That's some mighty fine technobabble you've assembled there. If you're not already there, I strongly recommend heading out west and becoming a Hollywood script writer. They need people like you, to make the characters seem smart without actually saying anything.
Seriously though, I should point out that in a hydrological holographic communications medium, the thermal dynamism will, while not affecting the message in, a, lossy way, will cause changes in the order, that, the binary components might be received. It is of course trivial to correct for this, current use of super string theory provides an elegant method for accounting for said brownian reverberations in the stream, but it's still important to XOR the bits into a checksum before sending, just to make sure you understand.
I beta tested for Jumpgate earlier this year. The game absolutely bored me stiff. Essentially it has no low gameplay at the lower levels; you have to spend many, many hours in game running missions before you can even consider space combat. I was unwilling to put in so much "dues time", so I bailed.
Jumpgate is far too focused on the die hard player to ever be a real success in the online world. All the other games make their low level play extra interesting to coax people into playing, Jumpgate practically drives them away. While keeping away the n00bs probably makes the die hard players happy, it certainly didn't do anything for me.
I think most projects need a powerful leader to get them started quickly and push them in direction.
This is exactly right. I was expand this idea by saying that the most important thing is to have someone leading by example rather than by direction.
What I mean is that the ideal open source leader should take it upon theirself to make it so the project is completed, regardless of whether other people join the project. This allows people to join and leave the project at their own whims, and yet things will get accomplished because the leader maintains a continual forward push.
Leadership by example is also important because the only person a programmer will listen too (besides a person that pays him money) is one who has done the most work in the project. This is why the best leaders for open source projects are, in my opinion, programmers themselves.
Thanks for the info. It looks like DDML is a display layer that was implemented for Windows 2000, it looks pretty cool. If it's also implemented in XP, I may be able to restart my experiments.
Just a wild guess, but wouldn't it be possible to install a hook to intercept WM_PAINT messages or something?
WM_PAINT is what programs like VNC currently use, at least as far as I can tell. I could intercept WM_PAINT messages, but that wouldn't get me anywhere; I'd just find out everytime another program requested a refresh. Whenever a program updates it's window, it calls the GDI layer and passes in information on the part of the window that's being updated. GDI is then responsible for doing all the necessary mapping so it gets painted correctly on the screen. No messages are passed during this process.
What I ideally needed was a way to tell GDI that my program would be handling all the updates for a given window, just pass them to me and don't worry about the screen. I suspect it's possible to do this, I bet all these Microsoft products do something similiar, but I was never able to find documentation on it. As I mentioned before, I could've written a wrapper around the dlls and intercepted these calls myself, but that's a foolish thing to do in Windows. So I gave up. Sending a WM_PAINT message seems to be the only way to get the contents of a window, but that was too inefficient for what I was trying to do.
VNC isn't very good at working out which bits of the desktop have been redrawn (Or Windows isn't very good at telling it...)
Definately the latter. I spent some time trying to figure out how to get Windows to pass my program graphical updates to various windows rather than just updating the screen, it really isn't possible. The best you can do is constantly take snapshots of the windows, possibly keyed off of keyboard and mouse messages. But that only works in an interactive app, and it's no way to deal with something like a movie player. The only efficient solution I could come up with was to replace the gdi dlls with wrappers so I could intercept the information as it went through, but that's just stupid.
Of course, there must be a way to do all this efficiently because Microsoft is doing it. It's crap like this that is causing me to move towards free software, Microsoft has made it clear that their operating system will never be an equal playing field.
I think the real outcome would be that the US gets marginalized. If we stifle the very openness and sharing that now occurs, and that keeps the US at the head of the pack in science, industry, military technologies, etc., other nations (europe perhaps, or Japan) will pass us by.
I agree with you completely. It's a shame that recent events have caused so many people to question how open our country should remain, a lot of our strength comes from the people and information that flows across our borders.
If the US imposes such restrictions on ourselves alone, we'll be passed by - Americans will go abroad to do research, start companies, etc.
I've traveled a bit and the U.S is the only country that feels like my home. I'm always happy to return to this land and really have no desire to leave. But if the Slashdot popular worst case scenario does come to pass, I'll probably leave on principle. Many others will too.
Hopefully saner heads will prevail in the end. I sure hope so.
They always have. We've had some pretty strange laws passed in this country but over time things have corrected themselves. Things are not ideal of course, but our government remains generally a secular and rational force. I find comfort in looking back at all the stuff that this country has survived so far and realizing that nothing on the horizon really compares.
i don't see how the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide" argument can hold weight with anyone, possibly excluding some of the clergy, because 99.99% of the population is probably doing something illegal fairly regularly.
I agree with this sentement. The problem is that our laws were written with the assumption that they couldn't be enforced 100% of the time, so better to make them too broad. There are far too many laws on the books that simply aren't enforced; it is inevitable that someone is going to break one without even knowing about it.
