You can find out more here about how advancing economies tend to have reductions in fertility rates, and that the UN now thinks global population will only be 8.9 billion by mid-century.
Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is more about why Europe could colonize and crush the rest of world, instead of say Paraguay colonizing England.
Sure, once a society has advanced technology and economy, it can do all kinds of things. The question is, how did those civilizations get to that point?
A modern SUV produces much less pollution than 70's econobox, when we are talking about things like lead, carbon monoxide, and NOx's. It does produce more CO2 per mile - that's another story altogether.
People buy SUVs because of an incredible economic expansion since the last Gulf War. Plus, they are just damn convenient for when you want to move big stuff.
In the Washington, DC area, jobs have been added over the last year. This is the place to be.
Yes, the surf isn't good, and you have to deal with the occasional snow, and you may have to work for a company that designs better ways to kill people (fortunately I'm not...)
I agree with the poster that talked about Cygwin. Cygwin provides the shell and favorite Unix commands you need to make Windows a usable operating system. I put it on all the Windows boxes I need to do anything serious with.
And, oh yeah, I still have Visual Basic to make 5 minute complex GUI functions, and Visual Studio to build C# web service clients in 30 seconds from the WSDL.
Sony is pushing the "Blue Ray" DVD storage for their professional cameras.
I think the big win by Panasonic is not to have people pull out the PCMCIA cards, but to uplink video over Firewire or high-speed wireless from the camera. The PCMCIA cards should just be ways of installing or upgrading memory.
While PCMCIA cards aren't durable in terms of putting-in, pulling-out, once in place they don't need any maintenance, unlike tape mechanisms or DVD drives.
Panasonic is pushing SD memory cameras for professional broadcast use.
When you buy a $20,000-$50,000 camera, that is only the beginning. Each year you pay thousands of dollars to clean and align tape heads and other maintenance.
By going totally solid-state for the media, you reduce maintenance downtime and costs. Plus the tape drive is a power hog, so you increase battery life as well.
The Panasonic SD-based cameras are a move to the "tapeless" environment, which promises more efficient workflows through broadcast entities. Instead of going to tape and then digitizing, you just download the file from the camera (perhaps using high-speed wireless) right into the editing system.
Sony on the other hand is standardizing around "blue ray" high-capacity writable DVDs for pro video cameras.
Dynamic range is being solved by CMOS focal plane array processing, just like our retina does. Infact, CMOS sensors can probably have a much higher dynamic range than film.
Expect to see CMOS sensors like the Foveon in cameras soon.
Re:This is actually major news to some people
on
First HDTV Camcorder
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Mark Cuban's HD-NET is carried by satellite. Plus a lot of cable companies are now carrying HD channels of terrestrial broadcasters on their digital cable channels.
You could have hundreds of high-def video channels on a digital cable system. The problem is that the legacy analog video channels hog huge amounts of broadcast. As the MSO's drop analog channels, they can add many more digital channels.
ATSC over-the-air emission rate is 19.34 Mbps using long-GOP MPEG-2. There are all kinds of artifacts, but most people won't notice them except for certain kinds of scenes.
Another issue is that not all MPEG-2 compressors are made the same. Broadcast entities purchase very, very expensive MPEG-2 compressors that can do a much better job than cheaper ones. Issues like pre-filtering of noise, better searches for movement, etc. can dramatically improve the compression job.
But there are some things ATSC emmission rates just can't do well - the best example I've seen is an native American dance where a headress with hundreds of thousands of feathers go down the back of the dancer, each feather moving in a different direction. At 19.34 Mbps, it looks like fuzz.
Most broadcast engineers consider 50 Mbps good looking HD, but most prefer at least HDCAM (270 Mbps) rates. Uncompressed HD is a bit over a Gbps.
I'm sure we'll see HD scenes from this new prosumer HD camera woven into HD programs just like prosumer DV camera footage sneaks into mainly Beta or DVCPro production where you need a cheap, small camera to shoot...think about interviews of that Butterfly woman 100 feet up in a tree, or embedded reporters in a war.
I don't get why you would disqualify "GM" humans versus humans bred selectively (i.e. two athletes having kids).
