Haha! Ever use one? Sure GPS is accurate relative to the satellites..but is it accurate according to you map, and your datum? If you have a GPS, go look at the number of Datum settings there are...a huge number that you have to be a real expert to know which one to use when.
Get one and drive around the city...how often is the track on the road? Almost never? The maps and the satellites do not gibe because the maps were made with different technology which takes into account geography and altitude.
From the FAA's web site: GPS is not yet approved as a sole means of IFR navigation. It can, however, be used as a supplemental system for en route navigation and nonprecision approaches.
Yes, FAA does certify GPS navagation systems, but it is ILLEGAL for a PILOT to use GPS as PRIMARY navigation. All the certification means is that it is legal to install the device into the aircraft.
Jamming GPS would not be effective
on
GPS Jamming for $50
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It is explicitely illegal for pilots to rely on GPS for navigation. Of the several types of navigation you learn when you earn your pilots license, GPS is not one of them. Even if a (assumed general aviation) pilot was breaking the rules and relying solely on GPS for navigation, its not like the GPS begin jammed would suddenly screw him. He can always go back to the more reliable methods, including the tried and true "looking out the window".
To be effective, GPS jamming would have to have a range of at least 20 miles, which would be a signal that would be quite easy to track down and stop.
Who else uses jamming? The military can use it, but again, its not like jamming is going to do much because missles can be targeted at the jammers.
Hikers could be screwed I suppose, but few hikers rely on GPS for their lives.
GPS Lo-Jacks could be disabled, but activating a GPS jammer would be like turning on a huge beacon pointing straight to the thief anyway.
Street-map GPSs could be disabled, but given their accuracy, most people wouldnt even notice:P
The new defaults effectively disable karma; since the bonus is nothing, there is no benefit to having good karma anymore. Basically, its now opt-in and how many people are going to bother to opt-in?
Worse, there is now an incentive to always uncheck the karma bonus, so your good comments more likely to get voted up by moderators who have the karma value set to no-zero. After all, who mods up a comment that is already at the max?
Which brings us to something that must be a bug: the point cap on comments is still 5, though the bonus can go to 6. Thus, I can set the karma bonus to +6, but comments never have values above 5. I don't see how this would ever be the desired behavior.
The US government has a lot of secrets. Whole agencies even existence have been secrets for decades (like the NSA); how many do we not know about today? And there's the secret black budget written by congress.
Imagine a middleman attack on this system.
Your forge up some fancy documents, then go recruit some people to your secret organization. Ostensibly, you are a secret arm of the TLA, a super-secret black-op, so they have to be discrete. You then have those employees recruit more people for you. If you do it right, you will soon have a large organization made up of people who believe they are working for a secret national security agency willing to do just about anything because they are patriots. This will take money, but given that you are a black-op, nobody can track your finances, which most likely come from clever schemes where your 'agents' unwittingly secure loot for you to buy more agents. All in the name of national security, so you never have to explain yourself. If one of your recruits gets caught doing the bad thing, they will have been trained to keep mum, and since you operate like a real black-op, you won't be easily rooted out. If you trained your first recruits well, most people in your 'agency' won't even know you exist.
Anyway, if you use your imagination a little bit you might be able to scare yourself.
Could this work? Is anyone so stupid to fall for it? Sadly, yes. There are a lot of gullible people in the world. A close aquaintance of mine believes to this day that the FAA is really a secret organization with assassins, aircraft navigation VORTACS are black op bases that somehow shoot down soviet nuclear missles. She actually thinks she was a secret agent doing missions for the FAA. She won't tell me what she did, but implications are that the people she 'worked' did some really nasty deeds.
It is not merely the possibility of scamming that is the problem.
There is something very deeply wrong with the theory and the experiment. You say yourself you would have to look at a lot of sample human data to judge this game; think about that for a moment. Wouldn't collecting a large amount of human data and fitting it with a neural network or whatnot be a more straightforward approach that leads to a scientific result?
There is feedback in this contest method that would lead to an unbounded number of refinements to emulators and detectors(and ever more research grants no doubt!) Its a tail chaser.
This 'contest' reminds of the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray manipulates pre-cog cards to get women. Really, if a ESP buff were to present something like this to the Amazing Randi he would not accept it on the grounds that it was too easy to manipulate.
First and foremost, there is a large sum of money being bandied around. The participants are incented to win by monetary payouts, and two payouts of $10,000 dollars are at stake as well. When games with this high of stakes are being played, great caution is generally used by the house.
