Killer implies it not just rivals the iPod but bests it severely. Ask youself, if both were free which would you pick. Duh, an iPod. Now both are not free but its not a better value so why pick it.
The same day the settlement was announce the change in stock price alone was several fold the vlaue of the settlement. It's a crock. The value of the trial and the evidence discovery value would have grossly exceeded any cash value to the state of CA. shame on them for settleing.
Perhaps they have it all backwards. Bird calls are picked by birds on the basis of many factors. Beyong the obvious need to differentiate for sexual selection and niche indentity there are practical consideration on how they differentiate.
For example, do you want to optimize your call so that it travels well over water, through bushes, in heavy winds, tree-tops, urban landscapes? Maybe you want it not to travel far or make it hard to echo-locate for predator avoidance? Finally there is the problem of modulation.
Presumably you want to embedd information on the call. So you want to choose a family of calls which are easy to generate and modulate.
Sure you could devise an arbitrarily complex voice box to generate any particular coding scheme, but why not instead pick some crude but reliable mechnism with the minimum number of nerve and muscle controls.
Perhaps also efficiency and strain are issues as well.
The bottom line is that perhaps the regular step arrays that can turn an impulse like a hand clap into a characterisitic modulated sound are exactly the same proces by which birds turn a pulse of breath into a modulated bird call? If so it would be unsurprising for artifical geometric structres to produce "bird noises" to the human ear.
What is so interesting about sex? This is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to use mathematics to sell a book on sex to the enourmous geek market. Shameless exploitation I tell you! Real geeks want Pi not Pie.
Re:DNA versus other digital data
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
Well if you can write down the DNA then you can make the DNA later (in theory) and You can simulate a cell's use of DNA (in theory). Thus having the DNA consitutes being able to encode anything DNA encodes. Of course not all things are in the DNA. for example the DNA is twisted and bound by various molecules that act as additional logic and thus additional state values. But the number of these extra states is dwarfed by the states of the DNA sequence it self. Thus it is somewhat safe to ignore these on a per cell basis. (maybe not on a whole animal basis since each cell may be different). But that was what my next comment about being able to do a whole brain state model was about anyhow.
We are certainly the first species to be able to carry more information on our persons than is stored in our DNA. Indeed a list of your DNA will fit on a CD--you could put it on your ipod or even a creditcard flash memory.
Perhaps even more interesting is that at some point we may be able to store on our persons more information that accessible capacity of our brains.
At some point in the long future, mory cpapcities will exceed the number of cells in your brain. At this point it may become more relevant to speak of a Homo Silicon individual walking around carrying a human pet on its person.
The final evolution is the sim human whl believes he is alive and posting to slash dot but is actually one of many simulations. Indeed given that you live today only fifty years past the first digital computer and the future holds orders of magnitude more time it is ovewhelmingly probable that you are infact a simulation. The Anthropic prinicple says that : If the human race did not go exctint before achieving this capability then its a certainty you are a simmulation or cannot prove you ar not. The corollary is that there is no point for you to play the game but should try to visit the out-of-bounds areas and try to break it. Stars are probably the avatars of real humans, and People/US magazine therefore contain the only useful information in the universe.
Of course there might be some tell tale signs. Simply modeling your brain would not be enough since you are not a closed finite state machine, It would have to have a world model also in order to be able to update the state of your model brain with external sources of information. It's this world model that one could test. Clues to its finiteness might be visible.
for example, you would likely find that the low-observable conent scenery is generated by random fractal generators. And that any time you look at it it is slightly different but looks the same mostly. For example a waterfall or tree blowing in the wind or a mirage. If you were to drill down and state at some element in the scene the you wold find at some level of resolution it would suddenly switch from a proabilistic outcome to a discrete state. But in doind so you would have to give up knowing some of its other properties since the scene generator can retain all details simultanoeus. To allow you to measure one in precise detail means it has to give up allowing another proprty to be measurable. Lets call this the quantum effect.
another property you might observe is that the scene description bandwidth is finite. This would manifest it self in not being able to observe fourier components above a certain value, lets call this value the reciprocal waveleneght. This would be the limit of resoulution. To the casaula observer, things further from you wol dbe less resolvable than things close to you as there would be seeming constant minimum angluar resolution you could achieve. Lets call this effect diffraction.
I wont go on but there are several other effects you could observe in a limited capacity world model. These would include Dispersion, finite speed of information travel (call this c), time-energy uncertainty, and an equivalence between the complexity of an object the amount of work it took to model it (call this E=mC^2)
The first Mars landers were autoclaved to prevent contamination from mars. This made for some rather remarkable compromises in the lander design in order for it to survive baking.
