Yeah infant mortality differnce is a good point as higher numerbers that far out of whack with the general scale can have a strong impact on realistic numbers for those who survive infancy. And yeah the deal with 40 years ago is pretty big because that is when vaccines had been almost universaly available in the US long enough that a number of desieases were irradicated as common occurances for the most part resulting in a much lower rate of not only infant mortality but young childhood and even adult mortality due to disease.
What seems to have really finished off closing the class gap is a better standard of basic healthcare easily available ( long lines and shitty doctors beat none at all ) and probably more importantly widespread emergency services. It truly is amazing what 911 coupled with EMT's ready to go at a moments notice have done for dealing with preventable deaths. Same goes for copmuters and something seeming so simple as patient record availability in a time of crisis.
Only if you elect to carry the orbiter. If you hung a payload structure in its place not designed to come back it would be a very capable heavy lift system. Google around for "Shuttle C" It was a fully fleshed out option by NASA that just never got funded.
Not really a fair comparison between the shuttle stack and sat V. True enough that is the shuttles payload capacity but when you include the weight of the three SSME's and the weight of the orbiter plus the specific payload mass it is actually about 75% of what a sat V tossed into orbit. If you launched a pure payload cannister in place of the orbiter with its heatshielding yould could toss a good chunk into orbit. Course you loose the ability to reuse the engines... but hell they have to be rebuilt after every flight anyway, damn near have to rebuild the orbiters as well.
That aside I agree, the side mount experiement needs to come to an end. Untill you can build an SSTO I think we are going to say good by to winged space craft as it is very hard to control a rocket with wings at the tip. That is the reason for the side mount in the first place.
You know I wonder if they could retro engineer the ET to use Kerosene and LOX instead of Hydrogen. Should be easier to keep ice from forming and perhaps could use a more structurally sound foam. Probably cost to much... and the SSME's would have to go through extensive re-design modification... or they could try to fit two of the new Boeing engines. Rather think doing this with the SRB's and then putting a payload on top would be one of the quickest ways to develop a heavy launch system to replace shuttle.
I think they reacted to your statement that a rescue mission would even be considered.
To also use what NASA said, there have been 15,000 documented debris strike, only one of which has prooven fatal and it was not to the Tile system which is what was affected here.
Now that being said the assumption that a debris strike could not be fatal was what led to us not knowing Columbia was in danger. I think it safe to say that assumption will no longer be made. If nothing else this may provide an excellent opportunity to actually test the repair process so long as they do not think any such repair attempt could cause further damage on re-entry than just leaving it alone. Seeing as the re-entry environment is essentially impossible to re-create it could be a very nice point of data for futher development of a repair method.
As for the idea of a point temperature array of thermocouples in the wings ? That would require an awfull lot of wiring and wire has weight and every freakin ounce is important when talking about a launch vehicle. Not saying it couldn't be done but you would have to weigh the value of the information that could be provided vrs the negative impact to payload. Still ounce of prevention and all that. Besides it isn't like they don't have temp sensors in the wing to begin with. The first indication of any problem with Columbia was the dropping out of the wing temp sensors.
As for a joe.schmuck@jsc|msfc|ksc.nasa.gov e-mail address ? Hell I have one as well, but an expert in TPS debris strike analysis from stock replay footage and brief press releases it does not make. But you just said that.
So you are most correct that you don't know. So stop suggesting ANY knowledge of what a response should be and wait till the results of the scan are in. Then we can all debate ad nauseum about what they should do and whether or not they should launch Atlantis.
Is it just me or did anyone else get an image of Google Earth with moving dots for people at the higher zoom levels....
Imagine being able to scroll around Google Earth and watching people like ants in an Ant Farm.
Add in Jet Transponder information and be able to see where a flight is not just ETA.
Trains, Cars, Ships etc...
On a less privacy oreiented issue how about GPS locator info on tracked animals ? Or hell at the other end of the spectrum Tracked Sex offenders etc....
