Photo ID only works if the person and the card are both present...otherwise you just have a card with a photo on it, with no verification that the person who sent it is actually the person on the photo (not only that, but you have no idea who the person is who registered, so wtf are you going to do with the photo?).
The best thing is telephone callback. Email can be too easily hacked, but a callback system with a preregistered phonenumber is pretty much foolproof.
Hmmm...appart from FormZ, what 3d/CAD/CAM packages are there for the Mac? I'm an engineering student too (mechanical), so I'm just curious, not covertly flaming:)
And that's the best and the worst of it, though, isn't it?
It's true what you say, therefore it is a good thing in and of itself. But what's bad about this is that ultimately, no-one gets punished for screwing the consumer out of their hard earned cash. And it sets an unwanted precedent where the guy who made all of the anti-competetive decisions saying "Hey, don't get me, take it out of the company's (read employee's)bank account". That's just Enron in a different guise.
What you said is absolutely true, except for this statement: "You open a store in uganda(sp?) and someone slips and falls on the steps, they sue you there".
That might be true in the US, but in any other country in the world, we'd (and the courts) would tell you to be more carefull, get shoes with better grip and/or to get stuffed.
Way to overhype a strory...
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Go/.! Now you don't even bother to have the submitter read the article!
The Infineon chip doesn't connect to the brain. You put tiny slices of brain matter (neurons) in the chip (in a suspension inside the chip) and can then run current through those slices. No direct brain connection at all. And of course, those signals through the neurons on the chip can be recorded and put on screen...but no "recording of signals from the brain"...dunno where he even got that from. Must be on crack.
Still, it's a cool development; as the article says, we can now do better research over a longer period of time, for a better picture of how neurons work.
Yeah...that's seriously surprised me. The one thing that could have stopped 9-11 still hasn't been implemented; installing locked metal doors to the aircraft cockpits. Lots of privacy invading, right-depriving laws have been passed, but the one thing which would have had any effect hassn't been implemented.
Actually, it's more than that. The whole Frankenstein thing is something deeper than technology: it's a human thing. Humans are afraid that they'll be...usurped, made obsolete by their offspring. The saddest (and at the same time happiest) moment in ones life is when your kids become better than you (beat you at basketball, make much more money than you, whatever). That is at the crux of the Frankenstein myth (and all it's offspring/ilk)...it's not that technology is bad, it's about the fear that what you create/your offspring will surpass you and make you obsolete.
"And the cloaking... why couldn't the Enterprise's brilliant engineers program the weapons to shoot right back at anything shooting at the ship? It doesn't matter if the Romulan ship is cloaked, it's shooting you right now! Right over there! Sheesh."
Now that's always bothered me about ST...why the fsck don't they just teleport a part of the engine of the attacking ship about 3 meters to the right? I mean, you have this transporter tech, so why not use it to get your companions out of danger, or blow up a ship?
Yup, you said it; that's why Star Wars ruled over for Star Trek for me: culture, history and reality.
Star Wars 'won' me over because it was real; real people (asocial smuggler, idealistic idiot [;)], pragmatic yet consientious businessman [that's Lando]) with real personalities, which made the whole thing much more beleivaqble.
And you've hit the nail on the head with the history. That creates immediate feeling and immersion. The art of makebelieve...knowing something about what's gone before, yet not knowing the whole story (so that you can invent/make up whatever you want to fill up the gaps)...that's what draws people in.
And what does Star Trek do? It removes human motives from the story (greed at al) and thus makes it less real. Also, it's history fails due to breaks in continuity, making the whole history less real...which makes people just not care.
Yeah, true...but we're not talking about shopping here; we're talking Comdex. We're talking consumer goods which are above the impulse buy limit of $99. I want to know when a palmos/gsm with a highrez colour screen, grafitti and removable storage finally comes out.
Appart from that, which energy drink do you use? That dirt cheap one on the bottom right of the shelves? Or 'the one you know'? Trust me...the research has been done many times over, and 90% of the population does buy 'what they know', whether it be the $0.50 macarony of the cheap brand over the noname brand for $0.30 or the branded (and tv advertised) not-cocacola cola over the unknown, but cheaper cola. And more often than not, those products/have been made in the same factory, in the same bloody process, but only packaged differently!/! So don't shout 'but the taste is different!'...it's not.
Go read some marketing books, or talk to that creep in sales. You'll be surprised at the shit that goes on, and how much everyone is influenced by advertising and the 'what they know' principle. You'll be even more surprised at the psychological research that has been done. Me, I'm an engineer by schooling, but those kinds of psych tricks have applications everywhere, from packaging to tech manuals to design to what to say in meetings. Sad, but true.