For example, because there were no heat resistant, space worthy (radiation resistant) memories back then an advance form of magnetic core memory memory was used. So this thing had VERY little memory. All data had to be stored on board for later transmission. The storage was done on magnetic tape. But of course the "modern" plastic magnetic tape could not be autoclaved. So they went back to the original magnetic tape: a steel band.
The atmosphere on mars has orders of magnitude lower pressure than ours. SO one cannot use a conventional pressure gauge. And an ultra sensitive baritron (capicitively measured diaphram gauge) would never have survived baking. (modern ones are become more robust). So insted they implemented a new kind of pressure guage never used before. It consisted of three temrerature sensors on stalks at right angle and some heat sources on stalks. By measuring the time history of the temperature reading they were able to use a mathematical heat transport model to back out the wind direction, velocity and pressure.
This device turned out to be amazingly robust and kept its calibration over years of service. No lander since then can claim the accuracy of this original weather station.
Later probes were not as thourgouly baked in part because they were so much more complicated their components could not withstand it.
As for bacteria living on mars. There are already earthly bacteria that could survive. For example take Radio-durans whose preferred environment is the high radiation environemnt underneath the hanford waste tanks. It can withsand having its DNA sliced in to tiny bits and still recover. It evolved on earth to live in extreme oxidizing conditions, turned out radiation damage, complete desication, and other stresses were a freebie. Things like antrhax spores can live decades, maybe much more, in a non-vegitative form.
The danger I think is that viruses in the host animal will now have an opportunity to learn how to invade human cells under favorable conditions. We are gaurenteeing our own extinction by disease.
As it stands asia is the source of virtualy all flu and africa the source of all Ebola. In both cases it's believed to be because of the biological conditions that put animals and humans in close contact where the viruses can jump between species. In the case of flu the host animal is birds which then jumps to mamals via pigs. Pigs are close enought o human that the jump to human is easy. and then it's flu season. In the case of Ebola no one knows what the host animal is. Apparently its not harmful to its host since it would slauter it wholsesale if it were as deadly as it is in humans. When it jumps to human's the only good nes is that it is so lethal it tends to kill it's host quicker than it spreads in rural africa. NY city might be a different story.
Some people think that ebola's natural host is a monkey or an ape.
Apes get many diseases we dont. For example Simian Aids. What would happen if we were to put human cells in an ape, then simian aids learned how to infect these cells. Then it jumped to the human population.
We are porting disease from the antire animal kingdom to our own without considering the consequences
It's scarey they think that is a solution
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure which is more worrisome, one that they are so cavalier about leaving unencrytped biometric information one is force to reveal (to get a passport) or that they actually beleive tinfoil solves the issue.
why does tin foil not solve the issue? well in most european countries you have to hand over your passport to get a hotel room. Presto, the passport reader can work.
likewise their other solution, putting a printed password inside the passport is equally broken. Again the hotel has access to your passport pasword.
these people are dangerously a) stupid, b) in charge.
First the smaller the size of the sensor area (all the pixels) the easier it is to make a good lens. Making flat field lenses is hard, so making lenses that gather light unifromly and in focus over the entire sensor is hard. So in this sense smaller is better.
Second, the smaller the pixel, all else being equal, generally the lower the noise level and thus the better the signal. Many forms of noise scale with pixel area so smaller can be better as long as the same number of photos hit both sensors. The catch is the "all else being equal". There tends to be more dead area per pixel are as you make the pixels denser. Those are lost photons. Also if there is leakage due to pixel crowding that's worse too.
So what it comes down to is photons per pixel. This has nothing to due with pixel size directly. A more powerful lens of the same diameter can concentrate the same number of photons in to the smaller sensor area.
However as you make lenses focus tighter the abberations tend to rise. At some point the lens becomes so curved it cannot feasibly become more curved. You can hold this off a while by making the lenses out of exotic high index materials. But by and large yo never see anything better than F1.
Those small lenses can gather as much light as a larger lens. Sometimes this can be an illusion however. A large lens run through a small iris may be gathering less light than a smaller lens with a big iris. Besides limiting light the iris changes the depth of field and corrects for abberations that affect the sharpness of the focus. The ultimate camera is the pin hole lens which has a tiny diameter, and because the depth of field is practically) infinite needs no lens and has no distortion. But it also gather almost no light.
So anyhow it's possible to make a dense array that is sharp but you have to work at it. But you dont lse light as you say until you are pushing F1 on the lense.