Just from a pure concept of data gathering it is an astonishing idea and what is perhaps more amazing is that it could be done.
actually the one I thought it was did go to the left. And at an oblique angle your not talking baout the lander footprint but its shadow and that could indeed stretch far enough to be visible. Just depends on the pixel resolution. If its down around 10m or so then the lander and shadow would indeed be a significant makeup of the shade of pixel rendered.
All in all I dunno, perhaps it is perhaps it isn't.
Eh the appollo 17 stuff has the lunar module when zoomed in. The tracks are additions to the shot. You see the lander more by its shadow (perhaps 3 pixels) and like one lighter shade pixel than the rest.
Instead of looking for patterns in entire games you really need to pull the subset of following move choices in games with the same board state.
So what you really need to do is to compile a filter of board states after every move in every game in your history. Then you account for current board state in your game and look for any game that contains your exact board state (regardless of number of moves to reach it). From there any following move selection would be valid (assuming your match is only pulled from games the side being played won). If you fail to find an exact state then you need to compile a list of states you could create and then search for that pattern.
So look for a matching board state from your list of known games that led to a win/draw and then pick one of the list of following moves. Probably the one you have the most examples of as that would imply the highest number of winning scenarios.
That would be a beysian match of what followed in a prior example.
Then if you didn't have any game states in your db that matched your current game state you would then compile which states you could create and look for a match. Again look for the match that returns the most examples.
that is a beysian search to complete a pattern.
I think this would solve the strategy problem as once you reached unkown (ie uncharted thus your off the path of example or pre cached strategy) you would make moves to bring you back to the known. Should theoretically allow you to transition game lines as well though in part you are going to be driven by your opponents skill and breadth of your DB here. The irony being the more skilled they are the more likely to bring you back to a known game line they will be ( in most cases ).
Might be possible to reach a state where one move could not get you to a known state in your library at which point you might have to run a second iteration. I think 3 iterations is about as deep as you can go in a realistic time frame. But once you start running through iterations like that you are dealing with a chess engine.
You know... considering how many guys I heard say CISCO screwed them that might not be an inaccurate statement. Well if CISCO were considered to have a masculine gender that is.
K that works. Man on Man I bet CISCO just salivates at that possibility. I say, if this comes to pass then all that CISCO stock some folks had go in the can might make it back to being worth something.
Well if you flip it around and realize that in 1960 you were not expected to live more than 5 years after retirement it might start to make sense. This was especially true for the more blue collar proffessions as at the time there was a notable gap in life expectency between those of average means vrs those who were wealthy. One of the real unherealded advances of the 20th century was that by its end that gap essentially ceased to exist in developed countries. So you might look back and find 65-66 as the average life expectancy in the 60's but if you took a closer look at more specific populations you would actually find a lower average of like 62-63 or even less.
If a company has a 1000 workers making an average of 50k that means labor costs 50,000,000 and you then have an added pension plan cost for previous workers. If you have one retired worker for everyone position you maintain that is an added cost of 37.5 million (worst case) and it will remain that way until they start to die. When these plans were introduced it was thought some would die relatively quickly and some would live a long time but it would average out the same way as life expectancy to about 5-6 years after retirement (or hopefully, from their perspective, less due to the actual demographic of their employees on the average life expectancy scale).
So in the 60's when these plans started out they looked win win. The company assured employees that long term work would be rewarded and that people had a deffinate goal to look forward to. The company had what it thought to be a reasonably short term liability that would gain them value in employee loyalty.
However, then life expectancy beyond the age of retirement doubled from 65/66 to 75+ in the intervening 30 years so that it no longer looks so good from the companies perspective. Its liability just doubled (or worse) and there was no increase in the benifit of offering the plans. Increasing the age of retirment without increasing the benifits seems unfair (IE have to work longer for less reward) so the age of retirment has not been increasing nearly as fast as medicine has been increasing life expectancy. To make matters worse, living longer is costing more and more and that raises the expense of medical benifits plans which were also a large part of those retirement packages.
In short the wages of current workers at companies that offer and are stuck with these plans are directly affected and the potential exists (see recent airline pension plan debacles) for the added liability of this increasing cost of providing pension plans to drag a company into the red in a hurry. Profit margians are razor thin and it dosn't take to much to adversely affect them. In this case liabilities entered into several decades ago are coming due in a BIG way and I fear we have only seen the lightest rumbles of the potential problems it could cause.
