Reminds me of the chapter in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion (part of The Baroque Cycle). Japanese mercury vendors try to disable the Minerva (an armed merchant vessel) by filling its cargo hold with half-filled pots of mercury, rather than filling them to the brim. The idea is that the sloshing in the hull would resonate with the waves at the entrance to the harbour and slow the ship enough to be captured (or something to that effect). There's a discussion of whether Stephenson got the science correct here.
"A single gun owner could also temporarily program a friend or family member's print into the gun to go target shooting and then remove it upon returning home."
Either that or the guy who takes your gun will also take your finger
My late father-in-law was a DJ. We have several boxes of his LPs, 45s and reel to reel tapes in the garage. Would you like them? If you call now I'll throw in a few milk crates of our VHS tapes, CDs and DVDs at no extra cost.
In contrast, we also have 40 years or so of 8mm/VHS family video that he put on DVD before his death. DVD isn't perfect, but those get backed up and have been shared with family.
What about using an antenna? I cut cable about 7 years ago - everything comes in on Mythbuntu via an HDHR hooked up to a small roof-mounted antenna. We get about 30 channels OTA with no excess compression and no copy protection. Everything else comes in over the net (Netflix and "other").
You don't say what metro area you are in or whether you are living in an antenna-friendly building but you've already got 90% of the gear you need. Lots of info on the web about how to make the jump. You may have already investigated OTA, but if not you definitely should.
So they replaced pixels with a two-dimensional grid of sqare vectors that scale in width and height to grid width(or height) divided by the number of square vectors on the grid?
Actually just skimmed TFA and it looks like they have an interesting model - they separate the three channels and then fit vector "contours" around the different levels of brightness for each channel. The finer you need control, the more contours you add and the more explicitly you define the the polygons. Looks like a promising, workable solution.
In other words, he's using a slit camera to make photo finish images (but with the subject something other than finish lines). Technology is being repurposed for a potentially interesting effect, but not technically revolutionary.
Almost anything you can do or use today has an open source option. You have open source options for everything from your operating system to your chat app. You can read open source textbooks, cookbooks and encyclopedias. You can even build an open source airplane or brew your own free beer (free beer as in free speech, not free beer as in free beer).
Given all these options, what part(s) of your life would you be unwilling to open source? Your children's education? Vaccines? A pacemaker? If so, what would your test be for deciding that a closed-source option is the only choice?
"Down there," said Golg, "I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds."
"Bosh!" said Jill rudely. "As if we didn't know that we're below the deepest mines even here."
"Yes," said Golg. "I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that's where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I'll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won't care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism."
"My father went to the world's end," said Rilian thoughtfully. "It would be a marvellous thing if his son went to the bottom of the world."
Unless the MRI can show the brain as a series of miniature illustrations, these guys are about 121 years late to the game. But maybe that's just my approbativeness showing...
point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)
If your accountant is using Excel to run your books that means it's time to get a new accountant.
1990's people used to email this crap to each other. stupid pictures and the dumb dancing baby animation with the rise of facebook and other social networking people share this crap and its more viral. and the sites that carry it found a way to monetize on the junk
And before the internet it was all done with photocopiers, fax machines, (to a much lesser extent) VCRs and (even more rarely) BBSs. People used to keep binders full of these things at their desks. Before photocopiers showed up it was done via mimeograph, and one assumes that before that people were tracing boobs through eight layers of carbon paper.
Just as porn is at the forefront of all consumer technology, any office technology gets immediately co-opted for cartoons, kittens and breasts.
Sounds like the same "private" information that every candidate and party has access to during the election campaign and on election day. Not sure about the birth date, but everything else is definitely on the voter registration and tracking printouts used by poll clerks and by party scrutineers during the election.
As long as Amazon forces the sellers to honour the price, then I don't see a problem. Pure market forces will balance the risk/reward for dynamic prices - if one or two consumers get lucky, then that's the cost of doing business.
The biggest mistake that the exchanges made following the flash crash was to cancel the errant trades - if you fuck up the pricing, you need to deal with the consequences. Getting rid of downside risk removes half the equation and blocks any incentive to play smart.
This is a RIM problem, not an industry problem. RIM's sales are way down because their technology is outdated and they can't get their shit together. If it were an industry problem we'd be seeing reduced volumes and purchase prices across the board. By that measure Huawei's success is a more accurate harbinger of what's to come.
