I try to become more cynical every day, but lately I just can't keep up. -- Lily Tomlin (She's only 74 but sharp as ever. YMMV)
Well, here's one possible effect and cause scenario that occurred to me.
Start with a healthy person who has a generally positive view of humanity.
Above the threshold reached at the age of reason (mental age ~7) when we begin to see the flaws in ourselves and others, I think it takes more mental energy to have a generally positive view of humanity than to fall back on cynicism. I agree with others that we may be seeing an indicator of pre-dementia rather than a cause of dementia.
I've lived over fifty years in this country and cynicism is at an all-time high. But strangely enough, so is credulity.
You've lived for fifty years in Finland?
We've become a nation of cynical suckers.
Oh, you're American. I'm sorry. Does anyone know why Slashdot's lameness filter can't handle my SARCASM tags?
I agree, right now she needs human contact attention, hope, understanding and patience from those around her. Start with low-tech pointing board, watch her eyes and any other expressions she can make. Just as those who lose a sense rely on others, she must rely more on non-verbal communication and those around her must know how to listen. Let her see and touch her baby. Help her to overcome the panic, fear, helplessness and dispair. Help her friends and family.
Once you're ready to move to more technology, start with an iPad or android tablet. Ask her if she would like to see any movies, or listen to music (her partner and family should be able to suggest favorites.) Read Oliver Sach's Musicophelia for information on the neurological healing power of music.
While she is going through rehabilitation, research Dasher and OpenGazer for eye and head tracking to see if they might be useful. Read about coping with paralysis injuries and the possibilities for recovery from The Christopher Reeve Foundation. Make sure that hoping and praying for a cure doesn't morph into "waiting and expecting for a cure." she and her family may have to learn to live with this condition for years even if there is hope on the horizon. I wish you, her and your family well.
A one-size fits all technical solution doesn't yet exist. Begin with low tech, use a pointing board and watch her eyes and face and see if she is able to move any other part of her body. Try to develop a personal communication technique and learn what she is capable of. Move to something like an iPad or Android ask her if there is something she would like to see, music, movies something to help her focus on something other than the fear, pain and bordem. Give her hope. While she is recovering and in rehabilitation, research Dasher and OpenGazer to see if it would help her communicate.
Gently support those who are closer to her but who might not have your level of medical or technical understanding. Help them give her the attention, space, touch, rest and love when she needs it.
I wish you and your family well. Look for information and try to support the Christopher Reeve Foundation and other organizations who are working hard on making life better for people with paralysis injuries. I understand that for other types of paralysis injuries, doctors/psychologists often recommend not to give the person hope that a "cure" is eminent because even if a cure is available now, it may be years before it is widely available and it will almost certainly require rehabilitation and that the person is kept mentally and physically healthy until a solution is found.
This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
Not really. "Into trouble" usually means a write-off fine and a sullied name for the length of Joe sixpack's attention span (a few weeks or months depending on whether the news oligopolies relationship with their corporate Goliath sponsors.)
Also, you forgot some, Employers that make it difficult for employees to switch careers and health-care companies who leverage pre-existing conditions to prevent customers from seeking competing alternatives. Political parties who shoehorn 300 million people into two points of view. The fact that Americans have come to accept monopolies in most aspects of their lives means they can't even see them or the problems they cause anymore. Apple isn't seen as a monopoly or even as an anti-competive corporate Goliath. Apple is seen as a "personal choice" or religion.
If you've taken a long distance commercial airline flight, you've flown as high as 40,000 feet and 72 percent of the atmosphere was below you. Transatlantic concord passengers flew as high as 60,000 feet above 90 percent of the atmosphere. Virgin Galactic's flights are perfect for those who demand Seenheiser headphones gold-plated monster cables for listing to talk radio. For the rest of us, a commercial airline flight is "close enough."
The paper does explain these limitations and it would be wrong to assume that this means we can see/photograph through fog, skin, clouds... But a semiconductor laser can have a spacial coherence long enough to do holography so if they said the source was a laser and non-conherent narroband, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they did something to destroy the laser coherence. Spinning frosted glass beam interrupters and other techniques are often used to despeckle laser light where it interferes with the laser's intended use.
Speckle does occur with non laser light sources but it isn't usually as strong because of the shorter coherence length. Go outside on a sunny day and look at your fingernails or a piece of black anodized metal, you may see the effect of white light speckle interference. The really amazing part of this technique is that they did it with such a low-res camera. While 42 Megapixels seems like ridiculous overkill for a phone camera, it doesn't hold a candle to the typical spacial resolutions approaching 400 Gigapixels for holography film. Extend and expand the technique into higher resolutions, illuminate with coherent laser light sources and it will be a valuable technique for laser imaging as well as other things. What else has point light sources against a dark sky and obscuring translucent material? The starry night sky. I knew the day would come when finally astronomers can have their cloud filter!
...Every employee had to take about 15 multiple choice tests. But every store had cheat sheets and no one really learned anything.... If an employee didn't ask every customer about a cell phone AND a satellite dish they were fired. Even before that turnover was like a fast food place.
