By definition you wouldn't need a highway-capable car at the destination, so glorified golf cart would probably do.
It depends on where you're going. Not everyone likes to hang out in big cities. When I travel, it's to see national parks and other natural areas. That means lots of driving, carrying around a bunch of gear.
Most Americans I know are so lazy they'll circle the parking lot for minutes looking for a place in the first few rows instead of (*gasp*) walk from the far side, or even the middle of the lot.
This always frustrates me to no end, especially when they stop to wait for someone they think is about to leave, and block traffic that's trying to get to the open spots further away.
However, there is also the flip side of the coin. Here in Seattle, the public transportation is *terrible*. I like 1.5-2 miles from where I work. If I wanted to take public transportation, I would have to take 3 different buses. Assuming everything lined up exactly, it would take 20-25 minutes using that method. Given the poor scheduling here, it would probably be more like 45 minutes. I walk now (30 minutes), but I used to drive (10 minutes) in order to save time. Greedy parking-lot companies killed that option for me.
I imagine that a national rail system would encounter similar problems, because the US is so much more spread out than Europe is. If it used the kind of trains where you can bring along your car (to use for the remaining 50-100 miles after you reach the nearest rail hub), then it stands a better chance.
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
It sounds like you are reading more into that concept than is actually there (which is a common mistake - see the pseudoscience in What The [Bleep] Do We Know?). The effect in question isn't about conscious observers. It's about physical interactions between particles.
An electron microscope will have an effect on the subject being imaged whether or not a grad student is looking through it. In addition, a grad student (like any other human) will certainly impart their own biases on the results - even if it's by failing to notice something in the image because they were only looking where they expected to find something, and not elsewhere. But the second isn't a quantum-mechanical effect. It's a procedural/data-processing issue.
Apologies if I read something into your post that wasn't actually there.
If so, why indeed are we messing with these lasers at all? Why don't we tap lightning clouds reliably for power that way?
Lightning represents an enormous amount of power. According to Wikipedia, the peak output of a lightning bolt is about a terawatt. Whether or not that's accurate, it's a lot of power to capture and store in a useful way in a tiny fraction of a second.
I saw once the sacrificial boxes they have attached to the lightning rods at the datacentre of the company I work for. A Colorado lightning bolt is able to put a significant hole in a metal device the size of a breaker box. I imagine you would need not only a substantial system on the ground to receive the power, but also a very hefty cable to carry it down from the sky. So if lasers can be used in this way, that would seem to make more sense.
...also, can I make two small (but important - well, at least the first one is important) requests regarding the music player?
1 - "Shuffle" does not mean "play a random track after the current track". It means "advance through the current playlist in a random order, playing each track exactly one time. One all tracks have been played, pick a new random order for the playlist and repeat". While the G1's random order is more random than some other players I've used, it definitely picks a fraction of the tracks much more frequently than the others, and some tracks virtually never.
2 - The option to filter the file list while browsing for a track shouldn't affect the actual playlist (although maybe this can be a selectable option)? One of the main ways in which I use the music player is while I'm exercising. I would really like to pick a specific track to start out with, and then have the "shuffle" mode give me random stuff after that. But if I use the track filter to find a track, the app will only select from the filtered view in terms of tracks after the current one.
Hey Google - have you fixed the mail reader so I can view messages composed by someone using Pine (or one of its derivatives) instead of just seeing "null" where the body should be?
All of the flash is nice, but getting the basics working would be better. This issue is supposedly fixed in the codebase, but I don't see anything in the 1.5 release notes indicating that it's included.
The interface may make employees slightly more productive as it is better than XP. Every time I go from Win7 back to XP I feel like I'm downshifting into 2nd from 3rd gear.
Any reason in particular? I feel exactly the opposite - it takes longer to do almost everything in Vista, because of MS' insistence on putting speedbumps like the asinine "Network and Sharing Centre"* in the way.
* AKA "The page whose only purpose is to have a link to the Network Connections folder that used to be linked directly from the Start Menu"
I live in Finland, which is proud of being one of the greatest coffee consumers in the world (something like an average of 6-8 cups a day per capita), and yet I've never heard public health warnings about drinking too much coffee.
