rotates and displays the 3-D model in real-time as I spin it around - damn impressive.
Agreed - it's a neat low cost way of making rapid prototypes, but that's it. I got the impression the story was trying to imply that these things could essentially self-reproduce and might be colonizing Mars sometimes soon!
Not even that... it could make copies of *some* of the parts needed to produce itself.
It does NOT :
- make all the parts (wires, etc) needed to make itself - assemble itself
It's really no different from a computer controlled milling machine that could of course also be programmed to make some replacement parts for itself. Big deal.
You may be right - I do remember that debate. Edwards would bring some of the southern "Hilary supporter" vote that's be useful, although given Obama's impressive primary run, I'm sure he's very much on top of what he needs to win the swing votes that matter and are achievable.
Both Edwards and Richardson deserve some reward for having come out at key momemnts to support Obama.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you know simply by looking at the photos without the sign that this was not say the grand canyon?
Yes, because the GC doesn't have so much vegetation growing down the sides.
The whole correct to 200 km aspect is troublesome when the state of the art in computer vision cannot yet even answer that this is a picture of a canyon.
The two things arn't related. You don't need to know it's a canyon to be able to locate it - you just find the closest match in your database and give that as the location. You only need to be able to assess degree of similarity. No need to start reading signs or logically analysing the picture for clues.
Getting the location right to 200 km doesn't really say anything about the accuracy of your matching algotithm - it just says that:
a) You have a database with at least one picture per 200Km radius
b) Enough locations (at least in your database) look sufficiently distinct that "distant but similar" matches occur infrequently enough not to drag your success rate below 16%
Nope - if you really RTFA, it says that downgrade (to XP Pro) rights are included in the Microsoft licence for Vista Business & Ultimate, and that for *most* models Dell therefore don't charge you extra for this.
For some unknown reason Dell is charging for this downgrade option for the Vostro models, but it would appear to be nothing to do with the fact that you get both since that it true for any model that you choose to downgrade.
Maybe the Microsoft Vista licence downgrade provision is for some reason only valid for high end models?
Even more worrying, when do we all get forcefully inoculated with a new E. Coli, helping us all to excrete oil.
I guess that would put an end to the recreational pastime of lighting farts, and/or it'd give Red Adair a whole new set of customers.
They're not changing what these microbes eat - they are changing what they shit.
No doubt they would escape into the wild, and the effects of that are hard to guess, but there's no reason to worry specifically about anything getting eaten that isn't already getting eaten. There's plenty else to worry about though!
That makes no sense at all - if crude supply exceeds demand, then why are prices so high? If the problem is lack of refineries rather than lack of oil, then why is Bush begging the Saudis for more oil rather than giving tax breaks to his buddies to build more oil refineries?
The real problem here is indeed oil - partly because demand is up from China, and partly because Iraq is currently producing about 2.5 Mbbls a day less than it was before Bush invaded (a discrepency which the short-term 0.5 Mbbls increase the Saudis are **hoping** to provide will do little to offset).
It would be a perteptual motion machine - it violates the conservation of matter/energy.
H2O ---seperate--> 2H + O ---burn--> H2O + energy
Keep cycling the H2O around and you get a continuous supply of energy without ever using up your water, eh?
You don't need to know how the seperation is being done to realize that the only way this can work is if at least as much energy is put into the seperation process as is being extracted from the burning.
Also, since the water is never used up (it gets recreated in the burning), it's hardly the fuel! The fuel is the thing that gets used up, which in this case would be the energy source used to seperate the water.
It also means we can expect almost any planet anywhere to have _some_ of the building blocks, and evolve life, if the conditions and timing are right.
We already know that amino acids form naturally in early earth conditions - it's been replicated in the lab, so that is not news. The emergence of life is a whole other story and a couple of simple organic molecules on a meteorite does precisely ZERO to inform us of the how often that is likely to occur given the right conditions and enough time.
Based on the results of PetaVision's inaugural trials, Los Alamos researchers believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex--arguably a human being's most important sensory apparatus.
What the hell does that mean???
