If you want to debunk this, then instead of being flippant, why don't you come up with an alternative explanation for this object seen by both the left and right cameras?
Bill Weller took four Mars Pathfinder images and created an animated, 3-D stereogram of something popping out from behind a rock. (Hope you are good at crossing your eyes to resolve those "Magic-eye"-type images.)
He nicknamed the organism the "Zolax." (Scroll two-thirds of the way down the page to see it.) If it resembles any earth organism, I would say the tarantula -- although it seems to have a half-dozen or so "tentacles," rather than articulated legs. If you look closely at the lower-left corner of the image, you'll even see one of the tentacles in contact with the ground. The point where it's attached to the body is hidden behind the rock, and it's casting a shadow! If this is a hoax, the hoaxer showed admirable attention to detail.
Disclaimer: the other purported anomalies on this web page are pretty dubious. (Don't you hate when some wacko points to a JPEG artifact and says "look, an artificial structure!" or "look, an organism!") I wish they weren't on the same page as the Zolax, because they hurt its credibility. Nevertheless, the Zolax looks like the real deal. It appears in both the left and right cameras simultaneously, so it can't be an image-processing artifact. It could be a hoax, but it would take a lot of effort to fake a stereo image like this.
It would be nice if we knew the time interval between the two frames -- then we'd have an idea of how fast this critter moves.
M$ is doing this to help the Java platform, and with it, Sun. What are you smokin?
National Geographic has signed on, video coming
on
Pillars Underwater
·
· Score: 1
How hard would it be to rig a videocamera to capture their 'high-resolution sonar images' ?
Very hard, compared to the side-scan sonar unit which is merely towed behind a surface ship. To get video from 800 meters down requires expensive submersibles, either robotic or manned.
Fortunately the National Geographic Society is sponsoring another expedition. We should have some answers soon.
Some FAR more interesting underwater structures...
on
Pillars Underwater
·
· Score: 5
...have been discovered near Cuba. Far more interesting, because the principle investigators believe they're man made.
And they're not merely a 2200-year-old city in shallow water like the one recently-discovered off the coast of Egypt -- these structures are 800 meters deep, and must be far older.
If this discovery is verified, it'll be huge.
Read about it on a mainstream site (MSNBC -- quick, grab it before it disappears from Google's cache!)
or get more detail from this fringe site.
The DC-X was SO promising... I hope the Japanese take this technology and make inexpensive, quality, mass-produced copies like they have with so many other American inventions. (Sad that we still haven't learned to do this ourselves yet.)
There's a lot of land in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia where farming isn't viable because the growing season is too short. Landowners up there will greatly benefit from global warming -- as would the rest of us, as food becomes cheaper and more plentiful.
Likewise, inasmuch as people migrate into lands that were formerly just too cold to live in, overcrowding will decrease in the lower latitudes.
I'm sure my fellow slashdotters can think of a lot of other examples of how global warming wouldn't be all bad.
The problem with micropayments is that there are (or were) a lot of competing private micropayment systems; none of them gained enough market share to reach critical mass. They are basically "minters" of e-money.
I'm a firm believer in small, limited government, but this one is a no-brainer, people -- the government should be the only organization allowed to mint money, of either the traditional or electronic kind.
The US Treasury prints notes and mints coins in order to facilitate exchanges of money, but these are obsolete means of commerce -- basically unchanged from coins that were minted by governments in 500 BC! It's time the Treasury set up an official farm of money servers, and require all online vendors to consider money transferred from accounts thereon legal tender. With one offical system, good for both micro- and macropayments, watch e-commerce take off in all kinds of interesting ways. And inasmuch as the demand for paper notes and coins would decrease, the Treasury's operating costs will decrease.
Lots of possibilities...
Without the limitations of physical currency, vendors could set fractional prices such as $0.124.
For convenince, you could choose to use your IRS refund to recharge your account.
