If memory serves correctly the very first shuttle missions returned with entire missing heat tiles that broke off during ascent and where known to be gone. Much hand ringing, but a safe landing. No 2 ½ year delay while better adhesives were worked on for the tiles, though I am surprised some repair in space protocol was established back them.
The rather large hole in Columbia's wing did doom the mission and should have prompted an abort to land, or at least a repair attempt of some sort if no rescue could be attempted, even if it was just stuffing pieces of a spacesuit in the hole.
My point is, we didn't image the huge damage, but now we are being way to cautious with every nick and ding we are seeing in exquisite detail that were probably there in similar degrees on every previous mission. Am I the only one worried they are going to break something critical trying to fix these minor problems? It wasn't some minor airflow problem over Columbia that doomed the mission, but a gapping hole.
On a related note, it does seem that more debris is falling of the external tank than ever before. One reason for the increase shedding was explained as a change in fabrication techniques for the foam using ozone safe chemicals. This being speculated in the wake of loosing Columbia. Have we gone back to the older fab technique, or are the few shuttle launches a year just too much of a strain on the environment? Seriously, I support the replacement of dangerous CFCs, but only in situations where they don't endanger life. What percent of ozone depletion could the foam on the Shuttle possible represent?
Seems like NASA should concentrate on first causes, not this piddling after the fact stuff.
When NOBODY is "stupid enough" to be an early adopter then you will never have anything nice or new. How lucky of you to get all your goodies on the backs of those willing to pay more than the price point where you wisely step in. Man what chumps. Of course I'm in the chump camp with over 4K invested in a homebrew setup that I've been building for over 3 years. AND I SURE AS HELL AM NOT GOING TO BY HD-DVD EARLY if they are going to punish me for being an early adopter. Of course the upshot is, if the original (monnied/care-about-HD) don't buy HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray if similarly crippled) you won't get lost cost HD toys as early as you would like either.
HD is already slow to be adopted. While this has nothing to do with OTA transmission, it will likely hurt public acceptance of HDTV once again. Let's all just wait and see if there is an even more newer-newer-newer standard we'll be forced to switch to.
It occurs to me that one reason that popup advertising and flash advertising is so aggravating to many is the mixed media types it employs.
When you're in the mood for a read, you read. So the ads in magazines and newspapers match the type of sensory input you have chosen which is READING, and don't require any action to un-obscure what you are reading. Popup ads transform the passive act of reading into a forced interactive one.
When you watch a TV show or movie on TV you're in a video watching mode and ads while sometimes obnoxious or overly abundant don't tend t to be a jarring experience because they are presented in the same sensory input experience you have chosen to engage in. Ironically while many TV ads employ printed text also, it is rarely the only content of the ad and tends to be supplementary. If during your 30 minute viewing of a TV show you were subjected to 7 minutes of static, music less, text only ads you would probably have a similar amount of irritation.
For websites and games that are interactive in nature I predict the acceptance of popup type ads should/would be better since you would already be in an interactive mode state of mind. At $50 dollars a pop no one would tolerate active popup style ads in video games, but if Pepsi or Coke sponsored free game content that rivaled paid game content then you can bet game players would tolerate (with little complaint) interactive ads built into the game at between level intermissions. Call me immodest, but I would be surprised if my little post here doesn't start the hamster wheel turning in some marketing type's head (granted this idea has already been implemented to varying degrees already, and is no doubt in some stage of development somewhere for something by somebody).
My advise to advertisers who don't want to be hated, if not to be considered downright EVIL, don't mix modes when presenting ads. People have expectations for the types of experiences they engage in and don't want to be forced into another one involuntarily.
Granted this thing will be viewable by more than one individual at a time, but has was posted before this thing will have like 640x480 2D resolution max. I'd rather my Doctor look at Mega-Pixel image slices individually than make do with this crude imaging. My prediction: devices like this will only be good for walk around advertisements in crowded public areas.
My BETTER suggestion/solution: a screen than can be gimbaled 360 degrees in the horizontal and 90 degrees in the vertical. Project 2 polarized HIGH-resolution images on it for high-resolution stereo imaging (only a cheep pair of polarized glasses required for viewing). Now track the head of the viewer with an infrared beacon worn on the user's head and automatically swivel the display to be perpendicular. Display the appropriate image pair at whatever frame rate you wish.
I have seen near VR systems that track your head with a pole to accomplish the same effect, but only at a fixed distance and not a full 360. Head tracking in my suggestion could be accomplished at a variety of qualities.
1. 360 tracking only (no need to gimbal in the vertical).
2. Gimbal in both horizontal and vertical, but assume a constant distance (just track the head's direction from infrared beacon). Note: if there ins't a need to actually peer directly down on the object then no vertical gimbal would be needed. Vertical adjustments could be made from head tracking and image adjust for a reasonable range of angles, certainly upto 45 degrees.
3. Detect distance to head also with some kind of ranging based on the infrared beacon, adjusting the stereo pairs to maintain proper parallax.
4. Track head tilt with a tilt detector in the infrared beacon's housing, modulate this information into the beam so the image pair can also take head tilt into account in maintaining proper parallax for stereo viewing.
5. If you want to get really exotic you could track eye accommodation (focus), you would then have lenses counter adjust focus to keep optimum focus on the screen's actual location, then have the computer blur those parts of the 3D image not at the focus distance detected.
Two doctors consulting on one 3D image set -- two viewers. This method would be orders of magnitude cheaper for any given resolution. P.S. if anybody wants to run with the ball on my suggestions I wouldn't mind a kickback. Though in all likely hood all my suggestions are probably already being worked on in the lab.
CRTs days are numbered I think, though this will be inconvenient for multi-resolution needs until LCDs get MUCH smaller dot pitches so extrapolation artifacts are not so apparent.
