I gotta say that it looks like it's just highlighting the areas of high spatial frequency (i.e. sharp lines), which is where you'd expect the differences to be if you save at a lower quality JPEG level and compare to the original (which is what the article says it's doing). The way JPEG compression works is by throwing away high frequency information away - the lower quality you choose the more is thrown away.
Hi beard is showing up because it's a mass of fine lines (high freq. info), ditto the text.
The Saturn V may have been an expensive way to get to the moon, but at least it could get there, as can it's modern Russian cousin the Soyuz (maybe soon to be used for a $100M space tourist trip around the moon). The resuable Shuttle costs around 10x more per launch then the Soyuz ($450M vs $30-50M), and won't get you much further than the ISS. No moon for you!
Maybe non-reusable designs are inherently more cost effective for heavy launch?
Even if that becomes possible, I think you'd lose the "Visual Voicemail" feature (email-like random access to voicemail messages) since they said at the launch that it required AT&T back end development, and minimally has to be closely tied to the AT&T way of retrieving voice mail messages.
Any Martian life is certainly surviving some tough conditions, but they may have quite different bio-chemistry to life on earth. Who knows what they might use as an energy source or what elements of a human-hospitable environment they may be able to tolerate.
There are plenty of critters on earth that survive in extraordinary environments (boiling water, concentrated acid, anaerobic environments...), but they don't take over the planet due to beign tough, because their "tough" (to *us*) environment is what they need to survive.
Imagine an alien species "terraforming" earth to their own needs so they could come here... maybe they'd start by replacing the air with methane because that's what they breathed, or introduce large quantaties of elements toxic to us into the environment to match their own planet and needs.
I'm all for eventually terraforming Mars once we've determined that there's no existing life there, but to do so before then would be a scientific loss on an unimaginable scale.
Given that we're still discovering new species (microscopic ones by the gazillion, and still finding occasional large ones too) on earth, despite a huge exploratory effort that's been underway for hundreds of years, I think it's a bit early (massive understament) to think we've determined that mars is lacking any life at all
Talk to ANYBODY who has got a green card thru their company (assuming they were reasonably cognisent of the process) and you will discover the same thing - this is standard operating procedure, and not just an abuse by this specific law firm.
The way the system is set up, how can it be any other way... if a company has decided they want to get someone a green card, then of course they do whatever they can to achieve that. If they instead wanted to replace the person with a US worker then they'd be doing an honest job search, and NOT pursing a green card. Duh! The law says you have to advertize the job, so you put an ad for the job in the most obscure paper possible, with the job requirements so custom tailored to the person you are trying to get a green card for that no one else can qualify. I'm sure it works better than ever in recent years now that most people expect to find job openings online rather than in the local paper.
What's lame here is Congress pretending to give a crap (presumably just because this particular story/video has hit the press) and wanting to investigate this particular law firm. One has to wonder are they being investigated for breaking the law, or rather just for making Congress look bad by openly flaunting the law? If Congress really gave a crap they'd fix the broken system rather than go after a law firm doing nothing different than every other law firm hired to assist in this process.
Just to put it in perspective, Bush's Iraq war has so far (budget approval through this year) cost us, the US taxpayers, about $400 billion (it's running about $200 million PER DAY), and it's estimated that it'll be over $1 trillion ($1000 billion) by the time the troops eventually come home. On a more personal note $1 trillion is about $10,000 per US household.
Compared to that, NASAs annual budget is around $17 billion.
So, yeah, rather than killing 100,000 Iraqi civilians, turning Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists, making the rest of the world hate us, and destroying the US constitution as an added bonus, we *could* have done a LOT more fun and worthwhile things. Or Bush could instead have just given $10,000 to each family in the US to spend how they please. Same cost.
Yet despite doing poorly for Yahoo's stockholders and letting Google eat their lunch and dominate the internet, Semel received $70M last year via stock options. Makes you wonder what these executive incentive packages actually buy the shareholders who are footing the bill. Apparently it's not a performance/results incentive.
Rather than seek out a livable planet, why not (once we're capable of it) genetically engineer some simple microscopic life that can live in and off the target environment whatever it may be. Let them evolve into higher life forms that can also live there. Maybe that's how we got here ourselves!
Al Gore should respond by posting a video of himself using a fart fire to light a candle - excellent way to get the write-in vote without even running!
