IIRC, usually extradition only applies for crimes that are recognized as such by both countries. Clearly that would be rarely true in the case of these particular laws.
Shame they haven't added a category for general
science education for kids.
I grew up at a great time to be a science nerd, I remember fondly the Time-Life Science Books, newspaper articles and television coverage of the Apollo missions, playing with a chemistry set...
clearly stated on the front of the booklet and on the back of the jewel box that the CD "will not play on a PC or a Mac
Agreed. I will note, however, that if the Dion product doesn't play in a PC, it's because it isn't a Compact Disc (tm), and, as Phillips has pointed out, is fradulent on that grounds.
Why wouldn't it be true? It would be pretty hard to fake something like that.
After 18 years developing in Silicon Valley, and participating in 5 mergers to date, while it may very well be true for a little while, it won't last. I've seen it again and again. In every case, the folks involved thought it was a real plan. I'm not saying they're faking it, it's more likely a case of naivete.
I think that my own phone number looks even better with a new area code. Like 900. Or 809. Or 911.:)
No applications?
on
Hawaii Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Through all the hype about 802.11b, I haven't seen too many real applications being talked about...
I disagree. I believe that being able to answer email during the dead bits of meetings, being able to wander into someones office at work and being able to immediately work with them, being able to telecommute, read my mail or just surf the TV listings from my couch without having to be tied to a cord are all pretty solid applications of the technology.
I'm not the only person who thinks so. A coworker recently ran an 802.11b networking finding program on his laptop on his drive to work, and counted 175 distinct networks, all probably within 100 yards of his car during his commute... There're a lot of 802.11b networks going up.
--Joe
Re:Circular track explanation is flawed..
on
Homemade Gauss Gun
·
· Score: 1
Not quite. The magnets create a magnetic "force field". As you recall from physics 101, energy is defined is force times the delta of distance, not force alone. The energy of separating the magnets is not 'released' during this experiement, as the magnets do not move.
It's true that the magnets don't move--what's released is the potential energy
of the magnet in its set state (a whole ball away from the left magnet) minus its potential energy in its fired state (in contact with the right magnet).
Oh, just to make things even more difficult, two colors which are quite perceptually distinct may still make poor colors for text legibility. Try reading bright red text on a bright green, equal-intensity background. (Even if you're not red-green color-blind.) I suspect without evidence that text legiblity is more strongly related to luminosity differences than to perceptual difference metrics.
None of the standard Photoshop, et al color spaces is designed to produce perceptual equivalence, perception is just too complex.
In addition, it sounds like you're hoping to test whether things are sufficiently perceptually different on people's monitors. The sad news is that the variation between different monitors, between LCDs and CRTs, between different brightness and contrast settings, between different phosphor technologies, differences in how long the monitor has been warmed up, and differences in the aging of the phosphors mean that no two monitors will actually produce the same color from the same R, G and B equivalents, and you'll get different distinguishabilities for different colors on different monitors.
As a nature photographer, I have to jump through hoops, including hardware sensors for detecting the output of my monitor, to get anything like reproducable color out of my own equipment. It's just a difficult problem, I'm afraid.
...you could probably remove a lot more landmines in many areas with a chain grid towed from a helicopter. Sound crazy? Might be, but...
this describes how to work around some of the more obvious engineering gotchas, and a video of a test of the system. I think it's pretty cool, at any rate.
If they're collecting the data themselves, instead of using a third party, I believe they would be in direct violation of the Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984.
While IANAL, I work in the digital television middleware industry and have been involved in making sure that we do not inadvertantly let our customers run afoul of that precise law. It's not just the law, it's a good idea.
Ah, I understand the issue now. So here's my next idea: Place two (or more) sensors on each pixel. Have one sensor respond to the "typical" light ranges with a certain precision. Have the other one respond only to low light variations (it would wash out completely for higher light values, but its output could be disregarded at higher light levels). Assuming it had the same level of granularity as the other sensor, but it was operating over a smaller range, you'd effectively get finer sensitivity in low light conditions.
Not for free, unfortunately. The problem is that most sensors are already maxed out at how much light they can detect per unit area. So, to make a more sensitive detector, you have to increase the area of the sensor you're using to detect it. To do a low and a high sensor, you'll end up giving up image resolution--or a bigger (and exponentially more expensive) chip, probably the former.
I have no idea how thick the individual sensor layers are...
As chip layers, the answer is going to be on the order of microns. As you suggest, this is orders of magnitude smaller than would be necessary to cause any detectable image change.
It's gotta be small. I believe typical CMOS layers have depths on the order of a micrometer, which is effectively zero for this purpose. It's not a problem, the scales are massively different.
