The plot of The Killing Star works from pretty logical assumptions: An advanced sentient race will have survived by placing its own survival before that of other species, especially those outside its own ecosystem; it will act swiftly, aggressively and ruthlessly when necessary to protect itself; and it will assume that any other advanced sentient race will do the same.
Look at it from the aliens' perspective: A race that can transmit audio and video with electromagnetic radiation may last long enough to pose a threat, perhaps even unintentially by building an interstellar probe with an accidental grey goo potential, or by producing a wealthy xenophobe willing to blow her fortune on doing it intentially.
Seeing this from a human perspective, would you be willing to gamble that some octopedal ammonia-breathing lifeform will value the human race's survival more than Greenpeace does?
Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop.
The referenced Tuesday was yesterday, not six days from now. It's completely understandable that some stories are posted late, but is it too much to ask that they be edited to remain factual?
I was going to post something about imagining a Beowulf cluster of these or of welcoming our new botnet overlords, but the bot on my computer started threateNO CARRIER
A writer promotes the isolation and eventual hunting and eating of a huge fraction of a country's population, based solely on their beliefs, which he sees as evidence of hopeless intellectual inferiority. His statements receive overwhelming agreement from the forum in which he is published.
How is this viewpoint is morally superior to those which wrought genocides in Biafra, Croatia, Nigeria, Rwanda, East Timor and dozens of other places in our lifetimes? Are we really so willfully ignorant that we believe all these atrocities didn't start this way? So filled with hubris that we believe America (or our intelligencia, which has itself been targeted in other times and places) incapable of such virulent hatred?
If you still aren't taking me seriously, consider this: Orthodox Judaism posits a literal six-day Creation. If the writer had singled out this group instead of attacking all Genesis believers and the geographic region which he believes contains them, would any of us have called his diatribe anything but hate speech of the most vitriolic and unconscionable sort?
Please read the parent post again, examine its +5 Insightful score, and tell me how far removed we are from that mindset. And please be intellectually honest; if you plan to claim that BadAnalogyGuy was only trying to be funny, or that the moderators were only moderating ironically, please provide supporting evidence.
The back door uses a normal metal key, which is buried in the second plantpot from the left.
You have just described in a public forum a procedure for circumventing a security technology. Helpful SDMA enforcement personnel will be with you shortly. Please do not offer resistance when they break down the door, and thank you for your cooperation.
In "Cradle of Life," Schopf recounts his involvement in evaluating the evidence for life on Mars, and the events that led to the life on Mars NASA press conference. NASA administrators asked him in January 1995 to assess what geologists at the Johnson Spacecraft Center (JSC) in Houston believed might be microfossils in a chunk of a meteorite thought to have come from Mars. The focus was on tiny, orange pancake-shaped globules of carbonate material. The scientists thought these globules might be Martian "protozoans," but Schopf's analysis showed that their guess was wrong.
"Many of the objects merged one into another in a totally nonbiologic way," Schopf says. "Their overall size range also did not fit biology, and they lacked any of the telltale features—pores, tubules, wall layers, spines, chambers, internal structures—that earmark tiny protozoan shells. In addition, the 'lifelike' traits they did possess could be explained by ordinary inorganic processes.
"I raised these points with the JSC scientists. They seemed to agree. I thought the matter was closed. But more than a year later, at the August 1996 news conference, the same little pancakes were again proffered as evidence of Martian life, this time of bacteria rather than protozoans. Evidently the scientists' minds were set—the facts hadn't changed, only the meaning attached to them."
Several weeks before the press conference, NASA again asked Schopf to evaluate the findings. He studied the evidence three times, and was not impressed.
"Crucial questions had not been asked," he writes. "Articles published earlier and critically relevant to the authors' contentions had been ignored. More plausible ways to explain the findings were given short shrift. The claim of 'evidence for primitive life on early Mars' seemed overblown, ill-conceived."
At the press conference, the JSC scientists presented their findings with the aid of "high-tech cartoon videos," says Schopf, who spoke after them.