It is to some extent the same problem facing SS and the baby boomer bubble albeit without the added complexity of a potentially smaller work force trying to provide for a longer lived retired population.
Now if you want to understand CEO compensation plans consider how to get out of this mess. Offer a plan that is mostly at cost to the employee like 401K. IE they choose to deffer part of their check into a pension plan rather than you adding it to their compensation package. As an incentive you then say you will match funds. Matching plans normally come with what is known as a period of time in which you become vested in the plan. Most times if you are not with the company long enough to become vested then any extraneous contributions by the company in matching funds is defaulted back to the company.
Now the companies have some nasty options. One, not push 401k very well, and two find a way to have a roll over rate t
Is this assumption that our power supply cannot be hardened in the same way as the Telco system thus making this whole discussion moot since power would then be just as reliable as telephone service. And before you say cost I have to call bull shit. Every major metro area buries its plumbing and those systems of tunnles are more than large enough and comprehensive enough to run wires everywhere that power runs above ground now.
Also if you do large underground connecting tunnles you introduce the possibility of just being precise about it and enabling laser power transmission systems. Or perhaps beaming microwaves down a metal pipe. Wonder if that would work ? After all the metal walls of a microwave contain the emmissions of the magnetron, not abosrb it. Imagine its efficiency would have something to do with the absobtion of power by the air in the tunnel unless you created a vacume....
Hmm science experiment... a metal tube a few cm in diameter (large enough to contain the wave), with a magnetron at one end and a 2.4ghz antenna at another attached to a multimeter to measure power transmission efficiency. The recieving antenna would have be capable of absorbing as much energy was was being out put... otherwise you would probably harm the magnetron.
That dosn't make much sense. Are you saying PoE would have to be managed from connection to connection ? Once you charge the line then all ethernet cabling plugged in would be live unless you also had a method for switching power inside say routers. And if that is part of the standard then everyone would have to upgrade routers as well.
Homes and businesses ??? Who needs em:-) Eh think of a 3-4 story parking garage that covers the major downtown streets in a city. Top layer becomes pedestrian right of way, next layer handles light cart traffic and so on.
More advanced would be to put all the heavy stuff underground. We have drilled miles and miles of tunnels for mines and subways. Just expand on the same concept. This dosn't affect surface building much at all. Make a grid system which allows proper spacing for foundation securing of major building areas and then create tunnel access to parking/loading and mass trasist areas. Surface streets become golf cart type zones with light structure over/under passes for pedestrian right of ways.
Another thought would be requiring a public floor of down town building developemnt to be given over via imminent domain for a connecting series of Gerbile tunnels connecting all down down buildings. You could put these several stories up and link major thorough fares into into them from outliying areas utilizing pedestrian overpasses and tunnels. If this were done on a massive scale then a modular system that could be constructed in days could be created rather easily. In this way a segway might actually work. Say your apartment building was a part of this area that was conencted and the tunnels had a right of way for low powered electric vehicles like a segway and it connected you your office building. Sheltered travel to and from work on an electric bike/segway or something similar. Or the parking lot leads to a system of cart paths utilizing old surface streets essentially doubling traffic capacity just because of the smaller size or you drop down intot he mass trasit system which is designed to have access to all blocks in some form of fasion. Say trains for major arteries and trams/busses for conencting less traveled networks. However they are on unimpeeded right of ways so they can run on regular schedules.
If your not in an apartment but instead live in a residential area then say the residential community has these connections.
I think more than anything a modern city needs to find someway to manage multiple means of travel and keep them seperated. IE have a pedestrian system that does not impinge or become obstructed by vehicle travel.
I would like to see a system that could allow for 4-5 types of right of way. Say
1- Pedestrian. Except for residential there would be no mingling of pedestrian right of way and vehicle right of way. The pedestrian right of way would be non-powered only. Foot/pedal etc... Maybe powered in the class of segway/electric bike/scooter. Say 20/mph limitation.
