I'll go one further. WTF is up with the government? Weren't all their efforts in the past four years supposed to prepare for a national tragedy/exactly like this/? Wasn't DHS set up to promote cooperation with all the agencies?
True, I rather suspect they where expecting to deal with a city nuked by terrorists or something of the like, but wouldn't the consequences be exactly what we are seeing in NO today? So WTF have the agencies been doing the past years?
The nicely safe and dry country of the Netherlands (who's offer of help to inspect/help repair the dikes/levees has just been refused by the US gov'ment) says 'Hi!'.
And just in case that wasn't clear enough; the last time we had a 'catastrophic' water problem (which wasn't even near the scale of the problem NO has) was 1953.
Could be...but a levee system is a/system/. If not all the levees are up to strenght, it doesn't matter than one levee was up to strenght; the system only works if the whole system is fully prepped; one levee all by itself has no value and it isn't strange that that levee failed (or was the only one to be up to spec), because it was likely the one which was going to be most stressed.
I know I'm not really explaining this as lucidly as I should; maybe the analogy is that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and what has been done is to strngthen only the one link, but that happened to be the link where the axe was going to land.
As for NO being the one to have to pay for it...you're forgetting that this area also happens to be of national importance, with all the oil/gas going through there. Appart from NO maybe not being able to afford that money, and even appart from the fact that protection from th environment on that level is maybe the governments responsibility, it is most certainly the governments responsibility to ensure the safety of resoutces of national importance.
Ok...I know it's usually pretty useless to comment in articles which have reached past a couple of hundred comments, but this here is a very important point.
American scientific reports cannot be considered credible anymore. Even moreso if the studies are on environmental/energy issues. Not since the turn of the century/millenium.
VERY high level scientists have resigned due to politics changing scientific reports and the Bush administration forcing their (obviously biased and often unqualified-for-scientific-positions) people into influential positions on the boards of the organisations/teams which write these reports. Many scientists (including at least 20 Nobel laureates) have signed a document stating this.
The whole 'intelligent design' debate is just a marker here (pushing religion as science in schools, of all places), but the fact that american scientists point to the fact that their reports are being changed tells every scientist in the world that american scientific reports (especially environmental/energy related) are not to be trusted anymore.
But thats not the point, is it? We're talking syntax, grammar, not meaning or form. 'Do' might be an irregular verb (ie utterly irrational and not based on logical transformation), but the position of the verb (in any of it's forms) will be consistent with the rules of grammar. And with the statistical analysis thrown in, the algorythm might also be able to pick up on the irrational placements a verb sometimes gets put in.
What they've develloped is something which interprets grammar; the ruleset behind the organisation of buildingblocks, apparently buildingblock agnostic.
A dictionary is just words. This algorythm cant assign meaning to the buildingblocks, it can only dicide how and in what order the buildingblocks go together.
What class of bluetooth are you talking about? What power IrDA?
Bluetooth and irda have the same range...lol! Good one:)
And when you include 'irda iis line of sight' as a security feature...I really hope you're not talking corporate/military or whatever other serious security...'cause the fact that you're walking in and out of a secure area with a device that can store/recieve data is itself a security risk.
"if it could interface with TV's etc and input stimulus from other remotes"
I'm sorry, but I have to insist you put down that crackpipe slowly. I've used my palmpilot IIIc as a remote, easy. I've even used it to learn the commands of non-tv remotes. I've used my IIIc's ir (and now my t3's) to re-program those scrolling LED signs, easy. Swapping files with friends was easy and foolproof too. I'm sorry your 'lab setup' couldn't get a reliable setup going [and I'me REALLY surprised, nay horrified that you couldn't get that done in controlled conditions, if I could swap 300kb documents with friends in the uni bar with beer and disco lighting being flung 'round], and I'm amazed you 'discovered' that 7 inches was a decent distance for ir...you could have just looked up the specs!