Moreover, viruses and radiation GM us on a regular basis.
And how are you going to tell if a person was "GM"? Are you going to say "Well, you have an unregistered single-nucleotide polymorphism?" How could you even catalog all the possibilities?
I hate articles that start "Philadendron 9.4 was just released. Get it here!" and I'm thinking "What is Philadendron?" as if everyone has a wetware interface to Freshmeat...
How about "Philadendron 9.4, which lets you cross-compile Python into TCL/Cobol, was just released!"
Of course, this article did imply that Crossover Office let you run Windows apps, so I'm not talking about this article;)
Armadillo has been held back significantly by limited access to hydrogen peroxide. I wonder if they've looked into "hyrbid" NO2/rubber rockets, and compared the difficulty versus power/weight of each.
It has not been firmly established that there was no way to save the astronauts.
I'm sure that if one had looked at the Apollo 13 accident ahead of time, one would have thought that there was no way to save them, yet it is amazing what the human mind can do with unlimited money when human lives and political capital are at risk.
Spacewalks could have happened - perhaps not the kind that NASA usually does - tiles could have been torn off less vulnerable areas, some equivalent of duct tape could have been found, Nomex pulled from space suits, some crazy patch could have at least been tried, alternative re-entry scenarious could have been used, who knows? You never know how ingenious you get until you are up against death.
I'll bet you that the leading edge breach was fairly small, probably a crack. The real issue was superheated gasses getting in the wing. Even if you just put some kind of ablative patch on, it wouldn't have had to survive too long, just enough so that most of the re-entry heating was over before it blew through.
In a related vein, I'm working on Angry Fish. In addition to the first fish that cries out in pain, I am working on a school of seven Linux-controlled fish, which will soon be decrying their position in life.
A long, long time ago, a lot of people used Cu-SeeMe for Internet videoconferencing. Then it was no longer available for free, and the world of NAT (i.e. most people with broadband routers) blotted out most H.323 options.
You may remeber QVIX, which has now become SightSpeed, which has a solution for NAT. It is more "IM-like".
While there has been an upsurge in bilateral and global agreements on trade in goods, the liberalisation of services and labour markets have proceeded much more slowly. Nearly twenty years ago Hamilton and Whalley (1984) suggested that the liberalisation of world labour markets could double world income and imply proportionately even larger gains for the developing countries. Thus allowing labour to move between countries would seem to be an important tool for growth and development. Far from seeking to exploit such opportunities, however, the developed world became less open to both migration and to temporary labour flows. Recently, however, the temporary movement of workers has moved back onto the agenda. It was recognised as one of four modes of delivering services abroad by the Uruguay Round's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), where it became known as 'Mode 4' liberalisation - the Temporary Movement of Natural Persons (TMNP).... We estimate that by increasing developed economies' quotas on inward movements of both skilled and unskilled labour by just 3% of their labour forces, world welfare would rise by $US156billion - about 0.6% of world income. This figure is half as large again as the gains expected from the liberalisation of all remaining goods trade restrictions ($US104billion). In general, developing countries gain most from the increase in quotas, with higher gains from the increase in quotas on unskilled labour than on skilled labour. Developed economies generally experience falling wages, but their returns to capital and overall welfare increase in most cases.
It is tough to find semiconductors with wide band gaps. The larger the band gap, the higher the energy photon produced by an electron moving from one band to another. Higher-frequency photons have higher energy, thus you need larger band gaps to produce blue light than red light. That is the problem, but it is slowly being solved.
The benefit of higher-frequency photons is that they can be focused into a smaller area. The higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength. The smaller the wavelength, the less diffraction limiting of focusing optics.
We've found the Sanyo 5300 to be worthless for general Web surfing under SprintPCS. But it makes a very handy camera, and I set up a system so she can email pictures to her blog for immediate display. The camera doesn't do well in low light, but the form-factor is just too cool. She lugged around a very small tablet computer webcam for a while, but now she just carries the cellphone.
While I think the MIT open courses concept is nice, most of the entries I see are like this:
1) Hi, I'm Prof. X 2) We're going to learn Y 3) Read a single chapter from each of these 20 books that cost $100 each
If the MIT initiative actually made the learning materials themselves free, that would be another thing altogether, but unless you buy all those books it is worthless.