The scary bit is that we're entering a time when technology will make 100% enforcement of certain laws feasible. Photo radar is a good example of this, many cities are on their way towards detecting every time someone runs a red light or accelates beyond the speed limit.
The point is, we can't be applying modern technology to broad laws or we really will be in trouble. I think technology can provide some nice improvements in how laws are enforced, but the laws themselves will have to rewritten first.
The plane wasn't moving at top speed. It is reasonable to assume they were going much slower to give them more maneuverability.
Or, in other words, just the force of that much mass at that speed is about the same as a WWII blockbuster bomb
While there was certainly a lot of kinetic energy, it was focused in a less than ideal (for the terrorists) way. It was quite successful at knocking out the central supports, but the support beams at the sides remained generally intact. It was the fire that eventually weakened these beams and caused the collapse.
More specifically, there isn't that much of a link between raw energy and destructive power. A much smaller amount of energy could've toppled the towers if it had been placed correctly. Conversely, a suitcase nuke would do magnitudes less damage if it was detonated at or below ground level versus several hundred feet in the air.
I know the college has to do this so they can somehow grade 'my' code and assess my performance. Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?
Just like in the real world, a team is a haven for slackers. Far too many people got through my CS classes simply because of who they knew. Insofar as college is designed to accredit individuals, it is necessary for nearly all of the work to be done as an individual.
Now most of the problem is that when students divide into teams, the instructors have the tendancy to view the team as a single entity. College professors are an unsympathetic lot and the easiest thing for them to do is judge the team with an external eye. Once the team members' fates are linked, it is often times easiest for the most industrious students to simply take on the burden of the work. It is rare that I see a team in which the doesn't occur, in both academia and the real world.
I understand where the author is coming from, I learned a great deal during the little time I was forced to work in a team in college. But my lessons were in politics and sociology, relatively little computer knowledge was involved. Students should spend some time in groups, but not too much. It is nice in some ways for college to be more idealistic than the real world.
Look at when it was filed. 1992. Very very few people were even thinking about the idea of pausing live TV back then. Just because it is a simple idea (especially now) does not mean the patent isn't valid when it was filed for. That's the nature of technology. You could make a case of "patent squatting" since the company doesn't appear to have done anything with the patent, but that's a whole other can of worms.
The problem is that if we consider having an idea the only prerequisite for getting a valid patent, our whole future is locked up by amateur futurists. It's easy to come up with ideas but it's the specific implementation that's important.
In this case we have technology that would have been developed and used even if the patent had never been filed. The goal of patents are not to reward the first person to come up with a given idea, but to protect the work someone has done. Time delayed video techniques have been used by the network studios for years, so have digital circular buffers. Combining existing tools in an obvious manner to meet an eventual need is not patent worthy.
I have no doubt that this patent will eventually be struck down in court if pressed far enough. It is merely irritating that this has to happen this way.
Electrolytic conversion from water requires electricity. The vast amount of electricity generated comes from icky dirty coal.
You are unfortunately correct about this. It looks like economic realities will make coal the U.S. fuel of choice for a long time to come.
Extraction of hydrogen from fossil fuels still generates some toxic pollutants, and is still in relatively early stages of development.
It's still less pollution than combustion causes. Not ideal, but it's a step in a better direction.
Shall we address the infrastructure problems associated with hydrogen? The costs of retooling fuel distribution channels to handle hydrogen?
Long distance electrical lines currently lose approximately 1/3 of their energy before they reach our neighborhoods. Part of the allure of fuel cells is the ability to run local generators that will run a lot more efficient. Distribution is certainly an issue, but it seems as feasible to send out tankers filled with liquid hydrogen as it is to send out gasoline tanker trucks.
It seems especially important to me that cameras be installed within the police station. We should know what's going on with our public defenders.
It always seemed to me an intriguing idea to outfit all law officers with video cameras mounted somewhere on their heads. The idea would be that video would broadcast continually to a central repository as it was recorded. The video repository would have to be maintained in such a way that it was secure, but footage could be pulled by both the police and defendants.
It would be an interesting double edged sword. Having constant video would protect citizens against police harrassment since everything the officer says has been recorded. It would also give the officer an additional degree of invulnerability, anyone who attacked an officer would realize that he probably wouldn't be able to get away with it.
I think recording techniques like these will greatly benefit justice in the future. The key is accountability, what is recorded needs to be accessible by everyone.
The only thing you can't do is compress the image with JPEG or other "lossy" compression routines.
That's a major problem though. In the real world lossy compression techniques are far more widely used than raw data. Simply posting a.bmp on Ebay or sending a.wav to a friend could be flagged as suspicious activity. For steganography to be truly useful you need to be able to intergrate with the most common file formats and protocols.
BTW, the technique works better if you simply encode your hidden message in the least significant bit of color values. If the original picture was of poor quality, it would be impossible to distinguish this from normal noise. The benefit is that you merely need to know the technique, not the original image.