I have used crystal Eyes in the Past for 3D imaging work I did for Wolfram Research, however you have to either give up half your horizontal resolution or half your refresh rate to use a single monitor.
I just saw Aliens of the Deep in IMAX 3D at Navy Pier in Chicago and it was glorious. Perhaps you should abandoned direct view and go to Front or Rear projection with 2 projectors. Each with Polarization filters at 90 degrees to one another like this \/
Then view with glass with polarization filters set to \ / also
The advantage of \ / vs. | -- is that you can't get the glasses backwards if they are the thin paper kind. This is also a much cheaper solution than CrystalEyes. The only downside to the polarization-based approach is that you have to keep your head vertical at all times. Some LCD shutter glasses detect head position and feed it back the render engine to maintain the 3D effect even if you tilt your head. This is very important for virtual games.
In any event with polarized projection it won't matter if it is a tri-beam CRT or a LCD bulb driven affair.
But I would plan on making the transition. CrystalEyes will always rely on VERY expensive high scan rate monitors for the same resolution as other current generation monitors.
Seriously these guys yammer on and on about how high tech and advanced the robot is for what seems like an hour, then set the stupid thing down to make one 3 second pass without even demonstrating it turning or navigating in any way -- it might has well have been a wind up toy.
Anyone that has a VGA monitor should be able to hook these things up to use 1080p.
I'm guessing that Sony will make the Component video out switchable to RGB. If not, you can get Component to RGB adapters.
At Home I watch DVD in 1080p straight from my computer on a 10' front projection screen (yes it is upconverted). Then I click a dial to watch HDTV off of my cablebox which comes out Component and goes through a component to VGA adapter.
The point is the Playstation 3 might be the appliance that truly ushers in HDTV as most everyone has VGA monitors that can be used as an entry level HDTV system, and unlike the crappy rear projection stuff you see at BestBuy and Wal-Mart these will work at 1080p not just 1080i or 720p.
At first this seems surprising, but of course we're not comparing Morse code to a Dvorak keyboard I'm guessing. Even so, a little thought would show that while the average Morse Key sequence is something between two and three key-presses, the finger doesn't have to move at all between them.
I would speculate that rather than a one to one mapping like Qwerty or Dvorak a faster system could be devised that used a combination of time domain mapping (Morse) and spatial mapping. Perhaps the ultimate system would have 5 or 6 keys and be usable with one hand only. Combinations of the keys representing the most used ASCII characters, with some multi tap shift to get the less frequent characters. The shift could be spatially encoded to give more up shift representations quickly than just clicking N times to get to the Nth shift-alt-ctrl. Think of the productivity of an IT worker with this device in one hand and the other always of the mouse. Or better yet 2 mice, one with conventional paste and cut usage, the other a combination of the keyboard I have just described, but and additional two degrees of freedom for cursor control (Z and Rotation?).
Despite Dvorak's 5 time advantage in average finger travel distance it still only gives a two time advantage in typing speed, and then only for the most advanced. Average Dvorak users get like a 20 to 30 percent speed boast. Significant for taking dictation, but not enough to get everyone else to switch. However, a completely new system that frees the hands to use the mouse and gives extra cursor control might have enough of and advantage to catch on if properly implemented. I would be surprised if there aren't already several experimental systems already developed. In a way my Cell Phone has time domain mapping, requiring you to hit the number keys between 1 and 3 times to register an alphabet character. It is not a sophisticated spatial mapping however, strictly a count to N and a timeout.
As long as we have some efficient spatially encoded shift, those upper shift combinations could encode say the most thousand or so common words and prefixes to additionally speed typing.
Oh what the hell, lets go with voice recognition, we're just about there in accuracy anyway.
I have several very intelligent colleagues that believe in Creationism and are devoutly Christian. I'm not sure how the debate came up, but in discussing evolution with one of them one on one, they pointed out the lack the of transitional fossils as proof that evolution did not occur. Now I believe that transitional fossils abound, but that is an aside. I then asked them: what if I could provide overwhelming transitional fossil evidence, would they then believe that Evolution was true? -- to which they replied no. I then asked what in their minds would be sufficient evidence to prove evolution over creationism to which they further replied they could provide no such example that would be sufficient because no such example could exist. I then abruptly disengaged from the debate because there was no point.
Here is my take on why the MPAA and RIAA will fail in trying to realize all of their draconian measures. We are headed into a sea of entertainment choices, and while the MPAA and the RIAA would like to make sailing these seas a cash cow with DMCA, it seems unlikely that will succeed. The RIAA is screaming about shrinking revenues and blames piracy. Piracy is a partial answer to why RIAA revenues are not increasing at projected rates. Actually shrinking (yet) is debatable depending on whose numbers you use. But here is a better list of reasons the RIAA is no longer getting what it thinks are its just dues:
People have been use to getting free music for decades -- ever since the birth of radio.
People used to feel the money paid on records was mostly in the physical process of making records and distributing them, but now they see with 10 cent CDROMS and 1/10 of a cent per Meg of disk space that playback mediums are now virtually free.
A lot of people feel recorded music is all advertising. Why would you listen to an artist if you hadn't already heard the artist and why would you pay for something you've already heard?
In the past people bought records they heard on the radio only because they didn't have a convenient way to record just the songs they wanted and to index, label, store, and retrieve them.
In the past people didn't feel like chumps for plunking down $10 for and album and $15 for a CD, because there weren't millions of others are getting this stuff for free. Let me make the point clearer - even if the RIAA scares someone into not downloading music from the net, the willingness to pay full price will also be diminished because the tantalizing free stuff lies just a wire away.