You know, I used to beleive the same, kinda. Now however I realise that we're not the average consumer. The average consumer doesn't actually do his market research...he asks the sales person in the store, and thus buys something way overpriced/over-spec'd for what he wants. And because he recognises the brand...he actually thinks he's done a good deal.
Face it...the average person is dumb, and branding, advertising et al does work. Furthermore, you and I need it too: how else would you know what's out there?
Now the question of whether they (sales, PR etc)could do with a lower budget to accomplish the same, that's another issue...
Gotta agree with you on that. The thing I always don't get though is that these deaths are....unexpected? (wrong word, but bear with me). Sad, I absolutely agree. But remember this: these guys and gals had done what they wanted to do all their lives...they went into space and stayed there 16 days! They got what they wanted most in life. The ancient greeks used to say "Die now!" whenever someone had a personal success, meaning that what came after wouldn't measure up to that moment of greatness. And in this case, yes it's sad that 7 died...but their lives where full...
As you say, technology inevitably brings grief. Especially on the cutting edge. Death is to be expected in these kinds of endouvours, and sure it's sad. It's just not a reason to set back what these people stood for, what they fought for, like when the Challenger went down.
Death is part of life...everyone does it, and any religioen which teaches you to fear it doesn't really get life...life is to be lived, not lived in fear of death.
Comfort and peace...maybe...understanding? Unless god talks directly to you, the only understanding you'll get is from scientific inquiry into what went wrong. And you'll probably learn that it's due to the damaged wing from the falling piece of heatshielding which fell off the main engine.
Either that, or due to using an outdated, experimental launch vehicle for the last 30ish years.
Anyway, the fact of the matter is that smaller size bring huge implications in terms of drag, friction and energy requirements. There is a poster in this thread who shows it with some basic math, check it out as I can't be bothered to redo what's already been done correctly:)
As for the differntiation: you're right about the information content (as in DNA), but the cells themselves have hugely varied internal (and external) structures...a bone cells is not a liver cell is not a nerve cell. With nanites...well, it's sci-fi, but in the beginning all nanites would be the same. As soon as they reconstruct themselves, we'll call them life:)
Actually, it does: when using the 128 bit pipeline, you calculate everything in 128 bits. This automatically leads to greater acuracy when truncating to the 10 bit colour resolution your monitor can handle...which leads to a more accurate value of your 10 bit number.
To break this down to engineering terms: whenever you step the simulation program to higher values, you increase your accuracy, even if you then only display at half the frequency. This gives you more accurate readings than if you stepped the simulation at half the frequency to begin with. And that applies to whatever you simulate, be it velocity or colour.
And the thing is that your first sentence doesn't pan out: the rendering path would work with whatever it's programmed to do, and Carmack would difine that. Thus he'd say that when rendering for ATI the precision would be 96 bits, and for nvidia 128. Why would he give nvidia's path only 96 bits, when doing it at 128 would be just as fast, seeing as it's hardware!? If he gave the nvidia path 96 bits, it would be 96 bits with 32 null bits tacked on to the end anyway! The rendering path doesn't ask for anything...it just gets what it's given, and what it's given depends on how deep it is...96 for ATI, 128 for nvidia. What makes the difference is that the speeds of the 96 bit path is different from the 128 bit path...therefore making ATI faster and nvidia looking better.
Too true...but remember it's SCIENCE fiction...which stems from a tradition where although it might be fiction, the science is accurate, or at the very least a believable extrapolation of known facts. Anything else is just pulp-science fiction.
If you look at the old masters (Asimov is a prime example) you'll notice that these people actually knew something about what they were writing. If not from their own PhD's, then because of their research. Now, it's just hacks who get their idea's from spurious internet pages like the crap sciencebox.dk instead of xxx.lanl.gov (no, that is/not/ a porn site!).
Slashdot Mirror
That's why Lexmark also makes those 'proprietary' memory sticks...
By that definition murder is the theft of someones life.
So it's a technically correct, but effectively stupid definition.
Photo ID only works if the person and the card are both present...otherwise you just have a card with a photo on it, with no verification that the person who sent it is actually the person on the photo (not only that, but you have no idea who the person is who registered, so wtf are you going to do with the photo?).
The best thing is telephone callback. Email can be too easily hacked, but a callback system with a preregistered phonenumber is pretty much foolproof.