A system of automatic transfers from your bank could be set up, similar to overdraft protection, so that the balance in this non-interest-bearing account would always be kept at $0.01.
Alternatively, the Treasury could choose to make it an interest-bearing account -- a money-market-like alternative to T-bills and US Savings Bonds.
With wireless internet access, even hot-dog vendors on the street could accept this form of payment.
The penalty for hacking the system should be equal to the penalty for counterfeiting, since that's really what it is when this system is afforded legal tender status.
Consumers would benefit because the surcharge imposed by credit card companies would be gone -- and smart businesses would pass some of the savings back to the customer in order to be more competitive.
Very tiny transactions that are not practical because of said credit card fees would suddenly become practical.
Sure, there will have to be security considerations, and the system could never be certified hackproof. But done right, the incidence of problems should be at least as low as online credit card payment systems -- and millions of consumers already trust those enough to use them.
No one would be forced to open such an account; any citizen who doesn't trust it would be free to forego the convenience and conduct transactions by more traditional means.
Of course, credit card companies would not like this scheme one bit. But they have no special right to benefit from these kinds of transactions. They've enjoyed great profits to date just because the Treasury hasn't been innovative enough to facilitate these transactions. There's no reason that shouldn't change, and a lot of reasons why it should.
Credit card companies wouldn't disappear, because there would still be a large demand for making purchases on credit, which is obviously beyond the scope of the official system. But they would be put back into their rightful role: dispensers of credit -- not unofficial, fee-charging substitutes for legal tender that inject friction into the online economy every time they're used.
A national system like this would be a great start. Before long, it would be internationalized as future NAFTA and GATT negotiators demand to be let in on this great system!
Last time I checked, all the free ISPs (in the United States) had folded except for K-Mart's. I still have one of their CDs, and I was thinking about installing it so I'd have a backup ISP in case my DSL line went down.
that what he did does not constitute a waste of computing resources; instead, it was a good use of CPU cycles and bandwidth that would have otherwise been wasted.
As a taxpayer, I am outraged that 99% of government computers' CPU cycles are wasted. Government admins should be required to install distributed clients that solve scientific problems. David was just trying to bring us a little closer to that ideal.
Note to the defense: never, ever use the word "cracking" to describe what RC-5 does. The prosecution will seize upon it and turn it into a bogeyman for ignorant jurists. Just describe RC-5 as a "mathematical excercise" or at most, a project that improves security in computer networks.
His ideas for a Space: 1999 revival are pretty dubious. I rolled my eyes a couple times while reading that article. They need to come up with better for it to suceed.
When you install OS X, you automatically get a full installation of Mac OS 9.1 as well. Both of these OSes have very friendly, polished GUI tools that let you select the other OS as the default OS for subsequent reboots.
So when you say "downgrade" to OS 9, it's much less of a big deal than the word implies.
I use Windows much more than my Mac (forced to by employer), and I still haven't figured out how to make my Dell dual-boot into two different OSes. I could probably do it after two or three hours of research.
While Sun has a higher market cap than Apple, if you base the comparison on the number of Unix boxes these companies are projected to ship in the next 12 months, Apple is the largest Unix vendor, hands down.
Are there any microbes that could be injected into Venus' clouds that would transform Venus' greenhouse gases into benign gases (or fix them out of the atmosphere into solid or liquid compounds that would rain down on the surface)?
What are Venus' greenhouse gases anyway?
Sorely ignorant of Venusian atmospheric chemistry,
GPS
Few physicists thought neutrinos had mass... but since that paradigm seems to have been broken, might there be a remote chance that photons also have a wee bit of rest mass? Maybe photons travel at (1 - 10^-100000000)c, not c. Maybe nothing travels at c.