Check out this review and sample photos from the PowerShot S10 which uses the CYGM filter - it does seem to have very low noise, and awesome image quality in general. I wonder why they stopped using it?
Canon release the eos-30d equiv or eos-350d/400d equiv with this sensor within the next year? If so I'd wait to purchase:)
The article says that sensors based on this will start to become available early next year, but I'd guess it may be a little longer until camera manufactures have tuned their on-camera image processing algorithms (and off-camera RAW algorithms) for the production sensors.
The larger format sensor cameras like the EOS 30D/350D (both are APS-C) don't suffer so much in low light anyway since they already receive more light per pixel since the pixels are larger. This is the main reason why DSLRs do so much better in low light (other than having the option for expensive wide aperture lenses). It's really the point and shoots with their pathetically small image sensors that need this.
The old/current Bayer pattern (also a Kodak "invention") also reflects the lower resolution of our vision to color vs brightness (as does JPEG and YUV based image compression - UV can be downsampled compared to Y with little loss in perceived resolution). In the Bayer pattern each block of 2x2 pixels have 2 with green filters, described as luminance-sensitive in the original patent, and one each of red and blue filter described as chrominance sensitive.
The new Kodak filter pattern is still taking advantage of our better resolution for luminance, but is implementing it better by basing it on color filters (or the lack of them) that let more light through, thereby increasining signal-to-noise (especially needed in low-light conditions).
I'm not sure that this new filter pattern is optimal though. As another poster noted, R/G/B filters are too narrow and cut out a lot of light. You could still capture the color information with two broader filters more directly corresponding to the U & V of the YUV color space.
You described it as if speaker recognition was something new, if only a minor advance on speech recognition. In fact speaker recognition as an independent field with a long history to itself - you just don't typically see it used commercially.
Your position is inconsistent. As long as there are monopolies then the service those monopolies provide can only be good if they are financially healthy. Saying you don't care if they become obsolescent is the same as saying you *don't* really care about level of service because no company goes out of business overnight - going out of business would be preceded by years of declining revenues, reduced network maintenance, layoffs, etc, etc.
How is Verizon (or *any* phone company) meant to compete with other wireless carriers, VOIP (e.g. over cable), etc, if they are not also allowed to upgrade their technology to remain competetive? How is the new technology meant to be paid for if not by diverting some investments away from older technology? Would you prefer they raised prices, or just that they be forced into technological obsolesence and go out of business?
If you see value in phone company monopolies (& universal service provision) then it makes no sense to also insist that they operate with both hands tied behind their back such that they are guaranteed to become obsolete and go out of business!
So, instead of it being involved in cheating the market, it becomes a tool for cheating on taxes. Is this really any better?
There are also other situations where you may want to lock in a gain by shorting against the box - it's not just for "cheating on" (i.e. deferring) taxes. Say you have been granted some options in your company stock, but are not yet vested to be able to exercise them, and you are predicting that the stock may drop before you are able to exercise them... So you short against the box now obtaining the current stock price, then close the short later when you can exercise the options.
I don't see shorting in general as cheating the market - it's just a bet that a stock will go down vs going long (i.e. buying the stock) which is a bet that it will go up. Who's being cheated?
Margin is just taking a loan using your existing investments as collateral - nothing to get excited about there.
Personally I don't see what's wrong with shorting - it does provide some balance. Anyway, shorting has its place for regular investors also in the form of "shorting against the box" which means shorting a stock that you already own to lock in a profit - typically for tax purposes. e.g. Say it's December and you own a stock that has appreciated that you now want to sell but don't want to pay taxes for in the current tax year... so you short the stock in December (same amount as you own), then in January you close the short by handing over the shares you already own. What you've effectively done is get the December price, but not actually completed the trade until January, so you've got another year to pay the taxes on your gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I gotta say that it looks like it's just highlighting the areas of high spatial frequency (i.e. sharp lines), which is where you'd expect the differences to be if you save at a lower quality JPEG level and compare to the original (which is what the article says it's doing). The way JPEG compression works is by throwing away high frequency information away - the lower quality you choose the more is thrown away.
Hi beard is showing up because it's a mass of fine lines (high freq. info), ditto the text.
On that note, my SPARC/Solaris development box at work has a current uptime of about 9 months.