Can't help but think that RIM's current situation is a lot like what Apple faced with Copland back in the mid-90s. After several years of trying to build their own next-gen system they gave up and purchased NeXT, which we now know as OS X. After numerous OS delays and corporate near-death experiences they finally launched OS X Public Beta in 2000. Given that 90% of current Mac users never touched Classic, there is little shared memory for the bloated, buggy mess that was Mac OS 6-9.
RIM was in the same place two years ago, with a nasty software stack and no ecosystem. They responded by buying QNX. Even with the latest delays they are still going to from purchase to market faster than Apple did with OS X. Same fundamental problem, same solution, dramatically different outcomes.
Surprised that they chose to digitally edit his nose and chin. Since this is Game of Thrones I just assumed that they were going to add a pair of tits.
This type of boat is probably too limited in usefulness to be adopted by the navy. In terms of R&D capabilities it feels a lot like the experiments from the 1960s to develop militarized hydrofoils - the Canadian HMCS Bras d'Or being one good example. Despite impressive stability and speeds in excess of 60 knots (70mph), the limited load capacity and range made the prototypes unsuitable for military use.
The biggest hit, however, was the introduction of missiles. The difference between 20 and 30 knots isn't all that important when you're defending against a Sea Sparrow running at 500 mph. In WWII there were lots of destroyers running in excess of 35 knots. Now it's just the nuke-powered ACs that do top speeds, and everyone else is more worried about conserving fuel.
That means the proposed boat is really just a replacement for patrol vessels or stealth assault craft, and it doesn't look like the advantages of the design outweigh the compromises in handling, noise, carrying capacity and cost.
And there needs to be more uproar about this. Chip and pin is ridiculously easy to defeat. They used to steal data from the mag strips and get your pin before the banks made ATMs that were resistant to the type of tampering required to get an additional mag stripe reader into them.
Now all they need is an RFID reader and a camera set an an ATM anywhere and they can pick up every fucking card in your wallet from 6-10 feet away plus have your pin with a camera that could be set up with a good zoom up to 100ft away. You can literally throw an RFID reader into the plastic trash can with a wireless transmitter on it and get every single card that passes the atm that day, then have the evidence (the RFID reader) destroyed for you because the banks incinerate their garbage.
Pretty much everything in your post is wrong.
PIN plus RFID interception = SFA. With an EMV-compliant transaction the message is encrypted and the key can't be pulled off the card. EMV encryption has not been broken, and that's not for lack of effort. You could take the entire EMV message and post it on the Internet with your PIN, and nobody would be able to do anything with it.
Plus, very few fraudsters use pinhole cameras any more - it's generally done with tampered PIN pads.
Older contactless cards emulate a mag stripe transaction, but if the bank is too stupid to catch someone putting the contactless info on a mag stripe then it's their own fault. The message here is that the US needs to get its act together and get on with the EMV conversion.
Speaking of Classic 2D, I wonder if they will just drop half the frames to get to 24, or do some post-processing to add motion blur back in. If it's the former you'd think that the result would look very stuttery and unfamiliar. Our brains expect blurring with 24 frames/sec, so unless it's there the end result could be annoying.
I do wish people would stop using that as some sort of gauge of intelligence - it has very little to do with intelligence, and just modernity.
Sure, but the only thing worse than an IQ test is every other form of intelligence measure. Claiming that the test has issues (it does) should not be used to divert attention from the fact that some people are very smart while others are mind-bogglingly stupid.
It's like saying that thermometers suck because they don't account for wind chill, humidex, UV exposure or different peoples' metabolism. You may be correct, but I'm still going to check the temperature before going outside.
Well, Facebook could just go out and pick up RIMM for the price of six photo apps (give or take - there may be another 1/2 app in premiums). However, they probably wouldn't have the slightest idea what to with a profitable company that generates $18B in revenue every year.
Popovkin went on to announce that Drax Industries has been awarded the tender for construction of the new shuttle fleet and moon base. He went on to note that Drax's recent announcement of a toxic orchid-farming operation in the Amazon jungle was pure coincidence, and by the way did anyone know of an orthodontist in Washington who knew how to work with steel?
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the chapter in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion (part of The Baroque Cycle). Japanese mercury vendors try to disable the Minerva (an armed merchant vessel) by filling its cargo hold with half-filled pots of mercury, rather than filling them to the brim. The idea is that the sloshing in the hull would resonate with the waves at the entrance to the harbour and slow the ship enough to be captured (or something to that effect). There's a discussion of whether Stephenson got the science correct here.