Do you see public health warnings about drinking 30-40 cups of coffee per day? Does that mean it's a good idea?
Stimulants are hard on your nerves, which is probably why a neurologist would be concerned about a relatively low (but still high) amount like 6 cups a day of coffee.
Seriously. Mod parent up. I went to see a neurologist a few years ago and she was visibly horrified when I told her I drank about 6 cups of coffee a day.
I tried quitting altogether, but in the end I just cut back to 2-3 cups of black tea per day. It seems to have a more gradual, "extended release" effect that I prefer anyway. I'll also have half a cup of diet cola on the days that I go running.
Multiple pots of coffee a day? Especially on a regular basis? That's pretty much committing suicide in slow motion.
If you have trouble with low energy, try getting some cardiovascular exercise on a regular basis. Your body will work better as a result too, instead of crashing when the caffeine wears off. For me, getting my (giant) tonsils removed helped as well, because it meant I slept much better at night.
Actually, Zerth was correct. The human cornea blocks most UV light. People who have had theirs replaced with UV-transparent synthetic material report being able to see UV light (as white, IIRC, similarly to how we see near-infrared).
Humans with OEM corneas, at least. Artificial corneas don't absorb UV light.
Even with an artificial cornea, our eyes aren't sensitive to UV in the sense that some insects and birds are. We don't have UV-specific receptors, so we would see it as more white light, or more of whichever colour receptors were most sensitive to it.
I'd be curious to know if people with artificial corneas can see the UV patterns on flowers, even if they can't really tell that it's a different colour, just that there is a bright/dark pattern that people with natural corneas can't see. That's one of the easiest ways to determine useful UV sensitivity.
Incidentally, our eyes are mildly sensitive to near-infrared too, in the same no-specific-receptors sense. You don't need artificial corneas to take advantage of that either - just some NIR-bandpass goggles and a bright source of illumination, like a sunny day.
I really want to know where you get new Blu-Ray films for £4 a go.
Here in the US, evening tickets to the cinema are $12-$15 each. Blu-Ray discs tend to be $30. So if you're taking someone with you, and/or have to pay for parking, and/or plan on getting something at the concession stand, then yes, it's basically a wash with just buying it on Blu-Ray and having it to watch as many times as you want.
Any Turing-complete computing device, given enough memory and storage, can replicate anything this hardware can do.
But can it be replicated at a reasonable speed? The "analogue" in the name implies that the designers are taking advantage of the nearly-instantaneous nature of analogue computing.
In fact, the last part of TFA implies that this is exactly why the design was built as hardware - because software simulations were too slow.
Seriously, anyone who skips this "news" completely will have missed nothing. I have not read the FA, I have not read the/. story summary or any of the 8 comments thus far. There's literally nothing to see here except BS.
So, in other words, dogma trumps the scientific method? I'm pretty skeptical of cold fusion, but that's no reason to dismiss the results without bothering to read them.
There are lots of examples of people building tabletop fusors, but they all have one thing in common; they produce less energy than they consume. Cold fusion isn't the interesting bit, energy-positive fusion is.
Devices like a Farnsworth Fusor aren't "cold fusion". They're small-scale hot fusion.
I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.
It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than.15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.
I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too:).
The executives at Fox are conservative morons, and they hate science, even things that pretend to be "sciency".
I would be interested to know if this was really the case, or if they just recognized that there was an unfilled market waiting for them to monopolize.
Fox is NOTORIOUS for not sticking with their series (and have been for at least 15 years now).
Agreed.
The first thing I thought of when I saw TFA was Space: Above and Beyond, from back in the mid-90s. It certainly had some weak points, but I would definitely have been interested in seeing more of it.
I think Fox just doesn't have the stomach to gamble on high-cost programmes. Sci-fi has got to be one of the most expensive genres to film (properly), and it usually takes awhile for a new series or film franchise to build up a following.