I think the most effective technique would be to do what the NRA has been doing for a long time: send postcards. It's an easy thing to do on an individual basis, each person just needs to write a short statement on the back of a postcard and send it to the targeted congressman. Simple enough to do, but it takes enough time that the writer will be taken somewhat seriously.
The key to this technique of course is volume. Individually a typed letter is more impressive than a postcard, but if you can guarantee 10,000 - 100,000 postcards arriving at a congressman's office... that carries a lot of weight.
The ideal scenario is this: a person representing our concerns meets with a congressman, the congressman acts concerned but probably blows the representative off. The representative sits down at a computer and reports back using Slashdot or a mailing list, asking us to send out postcards on a given issue. The congressman's staff then spends the next several days sorting through several bags of mail coming in from all over the country but focusing on the same issue, giving the technical representative a good deal more credit.
We still need a reliable representative to actually meet with members of congress though. I continue to be impressed with the EFF and think someone from that organization would be the best bet.
I upgraded to a machine very similiar to this a few days ago. I'm running Windows 2000 and part of my focus was on games, so my decisions may not be relevant to you.
CPU: AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHz Socket A 266MHz
It's only a little extra to get a 1.4. Athlons run hot, I like the idea of being able to underclock my processor if things get a little too toasty.
RAM: DDR SDRAM 2100 2 * 256 MB Socket A
RAM here is tricky. Notice that most DDR boards only support 2 DIMM slots, you're cutting off an important future upgrade route. I went with a high performance 512MB from Mushkin.
Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 40 GB
Maxtor seems like the best bet currently. I'd lean towards them.
Motherboard: Asus A7M266, AMD761-chipsett, Socket A
This is the motherboard I got. I really like it, but note that it's pricier than most of the competitors. It's nice to have a motherboard that just works.
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024
I like my SB Live and generally recommend them. Note that they do have a problem with the VIA 686b chipset, which is the southbridge on the ASUS A7M266. I haven't experienced any problems, but others have.
Video Card: Matrox Millenium G450 32MB DDR-Ram, Bulk
If 3D games are in your future, I recommend going with an nVidia Geforce 2/3. I tossed my Matrox G400 a few months ago because I got few up with it. Matrox's do have great 2D support though, and I can't speak of their reliability under Linux.
The rest isn't worth commenting on. Sounds like you're on the right track, good luck.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls.
I have yet to see any proof of this; there is no evidence so far that any of the terrorists involved in the WTC disaster relied on anything more technological than a telephone to plan and execute their plans. The idea that the Internet is a terrorist medium seems to be mostly played up by a bored media.
I actually find the idea that someone like Bin Laden (who is probably living in a cave right now) would jump aboard the Internet as the ultimate terrorism organizational tool highly questionable. The concept of encryption is familiar to us on Slashdot, but to most other people it's really voodoo. The Internet is primarly an American invention, it would be prudent for someone to be wary of placing so much faith in the device of his enemy.
This is probably some of the best work I've seen from the Slashdot editors. They've been putting up reliable information faster than some of the big sites. They're dedication in this case is appreciated.
Sigh... Reading these responses fills me with doubt about the future of computers in general since half the people posting are posting with ignorance of the simplest physics concepts that should have been learned in Grade 10 science class.
The problem appears to be that so many Slashdotters think they learned all about this stuff in Grade 10 science class and thus feel like they understand enough to comment on it. There are so many posts pointing out the difference between weight and mass that I really think this is the case.
I predict that software design (open source and closed source) will decline further as too many unknowingly ignorant people make decisions. More crashes, more bad designs, more strange problems.
Bah, that's an overreaction. Slashdot has a computer focus and most of its users are from the computer industry, I think it's impressive that there are as many scientifically astute people here as there are.
It would be nice if people would refrain from posting in topics that they don't understand. And really the moderation system breaks down in this case because the moderators can't figure out who knows what they're talking about. But it still works well enough in general, because those of us who know a little about the topic can see past the moderation points and find the quality posts, and the rest of us will realize that there is too much conflicting information to be reliable.
I have been wondering about technology like this for a while. More specifically, the possibility to build cellular stations that are compatable with every communications protocol. If a company could build small communication units that were completely reprogrammable, they could place them around cities and open lease agreements with various phone and communication companies.
I'm not familiar enough with FCC regulations to know that someone could actually build a business model around this, but the idea still intrigues me. We're going to be using radio based gadgets for the foreseeable future, and a company that could move itself to become an all purpose wireless provider would have a good deal of potential.
Imagine if apartment complexes began offering this as a simple perk to residence
A friend of mine moved into a complex that offered this service and he immediately signed up. He generally got the worst of all possible worlds; it was a proprietary system brought in by another company, they gave him only one box which he has to keep next to a window to get a connection, the speed is slow, and so on. I believe he eventually gave it up for a cable modem.
