That's the reason I want us to go back. If you get weird results, you shouldn't shrug and go on to the next planet; you should find out exactly why the weird results happened. (That is, without interrupting any work for current missions, missing any favorable planetary alignments, totally blowing the budget, or rushing off without careful planning of how to avoid the ambiguous results with the next mission.)
Well, 30 years ago people did say that life was likely to be found on "terrestial planets." That's why the Viking missions to Mars had experiments to try to detect life--and why the Voyager and Pioneer missions didn't.
Now, if we have a near-infinite amount of resources, then narrowing the choices down is silly. But, as you might suspect, if we have a very limited amount of resources--and you'd better believe time on the large telescopes is pretty scarce--then trying to use that small amount of resources on the best canidates is sensible.
Minor nit. Japan does not really have that small of a land area. If you were to move Japan over to Europe, it would be the second or third largest country there. (I believe France is the only purely European country that would be larger.)
Japan's problem is on the maps it's right up against Russia and China on one side--the largest and fourth largest countries--and the North Pacific on the other--a fairly empty part of the largest ocean. And, if you look across the Pacific, you've got Canada and the US--second and third largest--to compare against. With all those big spaces to compete against, of course it looks small.
I know it's a far stretch, but it's entirely possible that the team placing the cables might have, umm, you know, actually looked at the area while they worked. I know it's a bit of a challange for a college student to be able to identify branches, let alone avoid them while stringing the cables; but that's why they have advisors.
As far as placing other sensors...well, if you had read a little bit farther in the article:
...and it talks to other fixed sensors on the ground around the forest.
There are a total of nine
cameras on the rover. I suspect that the pair of Navcams (which don't have solar filters) would be used for task should the pair of Pancams malfunction.
Consider, for your second item, what happens for someone right now in the passport system. You end up with basically three possibilites mapping to two results. The end cases are easy--you look like the picture and go through, you don't look like the picture and you're rejected. However, you have a middle ground where you look enough like the picture to exclude you from the third class, but there's enough differences to exclude you from the first class. There is no other help for the passport officer to decide aside from a gut feeling. (Or whether, in the officer's opinion, it's better to appear 'efficient' and have a high rejection rate or to be a non-trouble-maker with a low rejection rate.)
If there is biometric data available, then there's another source of data to back up the decision. Yes, there is a risk that the data will be fake. But, there's the risk that the photo is fake as well. There is and (most likely) always will be the problem of fake or altered passports--but that hasn't made anyone give up on passports yet.
So will face recognition join fingerprint and iris recognition in a long list of obtrusive recognition techniques?
Passports are inherently obtrusive. You walk up to the person in the uniform behind the desk, hand over your passport, and wait for them to decide if it matches you. Matching a face by camera at this point is no more of a bother. (Well, if you don't pass the scan, it is...but that's a different subject.)
Plus, the people manning the desk control the lighting and the positioning of your face. If you don't take off your sunglasses and look straight ahead, you don't pass. This will improve the performance of the software far above the 'scan the crowd' attempts. You'll still have some false positives, of course; but all systems dealing with humans do.
You have a coupon for 10% off any other MP3 player, yet you're not buying one because you want an iPod. If the ipod wasn't good enough for you to ignore the discount, then it too would be discounted.
It's been done before. Go watch the opening of
The Apartment.
Row after row after row of desks in a huge office. No privacy, people crammed all together in a noisy environment. Your work shift started at 8:10 because that is when your floor had the elevators. Imagine being in an office like that all day--the noise of adding machines (mechanical, of course) and telephones constantly abusing your ears.
At least a cube gives you some privacy and a little less noise.
but is a car listed in Guinness under the fastest mile?
Yes.
The one-mile (1.609-km) land speed record is 1,227.985 km/h (763.055 mph), set by Andy Green in Thrust SSC in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA, on October 15, 1997. Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) completed its record-breaking run in a matter of seconds, but was the culmination of six years of work and a six-week on-site campaign. Two and a half years of research went into the shape of the Thrust SSC, and building the most powerful car ever took a further two years and 100,000 man-hours.
Ah, if only life were that simple. But things aren't always black and white. Not only is there grey, there's also some blue, red, magenta, purple, and a dash of teal.
Good things about helmets:
They make your head hurt less if you're in an accident. (1)
Bad things about helmets:
They cost money.
You have to store them somewhere. Somewhere that they can't be stolen or lost.
They mess up your hair.
You look worse wearing one than if you weren't. (2)
If a person decides that the bad side outweighs the good side, then guess what. That helmet law has convinced them to drive instead of bike.
----------------
(1) And if I truly believed I was going to be in an accident where a helmet would save my life, I certainly wouldn't be riding. When I was growing up, there certainly weren't bike helmets everywhere. And we didn't have deaths from bikes every day of the week.
(2) This doesn't apply if you're wearing neon bike clothing anyway. You're so far gone by that point that you can't commit a worse fashion crime.
Well, that's what I mean. A lot of Dvorak users seem to be worse than Mac users. (Yes, I know that it's impossible to be more fanatical than a Mac user. Bear with me.) It's almost as if I've insulted their faith.
