They are. One method involves making use of telecommunications systems to provide information to areas that are not within easy physical access. But such communications systems cost money to run, especially if rates are charged on a per message or per minute basis. And it's not particularly helpful if that money is being wasted on sending/receiving spam messages. Getting rid of spam helps to get value for money.
Re:Let's Make a Movie! Yow!
on
Robots in Hospitals
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these. Robots, designed to serve and help mankind, a minor flaw,
There was a short story I remember reading (but completely lost the name of the author/title), which feature a man who was the last human being on Earth. Something on the lines of cryogenic storage is used to store people with terminal illnesses until they can be cured. During this time of his storage, the entire human population declines, with robots replacing much of the manual work. By this time the entire human population has gone, the entire planet is run by machines which give themselves the purpose of working on curing the remaining humans of their terminal illneses, but the humans die from the shock of regaining consciousness and not seeing any other humans around. The last human manages to survive this shock and proceeds to first search the continent, then the planet, then the solar system, then finally the nearest stars in the hope of finding life, all the time while bouncing in and out of cryogenic sleep for the odd million years. By the time the reports from the first exo-solar planets have been returned, the only life found is slow-moving plant-life, which doesn't impress the guy. After several billion years, when the sun has gone into the red-giant phase, the machines have found intelligent human life, even if they do have a slight greenish hue to their skin. The guy ends up travelling at warp-speed to the new planet to land on a paradise. Well, at least it was a happy ending.
It's not unknown for a retailer to claim to have a game available before the developer has actually released the product. One programmer I knew, actually saw the title he was currently working on, on sale by a mail-order company. It was rather amusing to call this company up, ask for details on the game, how well it was selling, what the reviews had been like etc.., then place an order only to find out the title had sold like hotcakes, and they were currently out of stock. He was so disappointed. He wanted to see what the game looked like so he could see where he could make improvements.
The main objection is that the waste products (fuel rods) remain radioactive for thousands of years and need constant observation. It usually proves to be very difficult to find a suitable location for such storage facilities. And if such a location is found, then there is much public opposition to the transportation of such materials by road or rail, due to the fear of contamination by an accident.
There is also objection to the environment due to the effect that the water used during power generation is slightly more radioactive than it was before it went in. Activists claim that the ocean currents/tides were not been studied thoroughly enough and that the radiation is gradually building up.
There is also the suspicion that the facilities are not properly maintained, and that "hot particles" of Plutonium/Uranium frequently leak out into the environment due to rusting equipment. Not helped by places such as Windscale.
There is also the issue that the water required for power generation ends up being several more degrees warmer that it was before, and disrupts ecosystems.
And there is also the fear of a plane crash or something similar onto a reactor.
Personally, I wouldn't object to nuclear energy if they put the reactor somewhere sensible like several miles underground in a disused mine. Then there wouldn't be any need transportation above ground. And they wouldn't have to worry about plane crashes, or leaks of "hot particles".
When we bought an Atari 800, I used the joysticks from the console system to play games. After much plugging and unplugging of the controllers, the plastic plugs became work out and the joysticks started failing. Since the connectors had nine pins, it seemed simple enough to replace these with a standard 9 pin RS-232 connector. This was easily done and the joysticks worked perfectly again.
All went well for several weeks, until I was working on a project and needed to plug in a controller. Unfortunately, the metal case of the connector hit the pins of the Atari 800 and formed a circuit with the earth the +5V pins. This consequently forced the Atari 800 to coldstart. After that, I always made sure the joysticks were plugged in before switching the computer on.
They don't get it. What we want is to be able to push a button and episode 28 of "I Dream of Jeannie" plays. Then after that, we push a button and Star Trek episode 52 plays.
If people could do that, what's to stop them viewing every episode of a particular series, recording it to PVR, making MPEG's/DVD's and never watching the channel again?
I'd rather see more of The Brigadier, even though I know he's getting a bit on in the years.
U.N.I.T was dismantled due to government cutbacks. The battle against alien invasions has been outsourced to private contractors who charge an upfront of 50% before fighting, and the remaining 50% after successfully defeating the invasion force. The rate will double if ther is more than one invasion force. An additional danger fee will also be charged if the aliens are coming from an hyperdimensional portal, stargate, wormhole or other form of interstellar travel. Any fighting on the other side of the portal will be billed separately.
Security is my number one priority. I recently bought a new laptop with Windows XP and a security firewall. No sooner had I connected my PC to the cable modem, then various security alert windows starting popping up (WIN_DCOM, WIN_LSASS) at least one every 5 minutes.