Some portion of the potential audience feels that musicians are over compensated, immoral, prima donnas that can't actually perform outside a recording studio without 100 retakes and then special post processing to improve their marginally capable voices.
Some people prefer live music and think money paid for a live show is the only real compensation music artists should expect.
Music artists and the RIAA are seen as hypocrites hawking anti-establishment messages and then looking for special rights, powers, and protection from the establishment to maintain their empire.
Ever since the death of the 45-rpm single, people have felt coerced into buying all of the songs on a CD or album when all they wanted was a song or two.
When people buy something they like to feel they actually own it and can do what ever they want with it. You can buy or subscribe to music singles again these days, but not without some flavor of DMCA. Some more draconian than others.
So ironically it is not that some huge percentage of the population is listening to bootleg music, though they probably would if the RIAA weren't fighting this loosing rear guard action, but that the cheapness of distributing music has been uncovered and become known because bootleggers exist. That Genie is not going back in the bottle -- maybe they should change their business models instead.
OK maybe I'm just showing my age here, but I think some episodes of TOS hold up extremely well and are well written. Yes the original series was not episodic, though the movies were.
I hold Mr. Cards books in high regard, but not necessarily his role as film critic. He makes some points, but not all of them are well founded. I would concede that TOS is like short fiction and later TV Sci-Fi like novels. Short stories are not by definition worse or more lowbrow than books. I would argue the same for this comparison of these two art forms (episodic versus non-episodic).
Production values are much higher these days, but that can sometimes be a detriment to story telling. Try viewing TOS and viewing it as a Play rather than a Movie and you might find its exaggerated acting holds up better.
Most off track is Card's indicating TOS could have benefited from the great writing talents of its day. It did. Several episode were penned by guests writers, well known Sci-Fi novelists of the day -- not so coincidently some of the best episodes. (I'm sure some other post will list the episodes and authors).
I wouldn't deny that TOS had some clinkers, but come on, compare it to "Lost in Space" or the hardly known "Star Lost" I'd say it took TV Sci-Fi twenty to thirty years to catch up where Star Trek had boldly gone.
Card, why you gotta be hatin'?
P.S. I have never been to a ST convention or worn vulcan rubber ears.
If sleep is for integrating experiences into an overall worldview and for formulating coping strategies by simulation then sleep probably will be needed by sentient machines in some fashion, however, being machines, if there is enough available horsepower then this function can be performed in parallel with wakefulness. Not doing so in parallel with most mammals and birds probably is to save having to have a brain twice as large with the required twice as large calorie drain. There are some very small-brained mammals that don't require sleep, but they probably don't have much of a worldview to improve upon.
Right now maybe it would be more practical to have a machine or robot cycle through sleep and wakefulness, like a baby maybe it would be a good idea to have sleep consume the majority of processing time. But Moore's Law will take care of the need for excessive downtime. As a really schizoid solution you could have a machine with two brains -- when one is awake the other is asleep.
I have a NEC1351 projector and can display in 1080i 1080p and 720p. I have looked in the show room and noticed a huge range of qualities in HDTV quality. Upconverting standard definition is by far the largest area of quality difference between various models, but that is a bit of an aside to this discussion. I have always been surprised at the number of show room models that wimp out at 720p and not even true 720p but some weird non 1280 horizontal number that has to be extrapolated no matter what the source. Three beam rear projection tube models generally support all resolutions, but have far less actual resolution than the raw numbers they sight on their spec sheets. My 1351 looks stellar compared to anything you will find at BestBuy, but I have done a lot of tweaking, and it is still short of absolute perfect 1080 performance, having to do with a range of factors I won't go into here. The point is even a high-end machine like mine is currently not maxing out the quality of a true HDTV signal yet. The HDTV signals themselves are of so huge a variance of quality you have to wonder what kind of Rube Goldberg solutions they are using behind the scenes in some cases.
I have seen pros and cons on how these sets do their sampling. Here is my advice -- go look at the picture on a set with a good HDTV source. Use the specs as a guide but don't trust them. Get what looks good to you. My father would never have been able to see anything more than the quality of a good DVD. He couldn't see the difference between crappy digital cable and DVD. Some people like me are so manic about visual quality we will devote huge amounts of time tweaking our systems. While my system is probably limited to about 1500 lines of resolutions due to the lenses, I find its image much warmer, uniform, and pleasing to the eye than the pixilated look of some very high-end flat screen solutions that go for 10-20k.
About the only thing that really shows how good HDTV can be is material that is shot originally with HDTV video cameras. Upconverting film inevitably introduces a softness that is exaggerated by systems like mine. For now you can only see a few things on the Discovery Channel and a few musical events in true HD (meaning not upcoverted from film). I mention this because while I advise you to go see for yourself (if possible) most stores don't really offer a good enough HD signal to display the difference. If you can hold out a little longer I would wait until either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players hit the shelves and then demand a demo with these HD sources to make a decision.
One final note, I haven't noticed that 1080i hasn't had as much comb-artifact during motion as I would have expected, but there still is a noticeable blurring during camera pans (maybe this is just combing in disguise). I'm sure I will get a little boast in quality when I can play off of a true 1080p source. If I were to design the next generation of video recorders I would introduce variable framing rates in playback. The picture being refreshed as high as120fps, but the actual picture updates depending on need for frames to eliminate motion blur. About motion blur, storing 120fps would be inefficient and overkill. The system I propose would make true frames at like 30-60fps, but as the camera moves, the edges would be scrolled in as needed to keep a smooth fluid motion. A really intelligent system might be able to also track one or two moving objects across this field and give them higher frame rates as well. At 2 mega pixels, I think we need to retrench and try to slay motion blur before going onto higher pixel counts.