Were you at Radioshack when they became one of the first and last private US employers to require polygraph test as a condition for employment? Yes there is a reason Snowden never worked at Radio Shack. Whoever managed that company during the 90s should be working for Vladmir Putin right now.
They had a commercial during the SuperBowl with 10,000 80's superstars. Getting into futuristic stuff like Raspberry Pi's, Arduinos and 3D printers is a great idea, but it would have been nice to hear about that during the commercial rather than see Hulk Hogan get into a DeLorean. Instead, I just found out about it on this thread.
And they need to stop the price gouging. If a Pi is $35 online, there's no way I should pay more than $69.99 no matter how much they are helping me. Anything more is robbery.
Radio Shack spent too much on their Superbowl ads and not enough on training staff. I live overseas so I visit RS maybe once a year. When I heard they were getting back to their hobbiest roots I almost forgave them for diving all of the independent radio parts shops out of business such as my former employer. I asked their employees about arduinos and other microcontrollers, they'd never heard of them. So I took them to the back of their store and showed them where they were. I asked about UV LEDs. They found me an IR LED, close but no cigar. I dug through a couple more drawers and showed them the UV one. Something like $4 for one LED, only about 5000% markup from the low-quanity price at Digi-key and Farnell, 10000% above what you'd get them delivered from Chinese online shops if you're willing to wait a month but yes if I needed it then and there, there it was. If only their staff knew what they had and knew how it could be used so they could help customers and get customers interested in buying more.
RS management, if you're listening, hire hobbiests and train the rest of your staff in Linux, electronics repair, arduino, PIC. Sift through the millions of wholesale electronics products and sell only the most open, well-documented and hackable products. Sell Arduinos, Pics, Pis, Canon (CHDK) capable cameras, software defined radio chips. Set aside a Makerspace/repair cafe in your store. Install 3D printers and create online portal for shared 3D designs, arduino sketches, Raspberry Pi and Linux. Buy a small wave solderer and train staff on how to rejuvenate the millions of video games, laptops and tablets whose GPUs have unsoldered themselves. Make deals with Amazon, alibaba, ebay, dx, farnell. You have a &(*@ load of retail space, they have the commodity components and proprietary batteries. Make your stores retail portals with staff to explain, upsell on installation and help. Clear your in-store warehouses to make room for deliveries.
You're welcome!
...The last time I was in Radio Shack two months ago, they still had blank VHS tapes on the shelf.
What! No blank Betamax L-750s?
I won't miss those expensive, leaky Radio Shack batteries, guaranteed to destroy whatever overpriced electronic gadget you bought at Radio Shack last month. Even Apple's welded-in iPhone batteries can't match that level of planned obsolescence.
The real problem is the whole student loan system. Since most people are paying for college with unlimited-balance, government-guaranteed loans, colleges can charge whatever the hell they want and they know that everyone can afford it and they always get paid. Why does the cost of tuition rise so much faster than inflation? Because colleges suffer no consequences for raising tuition.
If you took away the unlimited aspect or the government-guarantee aspect, you'd see tuitions stabilize right quick. If Uncle Sam (or I guess Aunt Sallie, in this case) said, "Colleges, go ahead and charge whatever the hell you want, but we're only giving each student $15k/yr in loans, indexed to inflation," you'd see colleges implementing some cost controls. Likewise, if Sallie Mae said, "Colleges, we pay you when the student pays us, so better make things affordable, hmm?" same thing would happen.
But no, we have a bubble like the real estate bubble because everybody's buying with other people's money, so nobody cares what it costs.
Mod parent up. US higher education debt now totals more than a trillion dollars. And it's becoming more obvious with each passing semester that students are reliving the history of the dot com and property bubbles. Take something of value, build a story around it that exaggerates its fiscal value, find some sucker to finance it (US taxpayers are born every minute.) This proposed fix won't help. There are too many ways to game the system. We've already turned our state-funded universities into glorified trade schools, funneling most students into accounting, MBA or whatever students counselors perceive to have the shortest term ROI. Basic research suffers and paradoxically unemployable degrees are on the rise. Universities win as long as there is a warm body in a classroom seat. The proposed system might help in the short term by forcing the burden of unraveling this mess onto the most educated population, but in the long term it will punish higher education, reward those horribly narrow certificate factories, give further advantage to PhDs in India and China and force even more of our best and brightest to leave the country.
Not joking, sarcastic. Because as you point out, this ban on education only helps to further solidify the positions of the dictators in the countries that the US has an embargo against. An embargo that was (presumably) put in place to try and get the dictators to change their ways about something. And here the US is, banning something that could get the populations of those countries to force the dictators into that change.
Because the 54 year-old embargo against Cuba was so effective at turning the Cuban people against Castro^H^H^H^H the US.
Makes you wonder what the real purpose of those embargoes is.
The black marketeers love it and it keeps up the price of fake Cuban cigars.