I filed a complaint to the cable TV company. The alert windows have stopped popping up, but since I never received any feedback from the cable company, I don't know if they have quarantined off the errant PC's or whether my PC has been compromised.
I found the FAQ interesting too, and am truly amazed by the beauty of the images (I definitely want a 6-foot wall poster of Jupiter and the moons).
Given the problems with bits being cut off from images due to time/memory constraints, I wonder if it would be possible to design camera sensors so that the returned pixels are ordered so that you could get increasing resolutions through time ie. First the (even,even) pixel coordinates first, then (odd,odd), finally followed by (even,odd)/(odd,even) so that you'd always get a full image if at a lower resolution.
Won't stop Branson trying to break a record in it though.
He broke the record; Travelling the 22 miles frm England to France in less than two hours using a Ford Aquada (works out to be around 12 miles/hour).
"Missed the last ferry sir? Just drive down that ramp down there; take a left at the harbour wall, and keep going until you see the European continent."
Nowadays, this niche is largely filled with F/OSS.
For me, the interest in writing software is the chance to do something new and original, while still professional looking. With Windows, for any idea that you have, a quick search will immediately reveal that similar applications have already been written for Windows. While there are cheap, shareware applications that appear to have been knocked up over a weekend, there will always be at least one shareware version with custom skins, available boxed, with written manuals. For windows, the incentive of writing any piece of shareware, was that you just might have a chance of making some cash from your efforts. But when you see that you are competing against such products, it becomes immediately obvious that this isn't going to happen.
You can do transparent windows in Windows XP as well. It's possible to set a global alpha on a window, and to specify transparency using a bitmap.
However, once you start using OpenGL or Direct3D, these will create custom contexts which are rectangular only. What I'd like to do is use the alpha channel of each pixel in the OpenGL framebuffer to control the transparency of that corresponding pixel. This would allow mouse clicks to pass straight through the window, onto the desktop below.
One gets used to the automatic spell check in KDE 3.2 in a big hurray.
There's nothing worse than receiving an order for "demonized water" from a chemistry lab. Do we call them back for confirmation, or just try looking up the yellow pages for a witch-doctor?
These cards will be bought by the game developers and hardcore enthusiasts. Eventually, they'll be able to reduce the power requirements. Look at the performance laptops now.
You can get a 2.8 MHz dual core Pentium 4 with 512 Mbyte RAM and a ATI/Nvidia graphics chips for less than $1500.
The use of transparent windows seems to be standard now, but would it be possible to create an OpenGL context which allowed the application to specify a transparent background color, which allow the current desktop to be seen underneath?Combine this with the "no window frames" option of X-windows, and some really cool visualisations could be written.
I used to like watch the re-runs on Fox Kids of the cartoons I watched when I was in high-school. That is until, I realised they were justing looping the first 14 episodes every two weeks.
Would I consider buying individual DVD's with packs of 10 episodes? No, I want to see the whole story from start to finish.
Would I buying the entire set of DVD's with every episode. Yes.
And there was a guy who carefully cased a bank, so he knew where all the security cameras were, when the bank staff left, and when the sliding doors automatically locked and unlocked. When the big day came, the prospective robber waited for the bank manager to leave. He then cut all the cables leading to the internal video cameras and proceeded to raid the bank. Then he tried to leave the same way he came in. Except there was a slight problem; when he cut the cables to the video cameras, he had also cut the power to the sliding doors, which automatically locked when there was a power failure. He was trapped in the bank until the next day, when the bank manager was the first person to arrive.
Not forgetting the bank robber who dressed up as a woman to disguise himself, only to leave a lip-print on the bank door.
This would increase the number of members in the union, which in turn would lead to a higher salary for the union management, and consequently more influence in trade meetings.
With the continuing redevelopment of brown-field sites, taxi drivers don't know the new streets anyway, while GIS/GPS systems are automatically updated once planning permission has been granted.
New developments tend to be on completely self-contained land with their own roads. Each development consists of quads of apartments surrounding a car-park, so every housing unit is located on a back-street off a side-street, and the main entrance will be obscured by newly planted trees. So every block of 12 flats will require a completely different route to be memorised. This is far differ ent from the long avenues and terraces that were typical in the past, where a taxi driver only had to know the number of one house to predict where all the others were.
Slashdot Mirror
They are. One method involves making use of telecommunications systems to provide information to areas that are not within easy physical access. But such communications systems cost money to run, especially if rates are charged on a per message or per minute basis. And it's not particularly helpful if that money is being wasted on sending/receiving spam messages. Getting rid of spam helps to get value for money.
