That's a really boring picture - of course, I don't really know anything about Mars, or space photography, so I could be wrong.
Can someone explain to me if this photograph shows anything truly interesting, or is it just a test as the article says?
Penrose's arguments suppose a noncomputable theory of quantum gravity to make the Goedelian "paradox" at the beginning of his books inapplicable to human consciousness. As you know, he's jumped through a few hoops recently trying to propose possible ways this could happen (bose-einstein condensates withing microtubules, etc)
Anyway, my understanding of this article (haven't read the paper in Science), is that the theory they have come up with is perfectly computable - a four-dimensional analogon to general relativity if you will. If they manage to extend it into a full theory of quantum gravity, that would not only be amazing, but it would show full computability as well.
... a preschooler in a penguin costume knocked on Bill Gates' door.
Tux: "Trick or Treat!"
Bill: "Release the lawyers!"
Needless to say, the evil empire met a grisly end at the hands (and fins) of Tux and his minions.
The End.
My university recently imposed a bandwidth cap on outgoing data, which means people can only send files outside the university network at 30K/sec. The reason they did this was because p2p filesharing applications, and the ftps a lot of students were running were hogging too much bandwidth. They figured the best way to do that is to allot users a fixed bandwidth cap and let them deal with it. What really annoys me is that rather than blocking only the real bandwidth hogs, they made everyone pay.
The thing is that occasionally there does arise a legitimate need to send a large file outside the university. It's really frustrating to have to wait several hours for a file transfer that could have taken 20 minutes. What's odd is that this in no way reduces piracy - people can still download whatever they want at ungodly speeds. I don't understand why they only blocked the sending.
So far, I don't know of any way to get around the cap, though I've tried a few little things. I don't know how it's implemented, but do let me know if you have any ideas. Or you can just rant at me.
Archiving analog pictures was pretty convenient for newspapers and photographers - all you had to do was throw unused pictures and negatives in a box and stick it in the cellar.
With a digital camera, you can look at the pictures, only get the ones you want onto the computer, and reuse the flash card. But if you want to archive everything, you can't just throw the flash card into a box - you have to download everything to the computer, set filenames and burn onto a cd. It's not much more difficult, but enough so that people won't do it.
Digital archiving just isn't convenient enough yet.
I'd never heard of K-Meleon before today. I've looked around on its website, but can someone help me understand what's special about it? Is it basically a quick, small Mozilla-based browser? How does it compare to Netscape, Opera, Konqueror and IE in terms of speed, stability and features?
The diameter of the pores in these capsules is about 7nm. Insulin molecules are about 5nm, whereas antibodies are larger, more complicated proteins (10-30nm, usually). Antibodies can't recognize the foreign cells inside the nanoparticle because they can't get through the membrane shielding it from the outside.
Concerning your second question, I think the way blood sugar levels are naturally monitored is in the pancreas, by this same kind of cells. So I assume the cells inside the nanoparticle would maintain insulin levels at a constant rate, adjusting for fluctuating diets, just like a nondiabetic's pancreas. You wouldn't run out of insulin, because it's produced inside those cells; that is, once injected, you're cured for life.
Look at the shape of the vapour trail. Considering how crazily it wobbled, does it look like a successful rocket launch? Can you even imagine it doing that at Mach 5?
Nanomachines are all well and good, but there's a big difference to this. This system consists simply of a few cells inside a special membrane that are able to manufacture something that the host cannot (e.g insulin). That's why it's so wonderfully simple and elegant.
Methods for inexpensive nanomanufacturing are still far away, and even then it will take a long time until we can produce self-powered, programmable (self-replicating?) nanomachines.
The article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine this technology could mean fantastic savings for diabetics. A lifetime supply of Insulin is incredibly expensive, and this cure is bound to be cheaper, and more convenient.
Not to mention how great it is for Parkinson's and hemophilia, and anything else it might be applicable to.
So Negroponte suggests that soon there will be more Barbie dolls connected to the Internet than Americans, because "the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content". Cute idea.
So, the miracle of 3G is that soon your home encyclopedia will be replaced by the wireless talking Barbie! Bet that will shed her dumb blonde image...
Imagine it now: the instant gratification of being able to answer any question on your mind by calling up google on your palmpilot while screaming upside-down in a rollercoaster.
I find this point of Negroponte's especially amusing: "the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content". So it gets better: you can answer any question on your mind by asking your Barbie doll for the answer!