The keyboard was horrible, yes, but that was fixed within months (I think people could swap the keyboards for free?).
As proof that computer companies have always blindly followed in the footsteps of other computer companies and repeated their UI mistakes, the following computers preceded PCjr's bad keyboard design:
When the PC/jr came out, the Commodore 64, Commodore Vic 20, Apple II series, Texas Instruments and Mac computers all had decent keyboards but IBM decided to reinvent keyboards again.
I've been through a passport application and two renewals. All it took was filling out the form and sending it in with a couple of pictures. I never needed to ask permission to travel, and all three times I sent in paperwork, I did not have pending travel. I am not sure what you mean by "get permission to travel." From whom are you asking permission and why?
I live abroad and have been through several passport applications and renewals. But for many of my American friends and family, the cost is prohibitive. They will never be able to visit me and they can no longer visit other parts of North America.
The cost of an adult US passport book and is currently $140 plus a $25 "execution fee." Add the photo, paperwork and postage and you're getting near $200 add another $150 for a file search if the person can't produce evidence of citizenship. Minors (under 16) are $95+$25. So for a family of four living in, say Niagara Falls, NY or Detroit, Michigan it can range from $570 to $1170 for the right to cross over to a better neighborhood on the Canadian side. You might say, "What's $570, that's only the cost of an iPad or iPhone?" But for many, this is two paychecks, a month's rent, the family car or a medical bill for a minor visit to a medical center. The US has an iron-curtain but it applies to the 9.9% of white Americans, 12.1% of Asian-Americans, 26.6% of Hispanic-Americans and 27.4% of Black-Americans who live below the poverty line.
A bit of dry ice forms in a crack in a stone and stays below freezing for a day or a million years before a rover tyre moves some soil and exposes it to the heat of the sun. The dry ice sublimates but instead of earth water's slow process of expanding and cracking a rock, sublimated dry ice occasionally pops a rock shard quite a long distance. Like pop-rocks.
Pop rock manufacture (from Wikipedia):
The candy is made by mixing its ingredients and heating them until they melt into a syrup, then exposing the mixture to pressurized carbon dioxide gas (about 600 pounds per square inch or 40 bar) and allowing it to cool. The process causes tiny high-pressure bubbles to be trapped inside the candy.
This may be another example of where our geocentric understaning of landscape geology misleads us. Perchlorate-rich soil under carbon-dioxide rich low atmospheric pressure, thermal tides, carbon dioxide ice... What would happen if a bit of CO2 froze inside a rock or in a pocket beneath a stone and eventually got up to its sublimation temperature? Sometimes it would vaporize with enough force to pop the rock somewhere else. What if the perchlorate-water reaction that caused so much excitement with the Viking landers happened naturally due to condensed water vapor? Might that sometimes cause internal pressures within rocks and cause them to fragment?
This is similar to what Northern Irish banks did after the Northern bank robbery got away with 26 million pounds sterling a few years ago. They recalled all of the northern Irish cash. Rumor is that a member of the political wing of the old IRA was spotted burning cash in his back garden. This becomes much easier with credit cards and digital currency but isn't too difficult in a small country where banks are able to issue individually identifiable notes (much as the US once did.)
US brick and mortar universities such as MIT have a captive consumer-base. They form a powerful oligopoly in a land where fewer than 50% of the citizens have passports and even fewer are aware that they are paying 2 to 3 times as much for their community college or technical institute than British students pay for Oxford medical school. While it is true that US brick and mortar universities do provide services that can't be found online. For example, the country-club gymnasiums and dormitories, sports, entertainment, party lifestyle and physical networking with the wealthy. But for those who value other university products (e.g. education), MOOC schools can work. The interesting thing with MOOC schools is that US for profit universities are on a level playing field with well-established distance learning universities in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.
Soldiers Grove, WI relocated and solarized in 1979
on
How Do You Move a City?
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· Score: 3, Informative
This has been done before. Soldgier's Grove Wisconsin was moved due to flooding by the Kickapoo river. One interesting outcome is that this happened in 1979 during a time of rapidly ising energy prices so the new business district was designed to be heated by solar energy. Several million residents who lived in towns near China's 3-gorges dam were also relocated.
...Heck, you could even do this in post-processing using a normal 2-D camera that's capturing a movie. Just snag a single column from successive frames and stack them into a single picture. Sure, your frame rate will be limited, but it's technically feasible, especially if the 2-D sensors allow for windowing to increase frame rate.
AFAIK this single column capture is very close to what NewTek's Digiview did on the Amiga computer and it was done that way because that was the cheapest, simplest way to digitize an NTSC/PAL frame on a slow computer which just happened to have a clock rate synchronized to the NTSC, PAL or SECAM video refresh rate.