In theory, sharing a internet connection across a whole apartment complex sounds like a great idea. In practice though, it never seems to work out very well. The complexes that I've investigated usually offer a pretty lame service aimed more at a casual user with no preconceptions or requirements. If you are interested in real broadband access, don't rent based on whether the complex provides access but rather on whether you can get DSL, cable, etc. through a third party.
I agree with the idea that science and the scientific method is useful throughout life. Many people already use the scientific method in it's loosest form, rational thinking. People are already finding the shortest routes through traffic, experimenting with cooking, etc. using their rational faculties. What they lack is a lot of fundamental knowledge of science, I believe this is your point. A chef would do well to understand chemistry as would a gardener, a stock broker should understand statistical methods, and so on.
The problem is that to improve the general level of knowledge would require even more eduction and there is no shortage of things kids should already be learning. Forget science; history, literature, and foreign languages are all skills that people would find just as useful in the age of today. Personally, I would prefer a population that could write well over one that understood the difference between energy and power.
I, like you and Prof Goodstein, realize that we are in a scientific era. It worries me when scientific studies are shot down because they conflict with someone's personal or religious view. And it would be nice to have a populous that could sit down, do the math, and figure out for themselves how much pollution the US is producing each day versus how much is absorbed by trees.
Thomas Jefferson believed in public education; once everyone was literate, a wall between the classes would be torn down and we'd all be better off. We reached his ideal but he was only partially right. Nearly everyone in this country can read and write yet few use it as the tool of empowerment as it was meant. This has taught me an important lesson about education, it is important but not all important. Simply teaching kids more science and making them more scientifically aware won't matter much if they refuse to use it.
Duh, it's harder. It's because you don't know it. Just like (as an example) Japanese is hard if you don't know it, or cooking tender pot roasts, or building a deck and patio, or laying a brick walkway.
The article meant us to think that we should all become scientists. Hard or not, we had better buckle down and learn it because it's the future. Many of the examples may be just as hard, but they are also as widely known. Few people bother to learn Japanese (with the exception of those ~150 million that took to it quite handily) and few can actually produce a gourmet meal. Trade skills, such as laying a brick path or assembling a house require less formal training and are based more on experience. But these people use science without needing to understand it, the calculations have already been done and the materials been designed by the more learned. As you said, "Those skills are learned, and take patience, and practice, and effort" but that really doesn't help us develop a more scientifically literate culture.
The point I didn't make, because it's been made several times in other discussions, is that these roles will continue to be filled by people who have an inate interest and ability in such things. The article seems to believe that there is some way to move more people into the scientific niche, my point is that it's not only a hard thing to do but unnecessary.
The article made me think back to one of the engineering physics courses I took in college. I'd sometimes get in a few minutes early and catch the previous class leaving, which was the A&S Intro to Physics class. I would sit down and watch as a few students milled around afterward, talking excitedly to the professors. Around them were the remnants of whatever demonstration took place that day, usually some combination or dry ice, lasers, and pneumatics. Pretty cool looking stuff, I could see why this excited some of the A&S students there.
Then the front of the room would begin to rotate (the physics lecture halls had a turntable so the professors could prepare behind the scenes) and my professor would slide into view. He would have about half of the chalkboard filled with equations and be hurriedly working on filling in the other half.
That to me is the wall of science. You can come up with all the cool analogies and demonstrations you want and get people excited, but dig into it at all and it becomes a lot harder. Yet you really can't understand science unless you understand the math that backs it up. I don't know what the authors of that article expect, but I don't think they're being very realistic
I happen to agree with Leo Laporte that computer labs shouldn't be the primary concern of schools. Computers are very useful tools, but one kids are very often exposed to at home.
Many schools are feeling pressured these days towards teaching pragmatic skills rather than the traditional esoteric persuits. As a society we provide schools to young people in order to prepare them for their later roles in life. To this end, schools should reflect the realities of the American life rather than some conceptualized ideal. Schooling is becoming a competitive business and those institutions that can reliably produce graduates with good typing skills will be held in higher regard than those whose graduates understand why Picasso's art was important.
So it happens that computers are important now. Very important. It makes sense to me that students should get used to using them in a learning environment in the same ways that they'll one day be using them in a work environment. It may be hard to appreciate unless you've seen it, but I marvel whenever I see someone who can't use a computer. Some type at a word or two a minute, others gingerly hold the mouse in their hand as they try multiple times to successfully pull down a menu. It will be up to them to seek additional training at some point, but at the moment they are at a significant disadvantage in comparison to those who are growing up with these skills.
I think I would've liked going to a school that might have focused on the loftier aspects of academia. But I went to public school and although I might have thrived in a more studious environment, it most certainly would have left many of my peers in the dust. These former classmates of mine are now helping to turn the wheels of our economy and doing so by drawing on only a few of the skills their official education granted them.
My point is that education is best utilized when it reflects our society as a whole. Since computers have made such inroads into our daily lives, so should they be proportionately
placed into our learning environments. Palmtops are pretty popular with a number of people out here in the real world, makes sense that they should appear in our schools.