"I was wearing my best suit—the one I got married in—looking at hundreds of reporters who wanted me to say there was life on Mars," he says. "I had no doubt my words would prove unwelcome. On a scale of one to 10, I gave each piece of their evidence a score. Some, such as the suggested Mars source of the meteorite, I ranked high. But the evidence for life was weak; I gave it a two. A number of scientists later called me to task for being too generous. One Nobel laureate said I should have ranked the evidence zero!
"This attempt failed to find life at Mars. That does not mean Mars contained no life—just that these scientists didn't find any."
How do respected scientists, from Scheuchzer and Beringer to the JSC team, Make such blunders? One answer, Schopf says, is that scientists have the same "strengths, fears and foibles as everyone" and are not so different from our neighbors. They have great successes and, sometimes, great failures. Mostly, "Cradle of Life" addresses one of science's great successes.
Perhaps Dr. Schopf's newer techniques will also be applied to ALH84001 and th
Note that the submitter identifies the product as "photo fraud software" not "photo fraud detection software." This is quite apt, since the application will obviously cut both ways. Someone cooking a photo could simply run each version through this software, making minor tweaks until their "improvements" pass its inspection. If the software works the way it appears to, it would be the image manipulator's equivalent of a spell checker.
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
Anyone care to guess how long it will be before this quote supplants "640K should be enough for anybody" as the Worst Technology Prediction Ever?
Forty-seven percent of those polled responded they they did not support 'wiretapping in order to reduce the threat of terrorism'.
Plain wrong. The article states, "Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants 'in order to reduce the threat of terrorism.'"
You may disagree in either case, but at least get the basic facts right.
...we'd all be drinking a lot of smoothies right now.
The findings from a recent look by Itellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, claim that most of these errors a trivial but approximately 2 percent of the patents examined had errors that weakened the core claims of the patent itself.
"Most of these errors a trivial," eh? I'll bet they a! And it's Intellevate, not Itellevate.
How can we expect 10,000-word patent applications and their appendant illustrations to be free from even trivial errors, when a 65-word story can't even use correct grammar or get the subject's name right? Honestly, how short does a story have to be to get proofread around here?
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just read the article, and, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The soil beneath us has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of antibotic-resistant bacteria. It's difficult to tell from this discussion point whether they will consume the captive ants or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the superbugs will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new microscopic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground plague nurseries.
It seems to me that the results suggest that humans can develop mental processes akin to Bayesian filtering.
Suppose that there are subconsciously-obvious visual cues that are generally indicative of worthwhile or worthless websites -- sufficiently obvious that they can be perceived in the space of an eyeblink -- and that, as we expand the corpus of websites to which we have been exposed, we subconsciously condition ourselves over time to recognize these cues.
The fact that lengthier review of these pages rarely changes the subject's mind may not be proof of a hastily-acquired bias, but instead offer a measure of the quality of the initial evaluation.
What, you're still reading this tripe? Must be the font.
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, I've just lost my Internet connection, but what we've seen speaks for itself. My previous post has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant RIAA apologists. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive music market or merely enslave it. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; DARM (digital/analog rights management) will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new copyright overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with Excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their third-world CD factories."
You've made some excellent points. Please accept my apologies for my previous demonstration of highhorsemanship, and my promise never again to post after mixing Jolt and WD-40.
Let's establish a rule of conduct: If you make it a point to attack and publicly castigate developers who don't follow the GNU license, you should NOT attack RIAA for protecting their own IP rights, or for publicly discussing options for doing so. If in doing so they use some tactic that you think is wrong (Sony's rootkit disaster for example), go after that behavior, don't deny their right to defend their own intellectual property.
So you don't think RIAA should have a stranglehold on music distribution? Don't give it to them then! Support local artists, independent songwriters, open-source music! Stop taking the easy way out and expecting others to pay for it.
If all the hype about Ashlee Simpson makes you want her music, you should expect to pay more for it, because hype costs money. If you're sick of the hype, well, don't patronize it. Don't steal RIAA's stuff and fool yourself into thinking that you're taking a moral stand by doing so.
Does this really seem like rocket science to anyone?