I have read elsehwere the company makes two models a 3016 vote model and a 10,000 vote model. The county bought the cheaper ones. Thus presumbably they cant sue because they were aware of the different machine types and since they had the option to contact for more capacity. On the other hand they could sue for the sloppy inadequate warning system, but it might be hard to win. My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.
Apparently the state is willing to cough up an unnesseccary 3 miilion now and then. Shame they did not just give it to the Open Voting Consortium. The OVC systems are open source and have paper trails. They even cost less to buy let alone the cost of redoing an election.
OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page .
Since on Macs you frequently dont have to install a driver to use a printer I wonder if macs have this Issue with the pre-installed drivers.
on a related topic, I was disaapointed how crappy the drivers for mac have be come with HP mulit-function printers. They are really unstable and unfreindly to mulit-user mode. I wish I could use it without the driver.
What is the coherence Length of a laser diode? Typically the coherence length of a laser scales with Q of the cavity and the length of the cavity; in effect average round-trip path length inside the laser made by a single photon. This is why large high-q systems like He Ne's worked well for making holograms: they had long coherence lengths.
why do you want long coherence lengths? because you need to make sure that at every point on the film the path lenth difference between every ray you want to capture and the reference beam is within the coherence length. As a starting point one would say that at a minumim it should not be less than the width of the film or the width/depth/height of the object or scene which ever is greater.
Looking at thepicture of the kit, the film and object are many times the cavity size of the a typical internal cavity diode laser. And dhiode lasers have sucky coherence normally.
are there some clever ways of lighting a scene that can minimize the coherence length requirements?
I note that the systemin use is a single frequency hologram not a white light hologram. thus the play back has to be done by a monochromatic light source. It must be the arrangement they are using is not a thick film hologram but a thin film hologram.
any ideas on the geometry they are using and how they are handling the coherence length issue???
pre-filled in ballots are a bad idea. Part of the voting process is to sequester the person voting from undue influence and thus assure a secret ballot. Absentee ballots are problematical on that score as well. Hopefully early voting will reduce the need for both conditions.
Optical scan is used in rural counties that are mostly Republican, while the electronic machines are used in the mostly-Democrt cities
wrong, read the article.
1)
Rural FL cities are overwhelminly registered democrat.
2) optical scan is used in more large cities than E-voting
They never plot this information, instead trying to hide it behind population counts,
Did you read the article you lambast? there are 6 plots and not a single table and not one population count is cited.
This could very well be a deliberate attempt to manufacture data to try to make people suspect the optical scan machines are bad and electronic ones are good
the web site you blame states in the first section in bold italics that the data does not support any such conclusions.
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Slashdot Mirror
Killer implies it not just rivals the iPod but bests it severely. Ask youself, if both were free which would you pick. Duh, an iPod. Now both are not free but its not a better value so why pick it.
So the equivalent of a SQL, insert field command, will be a retro-virus? Will my database be down...with a cold?
Live TV huh? well if nothing good is on I'll just use my Tivo then.
The same day the settlement was announce the change in stock price alone was several fold the vlaue of the settlement. It's a crock. The value of the trial and the evidence discovery value would have grossly exceeded any cash value to the state of CA. shame on them for settleing.
For example, do you want to optimize your call so that it travels well over water, through bushes, in heavy winds, tree-tops, urban landscapes? Maybe you want it not to travel far or make it hard to echo-locate for predator avoidance? Finally there is the problem of modulation.
Presumably you want to embedd information on the call. So you want to choose a family of calls which are easy to generate and modulate.
Sure you could devise an arbitrarily complex voice box to generate any particular coding scheme, but why not instead pick some crude but reliable mechnism with the minimum number of nerve and muscle controls.
Perhaps also efficiency and strain are issues as well.
The bottom line is that perhaps the regular step arrays that can turn an impulse like a hand clap into a characterisitic modulated sound are exactly the same proces by which birds turn a pulse of breath into a modulated bird call? If so it would be unsurprising for artifical geometric structres to produce "bird noises" to the human ear.
and http://www.macintouch.com/pbg4irda.html (mind the lameness filter gaps in the URLS)
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030 72008542035
0 30 72008542035
and
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20
What is so interesting about sex? This is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to use mathematics to sell a book on sex to the enourmous geek market. Shameless exploitation I tell you! Real geeks want Pi not Pie.