I actually find this completely unsurprising. PI is completely UNRANDOM. It can be compressed very efficiently with the progression Pi =4 (1-1/3+1/5-1/7+1/9-...). It is even possible to derive binary or decimal digits of PI in isolation with a formula as well. My point is that since the digits can be represented as a formula, they may completely screw up other functions expecting randomness from them. When they do I would predict there is some deeper connection between the function being tested and Pi than is realized.
When you cite for example a deviation from a Chi distribution, then there is probably some connection between Chi and Pi that doesn't seem obvious from how Chi is calculated, but is there non-the-less.
I am not a mathematician (though I did work at Wolfram Research for ten years). I look forward to seeing real mathematicians take on this.
I can't imagine giving people more open standard options is a bad thing. If SVG in a regular page starts to take off Microsoft will have no choice but to offer SVG as well. Granted they'll try to pollute the standard and add Microsoft only extensions, but most major sites have learned their lesson and will code to the original common denominator of SVG.
Microsoft may alternately try to come up with their on completely proprietary version of SVG supported only in IE, but I think they would have a hard time now getting major support for IE only view of websites. Ah what a difference a year or two makes.
Keep on raising the bar FireFox -- make Microsoft support open standards instead of coming up with closed solutions on their own to fill a vacuum.
As for people complaining there will soon be too many unviewable sites in [insert your favorite browser], what major site would code to a base of 5%? More likely they would offer two ways to view the same content until the other browsers come on board. It'll never happen if you don't let new functionality in. No one wants Microsoft driving the evolution of Web standards (OK the folks in Redmond do).
Unlike Microsoft products and backward compatibility, these improvements will be well greeted because they won't break old HTML.
I rarely re-watch episodes of even my most favorite shows, but Battlestar Galactica is showing on the HDTV Universal Channel and it is glorious in HiDef. Hopefully Universal will re-air the Firefly series. I suspect that if more of the content on the HD channels were Sci-Fi and Fantasy there would be faster buy-in for HD. When you look at DVDs it's always the Sci-Fi and Fantasy stuff that are Mega sellers.
The networks really seem to have a love hate relationship with Sci-Fi Fantasy fans. They are not content to cater to a smaller demographic. While that same demographic will none the less be loyal and unwavering for a good show, and support said show with DVD purchases and Fan sites, proving while maybe a 1/2 to 1/3 the normal demographic for other fair, the long term property value is much Higher. Sci-Fi fans should let advertisers know that they are major consumers and will well reward brands that support our hunger for good alternate fair on TV.
I will probably hear some boos on this, but I find it ironic that Enterprise has been exceptional the last few episodes. I liked it in general, though it could have been better. I was not obsessive about its departure, but now they've decided to go out with a bang and have plots that are not retellings of TOS I am vexed. It would seem we will never get a third Evil-Universe story, it seemed like a cliffhanger. Granted the Evil-Universe thing was used kind of gimmicky in the DS9 series, but Enterprise has it right by leaving the main universe out. Probably just get tired of seeing all the PC hand ringing our characters do, and enjoying seeing people give into some raw animal emotions.
I doubt that binary computing will ever be done efficiently with biological components, but I have to wonder if it might be easier to use self assembling bacteria structures to build powerful neural like nets for things like pattern recognition, or possibly self assembling neural interfaces that integrate more easily with the cortex than crude electrodes.
I believe this refers to the ballistic conduction that takes place in carbon nano-tubes and is a quantum phenomenon. Basically electrons experience a small resistance entering and leaving a nano-tube, but then near zero resistance travelling along them.
Are you saying we should be able to compare the final numbers for 2005 to 2004 now, as opposed to 2003 to 2004?
I assume you mean to complain the stats weren't published in January I guess. Your comment is modded funny, and this may have been your goal. If not, just who do you think should be busting his or her ass to get you this timely information. Somebody got around to looking at the trend and published it, and you seem to be bitching they didn't personally call you on New Year Eve with the final stats.
Since the wavelength of blue light is 470nm, and the claim here is to have imaged down to 40nm with visible light, this must not be the case.
Keep in mind that light is not just a wave but a particle. I don't understand the physics of it, but being unable to focus both the nearfield and farfield aspects of a wave is what previously prevented ascertaining the exact location of the atom that emitted a specific photon. It will be interesting to see what the new limit on resolving will be. Perhaps theorectially we will be able to image individual atoms (though this wouldn't be my bet).
Yes the amateur forger will not be able to fool the average expert, but the details of how a picture is shot can no doubt add invaluable extra information in uncovering a very clever forger. I would have to think it is already much easier to produce a convincing digital forgery than with traditional photography.
You mustn't just think of what is needed for today, but for what is needed as photo editing tools become more sophisticated, least we find we are floating in a sea of fakes we are unaware of. Tools in the future may extrapolate lighting angles to more accurately include additions or hide subtractions from a photo. Image size and perspective might also be auto-calculated in the future. Shadows automatically inserted, etc. I see nothing technically that would prevent this. Whether a human is examining the scene or an automated computer analysis of some sort, this type of thing would have to make forgery detection harder. Granted we will have better forgery analysis tools in the future also. It will no doubt become an arms race of sorts if it hasn't already.
Keep in mind that if a tool exists to detect a fake, a forger can use the same tool to continue to improve his or her forgery skill. By needing to also make his fake consistent with physical setting captured at the time of shooting the original, his work will be much harder, hopefully impossible.
As to encrypting and signing, encryption has always been subject to breaking. In this case you only need generate key pairs consistant with your doctored photo, not match some preexisting pair that belonged to the orginal
This is exactly the kind of Hard-Science News I depend on Slashdot for. I have heard about this work with microwaves and was hoping it would apply to higher frequencies as well. I am curious why this doesn't make the main Slashdot page however. I'm tired of seeing article after article about software lawsuits. More Hard-Science News I say.
