Yep. The Vertical Mouse is wonderful. I'd also recommend one of these: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm. It's also very important to make sure they're at the right height. Having your keyboard/mouse too high (as most desks are) leads to wrist problems fast. For me, this meant buying a good office chair and then building a desk (I wanted a really odd shape, too) with an adjustable keyboard tray (I got mine from www.humanscale.com, but there are cheaper options available).
That whole process knocked out my problems in about a month (a month of heavy coding, even). It ain't cheap, but it's cheaper than surgery.
--0x4a6d74
The computer does not ask "is it one or zero" and get told "both."
Going back to the same metaphor you began to use, the principle that the Schroedinger's Cat Experiment is suppposed to illustrate is not the concept of superposition (that the cat is both alive and dead whilst in its quantum state in the box) but the concept of decoherence of the quantum state under observation.
It's currently a postulate of quantum mechanics (i.e. everyone observes this phenomenon but nobody can explain it) that observation of a quantum state in a superposition (say, a "qubit" -- perhaps an electron spinning up for 0 and down for 1) will have one of the two values, with certain probability. Once read, the state loses that superposition and remains in the observed state (Recall: in the SCE, the cat stays alive or dead once you open the box).
If you don't want to measure your qubits, and thus maintain their superpositions, entanglements, etc., that's fine... of course, you can't get any information out of them. If you've properly designed your quantum machine, you may have a guess as to what the possible states are; you may even know the probability of each one.
As soon as you ask to see a qubit, however, it becomes a classical bit and stays one. That's the downside to all this quantum stuff.
Quantum computers also do not mean an end to binary -- currently, since humans have, and are trained to use, primarily classical faculties, quantum research is aimed at extending classical computation. So we typically discuss a "qubit" which may be 0, 1, or some combination thereof (specifically residing in the field C x C). But, if we ever want to interface a quantum computer with a classical instrument (for example, some sort of I/O device, or a classical computer, or a human) then we will unavoidably devolve back to binary.
For more information, I recommend Nielsen & Chuang's book on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (I think; I don't have it in front of me right now).
Disclaimer: I am not a quantum mechanic. I am, however, an junior finishing up my degrees in mathematics and computer science so that I can go on in a year to work on a PhD in quantum computation.
--0x4a6d74
It's definitely clear from your dialect that you're not just a PA resident, but a Pittsburgh resident... having grown up just outside of Pgh but having relatives in Philly (and NJ, 5 miles outside of Philly), and now attending university in Indiana, I can say with certainty that Pittsburgh-ese is a unique dialect of Hick. Nowhere else have I heard of a bird called an "iggle," nor have I heard "yins" (or "yuns," or "y(i|u)ns guys"). I also, until first grade, didn't know who George "Warshington" was... I'd heard of a guy named Washington, but this "warshing" business was pretty new.
--0x4a6d74
The reason is that those machines are no longer being produced. Worse than that, parts for them are no longer being produced. Bad enough yet? How about this: the company went out of business about 25 years ago. If anything ever breaks, the county calls up a local machine shop to replace them... and special orders like that can be pricey (I have a friend who's the GM of such a shop).
That would be the reason that a) those machines are not becoming more widespread and b) PA is thinking about phasing them out.
Besides, mechanical vote counting machines just aren't 1337 enough for this day and age.;)
(I live in the Pittsburgh area and my mom volunteers at the polls in my district, so she got to learn this stuff.)
BTW: The machine doesn't actually record the votes on paper, I think. My mom said that there's a readout on the back (think car odometer) and a roll of paper for the write-in votes. The pollworkers have to unlock and open up the machines at the end of the day, all read the numbers off (so that everyone knows no one's cheating), total the several machines at each polling station, and then fill out some paperwork to be taken to the county courthouse.
Given the recent attacks on personal liberties in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11, what measures would you try to take to restore Americans' freedoms, given that Congress will probably remain in the control of a "major" party, both of which seem to be riding the fear of the American public (which they have helped to create, eg. sometimes-meaningless Homeland Security alerts) to move from a free society to one in which the government "protects" its citizens by a) limiting the actions they may take as individuals and b) increasing the power and control of the government (and especially the police, FBI, and intelligence agencies)?