As for corporate adoption: where do you get the idea that, if the speed increases are true, increased typing speed translates to a commensurate increase in overall productivity;
You've thrown me for a loop there. Isn't the point behind Dvorak increasing productivity?
There are certain professions where improving one portion will not help increase productivity. For example, if you could instantly have your code appear on the screen merely by thinking, it still wouldn't speed things up appreciably; most of your time would still be spent on designing and debugging.
However, the typing pool isn't one. You had a straightforward system: the exectutive dictated to a girl from the steno pool who took it to a girl in the typing pool to convert into letters and memos. The faster the typing, the more documents were produced. We're not talking rocket science here.
a basic, and arguably perfectly serviceable, method of using said equipment
Which is my point. QWERTY works. Dvorak works. But neither is significantly better than the other.
I have a simple question for you then. Why hasn't the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard penetrated the commercial market?
If you truly could increase speed by 20%-40%, then you can reduce your support staff by the same. Large corporations are not stupid; spending a month on training in exchange of the ability to get rid of almost half your typing pool would have been done all over the place. Yet, during the post-war boom, you have no significant increase of DSK. Nor were there mass layoffs of unneeded staff.
Is it possible that everybody in the corporate world was that hidebound, that stuck in the past that they would turn up their noses at a 20% savings? Computers came in like gunbusters, so it's hard to say it was due to a fear of new technology. Nor did businesses continue to refuse to use mice when they came out. The initial dislike was quickly overtaken once the advantages became apparent. Little of the workings of an officeplace have been unchanged over the last 50 years. What miracle of stubborness is there that is keeping the QWERTY keyboard around while all around it has changed?
It sounds more and more like a paranoid fantasy. "If only they weren't suppressing it, Dvorak keyboards would have taken over the world."
Slashdot Mirror
and inconclusive results at best
That's the reason I want us to go back. If you get weird results, you shouldn't shrug and go on to the next planet; you should find out exactly why the weird results happened. (That is, without interrupting any work for current missions, missing any favorable planetary alignments, totally blowing the budget, or rushing off without careful planning of how to avoid the ambiguous results with the next mission.)
Well, 30 years ago people did say that life was likely to be found on "terrestial planets." That's why the Viking missions to Mars had experiments to try to detect life--and why the Voyager and Pioneer missions didn't.
Now, if we have a near-infinite amount of resources, then narrowing the choices down is silly. But, as you might suspect, if we have a very limited amount of resources--and you'd better believe time on the large telescopes is pretty scarce--then trying to use that small amount of resources on the best canidates is sensible.
Minor nit. Japan does not really have that small of a land area. If you were to move Japan over to Europe, it would be the second or third largest country there. (I believe France is the only purely European country that would be larger.)
Japan's problem is on the maps it's right up against Russia and China on one side--the largest and fourth largest countries--and the North Pacific on the other--a fairly empty part of the largest ocean. And, if you look across the Pacific, you've got Canada and the US--second and third largest--to compare against. With all those big spaces to compete against, of course it looks small.
The NGA could just approach Microsoft to get a key to sign their own materials.
I know it's a far stretch, but it's entirely possible that the team placing the cables might have, umm, you know, actually looked at the area while they worked. I know it's a bit of a challange for a college student to be able to identify branches, let alone avoid them while stringing the cables; but that's why they have advisors.
As far as placing other sensors...well, if you had read a little bit farther in the article:
As I understand it, the Beagle 2 probe is supposed to normally communicate via the orbiting platforms.
Perhaps they should have designed the probe with an alternative source of power...something like solar panels?
panoramic camera
There are a total of nine cameras on the rover. I suspect that the pair of Navcams (which don't have solar filters) would be used for task should the pair of Pancams malfunction.
Right next door indeed. You can see the Original Headquarters Building in the background about a third of the way through the video clip.
Does k have to be odd?
The page for Sierpinski numbers uses both k and (2k - 1). But the page on Riesel numbers seems to say k needs to be odd.
What's so neat about Sierpinski numbers?
Is there a real-life use for numbers that are excessively composite?
And, finally....
What's a Sierpinski number of the first kind?
Consider, for your second item, what happens for someone right now in the passport system. You end up with basically three possibilites mapping to two results. The end cases are easy--you look like the picture and go through, you don't look like the picture and you're rejected. However, you have a middle ground where you look enough like the picture to exclude you from the third class, but there's enough differences to exclude you from the first class. There is no other help for the passport officer to decide aside from a gut feeling. (Or whether, in the officer's opinion, it's better to appear 'efficient' and have a high rejection rate or to be a non-trouble-maker with a low rejection rate.)
If there is biometric data available, then there's another source of data to back up the decision. Yes, there is a risk that the data will be fake. But, there's the risk that the photo is fake as well. There is and (most likely) always will be the problem of fake or altered passports--but that hasn't made anyone give up on passports yet.
So will face recognition join fingerprint and iris recognition in a long list of obtrusive recognition techniques?
Passports are inherently obtrusive. You walk up to the person in the uniform behind the desk, hand over your passport, and wait for them to decide if it matches you. Matching a face by camera at this point is no more of a bother. (Well, if you don't pass the scan, it is...but that's a different subject.)