2- Light vehicle. I mean Golf Cart light. Strict HP/speed max limitation on the vehicle but not on the paths themselves. Use elevated and sunken tram ways as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. max of 40mph
3- Regular Vehicle traffic. Highway through traffic, right of way to parking lots etc... Max 100mph. Again avoid intersecting traffic as much as possible.
4- Frieght. Transfer trucks busses etc... access to industrial and commercial areas for delivery or perhaps central unloading zones that utilize lighter vehicles for last mile pallet delivery.
5- Mass Transit. If mass transit were isolated and designed from the begining to have its own right of way then scheduling can be far more consistent and if designed from the get go far more possible to solve the point to point travel inefficiency most systems face.
You would have to pretty much build a city from the ground up to manage something like this as it would require multiplane usage to enable roughly equivalent access to almost all points. You could probably have pedestrian and light vehicle more or less in the same plane and use tunnels and light strcutures for elevating the traffic out of each others way. Then utilize deeper/higher structures for the other. Mostly I would suggest burying the heavy/transit/regular vehicle traffic which would allow you to route the exhaust fumes for management. Require electric or other non-polluting method of power for light vehicles and keep it above ground.
Regulate speed largely via hardware limitations rather than operator limitations and do as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. By this I don't mean regulators on the equipment. I mean keep like vehicles in similar zones of travel and keep them headed the same direction. If you have roughly equivalent vehicles together traveling at similar speeds and rarely if ever encountering intersecting traffic then speed isn't much of a concern.
The primary idea would be to make light vehicle traffic the primary means of personal transportation around a city. Cars as we think of them would become more of a long distance/rural solution for personal travel essentially limiting them to primary arteries and as possible off ramps into common areas of commerce (ie the mall/grocery store etc...). The design limitations and requirements of the light vehicles would be the ability to survive most any concievable wreck possible. IE the intersection of technology to protect passangers in Head on/T-bone collisions. This should drasticly reduce the amout of traffic deaths. No more pedestrian/vehicle interaction. NO more massive inequality of mass interactions and largely reduced chances of intersecting traffic creating worst case scenario crashes. Also with keeping the light vehicles cheap and that much safer would reduce insurance and maintenece costs.
Freight keeps the craziest mix of vehicle classes apart. No more massive 18 wheelers and honda civics mixing it up. Also should allow again for tighter schedules and create less congestion. Also having them on specific roadways would mean not having to over engineer general right of ways to handle their level of stress. Mass Transist systems almost HAVE to have their own right of way else they are useless (see most buss systems in any congested metropolis)
There is always induction powering. You could have an induction top imbedded in a desk or just a pad that you sit your periphials on for the most part and get power that way which would solve the wire/battery problem for power.
I think a bigger issue would be number of channles for keepin things from cross talking. Would probably need to have some ability for cross communication between nearby devices for managing which channles are in use for what. Probably wind up being a fiasco like IRQ management in DOS/windows for a while.
No no no you can't have a mouse your neighbor already uses all the moust allowed channles. Sheesh.
Its only a hand geometry scanner? Ummm what exactly do you think fingerprint DB for criminals consists of ?
It is possible that the geometry used does not use sufficient points to hold up in court but we would need better stats on the machine and legal requirements to know for sure. It is not something as simple as an overlay, it is comparison of matching points and geometry that matches finger prints.
I am not so sure this thing is a bad idea really ( or good for that matter ). Afterall, if we want to start using biometrics instead of suitably non dictionary passwords then we have to get used to this idea of having this information available for comparison. What strikes me as worrisome about this is if such DB's get created ad hoc then they are just creating collection points for the information that may later be much more important than checking up on who is using a particular disney pass. And unlike passwords your biometrics don't change with time should they become compromised. All in all that is one of the primary reasons I am not to terribly sure biometrics are a good idea for primary/money ID system.... its actually to good in some ways.
Blue Tooth headphones or headsets (for higher quality). INterleaved with your cell phone you could have it drop out the show sound and automatically pause/DVR while you take a call and resume when end. Or any number of other possibilities. The directional speakers others have mentioned from Norris are allso very interesting.