The test model achieved voltage differences as high as 30kV and produced an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210,000 m/s, over four times faster than state-of-the-art ion engine designs achieve. This makes it four times more fuel efficient, and also enables an engine design which is many times more compact than present thrusters, allowing the design to be scaled up in size to operate at high power and thrust.
Since KE=(mv^2)/2, wouldn't an ion engine with over four times the exhaust velocity have over 16 times the efficiency, all other factors being equal? And wouldn't an increase in ion KE produce a proportional increase in the erosion rate of the dual low-voltage grids, along with a concomitant shortening of the engine's usable service life?
Afraid I have to agree with the AC, g8orade. You haven't even posted on/. since May '02 (and haven't answered anyone else's "Ask Slashdot" question, like, ever) and you're expecting everyone here to do your googling for you? Again?
I, for one, do not welcome our lazy, buck-passing overlords.
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just looked at the pictures, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. New York State has been taken over - "conquered," if you will - by a master race of giant alien propellers. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive townsfolk or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the props will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new rotary overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground storage battery caves.
--
If giant alien robots invaded California, would they think the windfarms were just outdoor fitness classes?
We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.
The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.
I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.
The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.
Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
...imagine how much more information you could extract from e.g. the Zapruder film if it had been captured this way.
Actually, it would likely have been rendered completely unusable. The Zapruder Film was taken on a Bell & Howell Zoomatic using Kodachrome II Super 8mm safety film, which had a stated resolution of 63 lines/mm. That gives each frame an effective resolution of about 85,000 pixels.
A plenoptic camera of the type described here, using this film as the detector, would have an effective resolution of less than 480 pixels, or about a 25x19-pixel field. The result might let you determine roughly how far away the Lincoln Continental was from the camera, but that datum wouldn't be 0.00001% as valuable as the details you sacrificed to get it.
Yes, the plenoptic camera has some neat benefits, including the ability to reconstruct the field of view from the perspective of any point on its objective lens. But for the image to contain all that information, it by necessity does NOT contain information that it otherwise would--in this case, resolution.
Look at the sample images. Even the sharpest-focused regions are soft-focused. This is a 16-megapixel camera with an effective resolution less than 1/3 that of VGA. Granted, the images can be refocused and depth information can be extracted, but do you really want to have to buy a 188-megapixel plenoptic camera to get sharp 1-megapixel images? Is focusing really that hard?
Rather than ignoring people and allowing them to find happiness in what may be an obscure or disgusting manner to us (or just posting friggin blurbs on a board), we comment on it and judge it.
You include this statement (without the slightest sign of intentional irony) in your own judgemental comment on someone else's judgemental comment. Ironically, I feel that I must comment judgementally on this.
This is why I have lunches with Andrea Dworkin and not a bunch of catty women whose sense of humor is so constrained by the mores of society that they don't even laugh at stories of Penis Puppetry.
When you last ate with Andrea, did she happen to mention that she had died in April? I'd have thought that your lunch dates would have been somewhat constrained by that event.
Slashdot Mirror
The plot of The Killing Star works from pretty logical assumptions: An advanced sentient race will have survived by placing its own survival before that of other species, especially those outside its own ecosystem; it will act swiftly, aggressively and ruthlessly when necessary to protect itself; and it will assume that any other advanced sentient race will do the same.
Look at it from the aliens' perspective: A race that can transmit audio and video with electromagnetic radiation may last long enough to pose a threat, perhaps even unintentially by building an interstellar probe with an accidental grey goo potential, or by producing a wealthy xenophobe willing to blow her fortune on doing it intentially.
Seeing this from a human perspective, would you be willing to gamble that some octopedal ammonia-breathing lifeform will value the human race's survival more than Greenpeace does?
Why should I get a Mac when I can do the exact same thing on Vista?
Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard all week.
Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop.
The referenced Tuesday was yesterday, not six days from now. It's completely understandable that some stories are posted late, but is it too much to ask that they be edited to remain factual?