Plus, the people manning the desk control the lighting and the positioning of your face. If you don't take off your sunglasses and look straight ahead, you don't pass. This will improve the performance of the software far above the 'scan the crowd' attempts. You'll still have some false positives, of course; but all systems dealing with humans do.
You have a coupon for 10% off any other MP3 player, yet you're not buying one because you want an iPod. If the ipod wasn't good enough for you to ignore the discount, then it too would be discounted.
It's been done before. Go watch the opening of The Apartment.
Row after row after row of desks in a huge office. No privacy, people crammed all together in a noisy environment. Your work shift started at 8:10 because that is when your floor had the elevators. Imagine being in an office like that all day--the noise of adding machines (mechanical, of course) and telephones constantly abusing your ears.
At least a cube gives you some privacy and a little less noise.
A team of 5 interesting, friendly people will ALWAYS outperform a lone social outcast barricaded in his single office.
If you've got five people doing the same job as that one person and they aren't outperforming him, then you have serious problems.
My favorite was:
Knight jumps Queen....Rook jumps Queen....Everybody jumps the Queen! Gang Bang!
It's good to be da King.
The quote may not be exact, but the spirit is there.
but is a car listed in Guinness under the fastest mile?
Yes.
The one-mile (1.609-km) land speed record is 1,227.985 km/h (763.055 mph), set by Andy Green in Thrust SSC in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA, on October 15, 1997. Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) completed its record-breaking run in a matter of seconds, but was the culmination of six years of work and a six-week on-site campaign. Two and a half years of research went into the shape of the Thrust SSC, and building the most powerful car ever took a further two years and 100,000 man-hours.
Guinness World Records
Whistling is neither more or less natural than any other system of making sounds for communication. It's merely less common.
Ah, if only life were that simple. But things aren't always black and white. Not only is there grey, there's also some blue, red, magenta, purple, and a dash of teal.
Good things about helmets:
They make your head hurt less if you're in an accident. (1)
Bad things about helmets:
They cost money.
You have to store them somewhere. Somewhere that they can't be stolen or lost.
They mess up your hair.
You look worse wearing one than if you weren't. (2)
If a person decides that the bad side outweighs the good side, then guess what. That helmet law has convinced them to drive instead of bike.
----------------
(1) And if I truly believed I was going to be in an accident where a helmet would save my life, I certainly wouldn't be riding. When I was growing up, there certainly weren't bike helmets everywhere. And we didn't have deaths from bikes every day of the week.
(2) This doesn't apply if you're wearing neon bike clothing anyway. You're so far gone by that point that you can't commit a worse fashion crime.
It still won't live up to Bill Cosby's idea of having a tape recorder in the casket.
Hi, Bob. How's the wife and kids? Don't I look like myself?
What the hell are you on about?
Well, that's what I mean. A lot of Dvorak users seem to be worse than Mac users. (Yes, I know that it's impossible to be more fanatical than a Mac user. Bear with me.) It's almost as if I've insulted their faith.
As for corporate adoption: where do you get the idea that, if the speed increases are true, increased typing speed translates to a commensurate increase in overall productivity;
You've thrown me for a loop there. Isn't the point behind Dvorak increasing productivity?
There are certain professions where improving one portion will not help increase productivity. For example, if you could instantly have your code appear on the screen merely by thinking, it still wouldn't speed things up appreciably; most of your time would still be spent on designing and debugging.
However, the typing pool isn't one. You had a straightforward system: the exectutive dictated to a girl from the steno pool who took it to a girl in the typing pool to convert into letters and memos. The faster the typing, the more documents were produced. We're not talking rocket science here.
a basic, and arguably perfectly serviceable, method of using said equipment
Which is my point. QWERTY works. Dvorak works. But neither is significantly better than the other.
I have a simple question for you then. Why hasn't the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard penetrated the commercial market?
If you truly could increase speed by 20%-40%, then you can reduce your support staff by the same. Large corporations are not stupid; spending a month on training in exchange of the ability to get rid of almost half your typing pool would have been done all over the place. Yet, during the post-war boom, you have no significant increase of DSK. Nor were there mass layoffs of unneeded staff.
Is it possible that everybody in the corporate world was that hidebound, that stuck in the past that they would turn up their noses at a 20% savings? Computers came in like gunbusters, so it's hard to say it was due to a fear of new technology. Nor did businesses continue to refuse to use mice when they came out. The initial dislike was quickly overtaken once the advantages became apparent. Little of the workings of an officeplace have been unchanged over the last 50 years. What miracle of stubborness is there that is keeping the QWERTY keyboard around while all around it has changed?
It sounds more and more like a paranoid fantasy. "If only they weren't suppressing it, Dvorak keyboards would have taken over the world."
You can't come in here unless you say "swordfish". Now, I give you one more guess.
*If* he was an expert,
There's a link at the end of the article where they point out that Fawkes was brought into the plot because...he was an expert in gunpowder.
*If* he had it packed in
This was not a spur of the moment event. There was more than enough time to ensure the gunpowder was correctly placed and packed.
See where the northern hemisphere's aurora activity is currently going on.