I was honestly shocked when The Sarah Connor Chronicles got a second season out of Fox. I really liked the first season. I think if the second one is doing poorly, it has less to do with the timeslot and more with the glacial pace of the story arc. I'm still enjoying it (minus the mercifully brief UFO convention side-trip), but I also think it should have taken half as many episodes this season to get to where it is.
I don't know if that's the fault of Fox or the production team. Either way it seemed more crisp when it was under the gun of being a season one Fox sci-fi series. I just hope that if it does get axed, there is proper finale instead of a never-finished cliffhanger like too many other one- or two-season productions.
We looked into the extra costs in doing embrodary and was appalled at the total lockdown of the artwork for any of the machines.
Is there no one who's hacked them yet? Home CNC paper-cutters which don't have built-in support for custom patterns have had third-party software published that lets you e.g. import SVGs.
It also appears they're doing some very fancy processing to allow limited alternate viewing angles on scenes with actors. I imagine if they allow the angles to differ from the source by too much, it'd look distorted.
They probably filmed the live-action sequences with the same extreme fisheye lens(es) that they used for the static crime-scene filming. So you would be able to "look around" a bit, but not change the position of the camera, or look rotate the POV too far in any one direction.
That sort of thing has been done with still photos for quite awhile. It's basically QuickTime VR, although I saw the same thing back in the dialup BBS era called "photo bubbles".
I'm not really sure how they managed to get a patent on this, given the amount of similar work done previously. It is an interesting technique, though, even if it's only useful (in its current form at least) for a very specific type of game.
I wonder how effectively it could be combined with computer vision software. I would think it would give a much more accurate 3D map of the area given the extensive source material to work from.
Slashdot Mirror
It may very well be cheaper in the near future, if fuel prices continue to increase.
Like how they "increased" from $4+ to about $2.50 over the last year?
By definition you wouldn't need a highway-capable car at the destination, so glorified golf cart would probably do.
It depends on where you're going. Not everyone likes to hang out in big cities. When I travel, it's to see national parks and other natural areas. That means lots of driving, carrying around a bunch of gear.
Most Americans I know are so lazy they'll circle the parking lot for minutes looking for a place in the first few rows instead of (*gasp*) walk from the far side, or even the middle of the lot.
This always frustrates me to no end, especially when they stop to wait for someone they think is about to leave, and block traffic that's trying to get to the open spots further away.
However, there is also the flip side of the coin. Here in Seattle, the public transportation is *terrible*. I like 1.5-2 miles from where I work. If I wanted to take public transportation, I would have to take 3 different buses. Assuming everything lined up exactly, it would take 20-25 minutes using that method. Given the poor scheduling here, it would probably be more like 45 minutes. I walk now (30 minutes), but I used to drive (10 minutes) in order to save time. Greedy parking-lot companies killed that option for me.
I imagine that a national rail system would encounter similar problems, because the US is so much more spread out than Europe is. If it used the kind of trains where you can bring along your car (to use for the remaining 50-100 miles after you reach the nearest rail hub), then it stands a better chance.
Trucks didn't have to pay for their infrastructure
What do you think all of those weigh stations on the side of every interstate freeway in the US are for?
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
It sounds like you are reading more into that concept than is actually there (which is a common mistake - see the pseudoscience in What The [Bleep] Do We Know?). The effect in question isn't about conscious observers. It's about physical interactions between particles.
An electron microscope will have an effect on the subject being imaged whether or not a grad student is looking through it. In addition, a grad student (like any other human) will certainly impart their own biases on the results - even if it's by failing to notice something in the image because they were only looking where they expected to find something, and not elsewhere. But the second isn't a quantum-mechanical effect. It's a procedural/data-processing issue.
Apologies if I read something into your post that wasn't actually there.
If so, why indeed are we messing with these lasers at all? Why don't we tap lightning clouds reliably for power that way?
Lightning represents an enormous amount of power. According to Wikipedia, the peak output of a lightning bolt is about a terawatt. Whether or not that's accurate, it's a lot of power to capture and store in a useful way in a tiny fraction of a second.