And you conveniently forget that especially in mobile tech, there's a third 'thing that matters'; battery life. IrDA kicks bluetooth and wifi squarely in the balls for mobile applications where power is the watchword.
It might well be, theoretically. But in practice, bluetooth is a HELL of a lot slower than that.
Not only that, but as others have pointed out, its a point and click protocol and it's ubiqiutous on phones and many printers. Wifi and wireless usb are overkill for those kind of apps. And bluetooth, whilst a nice idea, is uselessly complex in practice (OK, I'll have to clarify that here; by complex I do not mean that I can't do it or that others here can't. Hell, I've got my T3 and my samsung d500 talking to each other and to my pc [notoriously irritating to get setup right]. But I have to pair the devices, look em up again, activate bluetooth on both devices etc. It's just unneccessarily time consuming to just print something or to send a file. Plus bluetooth, wifi and w-usb consume insane amounts of power, rendering them not very good for mobile/pda usage).
Substitue USA for China and Iraq for Tibet. Same difference.
I'm happy to see that the recently started propaganda the US government has been spreading viz. China has taken such a good hold. And it's only been a couple of months since the first routine military assesments (they do them on things like Canada invading the US too, you know) have been blown out of proportion importance-wise by CNN.
And all this in a thread about MS (an american company) trying to impose serfdom on one of it's (ex)employees, too. The irony, the irony! [/apocalypse now]
That's the same thing which keeps girls in the sextrade.
Sure, you always have a choice...but where you to suggest to MS that you find the non-compete clause restrictive and want it cut, or want extra money if they leave it in, you'll find that MS (or any other large company) won't hire you. It's what's called a false choice. I bet you think Sophie had a choice too (go imdb Sophie's choice).
You're marked a 'funny', but what you say is very true.
A person goes to school/uni/whatever and learns and specialises in subjects he/she finds interesting. Based on that, you get a job, furthering your skills. In the end you become expert/guru at what you do...but now MS is saying that yes they hired him based on his skills...but now no-one else is allowed to hire him for the reasons they did!?!?
Non-compete clauses are fine and dandy, but they are meant to prevent you stealing a companies clients. The knowledge you accrue, that which makes you/you/, is not something you can unlearn, and even if you could, that would make you pretty useless to any company, because if you unlearnt your major talent/skill, what do you have to offer your (next) employer?
MS is setting a very dangerous precedent. It's something which not just resembles serfdom, but/is/ serfdom. They should be slapped down, hard.
Uh...why not use the distributed rendering client that Maya, and Houdini have standard? Shit, Renderman loves to work that way...I live in a flat and have lots of budies help me out when I'm rendering something....all over TCP/IP (over a LAN, true, but ANY IP could take/use/send the data).
"Does that thing even have Renderman installed? (at $5k/CPU I highly doubt it). Does it have Shake? Does it have Houdini? Does it have Maya?"
It doesn't need to. It just needs the distributed rendering client. And your studio would need a phat pipe...but nowadays that's a trivial (if one-time expensive) thing to get.
Heh...I know this one from science fiction stories from the 50's-70's...only there it was space travel (launch something now which takes 100 years to get there or wait 50 years for a technology which will get you there in 20 years).
"If Europe would pay back the US for are protection, then we could diverta Lot of tax payer money into other things."
Ah! Now I understand why the US is trying to force it's RI/MPAA and copyright/patent laws on Europe!
"europe used to be as bad as the middle east."
True...but that was in the 18th century...about when you had some unrest too.
"a powerfull laser could also make air warfare obsolete."
Yup...just like missiles made dogfighting obsolete.
"[x] is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago."
Hoo-boy, do you have an awfully simplistic and very much incorrect view of the world. History has taught us that technology makes for BLOODIER wars instead of les bloody wars. Look at what happened when the (cross)bow was introduced...or gunpowder, or cannon, or the machinegun. Bodycounts went up, as did civilian casualties. And since you mention the last sixty years (conveniently discounting Hiroshima et al), what happened in Korea? Or Vietnam? Or the Balkan? HUGE civilian losses. Now tell me that "A lot of money spent on 'destrustion' is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago.".