General Motors Invests in Strategic Alliance with General Hydrogen
Leading environmentalist and fuel cell innovator joins GM's global innovation and technology team
WASHINGTON, June 13/PRNewswire/ -- General Motors (NYSE: GM) and General Hydrogen announced a 25-year collaboration today to accelerate the spread of a hydrogen infrastructure, and to speed the introduction of fuel cell vehicles into markets in North America, Europe, Asia and emerging economies.
The strategic alliance will focus on several key areas, including hydrogen storage, fuel cell vehicle refueling, energy services, advanced materials, power electronics, and electric power production.
Larry Burns, General Motors Corporation vice president for research and development, and planning and Geoffrey E. H. Ballard, General Hydrogen Corporation chair announced the deal in Washington D.C. in advance of the 12th Annual Energy Efficiency Forum.
"General Hydrogen is an exceptional company with a tremendous management team and a very exciting future," said Burns. "We believe we've added a franchise player to our GM team. This relationship brings together an impressive group of world leaders in the development of fuel cell and hydrogen technologies. We look forward to working together with Geoffrey Ballard and his team to create a hydrogen infrastructure for fuel cell vehicles."
Burns added that significant investment and planning on the parts of federal and local governments will be a key factor in developing the hydrogen infrastructure necessary to support meaningful numbers of fuel cell vehicles in the future.
Ballard is a world-renowned environmentalist who played a major role in developing fuel cells for commercial applications when he founded Ballard Power Systems in 1979 with Paul Howard, currently General Hydrogen vice chair. Ballard Power Systems is recognized as a world leader in the development of fuel cell stacks.
"We are very excited to be partnering with the world's largest automobile manufacturer and a leading developer of fuel cell technology," said Ballard. "General Hydrogen and General Motors will work together to bring about a global hydrogen infrastructure capable of supporting large numbers of zero- emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles."
Both companies believe hydrogen is the best choice to power fuel cell vehicles over the long term. It is clean, can be made renewably and, when used as an energy source, emits only water and heat.
"In the upcoming months and years, GM and General Hydrogen hope to develop technology that will demonstrate the potential of our bold and exciting vision," said General Hydrogen President and CEO Michael Routtenberg. "This quest will be led by our powerful team, whose members include the world's foremost fuel cell and hydrogen industry leaders."
Byron McCormick, co-executive director of GM's Global Alternative Propulsion Center, said GM is committed to the effort of bringing fuel cell technologies to the market place.
"Significant work still needs to be done to build a hydrogen infrastructure," McCormick said. "The technology and business approach that we're developing with General Hydrogen is aimed at realizing that vision. This relationship clearly has the potential to fundamentally change the way energy is delivered in the future, while providing significant benefits both to consumers and the environment.
"We're putting together a world-class team to develop innovative solutions for the development of a hydrogen infrastructure," he said. "Starting with our investment in Giner Electrochemical Systems and their electrolyzer technology, to our just-announced alliance with QUANTUM Technologies, and their hydrogen storage and handling capabilities, and now our partnership with General Hydrogen, we plan to move aggressively to work on putting that infrastructure in place."
General Hydrogen Corporation, headquartered in Vancouver, BC, was formed in 1999 by Geoffrey Ballard and Paul Howard, co-founders of Ballard Power Systems, and Michael Routtenberg, who is President and CEO. GH develops technologies and invests in companies that facilitate the hydrogen infrastructure.
* LinuxPPC
* BeOS runs natively on pre-G3 PPC Macs
* VirtualPC is a Pentuim emulator, not a Windows emulator -- and a darn good one with very few compatibility issues. So any OS that runs on a Pentium can run on a Mac under VirtualPC: the x86 ports of Linux, BeOS, and QNX, to name a few; All versions of Windows; DOS.
With the latest version of VirtualPC, multiple OSes can run simultaneously! The number of OSes running simultaneously is limited only by your RAM. Copy-and-paste between apps running in different OSes.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to debunk this, then instead of being flippant, why don't you come up with an alternative explanation for this object seen by both the left and right cameras?