Of course, I'm not saying this is practical or possible.
For example, you can get undergad degrees in programs like accounting, business administration, computer and information science, english, environmental management, fire science, history, human resource management, humanities, information systems management, legal studies, management studies, marketing, psychology, and social science.
Slashdot Mirror
Real Slashdot users browse in Lynx...so why bother for all the "posers"?
;)
Actually, the site looks great, but you can only see the cool Web design if you are using Opera...
You can find out more here about how advancing economies tend to have reductions in fertility rates, and that the UN now thinks global population will only be 8.9 billion by mid-century.
Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is more about why Europe could colonize and crush the rest of world, instead of say Paraguay colonizing England.
Sure, once a society has advanced technology and economy, it can do all kinds of things. The question is, how did those civilizations get to that point?
Internal motications don't really matter. If US voters were truly against the Iraq war, it would not have happened.
A modern SUV produces much less pollution than 70's econobox, when we are talking about things like lead, carbon monoxide, and NOx's. It does produce more CO2 per mile - that's another story altogether.
People buy SUVs because of an incredible economic expansion since the last Gulf War. Plus, they are just damn convenient for when you want to move big stuff.
WTF do we even need to cut down trees, when we should just be bio-engineering high-density cellulose configurations?
In the Washington, DC area, jobs have been added over the last year. This is the place to be.
Yes, the surf isn't good, and you have to deal with the occasional snow, and you may have to work for a company that designs better ways to kill people (fortunately I'm not...)
I agree with the poster that talked about Cygwin. Cygwin provides the shell and favorite Unix commands you need to make Windows a usable operating system. I put it on all the Windows boxes I need to do anything serious with.
And, oh yeah, I still have Visual Basic to make 5 minute complex GUI functions, and Visual Studio to build C# web service clients in 30 seconds from the WSDL.
Sony is pushing the "Blue Ray" DVD storage for their professional cameras.
I think the big win by Panasonic is not to have people pull out the PCMCIA cards, but to uplink video over Firewire or high-speed wireless from the camera. The PCMCIA cards should just be ways of installing or upgrading memory.
While PCMCIA cards aren't durable in terms of putting-in, pulling-out, once in place they don't need any maintenance, unlike tape mechanisms or DVD drives.
Panasonic is pushing SD memory cameras for professional broadcast use.
When you buy a $20,000-$50,000 camera, that is only the beginning. Each year you pay thousands of dollars to clean and align tape heads and other maintenance.
By going totally solid-state for the media, you reduce maintenance downtime and costs. Plus the tape drive is a power hog, so you increase battery life as well.
The Panasonic SD-based cameras are a move to the "tapeless" environment, which promises more efficient workflows through broadcast entities. Instead of going to tape and then digitizing, you just download the file from the camera (perhaps using high-speed wireless) right into the editing system.
Sony on the other hand is standardizing around "blue ray" high-capacity writable DVDs for pro video cameras.
Dynamic range is being solved by CMOS focal plane array processing, just like our retina does. Infact, CMOS sensors can probably have a much higher dynamic range than film.
Expect to see CMOS sensors like the Foveon in cameras soon.
Yes, Mark Cuban's HD-NET is carried by satellite. Plus a lot of cable companies are now carrying HD channels of terrestrial broadcasters on their digital cable channels.
You could have hundreds of high-def video channels on a digital cable system. The problem is that the legacy analog video channels hog huge amounts of broadcast. As the MSO's drop analog channels, they can add many more digital channels.
ATSC over-the-air emission rate is 19.34 Mbps using long-GOP MPEG-2. There are all kinds of artifacts, but most people won't notice them except for certain kinds of scenes.
Another issue is that not all MPEG-2 compressors are made the same. Broadcast entities purchase very, very expensive MPEG-2 compressors that can do a much better job than cheaper ones. Issues like pre-filtering of noise, better searches for movement, etc. can dramatically improve the compression job.
But there are some things ATSC emmission rates just can't do well - the best example I've seen is an native American dance where a headress with hundreds of thousands of feathers go down the back of the dancer, each feather moving in a different direction. At 19.34 Mbps, it looks like fuzz.