While I do consider myself a "geek," at this point I have not learned much about networking and so ZA works better for me. This is due largely to choice; while I could easily pick up a book or take a class on it I have found myself more inclined towards compsci theory and so have taken classes more on that aspect.
However, I will look into Kerio, and I appreciate the information.
Would it be the fault of the tank tops, or the people [searches for word] filling the "tanks?" It seems to me that the problem is not the tanks themselves, but what's in them.
So if we move to solar-powered cars, people won't be filling up their tanks anymore and the roads will be safer, right?
I was wondering if anyone who runs a firewall (e.g. ZoneAlarm, among others) already would care to comment on their experience with upgrading to SP2. All of my machines (the Windows boxen, anyway) run ZoneAlarm and Norton AntiVirus (home edition on my parent's home machines, Corporate on my laptop since my university provides it for free:). I'm just curious if anyone can testify as to how this software cooperates with SP2.
Obviously, I'd prefer to use ZoneAlarm unless it and SP2 totally butt heads -- ZA has both out- and in-bound protection, and has demonstrably withstood minor script kiddie attacks and can theoretically handle much more (once a friend, just for fun, had Nessus run at maximum strength against my machine with ZA -- all ports were blocked, but by the way one service [RPC, I think] was denied Nessus was able to determine the system as Windows. This out of ~1200 scans and probes.) The only benefit I see to the XP firewall would be that it's loaded right after boot, so it starts protecting earlier.
So it seems to me that saying "piss off with your worthless crap" is a much less defensible position. By saying "we find this material objectionable" Kansas has found a position which makes it very difficult for the RIAA to fight their decision. Admittedly there is a lot of other worthless crsp in the shipment, but at least they can get rid of this stuff.
So the question is: was this decision truly about objectionable material, or just a politic way of getting rid of some of the crap? Obviously the AG can't come out and say "we're just using this as a tactic to dump some of the worse crap," since that would undermine the effort. But is it possible that this is the true goal of the operation? (Of course, the answer could quite possibly be no.)
Perhaps I don't count for much in the grand scheme of things, but I'm of the breed of conservative that believes the word implies smaller government. My philosophy is that the government should get the hell out of my life as much as possible, and let me live it for myself. So, I disagree with Medicare, Social security, etc -- but am a very strong advocate of individual rights and the inalienability of said rights. That includes the right to my (and *every* citizen's) say in the running of the country through fair elections -- elections where each vote is counted exactly once, for the result (e.g. candidate or referendum choice) for which the voter intended. I also believe that people have the right to vote for whomever/whatever they wish, and as such votes should be anonymous but verifiable. This is one of the major problems with suggestions in earlier posts of signing votes with PGP or assigning each a number to verify with -- as soon as one voter can be tied to his vote, that anonyminity disappears.
Yeah, so depending on whether "being on the right" means "believing what President Bush & co. say" or "holding educated beliefes on what is/isn't the best way to govern," *some* of "the right" do have opinons!
I remember finding once, a long time ago when I was doing some modeling/mapping projects for school, that the USGS provides some maps as vector (AutoCAD format [DWG, I think], to be precise). Furthermore, the data is stored within the file in layers. If you want, you can turn off property boundaries, for instance. Or, as might be more useful here, you can turn off everything but roads.
I don't have AutoCAD, but I do have CorelDRAW, which was also able to open and edit the files (and the various layers). I'm really sorry that I can't remember where I found these, but they're available for just about every quadrangle that USGS provides a raster topo map for.
Y'know, it's not like it's horribly difficult to block those ads anyway. I use Firefox with the AdBlock extension, and generally speaking those google ads show up in their own iframe... which AdBlock is smart enough to block. So my systems all have "advertisements.google.com" (or whatever it is -- haven't had to look at it in a long time) in their blacklist. Thus, if I had gmail, my mail would still be scanned, but I wouldn't have to deal with the ads. So while the privacy concerns may still exist, at least the second half of the problem is gone.
And honestly, as my dad was quick to admonish me in my younger days, "email is like a postcard." There's nothing to stop a bazillion people from reading it somewhere between the initial and final servers. So if you don't want your email to be read, you should already be enciphering it. It's that simple. Anything I have to send to someone that I seriously do not want anyone else to read, I encrypt -- and if they don't have PGP, I make 'em get it (generally, the people I truly need security with understand the desire for security and are willing to cooperate).