Well I wouldn't post that sheet music if you happen to have it. Just like performances are copyrighted so to are compositions. When a company adapts a symphony it retains copyright on the work of compiling a new composition. Simple versions for youth orchestras etc... transposing into a different key or some such.
School Band/symphony/prchestra directors have to deal with that mess all the time even when dealing with such as this.
Well its not like they go out of the way to make telephone systems friendly. Statefull call systems that utilized caller ID information to maintain state for a user and enable customization of menu options would go a long way in that direction. Think Browser interface that allows you to create macros/bookmarks.
As for feeling... there is a certain element of what a musician does that you will not replicate without managing to create a process capable of passing a turing test in a musical context. However, while there are indeed an infinite number of ways they can be combined it is more like the infinity of points between 0-1, not 0 to infinity. IE music places some pretty severe bounds on what you can do next and remain in context of the current piece.
So, I doubt such methods would manage to provide creativity. On the otherhand you could digitially sample all known recordings of a song by ANY artist that has played it if you could create a more general parsing routine with some heuristics for combining different methods. IE Power Electric with Soft Acoustic interpretation likely not a good mix withen a single song, but are quite possible for two differnt performances depending on setting. Classic example of that, Clapton Playing Layla.
Now the kicker that with what I was suggesting your not trying to create a system that can be creative on its own. You are creating one that cannot be immediately placed as 'automated' and you can steal from hundreds of thousands of samples of real creativity. Quite possible thousands of directly related samples of the song in question. IE think an IPOD full of renditions of a particular song classed acording to beat patterns/ speeds, style etc. Then dial in the kind of performance you want with a reactive process to a single live player... So a random nature that varies the performance with a random seed in whatever you choose as the 'lead' element.
Again this is not a replacement for musicians. It is just an aide.
Yes but that just brings up the next likely step for music automation and that is fuzzing the edges a bit. For example instead of sampling the stienway for a single tone to use for that note across a dynamic range how about you sample thousands of strokes and sample another layer or two to reproduce a more valid range. Also allow for a tune drift function that allows the individual values to float withen a range of acceptable values.
In effect you try to create something similar to brownian motion to the tone quality and musical execution. IE instead of set values/lengths of tones rigidly adhered to and perfection of timing you create a set of varibles that execute randomly across an acceptable range forming a HUGE range of possible combinations.
It still won't replace live musicians but it would likely go a long way to eliminating that fake perfection feel synthesized music always has.
in refference to this particular invention I found the decision to go with plucking to be an odd decision. It seems to me some kind of back and forth mechanisim utilizing an actual guitar pick would have resulted in a sound much more equivalent with something a live player would produce. Instead they wound up with what amounts to a 6 string harpsichord. A neat technical problem for applied engineering education though.
Yes but unlike your trash can, water etc... an open wireless router is using a public resource in radio bandwidth expressly allocated for wireless communication. The process requires authentication albeit in the case of an open network it is anonymous authentication, but an authentication none the less. IE you DO have permission to use the router because without permission you cannot rout information to and recieve information from it. In all of your examples you have to take something without asking. In the case of the router you do ask for and recieve permission from the router that has been left open.
So the man did not trespass on this persons property as he was on the street which allows public access. He requests and receives access via public airwaves being utilized by the router. If he does the same with an open network at say an airport or starbucks he is perfectly withen his rights. Why is he not withen his rights sitting in the street accessing an open network ?
Re:Take THAT, space science nay-sayers!
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Indeed you can... its called an orbit ! Or in other words the means of falling in such a manner that your path never intersects the object of gravitational pull by curving around the mass at such a rate that your acceleration is evenly counteracted by the attraction of gravity leaving you with 0 gravity acting on you.
So long as people belive that it will remain so. But the numbers suggest that such a wide sweeping change would indeed be possible with a full turnout of the voting age public. Right now the highest turn out is for a presidential and it has rarely crossed 30%. That means 60% of the voting age population did not vote. If that 60% decided to vote for joe schmuck on a write in joe schmuck would win the election. That is the system we have. Not that we use it very often.
Hell to tell the truth it would be an unmitigated disaster if everyone that could went to the polls. They simply are not capable of processing that many people in the given amount of time. Known in the political science world as the crisis of over participation.