In speculation I imagine it might take 3 super lenses, one for each frequency of red-blue-green (from previous reading the lenses are frequency specific), but I suspect it should be possible to image things in full color below the diffraction limit by adding the images together after three scans. Some day perhaps we will know the real color of objects that are smaller than one wavelength of light. Maybe red blood cells have little speckles of blue that just don't show because of the diffraction limit. Who knows what we may find. Since color spectrum is related to chemical composition we may be able to discover material and chemical properties in complex objects (mostly organic) we had not guessed at because they where hidden by being smeared out in the average.
I find your remarks a bit stinging. As to that I may be "an armchair mathematician/physicist" I guess you would consider that a pejorative. I would consider myself kept quite abreast of developments in physics and quantum mechanics in a layman's sense.
It has been known for decades that electrons can only inhabit certain discrete shells of probability about the nucleolus of an atom. Similarly for the nucleolus, the protons and neutrons can only take up certain desirable configurations. We don't know all the details of how this comes to happen, but the laws of geometry and topology govern it, perhaps as a result of actions taking place in dimensions above the normal 3+1. This might give us another tool in predicting what these stable configurations might be on the elementary particle scale, whether they are electron orbits, or atomic nucleolus configurations, or quark bindings in mesons. This is what I was trying to say. Maybe I said it poorly, I was trying to be concise. Maybe this is still a string of fancy sounding words with no common thread to you.
I appreciate the kind words from StillNeedMoreCoffee in this mater. I was trying to be vague enough to include the possibility that it might have implication in Quantum Computing. In trying to be as general as possible perhaps I muddy my meaning and message. The reference to near Infinite was indeed a reference or guess has to how these possible configurations are settled into, by some not yet understood quantum mechanical operation that allows many things to be tried in parallel before deciding on the optimal solution and collapsing into it.
As to the Karma Whoring accusation, having looked at your log, you post often and get points, are you a Karma Whore? What would be the difference between us? I have had Excellent Karma for over two years. I care little for Karma and post to try to state opinions and get feedback. Feedback that is corrective or informative is the best. Yours would not pass that test.
If wanting to have a thread of discussion with others on my take of things is Karma Whoring then so be it. I would have thought this was the whole reason for Slashdot.
You make me sad. On the other hand you have challenged me to explain myself better, but I doubt that was your intent.
I generally applaud anything to do with opening up data standards. I have heard that several camera manufacturers include things like focal distance and exposure time, etc. to their image formats. Perhaps this is the norm, I'm not really into the specifics of digital photography. We now live in an age where it is trivial to retouch photographs for propaganda or to tamper with evidence. With adequately safeguarded setting info it becomes much harder for digital forgers to do their work. If you can easily get to all that data you can easily alter it.
Granted those with enough motivation, time, or money can circumvent any protections against forgery, but in trying to open up the standard it should be done in such a way to make it an nonreversible process, such that you can manipulate the images, but not be able to push them back into the original format.
I predict that at sometime in the future Digital Camera manufacturers may taught their cameras has having "evidence quality" data integrity. Perhaps some already do.
Granted this evidence integrity argument almost certainly has nothing to do with why most manufactures might choose to close up their data formats.
Slashdot Mirror
The rather large hole in Columbia's wing did doom the mission and should have prompted an abort to land, or at least a repair attempt of some sort if no rescue could be attempted, even if it was just stuffing pieces of a spacesuit in the hole.
My point is, we didn't image the huge damage, but now we are being way to cautious with every nick and ding we are seeing in exquisite detail that were probably there in similar degrees on every previous mission. Am I the only one worried they are going to break something critical trying to fix these minor problems? It wasn't some minor airflow problem over Columbia that doomed the mission, but a gapping hole.
On a related note, it does seem that more debris is falling of the external tank than ever before. One reason for the increase shedding was explained as a change in fabrication techniques for the foam using ozone safe chemicals. This being speculated in the wake of loosing Columbia. Have we gone back to the older fab technique, or are the few shuttle launches a year just too much of a strain on the environment? Seriously, I support the replacement of dangerous CFCs, but only in situations where they don't endanger life. What percent of ozone depletion could the foam on the Shuttle possible represent?
Seems like NASA should concentrate on first causes, not this piddling after the fact stuff.
HD is already slow to be adopted. While this has nothing to do with OTA transmission, it will likely hurt public acceptance of HDTV once again. Let's all just wait and see if there is an even more newer-newer-newer standard we'll be forced to switch to.
When you're in the mood for a read, you read. So the ads in magazines and newspapers match the type of sensory input you have chosen which is READING, and don't require any action to un-obscure what you are reading. Popup ads transform the passive act of reading into a forced interactive one.
When you watch a TV show or movie on TV you're in a video watching mode and ads while sometimes obnoxious or overly abundant don't tend t to be a jarring experience because they are presented in the same sensory input experience you have chosen to engage in. Ironically while many TV ads employ printed text also, it is rarely the only content of the ad and tends to be supplementary. If during your 30 minute viewing of a TV show you were subjected to 7 minutes of static, music less, text only ads you would probably have a similar amount of irritation.
For websites and games that are interactive in nature I predict the acceptance of popup type ads should/would be better since you would already be in an interactive mode state of mind. At $50 dollars a pop no one would tolerate active popup style ads in video games, but if Pepsi or Coke sponsored free game content that rivaled paid game content then you can bet game players would tolerate (with little complaint) interactive ads built into the game at between level intermissions. Call me immodest, but I would be surprised if my little post here doesn't start the hamster wheel turning in some marketing type's head (granted this idea has already been implemented to varying degrees already, and is no doubt in some stage of development somewhere for something by somebody).