I was going to post something about imagining a Beowulf cluster of these or of welcoming our new botnet overlords, but the bot on my computer started threateNO CARRIER
A writer promotes the isolation and eventual hunting and eating of a huge fraction of a country's population, based solely on their beliefs, which he sees as evidence of hopeless intellectual inferiority. His statements receive overwhelming agreement from the forum in which he is published.
How is this viewpoint is morally superior to those which wrought genocides in Biafra, Croatia, Nigeria, Rwanda, East Timor and dozens of other places in our lifetimes? Are we really so willfully ignorant that we believe all these atrocities didn't start this way? So filled with hubris that we believe America (or our intelligencia, which has itself been targeted in other times and places) incapable of such virulent hatred?
If you still aren't taking me seriously, consider this: Orthodox Judaism posits a literal six-day Creation. If the writer had singled out this group instead of attacking all Genesis believers and the geographic region which he believes contains them, would any of us have called his diatribe anything but hate speech of the most vitriolic and unconscionable sort?
Please read the parent post again, examine its +5 Insightful score, and tell me how far removed we are from that mindset. And please be intellectually honest; if you plan to claim that BadAnalogyGuy was only trying to be funny, or that the moderators were only moderating ironically, please provide supporting evidence.
The back door uses a normal metal key, which is buried in the second plantpot from the left.
You have just described in a public forum a procedure for circumventing a security technology. Helpful SDMA enforcement personnel will be with you shortly. Please do not offer resistance when they break down the door, and thank you for your cooperation.
The UCLA paleobiologist in question, Dr. J. William Schopf, has already dealt directly with the ALH84001 Mars meteorite controversy:
Perhaps Dr. Schopf's newer techniques will also be applied to ALH84001 and th
Note that the submitter identifies the product as "photo fraud software" not "photo fraud detection software." This is quite apt, since the application will obviously cut both ways. Someone cooking a photo could simply run each version through this software, making minor tweaks until their "improvements" pass its inspection. If the software works the way it appears to, it would be the image manipulator's equivalent of a spell checker.
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
Anyone care to guess how long it will be before this quote supplants "640K should be enough for anybody" as the Worst Technology Prediction Ever?
Forty-seven percent of those polled responded they they did not support 'wiretapping in order to reduce the threat of terrorism'.
Plain wrong. The article states, "Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants 'in order to reduce the threat of terrorism.'"
You may disagree in either case, but at least get the basic facts right.
...we'd all be drinking a lot of smoothies right now.
The findings from a recent look by Itellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, claim that most of these errors a trivial but approximately 2 percent of the patents examined had errors that weakened the core claims of the patent itself.
"Most of these errors a trivial," eh? I'll bet they a! And it's Intellevate , not Itellevate.
How can we expect 10,000-word patent applications and their appendant illustrations to be free from even trivial errors, when a 65-word story can't even use correct grammar or get the subject's name right? Honestly, how short does a story have to be to get proofread around here?
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just read the article, and, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The soil beneath us has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of antibotic-resistant bacteria. It's difficult to tell from this discussion point whether they will consume the captive ants or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the superbugs will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new microscopic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground plague nurseries.
It seems to me that the results suggest that humans can develop mental processes akin to Bayesian filtering.
Suppose that there are subconsciously-obvious visual cues that are generally indicative of worthwhile or worthless websites -- sufficiently obvious that they can be perceived in the space of an eyeblink -- and that, as we expand the corpus of websites to which we have been exposed, we subconsciously condition ourselves over time to recognize these cues.
The fact that lengthier review of these pages rarely changes the subject's mind may not be proof of a hastily-acquired bias, but instead offer a measure of the quality of the initial evaluation.
What, you're still reading this tripe? Must be the font.
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, I've just lost my Internet connection, but what we've seen speaks for itself. My previous post has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant RIAA apologists. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive music market or merely enslave it. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; DARM (digital/analog rights management) will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new copyright overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with Excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their third-world CD factories."
You've made some excellent points. Please accept my apologies for my previous demonstration of highhorsemanship, and my promise never again to post after mixing Jolt and WD-40.