Slashdot Mirror
That's some mighty fine technobabble you've assembled there. If you're not already there, I strongly recommend heading out west and becoming a Hollywood script writer. They need people like you, to make the characters seem smart without actually saying anything.
Seriously though, I should point out that in a hydrological holographic communications medium, the thermal dynamism will, while not affecting the message in, a, lossy way, will cause changes in the order, that, the binary components might be received. It is of course trivial to correct for this, current use of super string theory provides an elegant method for accounting for said brownian reverberations in the stream, but it's still important to XOR the bits into a checksum before sending, just to make sure you understand.
I beta tested for Jumpgate earlier this year. The game absolutely bored me stiff. Essentially it has no low gameplay at the lower levels; you have to spend many, many hours in game running missions before you can even consider space combat. I was unwilling to put in so much "dues time", so I bailed.
Jumpgate is far too focused on the die hard player to ever be a real success in the online world. All the other games make their low level play extra interesting to coax people into playing, Jumpgate practically drives them away. While keeping away the n00bs probably makes the die hard players happy, it certainly didn't do anything for me.
I think most projects need a powerful leader to get them started quickly and push them in direction.
This is exactly right. I was expand this idea by saying that the most important thing is to have someone leading by example rather than by direction.
What I mean is that the ideal open source leader should take it upon theirself to make it so the project is completed, regardless of whether other people join the project. This allows people to join and leave the project at their own whims, and yet things will get accomplished because the leader maintains a continual forward push.
Leadership by example is also important because the only person a programmer will listen too (besides a person that pays him money) is one who has done the most work in the project. This is why the best leaders for open source projects are, in my opinion, programmers themselves.
Thanks for the info. It looks like DDML is a display layer that was implemented for Windows 2000, it looks pretty cool. If it's also implemented in XP, I may be able to restart my experiments.
Just a wild guess, but wouldn't it be possible to install a hook to intercept WM_PAINT messages or something?
WM_PAINT is what programs like VNC currently use, at least as far as I can tell. I could intercept WM_PAINT messages, but that wouldn't get me anywhere; I'd just find out everytime another program requested a refresh. Whenever a program updates it's window, it calls the GDI layer and passes in information on the part of the window that's being updated. GDI is then responsible for doing all the necessary mapping so it gets painted correctly on the screen. No messages are passed during this process.
What I ideally needed was a way to tell GDI that my program would be handling all the updates for a given window, just pass them to me and don't worry about the screen. I suspect it's possible to do this, I bet all these Microsoft products do something similiar, but I was never able to find documentation on it. As I mentioned before, I could've written a wrapper around the dlls and intercepted these calls myself, but that's a foolish thing to do in Windows. So I gave up. Sending a WM_PAINT message seems to be the only way to get the contents of a window, but that was too inefficient for what I was trying to do.
VNC isn't very good at working out which bits of the desktop have been redrawn (Or Windows isn't very good at telling it...)
Definately the latter. I spent some time trying to figure out how to get Windows to pass my program graphical updates to various windows rather than just updating the screen, it really isn't possible. The best you can do is constantly take snapshots of the windows, possibly keyed off of keyboard and mouse messages. But that only works in an interactive app, and it's no way to deal with something like a movie player. The only efficient solution I could come up with was to replace the gdi dlls with wrappers so I could intercept the information as it went through, but that's just stupid.
Of course, there must be a way to do all this efficiently because Microsoft is doing it. It's crap like this that is causing me to move towards free software, Microsoft has made it clear that their operating system will never be an equal playing field.
I think the real outcome would be that the US gets marginalized. If we stifle the very openness and sharing that now occurs, and that keeps the US at the head of the pack in science, industry, military technologies, etc., other nations (europe perhaps, or Japan) will pass us by.
I agree with you completely. It's a shame that recent events have caused so many people to question how open our country should remain, a lot of our strength comes from the people and information that flows across our borders.
If the US imposes such restrictions on ourselves alone, we'll be passed by - Americans will go abroad to do research, start companies, etc.
I've traveled a bit and the U.S is the only country that feels like my home. I'm always happy to return to this land and really have no desire to leave. But if the Slashdot popular worst case scenario does come to pass, I'll probably leave on principle. Many others will too.
Hopefully saner heads will prevail in the end. I sure hope so.
They always have. We've had some pretty strange laws passed in this country but over time things have corrected themselves. Things are not ideal of course, but our government remains generally a secular and rational force. I find comfort in looking back at all the stuff that this country has survived so far and realizing that nothing on the horizon really compares.
i don't see how the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide" argument can hold weight with anyone, possibly excluding some of the clergy, because 99.99% of the population is probably doing something illegal fairly regularly.
I agree with this sentement. The problem is that our laws were written with the assumption that they couldn't be enforced 100% of the time, so better to make them too broad. There are far too many laws on the books that simply aren't enforced; it is inevitable that someone is going to break one without even knowing about it.