You're incorrect. Check the Foveon web site. In conventinal sensors, as you say, the software has to guesstimate colors at boundaries because you can't sample the 'red' at the same point in the image that you sample the 'green'. With the X3 sensor, it appears that you get a simultanious reading of the color channels over the same parts of the image area. This means you avoid a lot of resolution-losing filtering in the color channel to avoid chroma aliasing, and at the same time perhaps improving light sensitivity.
Actually, according to the X3 FAQ on Foveon's web site, the X3 sensors are done in a CMOS process, which should give you all the benefits you describe above.
And yes, a well-done CMOS sensors has both practical and photographic qualitiative benefits relative to CCDs.
To the home, glass isn't the alternative to twisted pair, coaxial copper is. Coax still has better range than twisted pair (six-tenths of a mile is not that far). OTOH, twisted pair is cheap--and it's everywhre. Gotta love that.
Re:Cash movements
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'd guess that in a few years you'd have a pretty even distribution (actually one based on the relative proportion of coins produced by each country.), perhaps some bit of "more coins of my own country" still visible left in the distribution.
I can provide some data from a loosely analogous situation in the United States. US bills are printed at 12 locations in the US, and are originally distributed to banks based on which of the 12 districts that bank is located in.
I'm part of a fun projectthat involves tracking the motion of US currency. I live near (60 miles from) San Francisco--here are the locations the bills I've marked come from, and their relative proportion.
San Francisco 776 32.0%
Kansas City 323 13.3%
New York 205 8.5%
Dallas 187 7.7%
Minneapolis 182 7.5%
Chicago 146 6.0%
Atlanta 133 5.5%
St. Louis 129 5.3%
Cleveland 99 4.1%
Boston 97 4.0%
Richmond 82 3.4%
Philadelphia 63 2.6%
Now, while the banks print out different numbers of bills and such, it's pretty clear that the San Francisco printed bills dominate my sample.
This analogy is unlike the situation with Euro coins for at least one reason--the lifetime of bills is much shorter than the lifetime of coins. Bills tend to last a year or two in circulation, coins for a decade or more. So, as time goes on, I'd expect mixing to be a much larger effect for coins in the EU than it is for bills in the US...
Do you mean "who loses that money?" The people
who lent Ricochet money in the first place--banks, perhaps equipment vendors.
$1B doesn't appear from nowhere?
If you're asking here where the debt came from,
probably from the construction of the network,
and from rent, advertising, setting up and running
the service when there were even fewer customers
than the 50K or so they had when they closed
business... that sort of thing.
I hadn't realized that Richchet was $1B in debt. Paying the intereste on that probably ran to the tune of somewhere in the range of $5M-$8M/month,
which with only 50K customers means that you'd have to grab $100/month/customer just to make interest payments. It's easy to imagine that getting rid of that cost of $100/mo./customer might leave a more profitable business.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, usually extradition only applies for crimes that are recognized as such by both countries. Clearly that would be rarely true in the case of these particular laws.
I grew up at a great time to be a science nerd, I remember fondly the Time-Life Science Books, newspaper articles and television coverage of the Apollo missions, playing with a chemistry set...
I'm not sure what science kids resources on the net will live up to those standards. A couple that I like are Nine Planets and Science Toys you can make with Your Kids, anybody got any others?
Agreed. I will note, however, that if the Dion product doesn't play in a PC, it's because it isn't a Compact Disc (tm), and, as Phillips has pointed out, is fradulent on that grounds.
After 18 years developing in Silicon Valley, and participating in 5 mergers to date, while it may very well be true for a little while, it won't last. I've seen it again and again. In every case, the folks involved thought it was a real plan. I'm not saying they're faking it, it's more likely a case of naivete.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
And they actually believe this? ROFL.
Sure--look at how well it worked for WebTV... :)
I think that my own phone number looks even better with a new area code. Like 900. Or 809. Or 911. :)
I disagree. I believe that being able to answer email during the dead bits of meetings, being able to wander into someones office at work and being able to immediately work with them, being able to telecommute, read my mail or just surf the TV listings from my couch without having to be tied to a cord are all pretty solid applications of the technology.
I'm not the only person who thinks so. A coworker recently ran an 802.11b networking finding program on his laptop on his drive to work, and counted 175 distinct networks, all probably within 100 yards of his car during his commute... There're a lot of 802.11b networks going up.
--Joe
It's true that the magnets don't move--what's released is the potential energy of the magnet in its set state (a whole ball away from the left magnet) minus its potential energy in its fired state (in contact with the right magnet).