That's just bullshit; have the balls to just tell it like it is: a lot of money spent on 'destruction' is actually spent on making technology more accurate so we can kill more people in a shorter span of time.
You know, I've always wondered about that. SDI, that is. I say develop that system, put it under UN controll (or preferably under a UN2.0, without the current corruptive veto system) and sy 'fuck it, there will be NO ICBM launches by ANYONE on this earth [unless the trajectory indicates that the thing is just putting stuff into orbit or launching it into space]'.
I think Rutan proved that single stage is NOT a neccessity; it's just that if you have multiple stages (which just makes sense from a physics point of view; leave that empty weight behind!), it's much more economical to make sure that the empty stages can fly back and be re-used.
"we can't really analyze Buran since it only flew once, unmanned"
A true statement, but the fact that it did fly, totally unmanned (something I'd rather not see the shuttle try) says at least something about the worthyness of russian tech. That, and the fact that all russian tech is designed to be serviced by an ex-farmhand from the steppes, leading to the situation that Sukhoi's need only a fraction of the groundcrew neccessary to keep an F16 up in the air. Fact is, Russian mechanical engineering has always been better than any other nations...too bad their computer skills don't match up.
Slashdot Mirror
or what about the time we only needed just two cables plugged into our standalone players; power and content.
/and/ a copyright-cable. And maybe a dedicated ATM/bank cable too.
Soon we'll need power, content, internet
Oh, and special eye-stabber headmounted units just in case we do see un-paid for content.
I'll go one further. WTF is up with the government? Weren't all their efforts in the past four years supposed to prepare for a national tragedy /exactly like this/? Wasn't DHS set up to promote cooperation with all the agencies?
True, I rather suspect they where expecting to deal with a city nuked by terrorists or something of the like, but wouldn't the consequences be exactly what we are seeing in NO today? So WTF have the agencies been doing the past years?
The nicely safe and dry country of the Netherlands (who's offer of help to inspect/help repair the dikes/levees has just been refused by the US gov'ment) says 'Hi!'.
And just in case that wasn't clear enough; the last time we had a 'catastrophic' water problem (which wasn't even near the scale of the problem NO has) was 1953.
Could be...but a levee system is a /system/. If not all the levees are up to strenght, it doesn't matter than one levee was up to strenght; the system only works if the whole system is fully prepped; one levee all by itself has no value and it isn't strange that that levee failed (or was the only one to be up to spec), because it was likely the one which was going to be most stressed.
I know I'm not really explaining this as lucidly as I should; maybe the analogy is that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and what has been done is to strngthen only the one link, but that happened to be the link where the axe was going to land.
As for NO being the one to have to pay for it...you're forgetting that this area also happens to be of national importance, with all the oil/gas going through there. Appart from NO maybe not being able to afford that money, and even appart from the fact that protection from th environment on that level is maybe the governments responsibility, it is most certainly the governments responsibility to ensure the safety of resoutces of national importance.
Ok...I know it's usually pretty useless to comment in articles which have reached past a couple of hundred comments, but this here is a very important point.
American scientific reports cannot be considered credible anymore. Even moreso if the studies are on environmental/energy issues. Not since the turn of the century/millenium.
VERY high level scientists have resigned due to politics changing scientific reports and the Bush administration forcing their (obviously biased and often unqualified-for-scientific-positions) people into influential positions on the boards of the organisations/teams which write these reports. Many scientists (including at least 20 Nobel laureates) have signed a document stating this.
The whole 'intelligent design' debate is just a marker here (pushing religion as science in schools, of all places), but the fact that american scientists point to the fact that their reports are being changed tells every scientist in the world that american scientific reports (especially environmental/energy related) are not to be trusted anymore.