Magyar's technique is more sophisticated but if you panned a tripod at the same rate as someone walking past a video camera during a Digiview capture, you ended up with a space/time distortion somewhere between Magyar's and the motion blur you'd get with an analogue camera. We had as much fun playing with this aspect of Digiview as we had making "proper" still digitizations which required keeping the camera and subject absolutely still while you swapped in Red, Green and Blue filters. A turned head was stretched out into a weird cylinder with hair and chin in place but ears and eyes elongated horizontally.
We also found that it it was possible to create anaglyph 3D images by moving the camera horizontally during exposure.
Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium. They have some key advantages. The first is that they can be physically much smaller than high voltage discharge lights which means it takes smaller optics to throw the light where you need it. But where light trespass remains, LEDs present an interesting option. I how many of us end up having to put ugly black-out shades in front of bedroom windows to keep unwanted streetlight glare from keeping us awake? What if an LCD shutter were synchronized to close exactly when street light LEDs were on and open when they're off. Suddenly you see the natural night sky from your bedroom window, are awakened by natural morning sunlight.
The original series built upon a longer history of art, literature, war and peace. It referenced the bible, Greek and Roman classic literature, Shakespeare. You ended up quoting Milton, Dickens... when you thought you were quoting a playboy starship captain. That tradition held until this most recent reboot which had numerous references to previous Star Treks, but no grounding in the real world that that Star Trek plagiarized its ideas from.
Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury.
That's only relevant if you're referring to a specific person. Has anyone here done that? "Illegal aliens" refers to a group of people which exist, unless you believe that no one in this country is in violation of US visa and immigration laws.
I don't think anyone is pretending we'll jam 10,000,000+ allegedly illegal aliens through our court system so who exactly are we talking about with the sneering accusation "illegal?"
It simplifies the hundreds of different problems and circumstances applying to millions of people who may have violated one or more elements of US immigration law and lumps them into a single category of criminal
You should brush up on your immigration law - being in the country illegally is in and of itself a civil violation. It's muddled thinking for you to call them criminals - a class of people who (surprise, surprise) have violated criminal law.
Do you really understand US immigration law? Some of the visas granted this year were applied for as long ago as 1988. Do you know how many changes have been made to US immigration law in the past 25 years? Have any of these been reviewed as ex-post facto laws?
I have a friend who was born in the US of Australian parents but because he sensibly chose to go to university at Oxford UK which is half the cost of the cheapest American state college. INS flagged him and now he can never return to his birthplace to visit his friends and family. BTW he is a tech genius who would have qualified under H1B if he were not already banned from contributing to America's future.
everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists
I'm no fan of the Tea Party myself, but I wouldn't group them in with neo-fascists the way you have. That's a serious prejudice you have there.
racist union thugs
Racist union thugs are now in favor of "reform". They're now in your camp, so maybe you should tone down the name calling.
Of course they're in favor of it. As I said, xenophobia is always popular. Even this "reform" abolishes the green-card lottery and militarizes our borders.
It provides a focus for the xenophobia which is at the core of nearly every successful election campaign.
Including the campaigns where the candidate advocates "reform"? You should really be careful with those generalizations, as generalizing about groups is at the heart of prejudice.
The anti-Latino prejudices of today are no different than the anti-Asian, anti-Jew, anti-Irish, and anti-German prejudices of the past.
Except for, you know, that part where the Asians, Jews, Irish, Germans, etc. did their paperwork to get in. If they didn't, they weren't let in. Apparently Spanish-speaking immigrants are "more special" and don't have to immigrate properly.
Tell that to the natives...
In fact the immigrants with more native-American blood are more likely to be thrown out than those with more European blood. Arizona codified what was otherwise an ad-hoc policy.
shouldn't the word also "Illegal" refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?
If you prefer, but I think "criminal" or "felon" are better words. By comparison the word "illegal" is pretty mild, as it can refer to something as minor as a civil violation. Do you think we should use the milder term to refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?
Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury. Are you saying that everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists, racist union thugs... has had a fair trial by jury? No, the common American usage for the word "illegal" in reference to a class of immigrants is a crutch for muddled thinking it serves the following purposes:
It simplifies the hundreds of different problems and circumstances applying to millions of people who may have violated one or more elements of US immigration law and lumps them into a single category of criminal with a simpleminded solution with a one-size-fits-all punishment. Should we have a one-size-fits all punishment for errors in income tax filings?
It allows us to dehumanize and scapegoat a group of people as the cause of internally generated economic and criminal problems.
It allows politicians of every party to pretend to do something without having any obvious negative effects on any voters.
It allows us to be racist and nationalist in polite company, without fear
It provides a focus for the xenophobia which is at the core of nearly every successful election campaign.
Why does the noun "Illegal" always refer to a person who did not hire enough lawyers to weed through the reams of arcane paperwork and pay the fees necessary to become a legal immigrant? Shouldn't the word "illegal" also refer to those who haven't filed the proper paperwork to pay their taxes. Or when the word is said with a particular level of disgust, shouldn't the word also "Illegal" refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes? Why also does it almost exclusively apply to paperwork-deficient immigrants from Mexico, particular those with much native American blood in their family tree but it almost never refers to the hundreds of thousands of lighter-skinned illegal immigrants from Ireland and other parts of Europe.
