There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases.
Aside from the obvious privacy implications, this is what bothers me most about this program. We had enough information to stop 9/11 before it happened, but that information did not flow to the right people. Now, instead of making info flow the primary concern, they've added more data to the system. The likely result? More gridlock, and more missed opportunities.
AT&T apparently gave NSA access to databases containing telephone call logs, email content, and web addresses visited, not the raw stream of bits going through their routers. More sources: Wired and The Register. So it's not all internet traffic.
Still an egregious abuse of privacy, IMHO, and one of the reasons I donate to the EFF.
From the article: "Patients treated with "two-tiered" prayer had absolute six-month death and re-hospitalization rates that were about 30 percent lower than control patients, statistically characterized as a suggestive trend."
"Six-month mortality was lower in patients assigned bedside MIT, with the lowest absolute death rates observed in patients treated with both prayer and bedside MIT."
So, prayer did have a statistically significant benefit, according to the study. Note that the entities prayed to were drawn from many religions, suggesting that the act of prayer is the important thing, not so much entity prayed to. So you should be fine praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Blockbuster seems to have major problems with not having enough copies of movies available. I recently had rougly 40 movies in my Blockbuster queue. Of those, only six were listed as "available." Several were listed as "short wait", but a distressing majority were "long wait" or "very long wait." I checked the same movies in a friend's Netflix account. The results? Only three of those ~40 movies were not immediately available.
Disclaimer: Of course, this is just my experience. YMMV.
According to TechTV's "The Screen Savers" (computer help and trends show, for those not familiar), who have interviewed Lamo several times, he has struck a deal with the Feds to server six months in Federal prison. He was asking for six months of home detention, but he still ended up a heck of a lot better than five years!
My enterprise just rolled out something called BigFix that is supposed to allow them to provide patches immediately upon their release. It seems to be basically a cusomizable Windows Automatic Updates system. My understanding is that the user still has to allow the patches to be installed, which is a potential problem.
Does anyone have any experience or additional info about BigFix?
"Pate was wavering whether to call the RIAA to negotiate a settlement. "Should I call a lawyer?" he wondered.
The RIAA's president was not sure what advice to offer because he never imagined downloaders could be identified until Internet providers turned over subscriber records, as the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires them to do.
"It's not a scenario we had truthfully envisaged," Sherman said. "If somebody wants to settle before a lawsuit is filed it would be fine to call us, but it's really not clear how we're going to perceive this.""
They expect us to believe they haven't had this scripted for months? Come on, they know exactly what they're doing!
Keep those bits from building up in e-landfills!
on
Japan's War On E-Waste
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· Score: 2, Informative
Re:U2..? High speed...?
on
Secret Empire
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Last year I particpated in a U-2 launch as a ground crew member. Actually, it was one of NASA'a ER-2s, which are U-2s that are painted white. NASA obtained two U-2s from the Air Force to fly a wide range of sensors, such as the AVIRIS hyperspectral imager. IIRC, the usual mission speed is 410 knots.
The launch was an awesome experience. Those aircraft (nicknamed the "Dragon Lady") are a different breed. The wingspan is huge and the cockpit is very spartan and cramped. I really admire the pilots who sit in those things for 8-10 hours at a time while wearing a bulky spacesuit.
Indeed. Given that we can get one-meter or better spatial resolution panchromatic data from commercial sources now (http://www.digitalglobe.com/index.shtml and http://www.spaceimaging.com), one wonders what the government is up to.
Now, when the multispectral resolution gets to below one-meter we'll have reason to be really excited.
Well, maybe they don't *prevent* RSI and CTS, but they may help to reduce the effects. I used to have major RSI problems and switched to an ergo keyboard and a trackball two years ago. Now, whenever I use a non-ergo keyboard (or a regular mouse, for that matter) for any length of time, my wrists start to stiffen up again. Psychosomatic? I don't think so.
Having used everything from 1km AVHRR data to 1m Ikonos data in my remote sensing Ph.D. research, I hope I can provide some illuminating info here. The privacy concerns voiced here are somewhat alarmist. There are several factors that make it difficult for users of Quickbird 2's 0.61-meter imagery to effectively spy on people:
1. 0.61-meter data is simply not of sufficent spatial resolution to identify people. The best you can do is to say that there's a human-sized object in the image.
2. The average revisit time of Quickbird 2 is 3.5 days (due to its 93 minute sun-synchronous orbit). So there's a window every 3.5 days where there's even the *possibility* of getting data from a particular location.
3. Many parts of the world are cloud or haze (or smog) covered much of the time. Optical sensors are confounded by this. Now, if you use radar sensors you can see through the clouds, but the resolution of commercially available radar isn't as high as that offered by Quickbird 2 (~8m for Canada's RADARSAT).