My advise to advertisers who don't want to be hated, if not to be considered downright EVIL, don't mix modes when presenting ads. People have expectations for the types of experiences they engage in and don't want to be forced into another one involuntarily.
My BETTER suggestion/solution: a screen than can be gimbaled 360 degrees in the horizontal and 90 degrees in the vertical. Project 2 polarized HIGH-resolution images on it for high-resolution stereo imaging (only a cheep pair of polarized glasses required for viewing). Now track the head of the viewer with an infrared beacon worn on the user's head and automatically swivel the display to be perpendicular. Display the appropriate image pair at whatever frame rate you wish.
I have seen near VR systems that track your head with a pole to accomplish the same effect, but only at a fixed distance and not a full 360. Head tracking in my suggestion could be accomplished at a variety of qualities.
1. 360 tracking only (no need to gimbal in the vertical).
2. Gimbal in both horizontal and vertical, but assume a constant distance (just track the head's direction from infrared beacon). Note: if there ins't a need to actually peer directly down on the object then no vertical gimbal would be needed. Vertical adjustments could be made from head tracking and image adjust for a reasonable range of angles, certainly upto 45 degrees.
3. Detect distance to head also with some kind of ranging based on the infrared beacon, adjusting the stereo pairs to maintain proper parallax.
4. Track head tilt with a tilt detector in the infrared beacon's housing, modulate this information into the beam so the image pair can also take head tilt into account in maintaining proper parallax for stereo viewing.
5. If you want to get really exotic you could track eye accommodation (focus), you would then have lenses counter adjust focus to keep optimum focus on the screen's actual location, then have the computer blur those parts of the 3D image not at the focus distance detected.
Two doctors consulting on one 3D image set -- two viewers. This method would be orders of magnitude cheaper for any given resolution. P.S. if anybody wants to run with the ball on my suggestions I wouldn't mind a kickback. Though in all likely hood all my suggestions are probably already being worked on in the lab.
I have used crystal Eyes in the Past for 3D imaging work I did for Wolfram Research, however you have to either give up half your horizontal resolution or half your refresh rate to use a single monitor.
I just saw Aliens of the Deep in IMAX 3D at Navy Pier in Chicago and it was glorious. Perhaps you should abandoned direct view and go to Front or Rear projection with 2 projectors. Each with Polarization filters at 90 degrees to one another like this \ /
Then view with glass with polarization filters set to \ / also
The advantage of \ / vs. | -- is that you can't get the glasses backwards if they are the thin paper kind. This is also a much cheaper solution than CrystalEyes. The only downside to the polarization-based approach is that you have to keep your head vertical at all times. Some LCD shutter glasses detect head position and feed it back the render engine to maintain the 3D effect even if you tilt your head. This is very important for virtual games.
In any event with polarized projection it won't matter if it is a tri-beam CRT or a LCD bulb driven affair.
But I would plan on making the transition. CrystalEyes will always rely on VERY expensive high scan rate monitors for the same resolution as other current generation monitors.
At Home I watch DVD in 1080p straight from my computer on a 10' front projection screen (yes it is upconverted). Then I click a dial to watch HDTV off of my cablebox which comes out Component and goes through a component to VGA adapter.
The point is the Playstation 3 might be the appliance that truly ushers in HDTV as most everyone has VGA monitors that can be used as an entry level HDTV system, and unlike the crappy rear projection stuff you see at BestBuy and Wal-Mart these will work at 1080p not just 1080i or 720p.
I would speculate that rather than a one to one mapping like Qwerty or Dvorak a faster system could be devised that used a combination of time domain mapping (Morse) and spatial mapping. Perhaps the ultimate system would have 5 or 6 keys and be usable with one hand only. Combinations of the keys representing the most used ASCII characters, with some multi tap shift to get the less frequent characters. The shift could be spatially encoded to give more up shift representations quickly than just clicking N times to get to the Nth shift-alt-ctrl. Think of the productivity of an IT worker with this device in one hand and the other always of the mouse. Or better yet 2 mice, one with conventional paste and cut usage, the other a combination of the keyboard I have just described, but and additional two degrees of freedom for cursor control (Z and Rotation?).
Despite Dvorak's 5 time advantage in average finger travel distance it still only gives a two time advantage in typing speed, and then only for the most advanced. Average Dvorak users get like a 20 to 30 percent speed boast. Significant for taking dictation, but not enough to get everyone else to switch. However, a completely new system that frees the hands to use the mouse and gives extra cursor control might have enough of and advantage to catch on if properly implemented. I would be surprised if there aren't already several experimental systems already developed. In a way my Cell Phone has time domain mapping, requiring you to hit the number keys between 1 and 3 times to register an alphabet character. It is not a sophisticated spatial mapping however, strictly a count to N and a timeout.
As long as we have some efficient spatially encoded shift, those upper shift combinations could encode say the most thousand or so common words and prefixes to additionally speed typing.
Oh what the hell, lets go with voice recognition, we're just about there in accuracy anyway.
I have several very intelligent colleagues that believe in Creationism and are devoutly Christian. I'm not sure how the debate came up, but in discussing evolution with one of them one on one, they pointed out the lack the of transitional fossils as proof that evolution did not occur. Now I believe that transitional fossils abound, but that is an aside. I then asked them: what if I could provide overwhelming transitional fossil evidence, would they then believe that Evolution was true? -- to which they replied no. I then asked what in their minds would be sufficient evidence to prove evolution over creationism to which they further replied they could provide no such example that would be sufficient because no such example could exist. I then abruptly disengaged from the debate because there was no point.
- People have been use to getting free music for decades -- ever since the birth of radio.