AFAIK Viagra's only good for an hour or so.
As an emergency phone to keep in the car it'd work fine.
I'm looking for a way to convert my Lamborghini Diablo into a lawnmower.
The Saturn V may have been an expensive way to get to the moon, but at least it could get there, as can it's modern Russian cousin the Soyuz (maybe soon to be used for a $100M space tourist trip around the moon). The resuable Shuttle costs around 10x more per launch then the Soyuz ($450M vs $30-50M), and won't get you much further than the ISS. No moon for you!
Maybe non-reusable designs are inherently more cost effective for heavy launch?
Even if that becomes possible, I think you'd lose the "Visual Voicemail" feature (email-like random access to voicemail messages) since they said at the launch that it required AT&T back end development, and minimally has to be closely tied to the AT&T way of retrieving voice mail messages.
Any Martian life is certainly surviving some tough conditions, but they may have quite different bio-chemistry to life on earth. Who knows what they might use as an energy source or what elements of a human-hospitable environment they may be able to tolerate.
There are plenty of critters on earth that survive in extraordinary environments (boiling water, concentrated acid, anaerobic environments...), but they don't take over the planet due to beign tough, because their "tough" (to *us*) environment is what they need to survive.
Imagine an alien species "terraforming" earth to their own needs so they could come here... maybe they'd start by replacing the air with methane because that's what they breathed, or introduce large quantaties of elements toxic to us into the environment to match their own planet and needs.
I'm all for eventually terraforming Mars once we've determined that there's no existing life there, but to do so before then would be a scientific loss on an unimaginable scale.
Given that we're still discovering new species (microscopic ones by the gazillion, and still finding occasional large ones too) on earth, despite a huge exploratory effort that's been underway for hundreds of years, I think it's a bit early (massive understament) to think we've determined that mars is lacking any life at all
Talk to ANYBODY who has got a green card thru their company (assuming they were reasonably cognisent of the process) and you will discover the same thing - this is standard operating procedure, and not just an abuse by this specific law firm.
The way the system is set up, how can it be any other way... if a company has decided they want to get someone a green card, then of course they do whatever they can to achieve that. If they instead wanted to replace the person with a US worker then they'd be doing an honest job search, and NOT pursing a green card. Duh! The law says you have to advertize the job, so you put an ad for the job in the most obscure paper possible, with the job requirements so custom tailored to the person you are trying to get a green card for that no one else can qualify. I'm sure it works better than ever in recent years now that most people expect to find job openings online rather than in the local paper.
What's lame here is Congress pretending to give a crap (presumably just because this particular story/video has hit the press) and wanting to investigate this particular law firm. One has to wonder are they being investigated for breaking the law, or rather just for making Congress look bad by openly flaunting the law? If Congress really gave a crap they'd fix the broken system rather than go after a law firm doing nothing different than every other law firm hired to assist in this process.
The robotic orange-picking overloads welcome you!
(sorry - had to be said)
Just to put it in perspective, Bush's Iraq war has so far (budget approval through this year) cost us, the US taxpayers, about $400 billion (it's running about $200 million PER DAY), and it's estimated that it'll be over $1 trillion ($1000 billion) by the time the troops eventually come home. On a more personal note $1 trillion is about $10,000 per US household.
Compared to that, NASAs annual budget is around $17 billion.
So, yeah, rather than killing 100,000 Iraqi civilians, turning Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists, making the rest of the world hate us, and destroying the US constitution as an added bonus, we *could* have done a LOT more fun and worthwhile things. Or Bush could instead have just given $10,000 to each family in the US to spend how they please. Same cost.
If it's simulation you want, then you should also check out the Microsoft Robotics Studio.
. aspx
o tics-Tour-CCR-VPL-Simulation-Part-1/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default
http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/Media/Microsoft-Rob
It pains me to praise Microsoft, but from the Channel 9 video it looks pretty impresive - especially the simulation capabilities.
Yet despite doing poorly for Yahoo's stockholders and letting Google eat their lunch and dominate the internet, Semel received $70M last year via stock options. Makes you wonder what these executive incentive packages actually buy the shareholders who are footing the bill. Apparently it's not a performance/results incentive.
Rather than seek out a livable planet, why not (once we're capable of it) genetically engineer some simple microscopic life that can live in and off the target environment whatever it may be. Let them evolve into higher life forms that can also live there. Maybe that's how we got here ourselves!