But look at the rules of the game...there basically are none. Participants are identified by e-mail address; no rule is specified about the number of entries per person. Also, no rule is specified about collusion between entrants (detectors and emulators). It doesn't take an einstein to figure out how to bias the results of the experient by making enough colluding entries. It is funny this, given that the games themselves are *about* collusion. Its a joke.
Next, notice that there really isnt any way for anybody to tell if the results of the experiement are meaningful, or if they have been manipulated. Its not based on a falsafible proposition and is not scientific. Its no different from any method used by psychic hoaxers of the past. The creators of the 'contest' can manipulate the data, and direct the winnings to their confederates.
Finally, the bizarre nature of the contest should raise some flags. They are giving out $10,000 for a program that would have been hacked together in a couple of months at most. What kind of value could you expect from a contest like this?
The following is an example game file your program is supposed to output a dataset for that is "most human". I give you: NFG 1 R "game1" { "1" "2" } { 2 2 }
It really bugs me when I see benchmark numbers relied upon when they have not been presented as statistically significant. Whenever you run a benchmark, you MUST run it multiple times and do the proper statistical calculations for standard deviation. It is NOT VALID to do one run, and it is NOT VALID to average a bunch of runs without knowing what the deviation is. Some times a benchmark's time will vary by more than 100%. Sometimes the reasons are valid, sometimes they are because of an error in the benchmark. Without this sort of validation, the numbers presented should not be trusted.
After reading the gobblygook article and looking at the race types, I went in search of something that would tell me what the game play is like. After seeing this screenshot , I decided I just didn't care.
The article and the screenshot together just make the game look mush-brained.
Not well put. What you are saying is not the problem, but how you say it is. You use obscentities and a self-righteous tone that seriously detract from your credibility.
Go rewrite this in an tone and language that you might see in a newspaper opinion column. That would be a valuable post.
Static is a very dangerous construct. Statics are global while the code may eventually find its way into multi-threaded code, or code which has fewer assumptions than some obscure function it relies upon. This code for example assumes there is only one video card. Of course there isn't enough information here to determine the context of the caller, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the context could change depending on which video card has been 'selected'.
I like William Gibson's books, but it is totally ignorant to call him the father of cyberpunk. Please go read (for example) Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". Compare and contrast with Gibson's story. Then look at the copyright dates...
Yes, the military would do that. Never base your logic on military intelligence. In fact, GPS is effected by adverse weather. Thick overcast will block the signal. The military has to use other methods of guidance in stormy situations.
The article states that the gas tax will be subtracted from the mileage tax; since inefficient cars use more gas and thus pay more gas tax, they will get a higher gas tax credit, and thus pay a smaller mileage tax. This method is not equitable by my sensibilities.
Taxing cars on the number of miles they drive, rather than the amount of fuel they consume in effect punishes people with fuel efficient cars. With current gas taxes, people who drive vehicles which have poor gas mileage (such as SUVs and sports cars) pay more tax than those who drive more efficient vehicles like Geos and Insights.
Of course the whole idea of using GPS to track mileage is ludicrous. GPS tracking fails in many situations such as tunnels and even heavy weather. Not to mention that they take time to 'lock on' to the satellite signal, often times longer than the trip itself. And of course buying a GPS device for every car would cost an outrageous amount of money.
While reading in the slashdot postings below about Raelean leader Rael, I hit a link to www.skepdic.com on rael, when i cycled through and found this page charles tart. It describes an anecdote by an apparently famous crackpot about a psycic experience about an explosion a woman had the night before Port Chicago blew up.
I had never heard of Port Chicago before, and here I find it connected like Kevin Bacon to Slashdot.
Projectors take up wall space and ceiling space only. Projectors project an image designed to be shown from the ceiling at an angle, so you can even walk in front of the screen without blocking the projection.
The actual projector takes up *less* volume than a plasma, and the 'screen' is infinitely thin!
This list reads more like pop-movie script devices than astronomy.
Number 10 is "will be survive 2003" or will we be destroyed by an asteroid?
Also mentioned is SETI which is interesting to laymen, but not really at the forefront of most astronomers minds.
The whole of the list is just fuzzy headed gobbledygook a high school student turned in for a book report. "The Enigmatic Sun" indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha! Ever use one? Sure GPS is accurate relative to the satellites..but is it accurate according to you map, and your datum? If you have a GPS, go look at the number of Datum settings there are...a huge number that you have to be a real expert to know which one to use when.
Get one and drive around the city...how often is the track on the road? Almost never? The maps and the satellites do not gibe because the maps were made with different technology which takes into account geography and altitude.
From the FAA's web site:
GPS is not yet approved as a sole means of IFR navigation. It can, however, be used as a supplemental system for en route navigation and nonprecision approaches.