He nicknamed the organism the "Zolax." (Scroll two-thirds of the way down the page to see it.) If it resembles any earth organism, I would say the tarantula -- although it seems to have a half-dozen or so "tentacles," rather than articulated legs. If you look closely at the lower-left corner of the image, you'll even see one of the tentacles in contact with the ground. The point where it's attached to the body is hidden behind the rock, and it's casting a shadow! If this is a hoax, the hoaxer showed admirable attention to detail.
Disclaimer: the other purported anomalies on this web page are pretty dubious. (Don't you hate when some wacko points to a JPEG artifact and says "look, an artificial structure!" or "look, an organism!") I wish they weren't on the same page as the Zolax, because they hurt its credibility. Nevertheless, the Zolax looks like the real deal. It appears in both the left and right cameras simultaneously, so it can't be an image-processing artifact. It could be a hoax, but it would take a lot of effort to fake a stereo image like this.
It would be nice if we knew the time interval between the two frames -- then we'd have an idea of how fast this critter moves.
Better to say, photons impart momentum to sail. You can't calculate their momentum from mass x velocity -- they're massless, relativistic particles.
M$ is doing this to help the Java platform, and with it, Sun. What are you smokin?
Very hard, compared to the side-scan sonar unit which is merely towed behind a surface ship. To get video from 800 meters down requires expensive submersibles, either robotic or manned.
Fortunately the National Geographic Society is sponsoring another expedition. We should have some answers soon.
And they're not merely a 2200-year-old city in shallow water like the one recently-discovered off the coast of Egypt -- these structures are 800 meters deep, and must be far older.
If this discovery is verified, it'll be huge.
Read about it on a mainstream site (MSNBC -- quick, grab it before it disappears from Google's cache!)
or get more detail from this fringe site.
The DC-X was SO promising... I hope the Japanese take this technology and make inexpensive, quality, mass-produced copies like they have with so many other American inventions. (Sad that we still haven't learned to do this ourselves yet.)
it will affect us in purely negative ways
Oh really?
There's a lot of land in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia where farming isn't viable because the growing season is too short. Landowners up there will greatly benefit from global warming -- as would the rest of us, as food becomes cheaper and more plentiful.
Likewise, inasmuch as people migrate into lands that were formerly just too cold to live in, overcrowding will decrease in the lower latitudes.
I'm sure my fellow slashdotters can think of a lot of other examples of how global warming wouldn't be all bad.
I'm a firm believer in small, limited government, but this one is a no-brainer, people -- the government should be the only organization allowed to mint money, of either the traditional or electronic kind.
The US Treasury prints notes and mints coins in order to facilitate exchanges of money, but these are obsolete means of commerce -- basically unchanged from coins that were minted by governments in 500 BC! It's time the Treasury set up an official farm of money servers, and require all online vendors to consider money transferred from accounts thereon legal tender. With one offical system, good for both micro- and macropayments, watch e-commerce take off in all kinds of interesting ways. And inasmuch as the demand for paper notes and coins would decrease, the Treasury's operating costs will decrease.
Lots of possibilities...
Without the limitations of physical currency, vendors could set fractional prices such as $0.124.
For convenince, you could choose to use your IRS refund to recharge your account.
A system of automatic transfers from your bank could be set up, similar to overdraft protection, so that the balance in this non-interest-bearing account would always be kept at $0.01.
Alternatively, the Treasury could choose to make it an interest-bearing account -- a money-market-like alternative to T-bills and US Savings Bonds.
With wireless internet access, even hot-dog vendors on the street could accept this form of payment.
The penalty for hacking the system should be equal to the penalty for counterfeiting, since that's really what it is when this system is afforded legal tender status.
Consumers would benefit because the surcharge imposed by credit card companies would be gone -- and smart businesses would pass some of the savings back to the customer in order to be more competitive.
Very tiny transactions that are not practical because of said credit card fees would suddenly become practical.