The scary bit is that we're entering a time when technology will make 100% enforcement of certain laws feasible. Photo radar is a good example of this, many cities are on their way towards detecting every time someone runs a red light or accelates beyond the speed limit.
The point is, we can't be applying modern technology to broad laws or we really will be in trouble. I think technology can provide some nice improvements in how laws are enforced, but the laws themselves will have to rewritten first.
It has a typical cruise speed of 840 km/h
The plane wasn't moving at top speed. It is reasonable to assume they were going much slower to give them more maneuverability.
Or, in other words, just the force of that much mass at that speed is about the same as a WWII blockbuster bomb
While there was certainly a lot of kinetic energy, it was focused in a less than ideal (for the terrorists) way. It was quite successful at knocking out the central supports, but the support beams at the sides remained generally intact. It was the fire that eventually weakened these beams and caused the collapse.
More specifically, there isn't that much of a link between raw energy and destructive power. A much smaller amount of energy could've toppled the towers if it had been placed correctly. Conversely, a suitcase nuke would do magnitudes less damage if it was detonated at or below ground level versus several hundred feet in the air.
I know the college has to do this so they can somehow grade 'my' code and assess my performance. Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?
Just like in the real world, a team is a haven for slackers. Far too many people got through my CS classes simply because of who they knew. Insofar as college is designed to accredit individuals, it is necessary for nearly all of the work to be done as an individual.
Now most of the problem is that when students divide into teams, the instructors have the tendancy to view the team as a single entity. College professors are an unsympathetic lot and the easiest thing for them to do is judge the team with an external eye. Once the team members' fates are linked, it is often times easiest for the most industrious students to simply take on the burden of the work. It is rare that I see a team in which the doesn't occur, in both academia and the real world.
I understand where the author is coming from, I learned a great deal during the little time I was forced to work in a team in college. But my lessons were in politics and sociology, relatively little computer knowledge was involved. Students should spend some time in groups, but not too much. It is nice in some ways for college to be more idealistic than the real world.
Look at when it was filed. 1992. Very very few people were even thinking about the idea of pausing live TV back then. Just because it is a simple idea (especially now) does not mean the patent isn't valid when it was filed for. That's the nature of technology. You could make a case of "patent squatting" since the company doesn't appear to have done anything with the patent, but that's a whole other can of worms.
The problem is that if we consider having an idea the only prerequisite for getting a valid patent, our whole future is locked up by amateur futurists. It's easy to come up with ideas but it's the specific implementation that's important.
In this case we have technology that would have been developed and used even if the patent had never been filed. The goal of patents are not to reward the first person to come up with a given idea, but to protect the work someone has done. Time delayed video techniques have been used by the network studios for years, so have digital circular buffers. Combining existing tools in an obvious manner to meet an eventual need is not patent worthy.
I have no doubt that this patent will eventually be struck down in court if pressed far enough. It is merely irritating that this has to happen this way.
Electrolytic conversion from water requires electricity. The vast amount of electricity generated comes from icky dirty coal.
You are unfortunately correct about this. It looks like economic realities will make coal the U.S. fuel of choice for a long time to come.
Extraction of hydrogen from fossil fuels still generates some toxic pollutants, and is still in relatively early stages of development.
It's still less pollution than combustion causes. Not ideal, but it's a step in a better direction.
Shall we address the infrastructure problems associated with hydrogen? The costs of retooling fuel distribution channels to handle hydrogen?
Long distance electrical lines currently lose approximately 1/3 of their energy before they reach our neighborhoods. Part of the allure of fuel cells is the ability to run local generators that will run a lot more efficient. Distribution is certainly an issue, but it seems as feasible to send out tankers filled with liquid hydrogen as it is to send out gasoline tanker trucks.
It seems especially important to me that cameras be installed within the police station. We should know what's going on with our public defenders.
It always seemed to me an intriguing idea to outfit all law officers with video cameras mounted somewhere on their heads. The idea would be that video would broadcast continually to a central repository as it was recorded. The video repository would have to be maintained in such a way that it was secure, but footage could be pulled by both the police and defendants.
It would be an interesting double edged sword. Having constant video would protect citizens against police harrassment since everything the officer says has been recorded. It would also give the officer an additional degree of invulnerability, anyone who attacked an officer would realize that he probably wouldn't be able to get away with it.
I think recording techniques like these will greatly benefit justice in the future. The key is accountability, what is recorded needs to be accessible by everyone.
The only thing you can't do is compress the image with JPEG or other "lossy" compression routines.
That's a major problem though. In the real world lossy compression techniques are far more widely used than raw data. Simply posting a .bmp on Ebay or sending a .wav to a friend could be flagged as suspicious activity. For steganography to be truly useful you need to be able to intergrate with the most common file formats and protocols.
BTW, the technique works better if you simply encode your hidden message in the least significant bit of color values. If the original picture was of poor quality, it would be impossible to distinguish this from normal noise. The benefit is that you merely need to know the technique, not the original image.