But thats not the point, is it? We're talking syntax, grammar, not meaning or form.
'Do' might be an irregular verb (ie utterly irrational and not based on logical transformation), but the position of the verb (in any of it's forms) will be consistent with the rules of grammar. And with the statistical analysis thrown in, the algorythm might also be able to pick up on the irrational placements a verb sometimes gets put in.
What they've develloped is something which interprets grammar; the ruleset behind the organisation of buildingblocks, apparently buildingblock agnostic.
A dictionary is just words. This algorythm cant assign meaning to the buildingblocks, it can only dicide how and in what order the buildingblocks go together.
" bluetooth and irda have the same range"
:P
:)
Oh, man, is that a misleading statement!
What class of bluetooth are you talking about? What power IrDA?
Bluetooth and irda have the same range...lol! Good one
And when you include 'irda iis line of sight' as a security feature...I really hope you're not talking corporate/military or whatever other serious security...'cause the fact that you're walking in and out of a secure area with a device that can store/recieve data is itself a security risk.
"if it could interface with TV's etc and input stimulus from other remotes"
I'm sorry, but I have to insist you put down that crackpipe slowly. I've used my palmpilot IIIc as a remote, easy. I've even used it to learn the commands of non-tv remotes. I've used my IIIc's ir (and now my t3's) to re-program those scrolling LED signs, easy.
Swapping files with friends was easy and foolproof too. I'm sorry your 'lab setup' couldn't get a reliable setup going [and I'me REALLY surprised, nay horrified that you couldn't get that done in controlled conditions, if I could swap 300kb documents with friends in the uni bar with beer and disco lighting being flung 'round], and I'm amazed you 'discovered' that 7 inches was a decent distance for ir...you could have just looked up the specs!
And you conveniently forget that especially in mobile tech, there's a third 'thing that matters'; battery life. IrDA kicks bluetooth and wifi squarely in the balls for mobile applications where power is the watchword.
"Bluetooth is 721Kb/s"
It might well be, theoretically. But in practice, bluetooth is a HELL of a lot slower than that.
Not only that, but as others have pointed out, its a point and click protocol and it's ubiqiutous on phones and many printers. Wifi and wireless usb are overkill for those kind of apps. And bluetooth, whilst a nice idea, is uselessly complex in practice (OK, I'll have to clarify that here; by complex I do not mean that I can't do it or that others here can't. Hell, I've got my T3 and my samsung d500 talking to each other and to my pc [notoriously irritating to get setup right]. But I have to pair the devices, look em up again, activate bluetooth on both devices etc. It's just unneccessarily time consuming to just print something or to send a file. Plus bluetooth, wifi and w-usb consume insane amounts of power, rendering them not very good for mobile/pda usage).
Theb again...how many mobile phones have wifi?
Oh, man.
Substitue USA for China and Iraq for Tibet. Same difference.
I'm happy to see that the recently started propaganda the US government has been spreading viz. China has taken such a good hold. And it's only been a couple of months since the first routine military assesments (they do them on things like Canada invading the US too, you know) have been blown out of proportion importance-wise by CNN.
And all this in a thread about MS (an american company) trying to impose serfdom on one of it's (ex)employees, too.
The irony, the irony! [/apocalypse now]
That's the same thing which keeps girls in the sextrade.
Sure, you always have a choice...but where you to suggest to MS that you find the non-compete clause restrictive and want it cut, or want extra money if they leave it in, you'll find that MS (or any other large company) won't hire you. It's what's called a false choice. I bet you think Sophie had a choice too (go imdb Sophie's choice).
"IANAL, and this is just my lay understanding. So don't believe anything I say :-)"
/were/ a lawyer, we'd not believe anything you said.
No, no, no! You have it all mixed up. If you
You're marked a 'funny', but what you say is very true.
/you/, is not something you can unlearn, and even if you could, that would make you pretty useless to any company, because if you unlearnt your major talent/skill, what do you have to offer your (next) employer?