So am I surprised that Gmail can/will scan your email? No. Does it bother me? No -- because they won't be able to scan my private messages anyway.
Right, so that image they put up is nifty and shows that they have been able to extrapolate altitude from the stereo aspect of the cam.
But for those of us who like to do our own 3D modeling, when will they release the whole-planet texture and heightmaps (a la NASA's Blue Planet, as mentioned by another poster)? I want to be able to load that stuff up and then make my own animations of probes/ships/etc., complete with landing and interacting with the environment.
Besides, without that data, how can I start to plan how to terraform the planet? And how can I decide the optimum location for my evil lair?
If you here, for example, you can see a good quantity of the images they're releasing. They're in groups of three, for the most part -- and funny, but light has three primary colors -- and they seem to be in RGB order (as guessed by experimentation with the white tones in the last set, with the airbag visible). Thus you too can see what Mars looks like before being color (calibrated|corrected|conspiricized) by integrating the three images in (your favorite imaging software). Then, if only we could find the color data for the calibration sundial, it would be possible to recurve the colors to match the known values. I haven't found this stuff yet, but I'm stil looking. And I don't know if the GIMP can do this part (since I haven't used it enough) but I'm postive that Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint can handle it.
So get the data and prove for yourself whether or not it's real!
I've worked with the Cerebellum. I TA'd for a summer program at CMU for high school students who are strong in compsci/math. Part of the curriculum was building robots out of Lexan, hobby servos (with Lego wheels, 'cause they were conveniently around when the instructor moved away from Mindstorms), and these boards.
They have a PIC 16F877 controller driving 8 digital tristate I/O lines, and 8 analog lines (which I think were just input, IIRC). So we plugged the modified servos in as motors, and for sensors had switches, photoresistors, and an infrared rangefinder. The students were able to code in a somewhat-limited subset of C (due to the freeware compiler we had -- there was a better one available, but the instructor couldn't get funding for it) and compile it down, then transfer to the board (via a built-in serial port). It worked well for those applications, though with only a couple K of memory. In fact, I ended up writing a prettied-up API for the students, because the instructor decided he wasn't all that pleased with some of the low-level, non-intuitive calls (which would be trouble for those students who'd never coded before, let alone in C).
The Cerebellum was conveniently easy for this level, but I'm surprised they're using it for these rovers. I didn't think you could get Linux that small!
Slashdot Mirror
That whole process knocked out my problems in about a month (a month of heavy coding, even). It ain't cheap, but it's cheaper than surgery. --0x4a6d74
Going back to the same metaphor you began to use, the principle that the Schroedinger's Cat Experiment is suppposed to illustrate is not the concept of superposition (that the cat is both alive and dead whilst in its quantum state in the box) but the concept of decoherence of the quantum state under observation.
It's currently a postulate of quantum mechanics (i.e. everyone observes this phenomenon but nobody can explain it) that observation of a quantum state in a superposition (say, a "qubit" -- perhaps an electron spinning up for 0 and down for 1) will have one of the two values, with certain probability. Once read, the state loses that superposition and remains in the observed state (Recall: in the SCE, the cat stays alive or dead once you open the box).
If you don't want to measure your qubits, and thus maintain their superpositions, entanglements, etc., that's fine ... of course, you can't get any information out of them. If you've properly designed your quantum machine, you may have a guess as to what the possible states are; you may even know the probability of each one.
As soon as you ask to see a qubit, however, it becomes a classical bit and stays one. That's the downside to all this quantum stuff.
Quantum computers also do not mean an end to binary -- currently, since humans have, and are trained to use, primarily classical faculties, quantum research is aimed at extending classical computation. So we typically discuss a "qubit" which may be 0, 1, or some combination thereof (specifically residing in the field C x C). But, if we ever want to interface a quantum computer with a classical instrument (for example, some sort of I/O device, or a classical computer, or a human) then we will unavoidably devolve back to binary.
For more information, I recommend Nielsen & Chuang's book on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (I think; I don't have it in front of me right now).