4. These data sets are IMMENSE. The area of interest has to be really important for someone to invest the money and time to develop the infrastructure (hardware and software) to process the huge quantities of data that can come from repeated collects.
5. It's very expensive. Decent quality Ikonos 1m data costs $55 per sq. km. with a minimum purchase of 100 sq. km. Clearly, your average guy isn't going to be buying the stuff. Prices will fall as more sensors come online, but the data will be prohibitively expensive for quite a while.
Now, all of that is obviated by the capabilities of the U.S. government; they likely have much higher resolution sensors (maybe even 5cm or so). But, there are much simpler ways of keeping track of people than using satellite imagery (phone taps, carnivore, video cameras, etc. come to mind).
So, let's relax and celebrate the fact that scientists finally have high resolution tools with which to do some really cool research!
Re:space imaging nyc image Why different resolutio
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
The thumbnails are different "zooms". However, if you check out the full resolution images by clicking on the thumbnails you'll see the real detail level of the images.
Re:space imaging nyc image TECHNICAL INFO
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
A bit of clarification about these images. They are not RADAR and they are not just scanned photographs. The Ikonos (Greek for "image") satellite can be thought of as having two really advanced digital cameras onboard. One sensor has a resolution of one meter and takes panchromatic (black and white) images over the interval 0.45-0.90 um. This encompasses the blue, green, red, and near infra-red portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The second sensor has a resolution of four meters and takes multispectral images in four bands (sensitivity ranges) as follows:
0.45-0.52 um (blue)
0.52-0.60 um (green)
0.63-0.69 um (red)
0.76-0.90 um (near-IR)
Of the Ikonos images that you see on Space Imaging's site (and mirrored here http://www.ceo.ncsu.edu/attack ), the first two and the last two result from a fusion of the panchromatic and multispectral images (using bands 1, 2, and 3) to create a one meter resolution natural color composite image. The third image is a one meter panchromatic scene.
BTW, the stuff that looks like smoke in the black and white "pre" image is clouds. Remember, these images were taken from space, and so can be obscured by atmospheric phenomenae.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases.
Aside from the obvious privacy implications, this is what bothers me most about this program. We had enough information to stop 9/11 before it happened, but that information did not flow to the right people. Now, instead of making info flow the primary concern, they've added more data to the system. The likely result? More gridlock, and more missed opportunities.
AT&T apparently gave NSA access to databases containing telephone call logs, email content, and web addresses visited, not the raw stream of bits going through their routers. More sources: Wired and The Register. So it's not all internet traffic.
Still an egregious abuse of privacy, IMHO, and one of the reasons I donate to the EFF.
From the article:
"Patients treated with "two-tiered" prayer had absolute six-month death and re-hospitalization rates that were about 30 percent lower than control patients, statistically characterized as a suggestive trend."
"Six-month mortality was lower in patients assigned bedside MIT, with the lowest absolute death rates observed in patients treated with both prayer and bedside MIT."
So, prayer did have a statistically significant benefit, according to the study. Note that the entities prayed to were drawn from many religions, suggesting that the act of prayer is the important thing, not so much entity prayed to. So you should be fine praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
My startup company has just released its first product, but since it is made up of geeks...
Your product is made of geeks? Is that legal? How are the geeks prepared? Fried, pureed?
Does anyone else think the "satellite" in that image looks like a Viper from Battlestar Galactica?
Mars Odyssey
Viper
Good to know Mars is protected from the Cylons!
Blockbuster seems to have major problems with not having enough copies of movies available. I recently had rougly 40 movies in my Blockbuster queue. Of those, only six were listed as "available." Several were listed as "short wait", but a distressing majority were "long wait" or "very long wait." I checked the same movies in a friend's Netflix account. The results? Only three of those ~40 movies were not immediately available.
Disclaimer: Of course, this is just my experience. YMMV.
If you play if backwards and turn up the volume you'll hear, "Developers, developers, developers, developers!"
I guess the pr0n search engine, Booble, is next!
(Not safe for work.)
According to TechTV's "The Screen Savers" (computer help and trends show, for those not familiar), who have interviewed Lamo several times, he has struck a deal with the Feds to server six months in Federal prison. He was asking for six months of home detention, but he still ended up a heck of a lot better than five years!
My enterprise just rolled out something called BigFix that is supposed to allow them to provide patches immediately upon their release. It seems to be basically a cusomizable Windows Automatic Updates system. My understanding is that the user still has to allow the patches to be installed, which is a potential problem.
Does anyone have any experience or additional info about BigFix?
Linux Kernel Hacking for Dummies!
Really, if you use/need Solaris, you're probably not a "dummy".