Re:Take THAT, space science nay-sayers!
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Eh thought about that after I posted... most of the research towers use vacume. And I know the free fall ride at six flags over georgia was not compensated. Metal wheels on metal rails don't really create all that much friction and at the speeds it was dealing with wind resistence never had much chance to impact the experience.
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Yeah infant mortality differnce is a good point as higher numerbers that far out of whack with the general scale can have a strong impact on realistic numbers for those who survive infancy. And yeah the deal with 40 years ago is pretty big because that is when vaccines had been almost universaly available in the US long enough that a number of desieases were irradicated as common occurances for the most part resulting in a much lower rate of not only infant mortality but young childhood and even adult mortality due to disease.
What seems to have really finished off closing the class gap is a better standard of basic healthcare easily available ( long lines and shitty doctors beat none at all ) and probably more importantly widespread emergency services. It truly is amazing what 911 coupled with EMT's ready to go at a moments notice have done for dealing with preventable deaths. Same goes for copmuters and something seeming so simple as patient record availability in a time of crisis.
Only if you elect to carry the orbiter. If you hung a payload structure in its place not designed to come back it would be a very capable heavy lift system. Google around for "Shuttle C" It was a fully fleshed out option by NASA that just never got funded.
Not really a fair comparison between the shuttle stack and sat V. True enough that is the shuttles payload capacity but when you include the weight of the three SSME's and the weight of the orbiter plus the specific payload mass it is actually about 75% of what a sat V tossed into orbit. If you launched a pure payload cannister in place of the orbiter with its heatshielding yould could toss a good chunk into orbit. Course you loose the ability to reuse the engines... but hell they have to be rebuilt after every flight anyway, damn near have to rebuild the orbiters as well.
That aside I agree, the side mount experiement needs to come to an end. Untill you can build an SSTO I think we are going to say good by to winged space craft as it is very hard to control a rocket with wings at the tip. That is the reason for the side mount in the first place.
You know I wonder if they could retro engineer the ET to use Kerosene and LOX instead of Hydrogen. Should be easier to keep ice from forming and perhaps could use a more structurally sound foam. Probably cost to much... and the SSME's would have to go through extensive re-design modification... or they could try to fit two of the new Boeing engines. Rather think doing this with the SRB's and then putting a payload on top would be one of the quickest ways to develop a heavy launch system to replace shuttle.
I think they reacted to your statement that a rescue mission would even be considered.
To also use what NASA said, there have been 15,000 documented debris strike, only one of which has prooven fatal and it was not to the Tile system which is what was affected here.
Now that being said the assumption that a debris strike could not be fatal was what led to us not knowing Columbia was in danger. I think it safe to say that assumption will no longer be made. If nothing else this may provide an excellent opportunity to actually test the repair process so long as they do not think any such repair attempt could cause further damage on re-entry than just leaving it alone. Seeing as the re-entry environment is essentially impossible to re-create it could be a very nice point of data for futher development of a repair method.
As for the idea of a point temperature array of thermocouples in the wings ? That would require an awfull lot of wiring and wire has weight and every freakin ounce is important when talking about a launch vehicle. Not saying it couldn't be done but you would have to weigh the value of the information that could be provided vrs the negative impact to payload. Still ounce of prevention and all that. Besides it isn't like they don't have temp sensors in the wing to begin with. The first indication of any problem with Columbia was the dropping out of the wing temp sensors.
As for a joe.schmuck@jsc|msfc|ksc.nasa.gov e-mail address ? Hell I have one as well, but an expert in TPS debris strike analysis from stock replay footage and brief press releases it does not make. But you just said that.
So you are most correct that you don't know. So stop suggesting ANY knowledge of what a response should be and wait till the results of the scan are in. Then we can all debate ad nauseum about what they should do and whether or not they should launch Atlantis.
Is it just me or did anyone else get an image of Google Earth with moving dots for people at the higher zoom levels....
Imagine being able to scroll around Google Earth and watching people like ants in an Ant Farm.
Add in Jet Transponder information and be able to see where a flight is not just ETA.