Agreed for the most part, but a larger problem with the patent office that goes hand in hand with "entrenched thinking" is the patent office's legendary bureaucracy. If one of these clerks thinks a claim might not be legitimate, how many hoops will they have to jump through to get their point across to all the entrenched thinkers involved, and how much paperwork will it take!
I'm sure the new hires will start out wanting to do the job well, but after filling out forms in triplicate for a few proposals to kill a illegitimate claims for reasons only engineers would understand, they'll end up as entrenched as everyone else. A waste of good talent.
The point of attaching trailers to other movies is to generate traffic both ways. The Star Wars and LOTR demographics are pretty similar, so putting the trailer there wouldn't achieve much - people watching LOTR are likely to see Star Wars anyway, trailer or no. By attaching the trailer to Harry Potter and Monsters Inc., they
- generate more revenue for those movies by selling tickets to people who only care about the trailers, and
- show the new Jar-jar off to kids who then drag their parents off to the Star Wars movie and buy action figures.
From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense.
Thing is, you probably wouldn't want to compress it much at all. The reason you're recording HDTV in the first place is because you want top-notch resolution and detail. If you're willing to throw quality overboard, a standard video capture card will work just fine.
I give it three weeks before someone comes up with a way to crack the encryption and distributes it everywhere. HDTV2MPEG anyone? Plenty of lawsuits guaranteed for your enjoyment.
...we could somehow combine this thread and the one for large-scale video archiving to figure out how we can store a full season's worth of HDTV Star Trek...
The advantage to digital storage is mostly quick retrieval. Since you don't care about that, you can go the older, more cost-effective route:
Videotapes can hold up to a day's worth of video. Since you have 1000 cameras, you can have a split-screen four-camera recording on a single tape. Security companies sell large-scale recording systems like this, and it would cost much less than buying 250 VCRs. Your daily set of tapes would fill a large box that shouldn't be too hard to store.
Normally in the USA it is the rule of law which constrains a company from doing damage to society in the search for profits. Tobacco companies continue to create additions to their products, but their advertising is curtailed by legislation and the law has allowed individuals to later sue about the suffering and death which they caused. This would suggest that we should be looking at legislation to control the independence of the medium which we rely on and trust for so much.
What kind of argument is this? We all agree that MS has not been playing nicely, but to say "vertical integration = killing people => legislation" makes no sense at all. Berners-Lee has a wonderfully idealistic perspective on openness, and I applaud him for that. Much of the rest is bollocks.
This technology is intended to replace shock absorbers currently made of sand and gravel. That's nice in theory, but think of the cost: instead of sand, spaces would have to be filled with long manufactured chains of linked elastic spheres molded to exact dimensions. Even if they were incredibly cheap elastic spheres, protecting an entire building with this would be prohibitively expensive.
It's a beautiful idea. There's just no way anyone will use it.
How many rivers are big enough that several things like that could be submerged in at once and still remain hidden? Seems like a rather limited habitat.
Look, if you're just running a small apache and ftp server on your pc, it probably doesn't make much of a difference. You're probably going to take heavier performance hits from all the other stuff that's running than because your file system, kernel, partition, etc is not optimal. You only need to worry about this if you're building a dedicated system that's going to take lots of hits.
I'm running apache and ftp right now, and average traffic is about 20 hits per day. At this order of magnitude, or anywhere near it, it really doesn't matter.
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That's a really boring picture - of course, I don't really know anything about Mars, or space photography, so I could be wrong.
Can someone explain to me if this photograph shows anything truly interesting, or is it just a test as the article says?
Anyway, my understanding of this article (haven't read the paper in Science), is that the theory they have come up with is perfectly computable - a four-dimensional analogon to general relativity if you will. If they manage to extend it into a full theory of quantum gravity, that would not only be amazing, but it would show full computability as well.
That would mean Penrose is toast.
... a preschooler in a penguin costume knocked on Bill Gates' door.
Tux: "Trick or Treat!"
Bill: "Release the lawyers!"
Needless to say, the evil empire met a grisly end at the hands (and fins) of Tux and his minions.
The End.
The thing is that occasionally there does arise a legitimate need to send a large file outside the university. It's really frustrating to have to wait several hours for a file transfer that could have taken 20 minutes. What's odd is that this in no way reduces piracy - people can still download whatever they want at ungodly speeds. I don't understand why they only blocked the sending.
So far, I don't know of any way to get around the cap, though I've tried a few little things. I don't know how it's implemented, but do let me know if you have any ideas. Or you can just rant at me.