Well if you can write down the DNA then you can make the DNA later (in theory) and You can simulate a cell's use of DNA (in theory). Thus having the DNA consitutes being able to encode anything DNA encodes. Of course not all things are in the DNA. for example the DNA is twisted and bound by various molecules that act as additional logic and thus additional state values. But the number of these extra states is dwarfed by the states of the DNA sequence it self. Thus it is somewhat safe to ignore these on a per cell basis. (maybe not on a whole animal basis since each cell may be different). But that was what my next comment about being able to do a whole brain state model was about anyhow.
Perhaps even more interesting is that at some point we may be able to store on our persons more information that accessible capacity of our brains.
At some point in the long future, mory cpapcities will exceed the number of cells in your brain. At this point it may become more relevant to speak of a Homo Silicon individual walking around carrying a human pet on its person.
The final evolution is the sim human whl believes he is alive and posting to slash dot but is actually one of many simulations. Indeed given that you live today only fifty years past the first digital computer and the future holds orders of magnitude more time it is ovewhelmingly probable that you are infact a simulation. The Anthropic prinicple says that : If the human race did not go exctint before achieving this capability then its a certainty you are a simmulation or cannot prove you ar not. The corollary is that there is no point for you to play the game but should try to visit the out-of-bounds areas and try to break it. Stars are probably the avatars of real humans, and People/US magazine therefore contain the only useful information in the universe.
Of course there might be some tell tale signs. Simply modeling your brain would not be enough since you are not a closed finite state machine, It would have to have a world model also in order to be able to update the state of your model brain with external sources of information. It's this world model that one could test. Clues to its finiteness might be visible.
for example, you would likely find that the low-observable conent scenery is generated by random fractal generators. And that any time you look at it it is slightly different but looks the same mostly. For example a waterfall or tree blowing in the wind or a mirage. If you were to drill down and state at some element in the scene the you wold find at some level of resolution it would suddenly switch from a proabilistic outcome to a discrete state. But in doind so you would have to give up knowing some of its other properties since the scene generator can retain all details simultanoeus. To allow you to measure one in precise detail means it has to give up allowing another proprty to be measurable. Lets call this the quantum effect.
another property you might observe is that the scene description bandwidth is finite. This would manifest it self in not being able to observe fourier components above a certain value, lets call this value the reciprocal waveleneght. This would be the limit of resoulution. To the casaula observer, things further from you wol dbe less resolvable than things close to you as there would be seeming constant minimum angluar resolution you could achieve. Lets call this effect diffraction.
I wont go on but there are several other effects you could observe in a limited capacity world model. These would include Dispersion, finite speed of information travel (call this c), time-energy uncertainty, and an equivalence between the complexity of an object the amount of work it took to model it (call this E=mC^2)
For example, because there were no heat resistant, space worthy (radiation resistant) memories back then an advance form of magnetic core memory memory was used. So this thing had VERY little memory. All data had to be stored on board for later transmission. The storage was done on magnetic tape. But of course the "modern" plastic magnetic tape could not be autoclaved. So they went back to the original magnetic tape: a steel band.
The atmosphere on mars has orders of magnitude lower pressure than ours. SO one cannot use a conventional pressure gauge. And an ultra sensitive baritron (capicitively measured diaphram gauge) would never have survived baking. (modern ones are become more robust). So insted they implemented a new kind of pressure guage never used before. It consisted of three temrerature sensors on stalks at right angle and some heat sources on stalks. By measuring the time history of the temperature reading they were able to use a mathematical heat transport model to back out the wind direction, velocity and pressure.
This device turned out to be amazingly robust and kept its calibration over years of service. No lander since then can claim the accuracy of this original weather station.
Later probes were not as thourgouly baked in part because they were so much more complicated their components could not withstand it.
As for bacteria living on mars. There are already earthly bacteria that could survive. For example take Radio-durans whose preferred environment is the high radiation environemnt underneath the hanford waste tanks. It can withsand having its DNA sliced in to tiny bits and still recover. It evolved on earth to live in extreme oxidizing conditions, turned out radiation damage, complete desication, and other stresses were a freebie. Things like antrhax spores can live decades, maybe much more, in a non-vegitative form.
As it stands asia is the source of virtualy all flu and africa the source of all Ebola. In both cases it's believed to be because of the biological conditions that put animals and humans in close contact where the viruses can jump between species. In the case of flu the host animal is birds which then jumps to mamals via pigs. Pigs are close enought o human that the jump to human is easy. and then it's flu season. In the case of Ebola no one knows what the host animal is. Apparently its not harmful to its host since it would slauter it wholsesale if it were as deadly as it is in humans. When it jumps to human's the only good nes is that it is so lethal it tends to kill it's host quicker than it spreads in rural africa. NY city might be a different story.