I'm guessing it just means that this peta-beast has the oomph to run their model in real-time. They seem to want you to assume that the model actually achieves something human-like and/or never-done-by-a-computer-before, but seeing as they don't actually come out and make that claim, I think it really means it just ran their model (which may be a steaming pile of dingo droppings) DAMN FAST. Yawn.
Speciation is just as inevitable as evolution - whenever two populations evolutionally diverge past the point of inability to interbreed, then you have two species rather than one.
There are many people who confuse the origin of life with the theory of evolution. While evolution could cause organic chemistry to begat bio chemistry, it doesn't have to be so. Biochemistry could have come from anywhere, but evolution and speciation from that point (or points - although the DNA evidence is that all still extant species do have a common root) will have inevitably ensued.
You should read Stuart Kauffman's book "At home in the universe".
Briefly:
In the right conditions - chemical ingredients, energy source, mixing, etc (i.e. early early with water, geothermal heat, lightening, etc, the chemical complexity of the envorinment will inevitably increase as new compounds form and inter-react.
Some chemical reactions lead to rection products that will themselves react, etc, etc. Some chemicals will act as catalysts for other reactions.
As the chemical complexity builds, at a certain point you will start to get some circular chain reactions. These are the most rudimentary beginnings of bio chemistry. It is the inevitability of these occuring in the right conditions that makes us/life "at home in the universe".
The earlist form of reproduction will have been physical division - think of chemical solutions mixed with oily froth whipped up on the seashore, with "reporoduction" of chain chemical reaction constituents being via large bubbles broken up into many smaller ones.
The path to DNA is via chemicals which direct the reactions of other chemical reactions, such as simple catalysts. If you have a cyclic reaction that can produce the oily lipids (which initially would just have been part of the environment) neceessary to form the membranes of these rudimentaty cells/bubbles, then you have the beginnings of cells that can self-create and reproduce, and evolutionary forces will make the ones more successful at self-defining and reproducing become numerically dominant.
The hardest part of evolution would appear to have been the evolution of catalysts / DNA precursors that cause structure/asymmetry within the bubble to be created (or perhaps to be more likely to randomly occur), given the huge amount of time that passed from single cellular to multicellular life.
DNA is of course massively complex, but once you have the underpinnings of evolution in place (starting with something like catalysts that guide other reactions), complexity will develop.
No - it would make no difference. Genetic variation is the driver of evolution, but the source of that variation does not matter - it may be normal sexual reproduction, errors during reproduction, genetic defects due to environmental facts, genetic material absorbed from the environment (e.g. viruses).
Note also that this capability did not appear in a single generation - it took a further 10,000+ generations (generations 20,000 to 31,500) for some initially unnoticable change to evolve into an ability to metabolise citrate.
Evolution is not a theory. It's an inavoidable logical consequence of known facts.
a) IF traits are hereditory, AND
b) IF traits affect fittness (likelyhood to leave descendends, or can be thought of as degree of adaptation to the pervailing environment)
THEN
Successive generations will become fitter (better adapted) than preceding ones
***
Now, b) is trivially true - bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, more attractive, more disease resistant, etc, etc are all gentically defined traits that to some degree affect ability to survive, win mates, compete for food, raise and protect young.
a) is also true - traits are genetically encoded by DNA and propagated via reproduction. In Darwinn's time this was a theory, but nowadays it's a known fact.
The result is that evolution is indeed a fact. Not a theory. Get over it.
Nice try, but not really!
A limey would just be a Brit.
Agreed - you don't really want to have mutiple people editing the same file at the same time! If you really need that (two changes for the same release that impact the same file) then edit two different branches under source control and then merge them, but if you find yourself doing this a lot it may be a reflection of a poorly modularized/segmented design.
Or to totally spell it out for the geo-politically impaired :
United Kingdom - passport issuing union of four countries (and their minor island possessions)
England
Scotland
Wales
Northern Ireland
Great Britain - an island comprising three countries
England
Scotland
Wales
Ireland - an island comprising two countries
Northern Ireland
Ireland (aka Republic of Ireland)
Note that someone born in England is likely to identify themselves as English or British (born on the island of Great Britain) rather than as "citizen of the UK". AFAIK there's not even a word to identify yourself as a "United Kingdomer".