Heh...I wish they could put these out as desktop chips too...I've been meaning to upgrade my PIII550 for a while now :)
Hmmm...appart from FormZ, what 3d/CAD/CAM packages are there for the Mac? I'm an engineering student too (mechanical), so I'm just curious, not covertly flaming :)
Hehe...they shouldn't be considering a merger with InterBrew anytime soon then :)
"Also go ask random Joe Blow on the street if he knows what Solaris is."
I'm afraid they'll just say 'a crap movie' instead of a great book or an OS...
And that's the best and the worst of it, though, isn't it?
It's true what you say, therefore it is a good thing in and of itself. But what's bad about this is that ultimately, no-one gets punished for screwing the consumer out of their hard earned cash. And it sets an unwanted precedent where the guy who made all of the anti-competetive decisions saying "Hey, don't get me, take it out of the company's (read employee's)bank account". That's just Enron in a different guise.
What you said is absolutely true, except for this statement: "You open a store in uganda(sp?) and someone slips and falls on the steps, they sue you there".
That might be true in the US, but in any other country in the world, we'd (and the courts) would tell you to be more carefull, get shoes with better grip and/or to get stuffed.
Go /.! Now you don't even bother to have the submitter read the article!
The Infineon chip doesn't connect to the brain. You put tiny slices of brain matter (neurons) in the chip (in a suspension inside the chip) and can then run current through those slices. No direct brain connection at all. And of course, those signals through the neurons on the chip can be recorded and put on screen...but no "recording of signals from the brain"...dunno where he even got that from. Must be on crack.
Still, it's a cool development; as the article says, we can now do better research over a longer period of time, for a better picture of how neurons work.
...was too...clean. I always thought of Arakis as a really dusty, grimy place...the mini-series /looked/ as if it was filmed on a clean soundstage.
And as for the acting...*sigh*.
Yeah...that's seriously surprised me. The one thing that could have stopped 9-11 still hasn't been implemented; installing locked metal doors to the aircraft cockpits. Lots of privacy invading, right-depriving laws have been passed, but the one thing which would have had any effect hassn't been implemented.
Now isn't that at the very least curious?
Actually, it's more than that. The whole Frankenstein thing is something deeper than technology: it's a human thing. Humans are afraid that they'll be ...usurped, made obsolete by their offspring. The saddest (and at the same time happiest) moment in ones life is when your kids become better than you (beat you at basketball, make much more money than you, whatever). That is at the crux of the Frankenstein myth (and all it's offspring/ilk)...it's not that technology is bad, it's about the fear that what you create/your offspring will surpass you and make you obsolete.
"And the cloaking... why couldn't the Enterprise's brilliant engineers program the weapons to shoot right back at anything shooting at the ship? It doesn't matter if the Romulan ship is cloaked, it's shooting you right now! Right over there! Sheesh."
Now that's always bothered me about ST...why the fsck don't they just teleport a part of the engine of the attacking ship about 3 meters to the right? I mean, you have this transporter tech, so why not use it to get your companions out of danger, or blow up a ship?
Yup, you said it; that's why Star Wars ruled over for Star Trek for me: culture, history and reality.
Star Wars 'won' me over because it was real; real people (asocial smuggler, idealistic idiot [;)], pragmatic yet consientious businessman [that's Lando]) with real personalities, which made the whole thing much more beleivaqble.
And you've hit the nail on the head with the history. That creates immediate feeling and immersion. The art of makebelieve...knowing something about what's gone before, yet not knowing the whole story (so that you can invent/make up whatever you want to fill up the gaps)...that's what draws people in.
And what does Star Trek do? It removes human motives from the story (greed at al) and thus makes it less real. Also, it's history fails due to breaks in continuity, making the whole history less real...which makes people just not care.
I think the virtue you are referring to is called "originality".
Yeah, true...but we're not talking about shopping here; we're talking Comdex. We're talking consumer goods which are above the impulse buy limit of $99. I want to know when a palmos/gsm with a highrez colour screen, grafitti and removable storage finally comes out.
/have been made in the same factory, in the same bloody process, but only packaged differently!/! So don't shout 'but the taste is different!'...it's not.