Sure, there will have to be security considerations, and the system could never be certified hackproof. But done right, the incidence of problems should be at least as low as online credit card payment systems -- and millions of consumers already trust those enough to use them.
No one would be forced to open such an account; any citizen who doesn't trust it would be free to forego the convenience and conduct transactions by more traditional means.
Of course, credit card companies would not like this scheme one bit. But they have no special right to benefit from these kinds of transactions. They've enjoyed great profits to date just because the Treasury hasn't been innovative enough to facilitate these transactions. There's no reason that shouldn't change, and a lot of reasons why it should.
Credit card companies wouldn't disappear, because there would still be a large demand for making purchases on credit, which is obviously beyond the scope of the official system. But they would be put back into their rightful role: dispensers of credit -- not unofficial, fee-charging substitutes for legal tender that inject friction into the online economy every time they're used.
A national system like this would be a great start. Before long, it would be internationalized as future NAFTA and GATT negotiators demand to be let in on this great system!
Last time I checked, all the free ISPs (in the United States) had folded except for K-Mart's. I still have one of their CDs, and I was thinking about installing it so I'd have a backup ISP in case my DSL line went down.
Or has the Bluelight deal gone south as well?
-- from http://www.xiph.org/~jack/ibook/thoughts.html
As a taxpayer, I am outraged that 99% of government computers' CPU cycles are wasted. Government admins should be required to install distributed clients that solve scientific problems. David was just trying to bring us a little closer to that ideal.
Note to the defense: never, ever use the word "cracking" to describe what RC-5 does. The prosecution will seize upon it and turn it into a bogeyman for ignorant jurists. Just describe RC-5 as a "mathematical excercise" or at most, a project that improves security in computer networks.
When my RC5 client did updates over a 28.8 modem, the data exchange was very brief.
At least, we don't know for sure : )
He was pushed down the stairs and knocked unconscious, but Krychek didn't check his pulse to verify that he was finished off.
Similarly, we don't know whether Jeffrey Spender might resurface. He was shot, but we were never told whether he died.
His ideas for a Space: 1999 revival are pretty dubious. I rolled my eyes a couple times while reading that article. They need to come up with better for it to suceed.
When you install OS X, you automatically get a full installation of Mac OS 9.1 as well. Both of these OSes have very friendly, polished GUI tools that let you select the other OS as the default OS for subsequent reboots.
So when you say "downgrade" to OS 9, it's much less of a big deal than the word implies.
I use Windows much more than my Mac (forced to by employer), and I still haven't figured out how to make my Dell dual-boot into two different OSes. I could probably do it after two or three hours of research.
While Sun has a higher market cap than Apple, if you base the comparison on the number of Unix boxes these companies are projected to ship in the next 12 months, Apple is the largest Unix vendor, hands down.
Are there any microbes that could be injected into Venus' clouds that would transform Venus' greenhouse gases into benign gases (or fix them out of the atmosphere into solid or liquid compounds that would rain down on the surface)?
What are Venus' greenhouse gases anyway?
Sorely ignorant of Venusian atmospheric chemistry,
GPS
Anaerobic life is more primitive, and therefore more likely to be found there.
But the Google/Mac logo isn't as cool as the Google/Linux logo -- it contains all the fruity colors that Apple has largely abandoned.
Your search - Arkinstad - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "arkinstad".
And this search didn't yield any information on direct-to-retina displays.
Few physicists thought neutrinos had mass... but since that paradigm seems to have been broken, might there be a remote chance that photons also have a wee bit of rest mass? Maybe photons travel at (1 - 10^-100000000)c, not c. Maybe nothing travels at c.
When an electron neutrino transforms into another type of neutrino, could they be said to "decay" into the other neutrino?
Or is a neutrino transformation more similar to when an excited electron falls to a lower energy state, giving off a photon in the process?
Or are neither of these analogies appropriate?