With a digital camera, you can look at the pictures, only get the ones you want onto the computer, and reuse the flash card. But if you want to archive everything, you can't just throw the flash card into a box - you have to download everything to the computer, set filenames and burn onto a cd. It's not much more difficult, but enough so that people won't do it.
Digital archiving just isn't convenient enough yet.
I'd never heard of K-Meleon before today. I've looked around on its website, but can someone help me understand what's special about it? Is it basically a quick, small Mozilla-based browser? How does it compare to Netscape, Opera, Konqueror and IE in terms of speed, stability and features?
Concerning your second question, I think the way blood sugar levels are naturally monitored is in the pancreas, by this same kind of cells. So I assume the cells inside the nanoparticle would maintain insulin levels at a constant rate, adjusting for fluctuating diets, just like a nondiabetic's pancreas. You wouldn't run out of insulin, because it's produced inside those cells; that is, once injected, you're cured for life.
Look at the shape of the vapour trail. Considering how crazily it wobbled, does it look like a successful rocket launch? Can you even imagine it doing that at Mach 5?
Nanomachines are all well and good, but there's a big difference to this. This system consists simply of a few cells inside a special membrane that are able to manufacture something that the host cannot (e.g insulin). That's why it's so wonderfully simple and elegant.
Methods for inexpensive nanomanufacturing are still far away, and even then it will take a long time until we can produce self-powered, programmable (self-replicating?) nanomachines.
The article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine this technology could mean fantastic savings for diabetics. A lifetime supply of Insulin is incredibly expensive, and this cure is bound to be cheaper, and more convenient.
Not to mention how great it is for Parkinson's and hemophilia, and anything else it might be applicable to.
So, the miracle of 3G is that soon your home encyclopedia will be replaced by the wireless talking Barbie! Bet that will shed her dumb blonde image...
I find this point of Negroponte's especially amusing: "the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content". So it gets better: you can answer any question on your mind by asking your Barbie doll for the answer!
Agreed for the most part, but a larger problem with the patent office that goes hand in hand with "entrenched thinking" is the patent office's legendary bureaucracy. If one of these clerks thinks a claim might not be legitimate, how many hoops will they have to jump through to get their point across to all the entrenched thinkers involved, and how much paperwork will it take!
I'm sure the new hires will start out wanting to do the job well, but after filling out forms in triplicate for a few proposals to kill a illegitimate claims for reasons only engineers would understand, they'll end up as entrenched as everyone else. A waste of good talent.
- generate more revenue for those movies by selling tickets to people who only care about the trailers, and
- show the new Jar-jar off to kids who then drag their parents off to the Star Wars movie and buy action figures.
From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense.
Thing is, you probably wouldn't want to compress it much at all. The reason you're recording HDTV in the first place is because you want top-notch resolution and detail. If you're willing to throw quality overboard, a standard video capture card will work just fine.
What happens when you upgrade your video card? Do you lose all the encrypted videos you collected over the past year?
I give it three weeks before someone comes up with a way to crack the encryption and distributes it everywhere. HDTV2MPEG anyone? Plenty of lawsuits guaranteed for your enjoyment.
...we could somehow combine this thread and the one for large-scale video archiving to figure out how we can store a full season's worth of HDTV Star Trek...
The advantage to digital storage is mostly quick retrieval. Since you don't care about that, you can go the older, more cost-effective route:
Videotapes can hold up to a day's worth of video. Since you have 1000 cameras, you can have a split-screen four-camera recording on a single tape. Security companies sell large-scale recording systems like this, and it would cost much less than buying 250 VCRs. Your daily set of tapes would fill a large box that shouldn't be too hard to store.
This technology is intended to replace shock absorbers currently made of sand and gravel. That's nice in theory, but think of the cost: instead of sand, spaces would have to be filled with long manufactured chains of linked elastic spheres molded to exact dimensions. Even if they were incredibly cheap elastic spheres, protecting an entire building with this would be prohibitively expensive.
It's a beautiful idea. There's just no way anyone will use it.
Here's a more complete story about it on National Geographic:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/supercroc/
The page has more photos, information about the paleontologists, and a link to a photo gallery.
How many rivers are big enough that several things like that could be submerged in at once and still remain hidden? Seems like a rather limited habitat.
I'm running apache and ftp right now, and average traffic is about 20 hits per day. At this order of magnitude, or anywhere near it, it really doesn't matter.