Disclaimer: I am not a quantum mechanic. I am, however, an junior finishing up my degrees in mathematics and computer science so that I can go on in a year to work on a PhD in quantum computation. --0x4a6d74
It's definitely clear from your dialect that you're not just a PA resident, but a Pittsburgh resident ... having grown up just outside of Pgh but having relatives in Philly (and NJ, 5 miles outside of Philly), and now attending university in Indiana, I can say with certainty that Pittsburgh-ese is a unique dialect of Hick. Nowhere else have I heard of a bird called an "iggle," nor have I heard "yins" (or "yuns," or "y(i|u)ns guys"). I also, until first grade, didn't know who George "Warshington" was ... I'd heard of a guy named Washington, but this "warshing" business was pretty new.
--0x4a6d74
The reason is that those machines are no longer being produced. Worse than that, parts for them are no longer being produced. Bad enough yet? How about this: the company went out of business about 25 years ago. If anything ever breaks, the county calls up a local machine shop to replace them ... and special orders like that can be pricey (I have a friend who's the GM of such a shop).
;)
That would be the reason that a) those machines are not becoming more widespread and b) PA is thinking about phasing them out.
Besides, mechanical vote counting machines just aren't 1337 enough for this day and age.
(I live in the Pittsburgh area and my mom volunteers at the polls in my district, so she got to learn this stuff.)
BTW: The machine doesn't actually record the votes on paper, I think. My mom said that there's a readout on the back (think car odometer) and a roll of paper for the write-in votes. The pollworkers have to unlock and open up the machines at the end of the day, all read the numbers off (so that everyone knows no one's cheating), total the several machines at each polling station, and then fill out some paperwork to be taken to the county courthouse.
Just another local's opinion.
--0x4a6d74
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html
Haven't tried it yet; I keep meaning to but school keeps getting in the way.
Given the recent attacks on personal liberties in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11, what measures would you try to take to restore Americans' freedoms, given that Congress will probably remain in the control of a "major" party, both of which seem to be riding the fear of the American public (which they have helped to create, eg. sometimes-meaningless Homeland Security alerts) to move from a free society to one in which the government "protects" its citizens by a) limiting the actions they may take as individuals and b) increasing the power and control of the government (and especially the police, FBI, and intelligence agencies)?
Thanks.
While I do consider myself a "geek," at this point I have not learned much about networking and so ZA works better for me. This is due largely to choice; while I could easily pick up a book or take a class on it I have found myself more inclined towards compsci theory and so have taken classes more on that aspect.
However, I will look into Kerio, and I appreciate the information.
Would it be the fault of the tank tops, or the people [searches for word] filling the "tanks?" It seems to me that the problem is not the tanks themselves, but what's in them.
So if we move to solar-powered cars, people won't be filling up their tanks anymore and the roads will be safer, right?
I was wondering if anyone who runs a firewall (e.g. ZoneAlarm, among others) already would care to comment on their experience with upgrading to SP2. All of my machines (the Windows boxen, anyway) run ZoneAlarm and Norton AntiVirus (home edition on my parent's home machines, Corporate on my laptop since my university provides it for free :). I'm just curious if anyone can testify as to how this software cooperates with SP2.
Obviously, I'd prefer to use ZoneAlarm unless it and SP2 totally butt heads -- ZA has both out- and in-bound protection, and has demonstrably withstood minor script kiddie attacks and can theoretically handle much more (once a friend, just for fun, had Nessus run at maximum strength against my machine with ZA -- all ports were blocked, but by the way one service [RPC, I think] was denied Nessus was able to determine the system as Windows. This out of ~1200 scans and probes.) The only benefit I see to the XP firewall would be that it's loaded right after boot, so it starts protecting earlier.
Comments, anyone?
So it seems to me that saying "piss off with your worthless crap" is a much less defensible position. By saying "we find this material objectionable" Kansas has found a position which makes it very difficult for the RIAA to fight their decision. Admittedly there is a lot of other worthless crsp in the shipment, but at least they can get rid of this stuff.
So the question is: was this decision truly about objectionable material, or just a politic way of getting rid of some of the crap? Obviously the AG can't come out and say "we're just using this as a tactic to dump some of the worse crap," since that would undermine the effort. But is it possible that this is the true goal of the operation? (Of course, the answer could quite possibly be no.)
--0x4A6D74
Er, I am.