Some people think that ebola's natural host is a monkey or an ape.
Apes get many diseases we dont. For example Simian Aids. What would happen if we were to put human cells in an ape, then simian aids learned how to infect these cells. Then it jumped to the human population.
We are porting disease from the antire animal kingdom to our own without considering the consequences
why does tin foil not solve the issue? well in most european countries you have to hand over your passport to get a hotel room. Presto, the passport reader can work.
likewise their other solution, putting a printed password inside the passport is equally broken. Again the hotel has access to your passport pasword.
these people are dangerously a) stupid, b) in charge.
First your post is mostly wrong. Here's the deal.
First the smaller the size of the sensor area (all the pixels) the easier it is to make a good lens. Making flat field lenses is hard, so making lenses that gather light unifromly and in focus over the entire sensor is hard. So in this sense smaller is better.
Second, the smaller the pixel, all else being equal, generally the lower the noise level and thus the better the signal. Many forms of noise scale with pixel area so smaller can be better as long as the same number of photos hit both sensors. The catch is the "all else being equal". There tends to be more dead area per pixel are as you make the pixels denser. Those are lost photons. Also if there is leakage due to pixel crowding that's worse too.
So what it comes down to is photons per pixel. This has nothing to due with pixel size directly. A more powerful lens of the same diameter can concentrate the same number of photons in to the smaller sensor area.
However as you make lenses focus tighter the abberations tend to rise. At some point the lens becomes so curved it cannot feasibly become more curved. You can hold this off a while by making the lenses out of exotic high index materials. But by and large yo never see anything better than F1.
Those small lenses can gather as much light as a larger lens. Sometimes this can be an illusion however. A large lens run through a small iris may be gathering less light than a smaller lens with a big iris. Besides limiting light the iris changes the depth of field and corrects for abberations that affect the sharpness of the focus. The ultimate camera is the pin hole lens which has a tiny diameter, and because the depth of field is practically) infinite needs no lens and has no distortion. But it also gather almost no light.
So anyhow it's possible to make a dense array that is sharp but you have to work at it. But you dont lse light as you say until you are pushing F1 on the lense.
I have read elsehwere the company makes two models a 3016 vote model and a 10,000 vote model. The county bought the cheaper ones. Thus presumbably they cant sue because they were aware of the different machine types and since they had the option to contact for more capacity. On the other hand they could sue for the sloppy inadequate warning system, but it might be hard to win. My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.
OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page .
Your mother warned you about this. Playing with your joystick will make you go blind.
on a related topic, I was disaapointed how crappy the drivers for mac have be come with HP mulit-function printers. They are really unstable and unfreindly to mulit-user mode. I wish I could use it without the driver.
why do you want long coherence lengths? because you need to make sure that at every point on the film the path lenth difference between every ray you want to capture and the reference beam is within the coherence length. As a starting point one would say that at a minumim it should not be less than the width of the film or the width/depth/height of the object or scene which ever is greater.
Looking at thepicture of the kit, the film and object are many times the cavity size of the a typical internal cavity diode laser. And dhiode lasers have sucky coherence normally.
are there some clever ways of lighting a scene that can minimize the coherence length requirements?
I note that the systemin use is a single frequency hologram not a white light hologram. thus the play back has to be done by a monochromatic light source. It must be the arrangement they are using is not a thick film hologram but a thin film hologram.
any ideas on the geometry they are using and how they are handling the coherence length issue???
For all you slashdooters to young to know why a core dump is called a core dump, look at page 30 of the book.
pre-filled in ballots are a bad idea. Part of the voting process is to sequester the person voting from undue influence and thus assure a secret ballot. Absentee ballots are problematical on that score as well. Hopefully early voting will reduce the need for both conditions.
Optical scan is used in rural counties that are mostly Republican, while the electronic machines are used in the mostly-Democrt cities
wrong, read the article.
1) Rural FL cities are overwhelminly registered democrat.
2) optical scan is used in more large cities than E-voting
They never plot this information, instead trying to hide it behind population counts,
Did you read the article you lambast? there are 6 plots and not a single table and not one population count is cited.
This could very well be a deliberate attempt to manufacture data to try to make people suspect the optical scan machines are bad and electronic ones are good
the web site you blame states in the first section in bold italics that the data does not support any such conclusions.
Try readin' before you post.
If you want to see a detailed analysis and interesting primer on these voting patterns look here:
Analysis of Florida Statistics
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
analysis of florida voting patterns
Here is the correct one:
Analysis of Florida Voting Patterns
enjoy.