Yes, FAA does certify GPS navagation systems, but it is ILLEGAL for a PILOT to use GPS as PRIMARY navigation. All the certification means is that it is legal to install the device into the aircraft.
It is explicitely illegal for pilots to rely on GPS for navigation. Of the several types of navigation you learn when you earn your pilots license, GPS is not one of them. Even if a (assumed general aviation) pilot was breaking the rules and relying solely on GPS for navigation, its not like the GPS begin jammed would suddenly screw him. He can always go back to the more reliable methods, including the tried and true "looking out the window".
:P
To be effective, GPS jamming would have to have a range of at least 20 miles, which would be a signal that would be quite easy to track down and stop.
Who else uses jamming? The military can use it, but again, its not like jamming is going to do much because missles can be targeted at the jammers.
Hikers could be screwed I suppose, but few hikers rely on GPS for their lives.
GPS Lo-Jacks could be disabled, but activating a GPS jammer would be like turning on a huge beacon pointing straight to the thief anyway.
Street-map GPSs could be disabled, but given their accuracy, most people wouldnt even notice
This story is dopey. If you have a web server and it is hitting a CPU bottleneck, you have done something wrong.
Ok, if the server actively plays chess against a hundred people, I'll let you be cpu bound.
The new defaults effectively disable karma; since the bonus is nothing, there is no benefit to having good karma anymore. Basically, its now opt-in and how many people are going to bother to opt-in?
Worse, there is now an incentive to always uncheck the karma bonus, so your good comments more likely to get voted up by moderators who have the karma value set to no-zero. After all, who mods up a comment that is already at the max?
Which brings us to something that must be a bug: the point cap on comments is still 5, though the bonus can go to 6. Thus, I can set the karma bonus to +6, but comments never have values above 5. I don't see how this would ever be the desired behavior.
The US government has a lot of secrets. Whole agencies even existence have been secrets for decades (like the NSA); how many do we not know about today? And there's the secret black budget written by congress.
Imagine a middleman attack on this system.
Your forge up some fancy documents, then go recruit some people to your secret organization. Ostensibly, you are a secret arm of the TLA, a super-secret black-op, so they have to be discrete. You then have those employees recruit more people for you.
If you do it right, you will soon have a large organization made up of people who believe they are working for a secret national security agency willing to do just about anything because they are patriots. This will take money, but given that you are a black-op, nobody can track your finances, which most likely come from clever schemes where your 'agents' unwittingly secure loot for you to buy more agents. All in the name of national security, so you never have to explain yourself. If one of your recruits gets caught doing the bad thing, they will have been trained to keep mum, and since you operate like a real black-op, you won't be easily rooted out. If you trained your first recruits well, most people in your 'agency' won't even know you exist.
Anyway, if you use your imagination a little bit you might be able to scare yourself.
Could this work? Is anyone so stupid to fall for it? Sadly, yes. There are a lot of gullible people in the world. A close aquaintance of mine believes to this day that the FAA is really a secret organization with assassins, aircraft navigation VORTACS are black op bases that somehow shoot down soviet nuclear missles. She actually thinks she was a secret agent doing missions for the FAA. She won't tell me what she did, but implications are that the people she 'worked' did some really nasty deeds.
I am a retired software engineer.
If you believe this contest is really about marketing CalTech rather than a scientific approach to sociology or intelligence, I won't argue.
Note that my post just one way to approach the flaws riddling this contest...
It is not merely the possibility of scamming that is the problem.
There is something very deeply wrong with the theory and the experiment. You say yourself you would have to look at a lot of sample human data to judge this game; think about that for a moment. Wouldn't collecting a large amount of human data and fitting it with a neural network or whatnot be a more straightforward approach that leads to a scientific result?
There is feedback in this contest method that would lead to an unbounded number of refinements to emulators and detectors(and ever more research grants no doubt!) Its a tail chaser.
This 'contest' reminds of the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray manipulates pre-cog cards to get women. Really, if a ESP buff were to present something like this to the Amazing Randi he would not accept it on the grounds that it was too easy to manipulate.
First and foremost, there is a large sum of money being bandied around. The participants are incented to win by monetary payouts, and two payouts of $10,000 dollars are at stake as well. When games with this high of stakes are being played, great caution is generally used by the house.
But look at the rules of the game...there basically are none. Participants are identified by e-mail address; no rule is specified about the number of entries per person. Also, no rule is specified about collusion between entrants (detectors and emulators). It doesn't take an einstein to figure out how to bias the results of the experient by making enough colluding entries. It is funny this, given that the games themselves are *about* collusion. Its a joke.