Perhaps I don't count for much in the grand scheme of things, but I'm of the breed of conservative that believes the word implies smaller government. My philosophy is that the government should get the hell out of my life as much as possible, and let me live it for myself. So, I disagree with Medicare, Social security, etc -- but am a very strong advocate of individual rights and the inalienability of said rights. That includes the right to my (and *every* citizen's) say in the running of the country through fair elections -- elections where each vote is counted exactly once, for the result (e.g. candidate or referendum choice) for which the voter intended. I also believe that people have the right to vote for whomever/whatever they wish, and as such votes should be anonymous but verifiable. This is one of the major problems with suggestions in earlier posts of signing votes with PGP or assigning each a number to verify with -- as soon as one voter can be tied to his vote, that anonyminity disappears.
Yeah, so depending on whether "being on the right" means "believing what President Bush & co. say" or "holding educated beliefes on what is/isn't the best way to govern," *some* of "the right" do have opinons!
--0x4a6d74
I remember finding once, a long time ago when I was doing some modeling/mapping projects for school, that the USGS provides some maps as vector (AutoCAD format [DWG, I think], to be precise). Furthermore, the data is stored within the file in layers. If you want, you can turn off property boundaries, for instance. Or, as might be more useful here, you can turn off everything but roads.
I don't have AutoCAD, but I do have CorelDRAW, which was also able to open and edit the files (and the various layers). I'm really sorry that I can't remember where I found these, but they're available for just about every quadrangle that USGS provides a raster topo map for.
Hope this helps!
--0x4A6D74
Y'know, it's not like it's horribly difficult to block those ads anyway. I use Firefox with the AdBlock extension, and generally speaking those google ads show up in their own iframe ... which AdBlock is smart enough to block. So my systems all have "advertisements.google.com" (or whatever it is -- haven't had to look at it in a long time) in their blacklist. Thus, if I had gmail, my mail would still be scanned, but I wouldn't have to deal with the ads. So while the privacy concerns may still exist, at least the second half of the problem is gone.
And honestly, as my dad was quick to admonish me in my younger days, "email is like a postcard." There's nothing to stop a bazillion people from reading it somewhere between the initial and final servers. So if you don't want your email to be read, you should already be enciphering it. It's that simple. Anything I have to send to someone that I seriously do not want anyone else to read, I encrypt -- and if they don't have PGP, I make 'em get it (generally, the people I truly need security with understand the desire for security and are willing to cooperate).
So am I surprised that Gmail can/will scan your email? No. Does it bother me? No -- because they won't be able to scan my private messages anyway.
--0x4A6D74
Right, so that image they put up is nifty and shows that they have been able to extrapolate altitude from the stereo aspect of the cam.
But for those of us who like to do our own 3D modeling, when will they release the whole-planet texture and heightmaps (a la NASA's Blue Planet, as mentioned by another poster)? I want to be able to load that stuff up and then make my own animations of probes/ships/etc., complete with landing and interacting with the environment.
Besides, without that data, how can I start to plan how to terraform the planet? And how can I decide the optimum location for my evil lair?
If you here, for example, you can see a good quantity of the images they're releasing. They're in groups of three, for the most part -- and funny, but light has three primary colors -- and they seem to be in RGB order (as guessed by experimentation with the white tones in the last set, with the airbag visible). Thus you too can see what Mars looks like before being color (calibrated|corrected|conspiricized) by integrating the three images in (your favorite imaging software). Then, if only we could find the color data for the calibration sundial, it would be possible to recurve the colors to match the known values. I haven't found this stuff yet, but I'm stil looking. And I don't know if the GIMP can do this part (since I haven't used it enough) but I'm postive that Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint can handle it. So get the data and prove for yourself whether or not it's real!
They have a PIC 16F877 controller driving 8 digital tristate I/O lines, and 8 analog lines (which I think were just input, IIRC). So we plugged the modified servos in as motors, and for sensors had switches, photoresistors, and an infrared rangefinder. The students were able to code in a somewhat-limited subset of C (due to the freeware compiler we had -- there was a better one available, but the instructor couldn't get funding for it) and compile it down, then transfer to the board (via a built-in serial port). It worked well for those applications, though with only a couple K of memory. In fact, I ended up writing a prettied-up API for the students, because the instructor decided he wasn't all that pleased with some of the low-level, non-intuitive calls (which would be trouble for those students who'd never coded before, let alone in C).
More info here on robotics at Leap: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~roboleap/
The Cerebellum was conveniently easy for this level, but I'm surprised they're using it for these rovers. I didn't think you could get Linux that small!