When you hear the word "Illegal" referring to a group of people, you should be thinking of Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Jack Abramoff, Tycho corporation at least as often as you think of the guy who'll mow your lawn for $5/hour because it's the only thing that keeps his kids from starving.
Slashdot Mirror
I try to become more cynical every day, but lately I just can't keep up. -- Lily Tomlin (She's only 74 but sharp as ever. YMMV)
Well, here's one possible effect and cause scenario that occurred to me.
Start with a healthy person who has a generally positive view of humanity.
Above the threshold reached at the age of reason (mental age ~7) when we begin to see the flaws in ourselves and others, I think it takes more mental energy to have a generally positive view of humanity than to fall back on cynicism. I agree with others that we may be seeing an indicator of pre-dementia rather than a cause of dementia.
I've lived over fifty years in this country and cynicism is at an all-time high. But strangely enough, so is credulity.
You've lived for fifty years in Finland?
We've become a nation of cynical suckers.
Oh, you're American. I'm sorry. Does anyone know why Slashdot's lameness filter can't handle my SARCASM tags?
I agree, right now she needs human contact attention, hope, understanding and patience from those around her. Start with low-tech pointing board, watch her eyes and any other expressions she can make. Just as those who lose a sense rely on others, she must rely more on non-verbal communication and those around her must know how to listen. Let her see and touch her baby. Help her to overcome the panic, fear, helplessness and dispair. Help her friends and family.
Once you're ready to move to more technology, start with an iPad or android tablet. Ask her if she would like to see any movies, or listen to music (her partner and family should be able to suggest favorites.) Read Oliver Sach's Musicophelia for information on the neurological healing power of music.
While she is going through rehabilitation, research Dasher and OpenGazer for eye and head tracking to see if they might be useful. Read about coping with paralysis injuries and the possibilities for recovery from The Christopher Reeve Foundation. Make sure that hoping and praying for a cure doesn't morph into "waiting and expecting for a cure." she and her family may have to learn to live with this condition for years even if there is hope on the horizon. I wish you, her and your family well.
A one-size fits all technical solution doesn't yet exist. Begin with low tech, use a pointing board and watch her eyes and face and see if she is able to move any other part of her body. Try to develop a personal communication technique and learn what she is capable of. Move to something like an iPad or Android ask her if there is something she would like to see, music, movies something to help her focus on something other than the fear, pain and bordem. Give her hope. While she is recovering and in rehabilitation, research Dasher and OpenGazer to see if it would help her communicate. Gently support those who are closer to her but who might not have your level of medical or technical understanding. Help them give her the attention, space, touch, rest and love when she needs it.
I wish you and your family well. Look for information and try to support the Christopher Reeve Foundation and other organizations who are working hard on making life better for people with paralysis injuries. I understand that for other types of paralysis injuries, doctors/psychologists often recommend not to give the person hope that a "cure" is eminent because even if a cure is available now, it may be years before it is widely available and it will almost certainly require rehabilitation and that the person is kept mentally and physically healthy until a solution is found.
This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
Not really. "Into trouble" usually means a write-off fine and a sullied name for the length of Joe sixpack's attention span (a few weeks or months depending on whether the news oligopolies relationship with their corporate Goliath sponsors.)
Also, you forgot some, Employers that make it difficult for employees to switch careers and health-care companies who leverage pre-existing conditions to prevent customers from seeking competing alternatives. Political parties who shoehorn 300 million people into two points of view. The fact that Americans have come to accept monopolies in most aspects of their lives means they can't even see them or the problems they cause anymore. Apple isn't seen as a monopoly or even as an anti-competive corporate Goliath. Apple is seen as a "personal choice" or religion.
If you've taken a long distance commercial airline flight, you've flown as high as 40,000 feet and 72 percent of the atmosphere was below you. Transatlantic concord passengers flew as high as 60,000 feet above 90 percent of the atmosphere. Virgin Galactic's flights are perfect for those who demand Seenheiser headphones gold-plated monster cables for listing to talk radio. For the rest of us, a commercial airline flight is "close enough."
The paper does explain these limitations and it would be wrong to assume that this means we can see/photograph through fog, skin, clouds... But a semiconductor laser can have a spacial coherence long enough to do holography so if they said the source was a laser and non-conherent narroband, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they did something to destroy the laser coherence. Spinning frosted glass beam interrupters and other techniques are often used to despeckle laser light where it interferes with the laser's intended use.
Speckle does occur with non laser light sources but it isn't usually as strong because of the shorter coherence length. Go outside on a sunny day and look at your fingernails or a piece of black anodized metal, you may see the effect of white light speckle interference. The really amazing part of this technique is that they did it with such a low-res camera. While 42 Megapixels seems like ridiculous overkill for a phone camera, it doesn't hold a candle to the typical spacial resolutions approaching 400 Gigapixels for holography film. Extend and expand the technique into higher resolutions, illuminate with coherent laser light sources and it will be a valuable technique for laser imaging as well as other things. What else has point light sources against a dark sky and obscuring translucent material? The starry night sky. I knew the day would come when finally astronomers can have their cloud filter!