Next, notice that there really isnt any way for anybody to tell if the results of the experiement are meaningful, or if they have been manipulated. Its not based on a falsafible proposition and is not scientific. Its no different from any method used by psychic hoaxers of the past. The creators of the 'contest' can manipulate the data, and direct the winnings to their confederates.
Finally, the bizarre nature of the contest should raise some flags. They are giving out $10,000 for a program that would have been hacked together in a couple of months at most. What kind of value could you expect from a contest like this?
The following is an example game file your program is supposed to output a dataset for that is "most human". I give you:
NFG 1 R "game1" { "1" "2" } { 2 2 }
21 3 3 5 3 5 5 3
What is the most human response? Anyone? Anyone?
It really bugs me when I see benchmark numbers relied upon when they have not been presented as statistically significant.
Whenever you run a benchmark, you MUST run it multiple times and do the proper statistical calculations for standard deviation.
It is NOT VALID to do one run, and it is NOT VALID to average a bunch of runs without knowing what the deviation is.
Some times a benchmark's time will vary by more than 100%. Sometimes the reasons are valid, sometimes they are because of an error in the benchmark.
Without this sort of validation, the numbers presented should not be trusted.
You only pay sales tax to businesses in your own state. I suggest you start ordering from different companies...
After reading the gobblygook article and looking at the race types, I went in search of something that would tell me what the game play is like.
After seeing this screenshot , I decided I just didn't care.
The article and the screenshot together just make the game look mush-brained.
Not well put. What you are saying is not the problem, but how you say it is.
You use obscentities and a self-righteous tone that seriously detract from your credibility.
Go rewrite this in an tone and language that you might see in a newspaper opinion column. That would be a valuable post.
Static is a very dangerous construct. Statics are global while the code may eventually find its way into multi-threaded code, or code which has fewer assumptions than some obscure function it relies upon.
This code for example assumes there is only one video card. Of course there isn't enough information here to determine the context of the caller, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the context could change depending on which video card has been 'selected'.
I like William Gibson's books, but it is totally ignorant to call him the father of cyberpunk. Please go read (for example) Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". Compare and contrast with Gibson's story. Then look at the copyright dates...
My airplane-rated gps loses signal in heavy overcast. Science 1, bookworms 0.
Yes, the military would do that. Never base your logic on military intelligence.
In fact, GPS is effected by adverse weather. Thick overcast will block the signal. The military has to use other methods of guidance in stormy situations.
The article states that the gas tax will be subtracted from the mileage tax; since inefficient cars use more gas and thus pay more gas tax, they will get a higher gas tax credit, and thus pay a smaller mileage tax.
This method is not equitable by my sensibilities.
Taxing cars on the number of miles they drive, rather than the amount of fuel they consume in effect punishes people with fuel efficient cars. With current gas taxes, people who drive vehicles which have poor gas mileage (such as SUVs and sports cars) pay more tax than those who drive more efficient vehicles like Geos and Insights.
Of course the whole idea of using GPS to track mileage is ludicrous. GPS tracking fails in many situations such as tunnels and even heavy weather. Not to mention that they take time to 'lock on' to the satellite signal, often times longer than the trip itself. And of course buying a GPS device for every car would cost an outrageous amount of money.
The whole idea is DOA.
While reading in the slashdot postings below about Raelean leader Rael, I hit a link to www.skepdic.com on rael, when i cycled through and found this page charles tart. It describes an anecdote by an apparently famous crackpot about a psycic experience about an explosion a woman had the night before Port Chicago blew up.
I had never heard of Port Chicago before, and here I find it connected like Kevin Bacon to Slashdot.
Actually, NTSC is analog and does not actually have pixels. If a pixelized source is converted to NTSC you might get 720x525 interlaced.
It is not fair to say that is the resolution; an analog signal can carry more information than a converted digital one.
Projectors take up wall space and ceiling space only. Projectors project an image designed to be shown from the ceiling at an angle, so you can even walk in front of the screen without blocking the projection.
The actual projector takes up *less* volume than a plasma, and the 'screen' is infinitely thin!
I got the hitachi cpsx5500. Its $5000for true SXGA (1365x1024). [note that the viewsonic mentioned above is only XGA 1024x768].
The hitachi is really great. Super bright and about 8 feet across. Its so much better than a plasma screen I am sad for people duped into buying them.
This list reads more like pop-movie script devices than astronomy.
Number 10 is "will be survive 2003" or will we be destroyed by an asteroid?
Also mentioned is SETI which is interesting to laymen, but not really at the forefront of most astronomers minds.
The whole of the list is just fuzzy headed gobbledygook a high school student turned in for a book report. "The Enigmatic Sun" indeed.