Al Gore should respond by posting a video of himself using a fart fire to light a candle - excellent way to get the write-in vote without even running!
Check out this review and sample photos from the PowerShot S10 which uses the CYGM filter - it does seem to have very low noise, and awesome image quality in general. I wonder why they stopped using it?
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons10/
Canon release the eos-30d equiv or eos-350d/400d equiv with this sensor within the next year? If so I'd wait to purchase :)
The article says that sensors based on this will start to become available early next year, but I'd guess it may be a little longer until camera manufactures have tuned their on-camera image processing algorithms (and off-camera RAW algorithms) for the production sensors.
The larger format sensor cameras like the EOS 30D/350D (both are APS-C) don't suffer so much in low light anyway since they already receive more light per pixel since the pixels are larger. This is the main reason why DSLRs do so much better in low light (other than having the option for expensive wide aperture lenses). It's really the point and shoots with their pathetically small image sensors that need this.
The old/current Bayer pattern (also a Kodak "invention") also reflects the lower resolution of our vision to color vs brightness (as does JPEG and YUV based image compression - UV can be downsampled compared to Y with little loss in perceived resolution). In the Bayer pattern each block of 2x2 pixels have 2 with green filters, described as luminance-sensitive in the original patent, and one each of red and blue filter described as chrominance sensitive.
The new Kodak filter pattern is still taking advantage of our better resolution for luminance, but is implementing it better by basing it on color filters (or the lack of them) that let more light through, thereby increasining signal-to-noise (especially needed in low-light conditions).
I'm not sure that this new filter pattern is optimal though. As another poster noted, R/G/B filters are too narrow and cut out a lot of light. You could still capture the color information with two broader filters more directly corresponding to the U & V of the YUV color space.
I'm tired of all the 1-second-till-end phantom biding programs and online services screwing me over.
The only person screwing you over is yourself. The item went to someone who bid simply higher than you did.
If you failed to submit your real maximum bid before the end of the auction then you only have yourself to blame.
You described it as if speaker recognition was something new, if only a minor advance on speech recognition. In fact speaker recognition as an independent field with a long history to itself - you just don't typically see it used commercially.
You're talking out of your ass.
This is not speech recognition it's speaker recognition, and is nothing new.
Your position is inconsistent. As long as there are monopolies then the service those monopolies provide can only be good if they are financially healthy. Saying you don't care if they become obsolescent is the same as saying you *don't* really care about level of service because no company goes out of business overnight - going out of business would be preceded by years of declining revenues, reduced network maintenance, layoffs, etc, etc.
How is Verizon (or *any* phone company) meant to compete with other wireless carriers, VOIP (e.g. over cable), etc, if they are not also allowed to upgrade their technology to remain competetive? How is the new technology meant to be paid for if not by diverting some investments away from older technology? Would you prefer they raised prices, or just that they be forced into technological obsolesence and go out of business?
If you see value in phone company monopolies (& universal service provision) then it makes no sense to also insist that they operate with both hands tied behind their back such that they are guaranteed to become obsolete and go out of business!
So, instead of it being involved in cheating the market, it becomes a tool for cheating on taxes. Is this really any better?
There are also other situations where you may want to lock in a gain by shorting against the box - it's not just for "cheating on" (i.e. deferring) taxes. Say you have been granted some options in your company stock, but are not yet vested to be able to exercise them, and you are predicting that the stock may drop before you are able to exercise them... So you short against the box now obtaining the current stock price, then close the short later when you can exercise the options.
I don't see shorting in general as cheating the market - it's just a bet that a stock will go down vs going long (i.e. buying the stock) which is a bet that it will go up. Who's being cheated?
Margin is just taking a loan using your existing investments as collateral - nothing to get excited about there.
Personally I don't see what's wrong with shorting - it does provide some balance. Anyway, shorting has its place for regular investors also in the form of "shorting against the box" which means shorting a stock that you already own to lock in a profit - typically for tax purposes. e.g. Say it's December and you own a stock that has appreciated that you now want to sell but don't want to pay taxes for in the current tax year... so you short the stock in December (same amount as you own), then in January you close the short by handing over the shares you already own. What you've effectively done is get the December price, but not actually completed the trade until January, so you've got another year to pay the taxes on your gain.