...Every employee had to take about 15 multiple choice tests. But every store had cheat sheets and no one really learned anything.... If an employee didn't ask every customer about a cell phone AND a satellite dish they were fired. Even before that turnover was like a fast food place.
Were you at Radioshack when they became one of the first and last private US employers to require polygraph test as a condition for employment? Yes there is a reason Snowden never worked at Radio Shack. Whoever managed that company during the 90s should be working for Vladmir Putin right now.
They had a commercial during the SuperBowl with 10,000 80's superstars. Getting into futuristic stuff like Raspberry Pi's, Arduinos and 3D printers is a great idea, but it would have been nice to hear about that during the commercial rather than see Hulk Hogan get into a DeLorean. Instead, I just found out about it on this thread.
And they need to stop the price gouging. If a Pi is $35 online, there's no way I should pay more than $69.99 no matter how much they are helping me. Anything more is robbery.
Radio Shack spent too much on their Superbowl ads and not enough on training staff. I live overseas so I visit RS maybe once a year. When I heard they were getting back to their hobbiest roots I almost forgave them for diving all of the independent radio parts shops out of business such as my former employer. I asked their employees about arduinos and other microcontrollers, they'd never heard of them. So I took them to the back of their store and showed them where they were. I asked about UV LEDs. They found me an IR LED, close but no cigar. I dug through a couple more drawers and showed them the UV one. Something like $4 for one LED, only about 5000% markup from the low-quanity price at Digi-key and Farnell, 10000% above what you'd get them delivered from Chinese online shops if you're willing to wait a month but yes if I needed it then and there, there it was. If only their staff knew what they had and knew how it could be used so they could help customers and get customers interested in buying more.
RS management, if you're listening, hire hobbiests and train the rest of your staff in Linux, electronics repair, arduino, PIC. Sift through the millions of wholesale electronics products and sell only the most open, well-documented and hackable products. Sell Arduinos, Pics, Pis, Canon (CHDK) capable cameras, software defined radio chips. Set aside a Makerspace/repair cafe in your store. Install 3D printers and create online portal for shared 3D designs, arduino sketches, Raspberry Pi and Linux. Buy a small wave solderer and train staff on how to rejuvenate the millions of video games, laptops and tablets whose GPUs have unsoldered themselves. Make deals with Amazon, alibaba, ebay, dx, farnell. You have a &(*@ load of retail space, they have the commodity components and proprietary batteries. Make your stores retail portals with staff to explain, upsell on installation and help. Clear your in-store warehouses to make room for deliveries.
You're welcome!
...The last time I was in Radio Shack two months ago, they still had blank VHS tapes on the shelf.
What! No blank Betamax L-750s?
I won't miss those expensive, leaky Radio Shack batteries, guaranteed to destroy whatever overpriced electronic gadget you bought at Radio Shack last month. Even Apple's welded-in iPhone batteries can't match that level of planned obsolescence.
The real problem is the whole student loan system. Since most people are paying for college with unlimited-balance, government-guaranteed loans, colleges can charge whatever the hell they want and they know that everyone can afford it and they always get paid. Why does the cost of tuition rise so much faster than inflation? Because colleges suffer no consequences for raising tuition.
If you took away the unlimited aspect or the government-guarantee aspect, you'd see tuitions stabilize right quick. If Uncle Sam (or I guess Aunt Sallie, in this case) said, "Colleges, go ahead and charge whatever the hell you want, but we're only giving each student $15k/yr in loans, indexed to inflation," you'd see colleges implementing some cost controls. Likewise, if Sallie Mae said, "Colleges, we pay you when the student pays us, so better make things affordable, hmm?" same thing would happen.
But no, we have a bubble like the real estate bubble because everybody's buying with other people's money, so nobody cares what it costs.
Mod parent up. US higher education debt now totals more than a trillion dollars. And it's becoming more obvious with each passing semester that students are reliving the history of the dot com and property bubbles. Take something of value, build a story around it that exaggerates its fiscal value, find some sucker to finance it (US taxpayers are born every minute.) This proposed fix won't help. There are too many ways to game the system. We've already turned our state-funded universities into glorified trade schools, funneling most students into accounting, MBA or whatever students counselors perceive to have the shortest term ROI. Basic research suffers and paradoxically unemployable degrees are on the rise. Universities win as long as there is a warm body in a classroom seat. The proposed system might help in the short term by forcing the burden of unraveling this mess onto the most educated population, but in the long term it will punish higher education, reward those horribly narrow certificate factories, give further advantage to PhDs in India and China and force even more of our best and brightest to leave the country.
Not joking, sarcastic. Because as you point out, this ban on education only helps to further solidify the positions of the dictators in the countries that the US has an embargo against. An embargo that was (presumably) put in place to try and get the dictators to change their ways about something. And here the US is, banning something that could get the populations of those countries to force the dictators into that change.