Most broadcast engineers consider 50 Mbps good looking HD, but most prefer at least HDCAM (270 Mbps) rates. Uncompressed HD is a bit over a Gbps.
I'm sure we'll see HD scenes from this new prosumer HD camera woven into HD programs just like prosumer DV camera footage sneaks into mainly Beta or DVCPro production where you need a cheap, small camera to shoot...think about interviews of that Butterfly woman 100 feet up in a tree, or embedded reporters in a war.
I don't get why you would disqualify "GM" humans versus humans bred selectively (i.e. two athletes having kids).
Moreover, viruses and radiation GM us on a regular basis.
And how are you going to tell if a person was "GM"? Are you going to say "Well, you have an unregistered single-nucleotide polymorphism?" How could you even catalog all the possibilities?
I hate articles that start "Philadendron 9.4 was just released. Get it here!" and I'm thinking "What is Philadendron?" as if everyone has a wetware interface to Freshmeat...
;)
How about "Philadendron 9.4, which lets you cross-compile Python into TCL/Cobol, was just released!"
Of course, this article did imply that Crossover Office let you run Windows apps, so I'm not talking about this article
Is you RAID controller caching files or caching sectors?
Armadillo has been held back significantly by limited access to hydrogen peroxide. I wonder if they've looked into "hyrbid" NO2/rubber rockets, and compared the difficulty versus power/weight of each.
It has not been firmly established that there was no way to save the astronauts.
I'm sure that if one had looked at the Apollo 13 accident ahead of time, one would have thought that there was no way to save them, yet it is amazing what the human mind can do with unlimited money when human lives and political capital are at risk.
Spacewalks could have happened - perhaps not the kind that NASA usually does - tiles could have been torn off less vulnerable areas, some equivalent of duct tape could have been found, Nomex pulled from space suits, some crazy patch could have at least been tried, alternative re-entry scenarious could have been used, who knows? You never know how ingenious you get until you are up against death.
I'll bet you that the leading edge breach was fairly small, probably a crack. The real issue was superheated gasses getting in the wing. Even if you just put some kind of ablative patch on, it wouldn't have had to survive too long, just enough so that most of the re-entry heating was over before it blew through.
In a related vein, I'm working on Angry Fish. In addition to the first fish that cries out in pain, I am working on a school of seven Linux-controlled fish, which will soon be decrying their position in life.
A long, long time ago, a lot of people used Cu-SeeMe for Internet videoconferencing. Then it was no longer available for free, and the world of NAT (i.e. most people with broadband routers) blotted out most H.323 options.
You may remeber QVIX, which has now become SightSpeed, which has a solution for NAT. It is more "IM-like".
It is tough to find semiconductors with wide band gaps. The larger the band gap, the higher the energy photon produced by an electron moving from one band to another. Higher-frequency photons have higher energy, thus you need larger band gaps to produce blue light than red light. That is the problem, but it is slowly being solved.
The benefit of higher-frequency photons is that they can be focused into a smaller area. The higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength. The smaller the wavelength, the less diffraction limiting of focusing optics.
My wife uses her Sanyo 5300 and SprintPCS for a cellular camera-enabled blog.
We've found the Sanyo 5300 to be worthless for general Web surfing under SprintPCS. But it makes a very handy camera, and I set up a system so she can email pictures to her blog for immediate display. The camera doesn't do well in low light, but the form-factor is just too cool. She lugged around a very small tablet computer webcam for a while, but now she just carries the cellphone.
While I think the MIT open courses concept is nice, most of the entries I see are like this:
1) Hi, I'm Prof. X
2) We're going to learn Y
3) Read a single chapter from each of these 20 books that cost $100 each
If the MIT initiative actually made the learning materials themselves free, that would be another thing altogether, but unless you buy all those books it is worthless.
Of course, I'm not saying this is practical or possible.
For example, you can get undergad degrees in programs like accounting, business administration, computer and information science, english, environmental management, fire science, history, human resource management, humanities, information systems management, legal studies, management studies, marketing, psychology, and social science.