Leading environmentalist and fuel cell innovator joins GM's global innovation and technology team
WASHINGTON, June 13 /PRNewswire/ -- General Motors (NYSE: GM) and General Hydrogen announced a 25-year collaboration today to accelerate the spread of a hydrogen infrastructure, and to speed the introduction of fuel cell vehicles into markets in North America, Europe, Asia and emerging economies.
The strategic alliance will focus on several key areas, including hydrogen storage, fuel cell vehicle refueling, energy services, advanced materials, power electronics, and electric power production.
Larry Burns, General Motors Corporation vice president for research and development, and planning and Geoffrey E. H. Ballard, General Hydrogen Corporation chair announced the deal in Washington D.C. in advance of the 12th Annual Energy Efficiency Forum.
"General Hydrogen is an exceptional company with a tremendous management team and a very exciting future," said Burns. "We believe we've added a franchise player to our GM team. This relationship brings together an impressive group of world leaders in the development of fuel cell and hydrogen technologies. We look forward to working together with Geoffrey Ballard and his team to create a hydrogen infrastructure for fuel cell vehicles."
Burns added that significant investment and planning on the parts of federal and local governments will be a key factor in developing the hydrogen infrastructure necessary to support meaningful numbers of fuel cell vehicles in the future.
Ballard is a world-renowned environmentalist who played a major role in developing fuel cells for commercial applications when he founded Ballard Power Systems in 1979 with Paul Howard, currently General Hydrogen vice chair. Ballard Power Systems is recognized as a world leader in the development of fuel cell stacks.
"We are very excited to be partnering with the world's largest automobile manufacturer and a leading developer of fuel cell technology," said Ballard. "General Hydrogen and General Motors will work together to bring about a global hydrogen infrastructure capable of supporting large numbers of zero- emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicles."
Both companies believe hydrogen is the best choice to power fuel cell vehicles over the long term. It is clean, can be made renewably and, when used as an energy source, emits only water and heat.
"In the upcoming months and years, GM and General Hydrogen hope to develop technology that will demonstrate the potential of our bold and exciting vision," said General Hydrogen President and CEO Michael Routtenberg. "This quest will be led by our powerful team, whose members include the world's foremost fuel cell and hydrogen industry leaders."
Byron McCormick, co-executive director of GM's Global Alternative Propulsion Center, said GM is committed to the effort of bringing fuel cell technologies to the market place.
"Significant work still needs to be done to build a hydrogen infrastructure," McCormick said. "The technology and business approach that we're developing with General Hydrogen is aimed at realizing that vision. This relationship clearly has the potential to fundamentally change the way energy is delivered in the future, while providing significant benefits both to consumers and the environment.
"We're putting together a world-class team to develop innovative solutions for the development of a hydrogen infrastructure," he said. "Starting with our investment in Giner Electrochemical Systems and their electrolyzer technology, to our just-announced alliance with QUANTUM Technologies, and their hydrogen storage and handling capabilities, and now our partnership with General Hydrogen, we plan to move aggressively to work on putting that infrastructure in place."
General Hydrogen Corporation, headquartered in Vancouver, BC, was formed in 1999 by Geoffrey Ballard and Paul Howard, co-founders of Ballard Power Systems, and Michael Routtenberg, who is President and CEO. GH develops technologies and invests in companies that facilitate the hydrogen infrastructure.
* LinuxPPC
* BeOS runs natively on pre-G3 PPC Macs
* VirtualPC is a Pentuim emulator, not a Windows emulator -- and a darn good one with very few compatibility issues. So any OS that runs on a Pentium can run on a Mac under VirtualPC: the x86 ports of Linux, BeOS, and QNX, to name a few; All versions of Windows; DOS.
With the latest version of VirtualPC, multiple OSes can run simultaneously! The number of OSes running simultaneously is limited only by your RAM. Copy-and-paste between apps running in different OSes.
See VirtualPC at www.connectix.com.