Because the 54 year-old embargo against Cuba was so effective at turning the Cuban people against Castro^H^H^H^H the US.
Makes you wonder what the real purpose of those embargoes is.
The black marketeers love it and it keeps up the price of fake Cuban cigars.
The keyboard was horrible, yes, but that was fixed within months (I think people could swap the keyboards for free?).
As proof that computer companies have always blindly followed in the footsteps of other computer companies and repeated their UI mistakes, the following computers preceded PCjr's bad keyboard design:
When the PC/jr came out, the Commodore 64, Commodore Vic 20, Apple II series, Texas Instruments and Mac computers all had decent keyboards but IBM decided to reinvent keyboards again.
I've been through a passport application and two renewals. All it took was filling out the form and sending it in with a couple of pictures. I never needed to ask permission to travel, and all three times I sent in paperwork, I did not have pending travel. I am not sure what you mean by "get permission to travel." From whom are you asking permission and why?
I live abroad and have been through several passport applications and renewals. But for many of my American friends and family, the cost is prohibitive. They will never be able to visit me and they can no longer visit other parts of North America.
The cost of an adult US passport book and is currently $140 plus a $25 "execution fee." Add the photo, paperwork and postage and you're getting near $200 add another $150 for a file search if the person can't produce evidence of citizenship. Minors (under 16) are $95+$25. So for a family of four living in, say Niagara Falls, NY or Detroit, Michigan it can range from $570 to $1170 for the right to cross over to a better neighborhood on the Canadian side. You might say, "What's $570, that's only the cost of an iPad or iPhone?" But for many, this is two paychecks, a month's rent, the family car or a medical bill for a minor visit to a medical center. The US has an iron-curtain but it applies to the 9.9% of white Americans, 12.1% of Asian-Americans, 26.6% of Hispanic-Americans and 27.4% of Black-Americans who live below the poverty line.
A bit of dry ice forms in a crack in a stone and stays below freezing for a day or a million years before a rover tyre moves some soil and exposes it to the heat of the sun. The dry ice sublimates but instead of earth water's slow process of expanding and cracking a rock, sublimated dry ice occasionally pops a rock shard quite a long distance. Like pop-rocks.
Pop rock manufacture (from Wikipedia): The candy is made by mixing its ingredients and heating them until they melt into a syrup, then exposing the mixture to pressurized carbon dioxide gas (about 600 pounds per square inch or 40 bar) and allowing it to cool. The process causes tiny high-pressure bubbles to be trapped inside the candy.
This may be another example of where our geocentric understaning of landscape geology misleads us. Perchlorate-rich soil under carbon-dioxide rich low atmospheric pressure, thermal tides, carbon dioxide ice... What would happen if a bit of CO2 froze inside a rock or in a pocket beneath a stone and eventually got up to its sublimation temperature? Sometimes it would vaporize with enough force to pop the rock somewhere else. What if the perchlorate-water reaction that caused so much excitement with the Viking landers happened naturally due to condensed water vapor? Might that sometimes cause internal pressures within rocks and cause them to fragment?
This is similar to what Northern Irish banks did after the Northern bank robbery got away with 26 million pounds sterling a few years ago. They recalled all of the northern Irish cash. Rumor is that a member of the political wing of the old IRA was spotted burning cash in his back garden. This becomes much easier with credit cards and digital currency but isn't too difficult in a small country where banks are able to issue individually identifiable notes (much as the US once did.)
US brick and mortar universities such as MIT have a captive consumer-base. They form a powerful oligopoly in a land where fewer than 50% of the citizens have passports and even fewer are aware that they are paying 2 to 3 times as much for their community college or technical institute than British students pay for Oxford medical school. While it is true that US brick and mortar universities do provide services that can't be found online. For example, the country-club gymnasiums and dormitories, sports, entertainment, party lifestyle and physical networking with the wealthy. But for those who value other university products (e.g. education), MOOC schools can work. The interesting thing with MOOC schools is that US for profit universities are on a level playing field with well-established distance learning universities in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.
This has been done before. Soldgier's Grove Wisconsin was moved due to flooding by the Kickapoo river. One interesting outcome is that this happened in 1979 during a time of rapidly ising energy prices so the new business district was designed to be heated by solar energy. Several million residents who lived in towns near China's 3-gorges dam were also relocated.
...Heck, you could even do this in post-processing using a normal 2-D camera that's capturing a movie. Just snag a single column from successive frames and stack them into a single picture. Sure, your frame rate will be limited, but it's technically feasible, especially if the 2-D sensors allow for windowing to increase frame rate.
AFAIK this single column capture is very close to what NewTek's Digiview did on the Amiga computer and it was done that way because that was the cheapest, simplest way to digitize an NTSC/PAL frame on a slow computer which just happened to have a clock rate synchronized to the NTSC, PAL or SECAM video refresh rate.