Let's establish a rule of conduct: If you make it a point to attack and publicly castigate developers who don't follow the GNU license, you should NOT attack RIAA for protecting their own IP rights, or for publicly discussing options for doing so. If in doing so they use some tactic that you think is wrong (Sony's rootkit disaster for example), go after that behavior, don't deny their right to defend their own intellectual property.
So you don't think RIAA should have a stranglehold on music distribution? Don't give it to them then! Support local artists, independent songwriters, open-source music! Stop taking the easy way out and expecting others to pay for it.
If all the hype about Ashlee Simpson makes you want her music, you should expect to pay more for it, because hype costs money. If you're sick of the hype, well, don't patronize it. Don't steal RIAA's stuff and fool yourself into thinking that you're taking a moral stand by doing so.
Does this really seem like rocket science to anyone?
Thanks, ArcSecond, that makes sense. But we still use KE to calculate how quickly the plasma stream will erode the low-voltage grids, right?
The test model achieved voltage differences as high as 30kV and produced an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210,000 m/s, over four times faster than state-of-the-art ion engine designs achieve. This makes it four times more fuel efficient, and also enables an engine design which is many times more compact than present thrusters, allowing the design to be scaled up in size to operate at high power and thrust.
Since KE=(mv^2)/2, wouldn't an ion engine with over four times the exhaust velocity have over 16 times the efficiency, all other factors being equal? And wouldn't an increase in ion KE produce a proportional increase in the erosion rate of the dual low-voltage grids, along with a concomitant shortening of the engine's usable service life?
Afraid I have to agree with the AC, g8orade. You haven't even posted on /. since May '02 (and haven't answered anyone else's "Ask Slashdot" question, like, ever) and you're expecting everyone here to do your googling for you? Again?
I, for one, do not welcome our lazy, buck-passing overlords.
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just looked at the pictures, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. New York State has been taken over - "conquered," if you will - by a master race of giant alien propellers. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive townsfolk or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the props will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new rotary overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground storage battery caves.
--
If giant alien robots invaded California, would they think the windfarms were just outdoor fitness classes?
Perhaps he should call well-known philanthropist and First Amendment Center founder John Seigenthaler and ask him to help spread the word!
We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.
The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.
I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.
The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.
Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
Terry Gilliam would have loved to have had these in Brazil !
...imagine how much more information you could extract from e.g. the Zapruder film if it had been captured this way.
Actually, it would likely have been rendered completely unusable. The Zapruder Film was taken on a Bell & Howell Zoomatic using Kodachrome II Super 8mm safety film, which had a stated resolution of 63 lines/mm. That gives each frame an effective resolution of about 85,000 pixels.
A plenoptic camera of the type described here, using this film as the detector, would have an effective resolution of less than 480 pixels, or about a 25x19-pixel field. The result might let you determine roughly how far away the Lincoln Continental was from the camera, but that datum wouldn't be 0.00001% as valuable as the details you sacrificed to get it.
Yes, the plenoptic camera has some neat benefits, including the ability to reconstruct the field of view from the perspective of any point on its objective lens. But for the image to contain all that information, it by necessity does NOT contain information that it otherwise would--in this case, resolution.
Look at the sample images. Even the sharpest-focused regions are soft-focused. This is a 16-megapixel camera with an effective resolution less than 1/3 that of VGA. Granted, the images can be refocused and depth information can be extracted, but do you really want to have to buy a 188-megapixel plenoptic camera to get sharp 1-megapixel images? Is focusing really that hard?
Rather than ignoring people and allowing them to find happiness in what may be an obscure or disgusting manner to us (or just posting friggin blurbs on a board), we comment on it and judge it.
You include this statement (without the slightest sign of intentional irony) in your own judgemental comment on someone else's judgemental comment. Ironically, I feel that I must comment judgementally on this.
This is why I have lunches with Andrea Dworkin and not a bunch of catty women whose sense of humor is so constrained by the mores of society that they don't even laugh at stories of Penis Puppetry.
When you last ate with Andrea, did she happen to mention that she had died in April? I'd have thought that your lunch dates would have been somewhat constrained by that event.