"A single gun owner could also temporarily program a friend or family member's print into the gun to go target shooting and then remove it upon returning home."
Either that or the guy who takes your gun will also take your finger
My late father-in-law was a DJ. We have several boxes of his LPs, 45s and reel to reel tapes in the garage. Would you like them? If you call now I'll throw in a few milk crates of our VHS tapes, CDs and DVDs at no extra cost.
In contrast, we also have 40 years or so of 8mm/VHS family video that he put on DVD before his death. DVD isn't perfect, but those get backed up and have been shared with family.
What about using an antenna? I cut cable about 7 years ago - everything comes in on Mythbuntu via an HDHR hooked up to a small roof-mounted antenna. We get about 30 channels OTA with no excess compression and no copy protection. Everything else comes in over the net (Netflix and "other").
You don't say what metro area you are in or whether you are living in an antenna-friendly building but you've already got 90% of the gear you need. Lots of info on the web about how to make the jump. You may have already investigated OTA, but if not you definitely should.
As a surgeon, does he really think it's a good idea to replace the "Guy Hingston bankrupt" autocomplete with "Guy Hingston lawsuit"?
So they replaced pixels with a two-dimensional grid of sqare vectors that scale in width and height to grid width(or height) divided by the number of square vectors on the grid?
Actually just skimmed TFA and it looks like they have an interesting model - they separate the three channels and then fit vector "contours" around the different levels of brightness for each channel. The finer you need control, the more contours you add and the more explicitly you define the the polygons. Looks like a promising, workable solution.
In other words, he's using a slit camera to make photo finish images (but with the subject something other than finish lines). Technology is being repurposed for a potentially interesting effect, but not technically revolutionary.
Almost anything you can do or use today has an open source option. You have open source options for everything from your operating system to your chat app. You can read open source textbooks, cookbooks and encyclopedias. You can even build an open source airplane or brew your own free beer (free beer as in free speech, not free beer as in free beer).
Given all these options, what part(s) of your life would you be unwilling to open source? Your children's education? Vaccines? A pacemaker? If so, what would your test be for deciding that a closed-source option is the only choice?
"Down there," said Golg, "I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds."
"Bosh!" said Jill rudely. "As if we didn't know that we're below the deepest mines even here."
"Yes," said Golg. "I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But
that's where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing.
There I'll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You
won't care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the
live ones of Bism."
"My father went to the world's end," said Rilian thoughtfully. "It would be a marvellous thing if his son
went to the bottom of the world."
Unless the MRI can show the brain as a series of miniature illustrations, these guys are about 121 years late to the game. But maybe that's just my approbativeness showing...
point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)
If your accountant is using Excel to run your books that means it's time to get a new accountant.
1990's people used to email this crap to each other. stupid pictures and the dumb dancing baby animation
with the rise of facebook and other social networking people share this crap and its more viral. and the sites that carry it found a way to monetize on the junk
And before the internet it was all done with photocopiers, fax machines, (to a much lesser extent) VCRs and (even more rarely) BBSs. People used to keep binders full of these things at their desks. Before photocopiers showed up it was done via mimeograph, and one assumes that before that people were tracing boobs through eight layers of carbon paper.
Just as porn is at the forefront of all consumer technology, any office technology gets immediately co-opted for cartoons, kittens and breasts.
Hollywood seems to love re-boots, so why doesn't someone adapt Grendel?
They already did that. It was set in New York and starred Sarah Jessica Parker.
Sounds like the same "private" information that every candidate and party has access to during the election campaign and on election day. Not sure about the birth date, but everything else is definitely on the voter registration and tracking printouts used by poll clerks and by party scrutineers during the election.
Toronto Hydro already does this in the downtown core - 6 km2 of coverage using utility poles:
http://www.onezone.ca/
As long as Amazon forces the sellers to honour the price, then I don't see a problem. Pure market forces will balance the risk/reward for dynamic prices - if one or two consumers get lucky, then that's the cost of doing business.
The biggest mistake that the exchanges made following the flash crash was to cancel the errant trades - if you fuck up the pricing, you need to deal with the consequences. Getting rid of downside risk removes half the equation and blocks any incentive to play smart.
This is a RIM problem, not an industry problem. RIM's sales are way down because their technology is outdated and they can't get their shit together. If it were an industry problem we'd be seeing reduced volumes and purchase prices across the board. By that measure Huawei's success is a more accurate harbinger of what's to come.