Appart from that, which energy drink do you use? That dirt cheap one on the bottom right of the shelves? Or 'the one you know'? Trust me...the research has been done many times over, and 90% of the population does buy 'what they know', whether it be the $0.50 macarony of the cheap brand over the noname brand for $0.30 or the branded (and tv advertised) not-cocacola cola over the unknown, but cheaper cola. And more often than not, those products
Go read some marketing books, or talk to that creep in sales. You'll be surprised at the shit that goes on, and how much everyone is influenced by advertising and the 'what they know' principle. You'll be even more surprised at the psychological research that has been done. Me, I'm an engineer by schooling, but those kinds of psych tricks have applications everywhere, from packaging to tech manuals to design to what to say in meetings. Sad, but true.
You know, I used to beleive the same, kinda. Now however I realise that we're not the average consumer. The average consumer doesn't actually do his market research...he asks the sales person in the store, and thus buys something way overpriced/over-spec'd for what he wants. And because he recognises the brand...he actually thinks he's done a good deal.
Face it...the average person is dumb, and branding, advertising et al does work. Furthermore, you and I need it too: how else would you know what's out there?
Now the question of whether they (sales, PR etc)could do with a lower budget to accomplish the same, that's another issue...
Gotta agree with you on that. The thing I always don't get though is that these deaths are....unexpected? (wrong word, but bear with me). Sad, I absolutely agree. But remember this: these guys and gals had done what they wanted to do all their lives...they went into space and stayed there 16 days! They got what they wanted most in life. The ancient greeks used to say "Die now!" whenever someone had a personal success, meaning that what came after wouldn't measure up to that moment of greatness. And in this case, yes it's sad that 7 died...but their lives where full...
As you say, technology inevitably brings grief. Especially on the cutting edge. Death is to be expected in these kinds of endouvours, and sure it's sad. It's just not a reason to set back what these people stood for, what they fought for, like when the Challenger went down.
Death is part of life...everyone does it, and any religioen which teaches you to fear it doesn't really get life...life is to be lived, not lived in fear of death.
And you don't have to attack those of us who aren't. It's really not the time for that kind of comment here anyway.
Anyway, I think "Shit!" is the first thought many of us had to this news, even before any religious thoughts...it certainly was mine.
Comfort and peace...maybe...understanding? Unless god talks directly to you, the only understanding you'll get is from scientific inquiry into what went wrong. And you'll probably learn that it's due to the damaged wing from the falling piece of heatshielding which fell off the main engine.
Either that, or due to using an outdated, experimental launch vehicle for the last 30ish years.
Absolutely...more than that, discussion is fun :)
:)
:)
Anyway, the fact of the matter is that smaller size bring huge implications in terms of drag, friction and energy requirements. There is a poster in this thread who shows it with some basic math, check it out as I can't be bothered to redo what's already been done correctly
As for the differntiation: you're right about the information content (as in DNA), but the cells themselves have hugely varied internal (and external) structures...a bone cells is not a liver cell is not a nerve cell. With nanites...well, it's sci-fi, but in the beginning all nanites would be the same. As soon as they reconstruct themselves, we'll call them life
Isn't that the whole point? ;p
Actually, it does: when using the 128 bit pipeline, you calculate everything in 128 bits. This automatically leads to greater acuracy when truncating to the 10 bit colour resolution your monitor can handle...which leads to a more accurate value of your 10 bit number.
To break this down to engineering terms: whenever you step the simulation program to higher values, you increase your accuracy, even if you then only display at half the frequency. This gives you more accurate readings than if you stepped the simulation at half the frequency to begin with.
And that applies to whatever you simulate, be it velocity or colour.
And the thing is that your first sentence doesn't pan out: the rendering path would work with whatever it's programmed to do, and Carmack would difine that. Thus he'd say that when rendering for ATI the precision would be 96 bits, and for nvidia 128. Why would he give nvidia's path only 96 bits, when doing it at 128 would be just as fast, seeing as it's hardware!? If he gave the nvidia path 96 bits, it would be 96 bits with 32 null bits tacked on to the end anyway! The rendering path doesn't ask for anything...it just gets what it's given, and what it's given depends on how deep it is...96 for ATI, 128 for nvidia. What makes the difference is that the speeds of the 96 bit path is different from the 128 bit path...therefore making ATI faster and nvidia looking better.
Too true...but remember it's SCIENCE fiction...which stems from a tradition where although it might be fiction, the science is accurate, or at the very least a believable extrapolation of known facts. Anything else is just pulp-science fiction.
/not/ a porn site!).
If you look at the old masters (Asimov is a prime example) you'll notice that these people actually knew something about what they were writing. If not from their own PhD's, then because of their research. Now, it's just hacks who get their idea's from spurious internet pages like the crap sciencebox.dk instead of xxx.lanl.gov (no, that is