I think the most effective technique would be to do what the NRA has been doing for a long time: send postcards. It's an easy thing to do on an individual basis, each person just needs to write a short statement on the back of a postcard and send it to the targeted congressman. Simple enough to do, but it takes enough time that the writer will be taken somewhat seriously.
The key to this technique of course is volume. Individually a typed letter is more impressive than a postcard, but if you can guarantee 10,000 - 100,000 postcards arriving at a congressman's office... that carries a lot of weight.
The ideal scenario is this: a person representing our concerns meets with a congressman, the congressman acts concerned but probably blows the representative off. The representative sits down at a computer and reports back using Slashdot or a mailing list, asking us to send out postcards on a given issue. The congressman's staff then spends the next several days sorting through several bags of mail coming in from all over the country but focusing on the same issue, giving the technical representative a good deal more credit.
We still need a reliable representative to actually meet with members of congress though. I continue to be impressed with the EFF and think someone from that organization would be the best bet.
I upgraded to a machine very similiar to this a few days ago. I'm running Windows 2000 and part of my focus was on games, so my decisions may not be relevant to you.
CPU: AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHz Socket A 266MHz
It's only a little extra to get a 1.4. Athlons run hot, I like the idea of being able to underclock my processor if things get a little too toasty.
RAM: DDR SDRAM 2100 2 * 256 MB Socket A
RAM here is tricky. Notice that most DDR boards only support 2 DIMM slots, you're cutting off an important future upgrade route. I went with a high performance 512MB from Mushkin.
Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 40 GB
Maxtor seems like the best bet currently. I'd lean towards them.
Motherboard: Asus A7M266, AMD761-chipsett, Socket A
This is the motherboard I got. I really like it, but note that it's pricier than most of the competitors. It's nice to have a motherboard that just works.
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024
I like my SB Live and generally recommend them. Note that they do have a problem with the VIA 686b chipset, which is the southbridge on the ASUS A7M266. I haven't experienced any problems, but others have.
Video Card: Matrox Millenium G450 32MB DDR-Ram, Bulk
If 3D games are in your future, I recommend going with an nVidia Geforce 2/3. I tossed my Matrox G400 a few months ago because I got few up with it. Matrox's do have great 2D support though, and I can't speak of their reliability under Linux.
The rest isn't worth commenting on. Sounds like you're on the right track, good luck.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls.
I have yet to see any proof of this; there is no evidence so far that any of the terrorists involved in the WTC disaster relied on anything more technological than a telephone to plan and execute their plans. The idea that the Internet is a terrorist medium seems to be mostly played up by a bored media.
I actually find the idea that someone like Bin Laden (who is probably living in a cave right now) would jump aboard the Internet as the ultimate terrorism organizational tool highly questionable. The concept of encryption is familiar to us on Slashdot, but to most other people it's really voodoo. The Internet is primarly an American invention, it would be prudent for someone to be wary of placing so much faith in the device of his enemy.
This is probably some of the best work I've seen from the Slashdot editors. They've been putting up reliable information faster than some of the big sites. They're dedication in this case is appreciated.
Sigh... Reading these responses fills me with doubt about the future of computers in general since half the people posting are posting with ignorance of the simplest physics concepts that should have been learned in Grade 10 science class.
The problem appears to be that so many Slashdotters think they learned all about this stuff in Grade 10 science class and thus feel like they understand enough to comment on it. There are so many posts pointing out the difference between weight and mass that I really think this is the case.
I predict that software design (open source and closed source) will decline further as too many unknowingly ignorant people make decisions. More crashes, more bad designs, more strange problems.
Bah, that's an overreaction. Slashdot has a computer focus and most of its users are from the computer industry, I think it's impressive that there are as many scientifically astute people here as there are.
It would be nice if people would refrain from posting in topics that they don't understand. And really the moderation system breaks down in this case because the moderators can't figure out who knows what they're talking about. But it still works well enough in general, because those of us who know a little about the topic can see past the moderation points and find the quality posts, and the rest of us will realize that there is too much conflicting information to be reliable.
I have been wondering about technology like this for a while. More specifically, the possibility to build cellular stations that are compatable with every communications protocol. If a company could build small communication units that were completely reprogrammable, they could place them around cities and open lease agreements with various phone and communication companies.
I'm not familiar enough with FCC regulations to know that someone could actually build a business model around this, but the idea still intrigues me. We're going to be using radio based gadgets for the foreseeable future, and a company that could move itself to become an all purpose wireless provider would have a good deal of potential.
Imagine if apartment complexes began offering this as a simple perk to residence
A friend of mine moved into a complex that offered this service and he immediately signed up. He generally got the worst of all possible worlds; it was a proprietary system brought in by another company, they gave him only one box which he has to keep next to a window to get a connection, the speed is slow, and so on. I believe he eventually gave it up for a cable modem.