Magyar's technique is more sophisticated but if you panned a tripod at the same rate as someone walking past a video camera during a Digiview capture, you ended up with a space/time distortion somewhere between Magyar's and the motion blur you'd get with an analogue camera. We had as much fun playing with this aspect of Digiview as we had making "proper" still digitizations which required keeping the camera and subject absolutely still while you swapped in Red, Green and Blue filters. A turned head was stretched out into a weird cylinder with hair and chin in place but ears and eyes elongated horizontally. We also found that it it was possible to create anaglyph 3D images by moving the camera horizontally during exposure.
Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium. They have some key advantages. The first is that they can be physically much smaller than high voltage discharge lights which means it takes smaller optics to throw the light where you need it. But where light trespass remains, LEDs present an interesting option. I how many of us end up having to put ugly black-out shades in front of bedroom windows to keep unwanted streetlight glare from keeping us awake? What if an LCD shutter were synchronized to close exactly when street light LEDs were on and open when they're off. Suddenly you see the natural night sky from your bedroom window, are awakened by natural morning sunlight.
The original series built upon a longer history of art, literature, war and peace. It referenced the bible, Greek and Roman classic literature, Shakespeare. You ended up quoting Milton, Dickens... when you thought you were quoting a playboy starship captain. That tradition held until this most recent reboot which had numerous references to previous Star Treks, but no grounding in the real world that that Star Trek plagiarized its ideas from.
Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury.
That's only relevant if you're referring to a specific person. Has anyone here done that? "Illegal aliens" refers to a group of people which exist, unless you believe that no one in this country is in violation of US visa and immigration laws.
I don't think anyone is pretending we'll jam 10,000,000+ allegedly illegal aliens through our court system so who exactly are we talking about with the sneering accusation "illegal?"
It simplifies the hundreds of different problems and circumstances applying to millions of people who may have violated one or more elements of US immigration law and lumps them into a single category of criminal
You should brush up on your immigration law - being in the country illegally is in and of itself a civil violation. It's muddled thinking for you to call them criminals - a class of people who (surprise, surprise) have violated criminal law.
Do you really understand US immigration law? Some of the visas granted this year were applied for as long ago as 1988. Do you know how many changes have been made to US immigration law in the past 25 years? Have any of these been reviewed as ex-post facto laws?
I have a friend who was born in the US of Australian parents but because he sensibly chose to go to university at Oxford UK which is half the cost of the cheapest American state college. INS flagged him and now he can never return to his birthplace to visit his friends and family. BTW he is a tech genius who would have qualified under H1B if he were not already banned from contributing to America's future.
everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists
I'm no fan of the Tea Party myself, but I wouldn't group them in with neo-fascists the way you have. That's a serious prejudice you have there.
racist union thugs
Racist union thugs are now in favor of "reform". They're now in your camp, so maybe you should tone down the name calling.
Of course they're in favor of it. As I said, xenophobia is always popular. Even this "reform" abolishes the green-card lottery and militarizes our borders.
It provides a focus for the xenophobia which is at the core of nearly every successful election campaign.
Including the campaigns where the candidate advocates "reform"? You should really be careful with those generalizations, as generalizing about groups is at the heart of prejudice.
The anti-Latino prejudices of today are no different than the anti-Asian, anti-Jew, anti-Irish, and anti-German prejudices of the past.
Except for, you know, that part where the Asians, Jews, Irish, Germans, etc. did their paperwork to get in. If they didn't, they weren't let in. Apparently Spanish-speaking immigrants are "more special" and don't have to immigrate properly.
Tell that to the natives...
In fact the immigrants with more native-American blood are more likely to be thrown out than those with more European blood. Arizona codified what was otherwise an ad-hoc policy.
shouldn't the word also "Illegal" refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?
If you prefer, but I think "criminal" or "felon" are better words. By comparison the word "illegal" is pretty mild, as it can refer to something as minor as a civil violation. Do you think we should use the milder term to refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?
Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury. Are you saying that everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists, racist union thugs... has had a fair trial by jury? No, the common American usage for the word "illegal" in reference to a class of immigrants is a crutch for muddled thinking it serves the following purposes:
Why does the noun "Illegal" always refer to a person who did not hire enough lawyers to weed through the reams of arcane paperwork and pay the fees necessary to become a legal immigrant? Shouldn't the word "illegal" also refer to those who haven't filed the proper paperwork to pay their taxes. Or when the word is said with a particular level of disgust, shouldn't the word also "Illegal" refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes? Why also does it almost exclusively apply to paperwork-deficient immigrants from Mexico, particular those with much native American blood in their family tree but it almost never refers to the hundreds of thousands of lighter-skinned illegal immigrants from Ireland and other parts of Europe.
When you hear the word "Illegal" referring to a group of people, you should be thinking of Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, Jack Abramoff, Tycho corporation at least as often as you think of the guy who'll mow your lawn for $5/hour because it's the only thing that keeps his kids from starving.