I saw once the sacrificial boxes they have attached to the lightning rods at the datacentre of the company I work for. A Colorado lightning bolt is able to put a significant hole in a metal device the size of a breaker box. I imagine you would need not only a substantial system on the ground to receive the power, but also a very hefty cable to carry it down from the sky. So if lasers can be used in this way, that would seem to make more sense.
...also, can I make two small (but important - well, at least the first one is important) requests regarding the music player?
1 - "Shuffle" does not mean "play a random track after the current track". It means "advance through the current playlist in a random order, playing each track exactly one time. One all tracks have been played, pick a new random order for the playlist and repeat". While the G1's random order is more random than some other players I've used, it definitely picks a fraction of the tracks much more frequently than the others, and some tracks virtually never.
2 - The option to filter the file list while browsing for a track shouldn't affect the actual playlist (although maybe this can be a selectable option)? One of the main ways in which I use the music player is while I'm exercising. I would really like to pick a specific track to start out with, and then have the "shuffle" mode give me random stuff after that. But if I use the track filter to find a track, the app will only select from the filtered view in terms of tracks after the current one.
Hey Google - have you fixed the mail reader so I can view messages composed by someone using Pine (or one of its derivatives) instead of just seeing "null" where the body should be?
All of the flash is nice, but getting the basics working would be better. This issue is supposedly fixed in the codebase, but I don't see anything in the 1.5 release notes indicating that it's included.
The interface may make employees slightly more productive as it is better than XP. Every time I go from Win7 back to XP I feel like I'm downshifting into 2nd from 3rd gear.
Any reason in particular? I feel exactly the opposite - it takes longer to do almost everything in Vista, because of MS' insistence on putting speedbumps like the asinine "Network and Sharing Centre"* in the way.
* AKA "The page whose only purpose is to have a link to the Network Connections folder that used to be linked directly from the Start Menu"
By that logic, why do we have laws against cocaine and heroin?
Good question.
I live in Finland, which is proud of being one of the greatest coffee consumers in the world (something like an average of 6-8 cups a day per capita), and yet I've never heard public health warnings about drinking too much coffee.
Do you see public health warnings about drinking 30-40 cups of coffee per day? Does that mean it's a good idea?
Stimulants are hard on your nerves, which is probably why a neurologist would be concerned about a relatively low (but still high) amount like 6 cups a day of coffee.
Seriously. Mod parent up. I went to see a neurologist a few years ago and she was visibly horrified when I told her I drank about 6 cups of coffee a day.
I tried quitting altogether, but in the end I just cut back to 2-3 cups of black tea per day. It seems to have a more gradual, "extended release" effect that I prefer anyway. I'll also have half a cup of diet cola on the days that I go running.
Multiple pots of coffee a day? Especially on a regular basis? That's pretty much committing suicide in slow motion.
If you have trouble with low energy, try getting some cardiovascular exercise on a regular basis. Your body will work better as a result too, instead of crashing when the caffeine wears off. For me, getting my (giant) tonsils removed helped as well, because it meant I slept much better at night.
Actually, Zerth was correct. The human cornea blocks most UV light. People who have had theirs replaced with UV-transparent synthetic material report being able to see UV light (as white, IIRC, similarly to how we see near-infrared).
Humans with OEM corneas, at least. Artificial corneas don't absorb UV light.
Even with an artificial cornea, our eyes aren't sensitive to UV in the sense that some insects and birds are. We don't have UV-specific receptors, so we would see it as more white light, or more of whichever colour receptors were most sensitive to it.
I'd be curious to know if people with artificial corneas can see the UV patterns on flowers, even if they can't really tell that it's a different colour, just that there is a bright/dark pattern that people with natural corneas can't see. That's one of the easiest ways to determine useful UV sensitivity.
Incidentally, our eyes are mildly sensitive to near-infrared too, in the same no-specific-receptors sense. You don't need artificial corneas to take advantage of that either - just some NIR-bandpass goggles and a bright source of illumination, like a sunny day.
I really want to know where you get new Blu-Ray films for £4 a go.