- People used to feel the money paid on records was mostly in the physical process of making records and distributing them, but now they see with 10 cent CDROMS and 1/10 of a cent per Meg of disk space that playback mediums are now virtually free.
- A lot of people feel recorded music is all advertising. Why would you listen to an artist if you hadn't already heard the artist and why would you pay for something you've already heard?
- In the past people bought records they heard on the radio only because they didn't have a convenient way to record just the songs they wanted and to index, label, store, and retrieve them.
- In the past people didn't feel like chumps for plunking down $10 for and album and $15 for a CD, because there weren't millions of others are getting this stuff for free. Let me make the point clearer - even if the RIAA scares someone into not downloading music from the net, the willingness to pay full price will also be diminished because the tantalizing free stuff lies just a wire away.
- Some portion of the potential audience feels that musicians are over compensated, immoral, prima donnas that can't actually perform outside a recording studio without 100 retakes and then special post processing to improve their marginally capable voices.
- Some people prefer live music and think money paid for a live show is the only real compensation music artists should expect.
- Music artists and the RIAA are seen as hypocrites hawking anti-establishment messages and then looking for special rights, powers, and protection from the establishment to maintain their empire.
- Ever since the death of the 45-rpm single, people have felt coerced into buying all of the songs on a CD or album when all they wanted was a song or two.
- When people buy something they like to feel they actually own it and can do what ever they want with it. You can buy or subscribe to music singles again these days, but not without some flavor of DMCA. Some more draconian than others.
So ironically it is not that some huge percentage of the population is listening to bootleg music, though they probably would if the RIAA weren't fighting this loosing rear guard action, but that the cheapness of distributing music has been uncovered and become known because bootleggers exist. That Genie is not going back in the bottle -- maybe they should change their business models instead.I hold Mr. Cards books in high regard, but not necessarily his role as film critic. He makes some points, but not all of them are well founded. I would concede that TOS is like short fiction and later TV Sci-Fi like novels. Short stories are not by definition worse or more lowbrow than books. I would argue the same for this comparison of these two art forms (episodic versus non-episodic).
Production values are much higher these days, but that can sometimes be a detriment to story telling. Try viewing TOS and viewing it as a Play rather than a Movie and you might find its exaggerated acting holds up better.
Most off track is Card's indicating TOS could have benefited from the great writing talents of its day. It did. Several episode were penned by guests writers, well known Sci-Fi novelists of the day -- not so coincidently some of the best episodes. (I'm sure some other post will list the episodes and authors).
I wouldn't deny that TOS had some clinkers, but come on, compare it to "Lost in Space" or the hardly known "Star Lost" I'd say it took TV Sci-Fi twenty to thirty years to catch up where Star Trek had boldly gone.
Card, why you gotta be hatin'?
P.S. I have never been to a ST convention or worn vulcan rubber ears.
Right now maybe it would be more practical to have a machine or robot cycle through sleep and wakefulness, like a baby maybe it would be a good idea to have sleep consume the majority of processing time. But Moore's Law will take care of the need for excessive downtime. As a really schizoid solution you could have a machine with two brains -- when one is awake the other is asleep.
I have seen pros and cons on how these sets do their sampling. Here is my advice -- go look at the picture on a set with a good HDTV source. Use the specs as a guide but don't trust them. Get what looks good to you. My father would never have been able to see anything more than the quality of a good DVD. He couldn't see the difference between crappy digital cable and DVD. Some people like me are so manic about visual quality we will devote huge amounts of time tweaking our systems. While my system is probably limited to about 1500 lines of resolutions due to the lenses, I find its image much warmer, uniform, and pleasing to the eye than the pixilated look of some very high-end flat screen solutions that go for 10-20k.
About the only thing that really shows how good HDTV can be is material that is shot originally with HDTV video cameras. Upconverting film inevitably introduces a softness that is exaggerated by systems like mine. For now you can only see a few things on the Discovery Channel and a few musical events in true HD (meaning not upcoverted from film). I mention this because while I advise you to go see for yourself (if possible) most stores don't really offer a good enough HD signal to display the difference. If you can hold out a little longer I would wait until either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players hit the shelves and then demand a demo with these HD sources to make a decision.
One final note, I haven't noticed that 1080i hasn't had as much comb-artifact during motion as I would have expected, but there still is a noticeable blurring during camera pans (maybe this is just combing in disguise). I'm sure I will get a little boast in quality when I can play off of a true 1080p source. If I were to design the next generation of video recorders I would introduce variable framing rates in playback. The picture being refreshed as high as120fps, but the actual picture updates depending on need for frames to eliminate motion blur. About motion blur, storing 120fps would be inefficient and overkill. The system I propose would make true frames at like 30-60fps, but as the camera moves, the edges would be scrolled in as needed to keep a smooth fluid motion. A really intelligent system might be able to also track one or two moving objects across this field and give them higher frame rates as well. At 2 mega pixels, I think we need to retrench and try to slay motion blur before going onto higher pixel counts.
When you cite for example a deviation from a Chi distribution, then there is probably some connection between Chi and Pi that doesn't seem obvious from how Chi is calculated, but is there non-the-less.
I am not a mathematician (though I did work at Wolfram Research for ten years). I look forward to seeing real mathematicians take on this.
Microsoft may alternately try to come up with their on completely proprietary version of SVG supported only in IE, but I think they would have a hard time now getting major support for IE only view of websites. Ah what a difference a year or two makes.
Keep on raising the bar FireFox -- make Microsoft support open standards instead of coming up with closed solutions on their own to fill a vacuum.
As for people complaining there will soon be too many unviewable sites in [insert your favorite browser], what major site would code to a base of 5%? More likely they would offer two ways to view the same content until the other browsers come on board. It'll never happen if you don't let new functionality in. No one wants Microsoft driving the evolution of Web standards (OK the folks in Redmond do).