Can't help but think that RIM's current situation is a lot like what Apple faced with Copland back in the mid-90s. After several years of trying to build their own next-gen system they gave up and purchased NeXT, which we now know as OS X. After numerous OS delays and corporate near-death experiences they finally launched OS X Public Beta in 2000. Given that 90% of current Mac users never touched Classic, there is little shared memory for the bloated, buggy mess that was Mac OS 6-9.
RIM was in the same place two years ago, with a nasty software stack and no ecosystem. They responded by buying QNX. Even with the latest delays they are still going to from purchase to market faster than Apple did with OS X. Same fundamental problem, same solution, dramatically different outcomes.
They Digitally Edited Out the likeness of Bush?
Surprised that they chose to digitally edit his nose and chin. Since this is Game of Thrones I just assumed that they were going to add a pair of tits.
This type of boat is probably too limited in usefulness to be adopted by the navy. In terms of R&D capabilities it feels a lot like the experiments from the 1960s to develop militarized hydrofoils - the Canadian HMCS Bras d'Or being one good example. Despite impressive stability and speeds in excess of 60 knots (70mph), the limited load capacity and range made the prototypes unsuitable for military use.
The biggest hit, however, was the introduction of missiles. The difference between 20 and 30 knots isn't all that important when you're defending against a Sea Sparrow running at 500 mph. In WWII there were lots of destroyers running in excess of 35 knots. Now it's just the nuke-powered ACs that do top speeds, and everyone else is more worried about conserving fuel.
That means the proposed boat is really just a replacement for patrol vessels or stealth assault craft, and it doesn't look like the advantages of the design outweigh the compromises in handling, noise, carrying capacity and cost.
And there needs to be more uproar about this. Chip and pin is ridiculously easy to defeat. They used to steal data from the mag strips and get your pin before the banks made ATMs that were resistant to the type of tampering required to get an additional mag stripe reader into them.
Now all they need is an RFID reader and a camera set an an ATM anywhere and they can pick up every fucking card in your wallet from 6-10 feet away plus have your pin with a camera that could be set up with a good zoom up to 100ft away. You can literally throw an RFID reader into the plastic trash can with a wireless transmitter on it and get every single card that passes the atm that day, then have the evidence (the RFID reader) destroyed for you because the banks incinerate their garbage.
Pretty much everything in your post is wrong.
PIN plus RFID interception = SFA. With an EMV-compliant transaction the message is encrypted and the key can't be pulled off the card. EMV encryption has not been broken, and that's not for lack of effort. You could take the entire EMV message and post it on the Internet with your PIN, and nobody would be able to do anything with it.
Plus, very few fraudsters use pinhole cameras any more - it's generally done with tampered PIN pads.
Older contactless cards emulate a mag stripe transaction, but if the bank is too stupid to catch someone putting the contactless info on a mag stripe then it's their own fault. The message here is that the US needs to get its act together and get on with the EMV conversion.
Speaking of Classic 2D, I wonder if they will just drop half the frames to get to 24, or do some post-processing to add motion blur back in. If it's the former you'd think that the result would look very stuttery and unfamiliar. Our brains expect blurring with 24 frames/sec, so unless it's there the end result could be annoying.
I do wish people would stop using that as some sort of gauge of intelligence - it has very little to do with intelligence, and just modernity.
Sure, but the only thing worse than an IQ test is every other form of intelligence measure. Claiming that the test has issues (it does) should not be used to divert attention from the fact that some people are very smart while others are mind-bogglingly stupid.
It's like saying that thermometers suck because they don't account for wind chill, humidex, UV exposure or different peoples' metabolism. You may be correct, but I'm still going to check the temperature before going outside.
Well, Facebook could just go out and pick up RIMM for the price of six photo apps (give or take - there may be another 1/2 app in premiums). However, they probably wouldn't have the slightest idea what to with a profitable company that generates $18B in revenue every year.
But wouldn't building submarines in the great lakes be a violation of the Rush-Bagot treaty?
http://www.aandc.org/research/rush-bagot_agreement.html
They swapped diplomatic notes a few times during the war, which were essentially waivers on the treaty to support the war effort.
Popovkin went on to announce that Drax Industries has been awarded the tender for construction of the new shuttle fleet and moon base. He went on to note that Drax's recent announcement of a toxic orchid-farming operation in the Amazon jungle was pure coincidence, and by the way did anyone know of an orthodontist in Washington who knew how to work with steel?