/is/ serfdom. They should be slapped down, hard.
A person goes to school/uni/whatever and learns and specialises in subjects he/she finds interesting. Based on that, you get a job, furthering your skills. In the end you become expert/guru at what you do...but now MS is saying that yes they hired him based on his skills...but now no-one else is allowed to hire him for the reasons they did!?!?
Non-compete clauses are fine and dandy, but they are meant to prevent you stealing a companies clients. The knowledge you accrue, that which makes you
MS is setting a very dangerous precedent. It's something which not just resembles serfdom, but
Yup...the world had no /idea/ that Rutan was launching that day...
Uh...why not use the distributed rendering client that Maya, and Houdini have standard? Shit, Renderman loves to work that way...I live in a flat and have lots of budies help me out when I'm rendering something....all over TCP/IP (over a LAN, true, but ANY IP could take/use/send the data).
"Does that thing even have Renderman installed? (at $5k/CPU I highly doubt it). Does it have Shake? Does it have Houdini? Does it have Maya?"
It doesn't need to. It just needs the distributed rendering client. And your studio would need a phat pipe...but nowadays that's a trivial (if one-time expensive) thing to get.
Heh...I know this one from science fiction stories from the 50's-70's...only there it was space travel (launch something now which takes 100 years to get there or wait 50 years for a technology which will get you there in 20 years).
Yeah...but I'd sure love to use this instead of losing my home pc for a week when I want to render out one and a half minutes of 3D.
This was exactly what I was hoping for :) Thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail.
:)
I have to say: this is one of the most...uhm...'elegant'? fubars I've read about. Somehow it reminds me of the story of Mel, the real programmer
"If Europe would pay back the US for are protection, then we could diverta Lot of tax payer money into other things."
Ah! Now I understand why the US is trying to force it's RI/MPAA and copyright/patent laws on Europe!
"europe used to be as bad as the middle east."
True...but that was in the 18th century...about when you had some unrest too.
"a powerfull laser could also make air warfare obsolete."
Yup...just like missiles made dogfighting obsolete.
"[x] is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago."
Hoo-boy, do you have an awfully simplistic and very much incorrect view of the world. History has taught us that technology makes for BLOODIER wars instead of les bloody wars. Look at what happened when the (cross)bow was introduced...or gunpowder, or cannon, or the machinegun. Bodycounts went up, as did civilian casualties.
And since you mention the last sixty years (conveniently discounting Hiroshima et al), what happened in Korea? Or Vietnam? Or the Balkan? HUGE civilian losses. Now tell me that "A lot of money spent on 'destrustion' is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago.".
That's just bullshit; have the balls to just tell it like it is: a lot of money spent on 'destruction' is actually spent on making technology more accurate so we can kill more people in a shorter span of time.
You know, I've always wondered about that. SDI, that is.
I say develop that system, put it under UN controll (or preferably under a UN2.0, without the current corruptive veto system) and sy 'fuck it, there will be NO ICBM launches by ANYONE on this earth [unless the trajectory indicates that the thing is just putting stuff into orbit or launching it into space]'.
How the hell did you find this out in the afteraction? Did you have some kind of off-site commandlogging on or something?
I think Rutan proved that single stage is NOT a neccessity; it's just that if you have multiple stages (which just makes sense from a physics point of view; leave that empty weight behind!), it's much more economical to make sure that the empty stages can fly back and be re-used.
"we can't really analyze Buran since it only flew once, unmanned"
A true statement, but the fact that it did fly, totally unmanned (something I'd rather not see the shuttle try) says at least something about the worthyness of russian tech.
That, and the fact that all russian tech is designed to be serviced by an ex-farmhand from the steppes, leading to the situation that Sukhoi's need only a fraction of the groundcrew neccessary to keep an F16 up in the air.
Fact is, Russian mechanical engineering has always been better than any other nations...too bad their computer skills don't match up.