Here in the US, evening tickets to the cinema are $12-$15 each. Blu-Ray discs tend to be $30. So if you're taking someone with you, and/or have to pay for parking, and/or plan on getting something at the concession stand, then yes, it's basically a wash with just buying it on Blu-Ray and having it to watch as many times as you want.
Any Turing-complete computing device, given enough memory and storage, can replicate anything this hardware can do.
But can it be replicated at a reasonable speed? The "analogue" in the name implies that the designers are taking advantage of the nearly-instantaneous nature of analogue computing.
In fact, the last part of TFA implies that this is exactly why the design was built as hardware - because software simulations were too slow.
A disk that being spun up DID do something.
If gravity works at all like electromagnetism, would it make more sense to use a rotor or rotor/stator design instead of a disk?
Seriously, anyone who skips this "news" completely will have missed nothing. I have not read the FA, I have not read the /. story summary or any of the 8 comments thus far. There's literally nothing to see here except BS.
So, in other words, dogma trumps the scientific method? I'm pretty skeptical of cold fusion, but that's no reason to dismiss the results without bothering to read them.
There are lots of examples of people building tabletop fusors, but they all have one thing in common; they produce less energy than they consume. Cold fusion isn't the interesting bit, energy-positive fusion is.
Devices like a Farnsworth Fusor aren't "cold fusion". They're small-scale hot fusion.
...and have access to a pre-OS X MacOS, TurboGopher VR is a must-see. The screenshot at the bottom of this page (http://www.tidbits.com/iskm/iskm3html/pt4/ch24/ch24.html) doesn't do it justice.
Suffice to say, it is probably the only Gopher client that will ever have a key mapped to a "jump" action that is interpreted literally.
I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.
It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than .15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.
I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too :).
The executives at Fox are conservative morons, and they hate science, even things that pretend to be "sciency".
I would be interested to know if this was really the case, or if they just recognized that there was an unfilled market waiting for them to monopolize.
Fox is NOTORIOUS for not sticking with their series (and have been for at least 15 years now).
Agreed.
The first thing I thought of when I saw TFA was Space: Above and Beyond, from back in the mid-90s. It certainly had some weak points, but I would definitely have been interested in seeing more of it.
I think Fox just doesn't have the stomach to gamble on high-cost programmes. Sci-fi has got to be one of the most expensive genres to film (properly), and it usually takes awhile for a new series or film franchise to build up a following.
I was honestly shocked when The Sarah Connor Chronicles got a second season out of Fox. I really liked the first season. I think if the second one is doing poorly, it has less to do with the timeslot and more with the glacial pace of the story arc. I'm still enjoying it (minus the mercifully brief UFO convention side-trip), but I also think it should have taken half as many episodes this season to get to where it is.
I don't know if that's the fault of Fox or the production team. Either way it seemed more crisp when it was under the gun of being a season one Fox sci-fi series. I just hope that if it does get axed, there is proper finale instead of a never-finished cliffhanger like too many other one- or two-season productions.
We looked into the extra costs in doing embrodary and was appalled at the total lockdown of the artwork for any of the machines.
Is there no one who's hacked them yet? Home CNC paper-cutters which don't have built-in support for custom patterns have had third-party software published that lets you e.g. import SVGs.
It also appears they're doing some very fancy processing to allow limited alternate viewing angles on scenes with actors. I imagine if they allow the angles to differ from the source by too much, it'd look distorted.
They probably filmed the live-action sequences with the same extreme fisheye lens(es) that they used for the static crime-scene filming. So you would be able to "look around" a bit, but not change the position of the camera, or look rotate the POV too far in any one direction.
That sort of thing has been done with still photos for quite awhile. It's basically QuickTime VR, although I saw the same thing back in the dialup BBS era called "photo bubbles".
I'm not really sure how they managed to get a patent on this, given the amount of similar work done previously. It is an interesting technique, though, even if it's only useful (in its current form at least) for a very specific type of game.
I wonder how effectively it could be combined with computer vision software. I would think it would give a much more accurate 3D map of the area given the extensive source material to work from.