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these. Robots, designed to serve and help mankind, a minor flaw,
There was a short story I remember reading (but completely lost the name of the author/title), which feature a man who was the last human being on Earth. Something on the lines of cryogenic storage is used to store people with terminal illnesses until they can be cured. During this time of his storage, the entire human population declines, with robots replacing much of the manual work. By this time the entire human population has gone, the entire planet is run by machines which give themselves the purpose of working on curing the remaining humans of their terminal illneses, but the humans die from the shock of regaining consciousness and not seeing any other humans around. The last human manages to survive this shock and proceeds to first search the continent, then the planet, then the solar system, then finally the nearest stars in the hope of finding life, all the time while bouncing in and out of cryogenic sleep for the odd million years. By the time the reports from the first exo-solar planets have been returned, the only life found is slow-moving plant-life, which doesn't impress the guy. After several billion years, when the sun has gone into the red-giant phase, the machines have found intelligent human life, even if they do have a slight greenish hue to their skin. The guy ends up travelling at warp-speed to the new planet to land on a paradise. Well, at least it was a happy ending.
It's not unknown for a retailer to claim to have a game available before the developer has actually released the product. One programmer I knew, actually saw the title he was currently working on, on sale by a mail-order company. It was rather amusing to call this company up, ask for details on the game, how well it was selling, what the reviews had been like etc.., then place an order only to find out the title had sold like hotcakes, and they were currently out of stock. He was so disappointed. He wanted to see what the game looked like so he could see where he could make improvements.
As for water being more radioactive after removal, umm... Source?
Here's the link. A Google search for "sellafield, ireland" will bring up the various links.
Sellafield, UK
What is so bad about Nuclear energy?
The main objection is that the waste products (fuel rods) remain radioactive for thousands of years and need constant observation. It usually proves to be very difficult to find a suitable location for such storage facilities. And if such a location is found, then there is much public opposition to the transportation of such materials by road or rail, due to the fear of contamination by an accident.
There is also objection to the environment due to the effect that the water used during power generation is slightly more radioactive than it was before it went in. Activists claim that the ocean currents/tides were not been studied thoroughly enough and that the radiation is gradually building up.
There is also the suspicion that the facilities are not properly maintained, and that "hot particles" of Plutonium/Uranium frequently leak out into the environment due to rusting equipment. Not helped by places such as Windscale.
There is also the issue that the water required for power generation ends up being several more degrees warmer that it was before, and disrupts ecosystems.
And there is also the fear of a plane crash or something similar onto a reactor.
Personally, I wouldn't object to nuclear energy if they put the reactor somewhere sensible like several miles underground in a disused mine. Then there wouldn't be any need transportation above ground. And they wouldn't have to worry about plane crashes, or leaks of "hot particles".
3683 4008 4015 4029 4051, 4053
Is there a pattern to this sequence of numbers?
Or are they the winning numbers in next weeks state lottery?
When we bought an Atari 800, I used the joysticks from the console system to play games. After much plugging and unplugging of the controllers, the plastic plugs became work out and the joysticks started failing. Since the connectors had nine pins, it seemed simple enough to replace these with a standard 9 pin RS-232 connector. This was easily done and the joysticks worked perfectly again.
All went well for several weeks, until I was working on a project and needed to plug in a controller. Unfortunately, the metal case of the connector hit the pins of the Atari 800 and formed a circuit with the earth the +5V pins. This consequently forced the Atari 800 to coldstart. After that, I always made sure the joysticks were plugged in before switching the computer on.
They don't get it. What we want is to be able to push a button and episode 28 of "I Dream of Jeannie" plays. Then after that, we push a button and Star Trek episode 52 plays.
If people could do that, what's to stop them viewing every episode of a particular series, recording it to PVR, making MPEG's/DVD's and never watching the channel again?
I don't think any linux users have a 4k stack of bills.
You haven't see my pile of credit card statements.
I'd rather see more of The Brigadier, even though I know he's getting a bit on in the years.
U.N.I.T was dismantled due to government cutbacks. The battle against alien invasions has been outsourced to private contractors who charge an upfront of 50% before fighting, and the remaining 50% after successfully defeating the invasion force. The rate will double if ther is more than one invasion force. An additional danger fee will also be charged if the aliens are coming from an hyperdimensional portal, stargate, wormhole or other form of interstellar travel. Any fighting on the other side of the portal will be billed separately.
According to the Dr Who. Weekly (a comic book that was originally the BBC's answer to Judge Dredd), the Dalek's had levitation disks.
Security is my number one priority. I recently bought a new laptop with Windows XP and a security firewall. No sooner had I connected my PC to the cable modem, then various security alert windows starting popping up (WIN_DCOM, WIN_LSASS) at least one every 5 minutes.