His Film Can Cannon is pretty darn cool, too.
Oh, just to make things even more difficult, two colors which are quite perceptually distinct may still make poor colors for text legibility. Try reading bright red text on a bright green, equal-intensity background. (Even if you're not red-green color-blind.) I suspect without evidence that text legiblity is more strongly related to luminosity differences than to perceptual difference metrics.
In addition, it sounds like you're hoping to test whether things are sufficiently perceptually different on people's monitors. The sad news is that the variation between different monitors, between LCDs and CRTs, between different brightness and contrast settings, between different phosphor technologies, differences in how long the monitor has been warmed up, and differences in the aging of the phosphors mean that no two monitors will actually produce the same color from the same R, G and B equivalents, and you'll get different distinguishabilities for different colors on different monitors.
As a nature photographer, I have to jump through hoops, including hardware sensors for detecting the output of my monitor, to get anything like reproducable color out of my own equipment. It's just a difficult problem, I'm afraid.
...you could probably remove a lot more landmines in many areas with a chain grid towed from a helicopter. Sound crazy? Might be, but... this describes how to work around some of the more obvious engineering gotchas, and a video of a test of the system. I think it's pretty cool, at any rate.
That would be an interesting distinction to make, in many digital television systems it wouldn't necesarily be easy to tell the difference.
While IANAL, I work in the digital television middleware industry and have been involved in making sure that we do not inadvertantly let our customers run afoul of that precise law. It's not just the law, it's a good idea.
Not for free, unfortunately. The problem is that most sensors are already maxed out at how much light they can detect per unit area. So, to make a more sensitive detector, you have to increase the area of the sensor you're using to detect it. To do a low and a high sensor, you'll end up giving up image resolution--or a bigger (and exponentially more expensive) chip, probably the former.
As chip layers, the answer is going to be on the order of microns. As you suggest, this is orders of magnitude smaller than would be necessary to cause any detectable image change.
It's gotta be small. I believe typical CMOS layers have depths on the order of a micrometer, which is effectively zero for this purpose. It's not a problem, the scales are massively different.
You're incorrect. Check the Foveon web site. In conventinal sensors, as you say, the software has to guesstimate colors at boundaries because you can't sample the 'red' at the same point in the image that you sample the 'green'. With the X3 sensor, it appears that you get a simultanious reading of the color channels over the same parts of the image area. This means you avoid a lot of resolution-losing filtering in the color channel to avoid chroma aliasing, and at the same time perhaps improving light sensitivity.
And yes, a well-done CMOS sensors has both practical and photographic qualitiative benefits relative to CCDs.
To the home, glass isn't the alternative to twisted pair, coaxial copper is. Coax still has better range than twisted pair (six-tenths of a mile is not that far). OTOH, twisted pair is cheap--and it's everywhre. Gotta love that.
Thanks for the correction!
I can provide some data from a loosely analogous situation in the United States. US bills are printed at 12 locations in the US, and are originally distributed to banks based on which of the 12 districts that bank is located in.
I'm part of a fun projectthat involves tracking the motion of US currency. I live near (60 miles from) San Francisco--here are the locations the bills I've marked come from, and their relative proportion.
San Francisco 776 32.0%
Kansas City 323 13.3%
New York 205 8.5%
Dallas 187 7.7%
Minneapolis 182 7.5%
Chicago 146 6.0%
Atlanta 133 5.5%
St. Louis 129 5.3%
Cleveland 99 4.1%
Boston 97 4.0%
Richmond 82 3.4%
Philadelphia 63 2.6%
Now, while the banks print out different numbers of bills and such, it's pretty clear that the San Francisco printed bills dominate my sample.
This analogy is unlike the situation with Euro coins for at least one reason--the lifetime of bills is much shorter than the lifetime of coins. Bills tend to last a year or two in circulation, coins for a decade or more. So, as time goes on, I'd expect mixing to be a much larger effect for coins in the EU than it is for bills in the US...
Do you mean "who loses that money?" The people who lent Ricochet money in the first place--banks, perhaps equipment vendors.
$1B doesn't appear from nowhere?
If you're asking here where the debt came from, probably from the construction of the network, and from rent, advertising, setting up and running the service when there were even fewer customers than the 50K or so they had when they closed business ... that sort of thing.
I hadn't realized that Richchet was $1B in debt. Paying the intereste on that probably ran to the tune of somewhere in the range of $5M-$8M/month, which with only 50K customers means that you'd have to grab $100/month/customer just to make interest payments. It's easy to imagine that getting rid of that cost of $100/mo./customer might leave a more profitable business.