"Pate was wavering whether to call the RIAA to negotiate a settlement. "Should I call a lawyer?" he wondered.
The RIAA's president was not sure what advice to offer because he never imagined downloaders could be identified until Internet providers turned over subscriber records, as the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires them to do.
"It's not a scenario we had truthfully envisaged," Sherman said. "If somebody wants to settle before a lawsuit is filed it would be fine to call us, but it's really not clear how we're going to perceive this.""
They expect us to believe they haven't had this scripted for months? Come on, they know exactly what they're doing!
Check out this "related" article!
Environmental Group Fears Growing Problem of Digital Waste
Last year I particpated in a U-2 launch as a ground crew member. Actually, it was one of NASA'a ER-2s, which are U-2s that are painted white. NASA obtained two U-2s from the Air Force to fly a wide range of sensors, such as the AVIRIS hyperspectral imager. IIRC, the usual mission speed is 410 knots. The launch was an awesome experience. Those aircraft (nicknamed the "Dragon Lady") are a different breed. The wingspan is huge and the cockpit is very spartan and cramped. I really admire the pilots who sit in those things for 8-10 hours at a time while wearing a bulky spacesuit.
Will they be setting up servers to share pirated music and video or something??? Oh, wait...
Indeed. Given that we can get one-meter or better spatial resolution panchromatic data from commercial sources now (http://www.digitalglobe.com/index.shtml and http://www.spaceimaging.com), one wonders what the government is up to. Now, when the multispectral resolution gets to below one-meter we'll have reason to be really excited.
Well, maybe they don't *prevent* RSI and CTS, but they may help to reduce the effects. I used to have major RSI problems and switched to an ergo keyboard and a trackball two years ago. Now, whenever I use a non-ergo keyboard (or a regular mouse, for that matter) for any length of time, my wrists start to stiffen up again. Psychosomatic? I don't think so.
Having used everything from 1km AVHRR data to 1m Ikonos data in my remote sensing Ph.D. research, I hope I can provide some illuminating info here. The privacy concerns voiced here are somewhat alarmist. There are several factors that make it difficult for users of Quickbird 2's 0.61-meter imagery to effectively spy on people:
1. 0.61-meter data is simply not of sufficent spatial resolution to identify people. The best you can do is to say that there's a human-sized object in the image.
2. The average revisit time of Quickbird 2 is 3.5 days (due to its 93 minute sun-synchronous orbit). So there's a window every 3.5 days where there's even the *possibility* of getting data from a particular location.
3. Many parts of the world are cloud or haze (or smog) covered much of the time. Optical sensors are confounded by this. Now, if you use radar sensors you can see through the clouds, but the resolution of commercially available radar isn't as high as that offered by Quickbird 2 (~8m for Canada's RADARSAT).
4. These data sets are IMMENSE. The area of interest has to be really important for someone to invest the money and time to develop the infrastructure (hardware and software) to process the huge quantities of data that can come from repeated collects.
5. It's very expensive. Decent quality Ikonos 1m data costs $55 per sq. km. with a minimum purchase of 100 sq. km. Clearly, your average guy isn't going to be buying the stuff. Prices will fall as more sensors come online, but the data will be prohibitively expensive for quite a while.
Now, all of that is obviated by the capabilities of the U.S. government; they likely have much higher resolution sensors (maybe even 5cm or so). But, there are much simpler ways of keeping track of people than using satellite imagery (phone taps, carnivore, video cameras, etc. come to mind).
So, let's relax and celebrate the fact that scientists finally have high resolution tools with which to do some really cool research!
The thumbnails are different "zooms". However, if you check out the full resolution images by clicking on the thumbnails you'll see the real detail level of the images.
A bit of clarification about these images. They are not RADAR and they are not just scanned photographs. The Ikonos (Greek for "image") satellite can be thought of as having two really advanced digital cameras onboard. One sensor has a resolution of one meter and takes panchromatic (black and white) images over the interval 0.45-0.90 um. This encompasses the blue, green, red, and near infra-red portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The second sensor has a resolution of four meters and takes multispectral images in four bands (sensitivity ranges) as follows:
0.45-0.52 um (blue)
0.52-0.60 um (green)
0.63-0.69 um (red)
0.76-0.90 um (near-IR)
Of the Ikonos images that you see on Space Imaging's site (and mirrored here http://www.ceo.ncsu.edu/attack ), the first two and the last two result from a fusion of the panchromatic and multispectral images (using bands 1, 2, and 3) to create a one meter resolution natural color composite image. The third image is a one meter panchromatic scene.
BTW, the stuff that looks like smoke in the black and white "pre" image is clouds. Remember, these images were taken from space, and so can be obscured by atmospheric phenomenae.
Hope that helps.