I filed a complaint to the cable TV company. The alert windows have stopped popping up, but since I never received any feedback from the cable company, I don't know if they have quarantined off the errant PC's or whether my PC has been compromised.
Asa result I'm switching over to Linux.
That's been the subject of previous Slashdot discussions
PS2 a Weapons Development Platform?
U.S. Eases Computer Export controls
I found the FAQ interesting too, and am truly amazed by the beauty of the images (I definitely want a 6-foot wall poster of Jupiter and the moons).
Given the problems with bits being cut off from images due to time/memory constraints, I wonder if it would be possible to design camera sensors so that the returned pixels are ordered so that you could get increasing resolutions through time ie. First the (even,even) pixel coordinates first, then (odd,odd), finally followed by (even,odd)/(odd,even) so that you'd always get a full image if at a lower resolution.
Won't stop Branson trying to break a record in it though.
He broke the record; Travelling the 22 miles frm England to France in less than two hours using a Ford Aquada (works out to be around 12 miles/hour).
"Missed the last ferry sir? Just drive down that ramp down there; take a left at the harbour wall, and keep going until you see the European continent."
"was not designed for mass export of all stored images" and said the system experiences "substantial problems."
It's a ZX Spectrum with a wobbly RAM pack?
Nowadays, this niche is largely filled with F/OSS.
For me, the interest in writing software is the chance to do something new and original, while still professional looking. With Windows, for any idea that you have, a quick search will immediately reveal that similar applications have already been written for Windows. While there are cheap, shareware applications that appear to have been knocked up over a weekend, there will always be at least one shareware version with custom skins, available boxed, with written manuals. For windows, the incentive of writing any piece of shareware, was that you just might have a chance of making some cash from your efforts. But when you see that you are competing against such products, it becomes immediately obvious that this isn't going to happen.
Linux, is still very much pioneer country.
You can do transparent windows in Windows XP as well. It's possible to set a global alpha on a window, and to specify transparency using a bitmap.
However, once you start using OpenGL or Direct3D, these will create custom contexts which are rectangular only. What I'd like to do is use the alpha channel of each pixel in the OpenGL framebuffer to control the transparency of that corresponding pixel. This would allow mouse clicks to pass straight through the window, onto the desktop below.
One gets used to the automatic spell check in KDE 3.2 in a big hurray.
There's nothing worse than receiving an order for "demonized water" from a chemistry lab.
Do we call them back for confirmation, or just try looking up the yellow pages for a witch-doctor?
I wonder how long before they offer the qualification of "Certified Pointy Haired Boss"?
These cards will be bought by the game developers and hardcore enthusiasts. Eventually, they'll be able to reduce the power requirements. Look at the performance laptops now.
You can get a 2.8 MHz dual core Pentium 4 with 512 Mbyte RAM and a ATI/Nvidia graphics chips for less than $1500.
The use of transparent windows seems to be standard now, but would it be possible to create an OpenGL context which allowed the application to specify a transparent background color, which allow the current desktop to be seen underneath?Combine this with the "no window frames" option of X-windows, and some really cool visualisations could be written.
I used to like watch the re-runs on Fox Kids of the cartoons I watched when I was in high-school. That is until, I realised they were justing looping the first 14 episodes every two weeks.
Would I consider buying individual DVD's with packs of 10 episodes? No, I want to see the whole story from start to finish.
Would I buying the entire set of DVD's with every episode. Yes.
And there was a guy who carefully cased a bank, so he knew where all the security cameras were, when the bank staff left, and when the sliding doors automatically locked and unlocked. When the big day came, the prospective robber waited for the bank manager to leave. He then cut all the cables leading to the internal video cameras and proceeded to raid the bank. Then he tried to leave the same way he came in. Except there was a slight problem; when he cut the cables to the video cameras, he had also cut the power to the sliding doors, which automatically locked when there was a power failure. He was trapped in the bank until the next day, when the bank manager was the first person to arrive.
Not forgetting the bank robber who dressed up as a woman to disguise himself, only to leave a lip-print on the bank door.
This would increase the number of members in the union, which in turn would lead to a higher salary for the union management, and consequently more influence in trade meetings.
With the continuing redevelopment of brown-field sites, taxi drivers don't know the new streets anyway, while GIS/GPS systems are automatically updated once planning permission has been granted.
New developments tend to be on completely self-contained land with their own roads. Each development consists of quads of apartments surrounding a car-park, so every housing unit is located on a back-street off a side-street, and the main entrance will be obscured by newly planted trees. So every block of 12 flats will require a completely different route to be memorised. This is far differ
ent from the long avenues and terraces that were typical in the past, where a taxi driver only had to know the number of one house to predict where all the others were.