In theory, sharing a internet connection across a whole apartment complex sounds like a great idea. In practice though, it never seems to work out very well. The complexes that I've investigated usually offer a pretty lame service aimed more at a casual user with no preconceptions or requirements. If you are interested in real broadband access, don't rent based on whether the complex provides access but rather on whether you can get DSL, cable, etc. through a third party.
I agree with the idea that science and the scientific method is useful throughout life. Many people already use the scientific method in it's loosest form, rational thinking. People are already finding the shortest routes through traffic, experimenting with cooking, etc. using their rational faculties. What they lack is a lot of fundamental knowledge of science, I believe this is your point. A chef would do well to understand chemistry as would a gardener, a stock broker should understand statistical methods, and so on.
The problem is that to improve the general level of knowledge would require even more eduction and there is no shortage of things kids should already be learning. Forget science; history, literature, and foreign languages are all skills that people would find just as useful in the age of today. Personally, I would prefer a population that could write well over one that understood the difference between energy and power.
I, like you and Prof Goodstein, realize that we are in a scientific era. It worries me when scientific studies are shot down because they conflict with someone's personal or religious view. And it would be nice to have a populous that could sit down, do the math, and figure out for themselves how much pollution the US is producing each day versus how much is absorbed by trees.
Thomas Jefferson believed in public education; once everyone was literate, a wall between the classes would be torn down and we'd all be better off. We reached his ideal but he was only partially right. Nearly everyone in this country can read and write yet few use it as the tool of empowerment as it was meant. This has taught me an important lesson about education, it is important but not all important. Simply teaching kids more science and making them more scientifically aware won't matter much if they refuse to use it.
Duh, it's harder. It's because you don't know it. Just like (as an example) Japanese is hard if you don't know it, or cooking tender pot roasts, or building a deck and patio, or laying a brick walkway.
The article meant us to think that we should all become scientists. Hard or not, we had better buckle down and learn it because it's the future. Many of the examples may be just as hard, but they are also as widely known. Few people bother to learn Japanese (with the exception of those ~150 million that took to it quite handily) and few can actually produce a gourmet meal. Trade skills, such as laying a brick path or assembling a house require less formal training and are based more on experience. But these people use science without needing to understand it, the calculations have already been done and the materials been designed by the more learned. As you said, "Those skills are learned, and take patience, and practice, and effort" but that really doesn't help us develop a more scientifically literate culture.
The point I didn't make, because it's been made several times in other discussions, is that these roles will continue to be filled by people who have an inate interest and ability in such things. The article seems to believe that there is some way to move more people into the scientific niche, my point is that it's not only a hard thing to do but unnecessary.
The article made me think back to one of the engineering physics courses I took in college. I'd sometimes get in a few minutes early and catch the previous class leaving, which was the A&S Intro to Physics class. I would sit down and watch as a few students milled around afterward, talking excitedly to the professors. Around them were the remnants of whatever demonstration took place that day, usually some combination or dry ice, lasers, and pneumatics. Pretty cool looking stuff, I could see why this excited some of the A&S students there.
Then the front of the room would begin to rotate (the physics lecture halls had a turntable so the professors could prepare behind the scenes) and my professor would slide into view. He would have about half of the chalkboard filled with equations and be hurriedly working on filling in the other half.
That to me is the wall of science. You can come up with all the cool analogies and demonstrations you want and get people excited, but dig into it at all and it becomes a lot harder. Yet you really can't understand science unless you understand the math that backs it up. I don't know what the authors of that article expect, but I don't think they're being very realistic
I happen to agree with Leo Laporte that computer labs shouldn't be the primary concern of schools. Computers are very useful tools, but one kids are very often exposed to at home.
Many schools are feeling pressured these days towards teaching pragmatic skills rather than the traditional esoteric persuits. As a society we provide schools to young people in order to prepare them for their later roles in life. To this end, schools should reflect the realities of the American life rather than some conceptualized ideal. Schooling is becoming a competitive business and those institutions that can reliably produce graduates with good typing skills will be held in higher regard than those whose graduates understand why Picasso's art was important.
So it happens that computers are important now. Very important. It makes sense to me that students should get used to using them in a learning environment in the same ways that they'll one day be using them in a work environment. It may be hard to appreciate unless you've seen it, but I marvel whenever I see someone who can't use a computer. Some type at a word or two a minute, others gingerly hold the mouse in their hand as they try multiple times to successfully pull down a menu. It will be up to them to seek additional training at some point, but at the moment they are at a significant disadvantage in comparison to those who are growing up with these skills.
I think I would've liked going to a school that might have focused on the loftier aspects of academia. But I went to public school and although I might have thrived in a more studious environment, it most certainly would have left many of my peers in the dust. These former classmates of mine are now helping to turn the wheels of our economy and doing so by drawing on only a few of the skills their official education granted them.
My point is that education is best utilized when it reflects our society as a whole. Since computers have made such inroads into our daily lives, so should they be proportionately placed into our learning environments. Palmtops are pretty popular with a number of people out here in the real world, makes sense that they should appear in our schools.