I've been programming professionally since 1982, and while I havn't personally paid a penny for software tools for about a decade (since RedHat 5.0), I can say that the declining/disappearing market for software tools predates that, and I see the reason as being integrated IDEs starting with Borland Turbo Pascal.
In the early days I remember paying a lot of money for tools like Watcom-C (32 bit DOS/4GW development - $895 - the hottest optimizing compiler of the day), Instant-C (C interpreter for rapid prototyping/debugging - $695?), BRIEF ($195 - one of the best commercial editors ever - I still use BRIEF-compatible Emacs key assignments), some profiler I can't even remember the name of, etc, etc.
When Borland Turbo Pascal was introduced it completely changed the software tool pricing landscape. This was a very high performing comiler, with an IDE that included tools that would otherwise have been seperate (editor, debugger, profiler), all for a ridiculously low price (WikiPedia says $49.99 - I'd forgotten). While the integrated editor/etc may not have been as good as stand-alone alternatives, it was good enough for many people and pretty much spelt the death of multi-hundred dollar a la carte tools. The performance of the Borland compiler also forced Microsoft (who's optimization in the early days wasn't very good) to up their game which also helped kill the market for non-IDE optimizing compilers.
More recently of course Linux and open source tools have kept some competetive pressure on the tools market, but I really see Borland as being the start of the end for a market for software tools at prices that make them an attractive proposition for dedicated tools vendors.
If its an instrument failure, fortunately they have 7 other "ovens" to try. Redundancy is nice.
OTOH if it's a design failure, they're fucked.
Gotta wonder what made them go with such a tiny diameter oven and tiny admission size sieve. Would it have been so difficult to get a larger more clump/flow tolerant design to work?
Being 1st degree or 2nd degree isn't a matter of whether you have any sympathy for him - it's a matter of whether it was premeditated (planned) - 1st degree - or unplanned in the heat of the moment (2nd degree).
The evidence one hears in the press of her blood in the car, the front seat mysteriously gone missing with no explanation, and the car hosed down inside, all might tend to point to something that was perhaps unplanned (you'd think a nerd could plan it better), but OTOH we didn't hear all the evidence, and the jury that did hear it apparently thought it was planned (maybe for the exact reasons you suggest).
Yeah - hardly "news" when it's:
a) days old
b) superceded by failure - aka wrong
Who'd thunk that at -80C - -30C stuff would clump together when there's moisture present?
I don't see the point.
You're basically turning Netflix's 3-a-time plan into a N-a-time plan, but the only advantage of having them all to hand at the same time is if you want to watch them a second time. Either you've got a huge appetite for re-runs, or you are wasting your time ripping and filling drives with movies that you'll only ever rewatch a tiny fraction of.
I think you're confusing the download & model building speed (slow) with the rendering & display speed (real-time rotation - SUPER fast)
Zoom in as far as you can go, tilt the model as far close to horizontal as it will go, then spin the model around it's center point by dragging the compass dial in a circle - you can do this even as the model continues to download and refine itself.
This hitta.se 3-D seems to first be buiding a 3-D model, skinning it with photos (maybe tranformed on the server?), then displaying it with D3D or OpenGL. The graphics part of it is ligtening fast - try getting in close to the ground at a low angle (i.e. where you can really see the 3-D model) then rotating the 3-D world with the dial-thingy... I have an old Radeon 9200 card and it still rotates and displays the 3-D model in real-time as I spin it around - damn impressive.
Agreed - it's a neat low cost way of making rapid prototypes, but that's it. I got the impression the story was trying to imply that these things could essentially self-reproduce and might be colonizing Mars sometimes soon!
Not even that... it could make copies of *some* of the parts needed to produce itself.
It does NOT :
- make all the parts (wires, etc) needed to make itself
- assemble itself
It's really no different from a computer controlled milling machine that could of course also be programmed to make some replacement parts for itself. Big deal.
Good angle to get some press coverage though.
You may be right - I do remember that debate. Edwards would bring some of the southern "Hilary supporter" vote that's be useful, although given Obama's impressive primary run, I'm sure he's very much on top of what he needs to win the swing votes that matter and are achievable.
Both Edwards and Richardson deserve some reward for having come out at key momemnts to support Obama.