Unlike Microsoft products and backward compatibility, these improvements will be well greeted because they won't break old HTML.
The networks really seem to have a love hate relationship with Sci-Fi Fantasy fans. They are not content to cater to a smaller demographic. While that same demographic will none the less be loyal and unwavering for a good show, and support said show with DVD purchases and Fan sites, proving while maybe a 1/2 to 1/3 the normal demographic for other fair, the long term property value is much Higher. Sci-Fi fans should let advertisers know that they are major consumers and will well reward brands that support our hunger for good alternate fair on TV.
I will probably hear some boos on this, but I find it ironic that Enterprise has been exceptional the last few episodes. I liked it in general, though it could have been better. I was not obsessive about its departure, but now they've decided to go out with a bang and have plots that are not retellings of TOS I am vexed. It would seem we will never get a third Evil-Universe story, it seemed like a cliffhanger. Granted the Evil-Universe thing was used kind of gimmicky in the DS9 series, but Enterprise has it right by leaving the main universe out. Probably just get tired of seeing all the PC hand ringing our characters do, and enjoying seeing people give into some raw animal emotions.
I can't help notice the one and only visible point of light in the upper right sky. Could that possibly be Earth?
Coming soon, debugging bugs.
I believe this refers to the ballistic conduction that takes place in carbon nano-tubes and is a quantum phenomenon. Basically electrons experience a small resistance entering and leaving a nano-tube, but then near zero resistance travelling along them.
I assume you mean to complain the stats weren't published in January I guess. Your comment is modded funny, and this may have been your goal. If not, just who do you think should be busting his or her ass to get you this timely information. Somebody got around to looking at the trend and published it, and you seem to be bitching they didn't personally call you on New Year Eve with the final stats.
Chill.
Keep in mind that light is not just a wave but a particle. I don't understand the physics of it, but being unable to focus both the nearfield and farfield aspects of a wave is what previously prevented ascertaining the exact location of the atom that emitted a specific photon. It will be interesting to see what the new limit on resolving will be. Perhaps theorectially we will be able to image individual atoms (though this wouldn't be my bet).
You mustn't just think of what is needed for today, but for what is needed as photo editing tools become more sophisticated, least we find we are floating in a sea of fakes we are unaware of. Tools in the future may extrapolate lighting angles to more accurately include additions or hide subtractions from a photo. Image size and perspective might also be auto-calculated in the future. Shadows automatically inserted, etc. I see nothing technically that would prevent this. Whether a human is examining the scene or an automated computer analysis of some sort, this type of thing would have to make forgery detection harder. Granted we will have better forgery analysis tools in the future also. It will no doubt become an arms race of sorts if it hasn't already.
Keep in mind that if a tool exists to detect a fake, a forger can use the same tool to continue to improve his or her forgery skill. By needing to also make his fake consistent with physical setting captured at the time of shooting the original, his work will be much harder, hopefully impossible.
As to encrypting and signing, encryption has always been subject to breaking. In this case you only need generate key pairs consistant with your doctored photo, not match some preexisting pair that belonged to the orginal
In speculation I imagine it might take 3 super lenses, one for each frequency of red-blue-green (from previous reading the lenses are frequency specific), but I suspect it should be possible to image things in full color below the diffraction limit by adding the images together after three scans. Some day perhaps we will know the real color of objects that are smaller than one wavelength of light. Maybe red blood cells have little speckles of blue that just don't show because of the diffraction limit. Who knows what we may find. Since color spectrum is related to chemical composition we may be able to discover material and chemical properties in complex objects (mostly organic) we had not guessed at because they where hidden by being smeared out in the average.
It has been known for decades that electrons can only inhabit certain discrete shells of probability about the nucleolus of an atom. Similarly for the nucleolus, the protons and neutrons can only take up certain desirable configurations. We don't know all the details of how this comes to happen, but the laws of geometry and topology govern it, perhaps as a result of actions taking place in dimensions above the normal 3+1. This might give us another tool in predicting what these stable configurations might be on the elementary particle scale, whether they are electron orbits, or atomic nucleolus configurations, or quark bindings in mesons. This is what I was trying to say. Maybe I said it poorly, I was trying to be concise. Maybe this is still a string of fancy sounding words with no common thread to you.
I appreciate the kind words from StillNeedMoreCoffee in this mater. I was trying to be vague enough to include the possibility that it might have implication in Quantum Computing. In trying to be as general as possible perhaps I muddy my meaning and message. The reference to near Infinite was indeed a reference or guess has to how these possible configurations are settled into, by some not yet understood quantum mechanical operation that allows many things to be tried in parallel before deciding on the optimal solution and collapsing into it.
As to the Karma Whoring accusation, having looked at your log, you post often and get points, are you a Karma Whore? What would be the difference between us? I have had Excellent Karma for over two years. I care little for Karma and post to try to state opinions and get feedback. Feedback that is corrective or informative is the best. Yours would not pass that test.
If wanting to have a thread of discussion with others on my take of things is Karma Whoring then so be it. I would have thought this was the whole reason for Slashdot.
You make me sad. On the other hand you have challenged me to explain myself better, but I doubt that was your intent.
Granted those with enough motivation, time, or money can circumvent any protections against forgery, but in trying to open up the standard it should be done in such a way to make it an nonreversible process, such that you can manipulate the images, but not be able to push them back into the original format.
I predict that at sometime in the future Digital Camera manufacturers may taught their cameras has having "evidence quality" data integrity. Perhaps some already do.
Granted this evidence integrity argument almost certainly has nothing to do with why most manufactures might choose to close up their data formats.