Trains, Cars, Ships etc...
On a less privacy oreiented issue how about GPS locator info on tracked animals ? Or hell at the other end of the spectrum Tracked Sex offenders etc....
Just from a pure concept of data gathering it is an astonishing idea and what is perhaps more amazing is that it could be done.
actually the one I thought it was did go to the left. And at an oblique angle your not talking baout the lander footprint but its shadow and that could indeed stretch far enough to be visible. Just depends on the pixel resolution. If its down around 10m or so then the lander and shadow would indeed be a significant makeup of the shade of pixel rendered.
All in all I dunno, perhaps it is perhaps it isn't.
Eh the appollo 17 stuff has the lunar module when zoomed in. The tracks are additions to the shot. You see the lander more by its shadow (perhaps 3 pixels) and like one lighter shade pixel than the rest.
Instead of looking for patterns in entire games you really need to pull the subset of following move choices in games with the same board state.
So what you really need to do is to compile a filter of board states after every move in every game in your history. Then you account for current board state in your game and look for any game that contains your exact board state (regardless of number of moves to reach it). From there any following move selection would be valid (assuming your match is only pulled from games the side being played won). If you fail to find an exact state then you need to compile a list of states you could create and then search for that pattern.
So look for a matching board state from your list of known games that led to a win/draw and then pick one of the list of following moves. Probably the one you have the most examples of as that would imply the highest number of winning scenarios.
That would be a beysian match of what followed in a prior example.
Then if you didn't have any game states in your db that matched your current game state you would then compile which states you could create and look for a match. Again look for the match that returns the most examples.
that is a beysian search to complete a pattern.
I think this would solve the strategy problem as once you reached unkown (ie uncharted thus your off the path of example or pre cached strategy) you would make moves to bring you back to the known. Should theoretically allow you to transition game lines as well though in part you are going to be driven by your opponents skill and breadth of your DB here. The irony being the more skilled they are the more likely to bring you back to a known game line they will be ( in most cases ).
Might be possible to reach a state where one move could not get you to a known state in your library at which point you might have to run a second iteration. I think 3 iterations is about as deep as you can go in a realistic time frame. But once you start running through iterations like that you are dealing with a chess engine.
LOL. Me and my typos.
You know... considering how many guys I heard say CISCO screwed them that might not be an inaccurate statement. Well if CISCO were considered to have a masculine gender that is.
K that works. Man on Man I bet CISCO just salivates at that possibility. I say, if this comes to pass then all that CISCO stock some folks had go in the can might make it back to being worth something.
Well if you flip it around and realize that in 1960 you were not expected to live more than 5 years after retirement it might start to make sense. This was especially true for the more blue collar proffessions as at the time there was a notable gap in life expectency between those of average means vrs those who were wealthy. One of the real unherealded advances of the 20th century was that by its end that gap essentially ceased to exist in developed countries. So you might look back and find 65-66 as the average life expectancy in the 60's but if you took a closer look at more specific populations you would actually find a lower average of like 62-63 or even less.
If a company has a 1000 workers making an average of 50k that means labor costs 50,000,000 and you then have an added pension plan cost for previous workers. If you have one retired worker for everyone position you maintain that is an added cost of 37.5 million (worst case) and it will remain that way until they start to die. When these plans were introduced it was thought some would die relatively quickly and some would live a long time but it would average out the same way as life expectancy to about 5-6 years after retirement (or hopefully, from their perspective, less due to the actual demographic of their employees on the average life expectancy scale).
link to a look at life expectancy through the years.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=13 9242
So in the 60's when these plans started out they looked win win. The company assured employees that long term work would be rewarded and that people had a deffinate goal to look forward to. The company had what it thought to be a reasonably short term liability that would gain them value in employee loyalty.
However, then life expectancy beyond the age of retirement doubled from 65/66 to 75+ in the intervening 30 years so that it no longer looks so good from the companies perspective. Its liability just doubled (or worse) and there was no increase in the benifit of offering the plans. Increasing the age of retirment without increasing the benifits seems unfair (IE have to work longer for less reward) so the age of retirment has not been increasing nearly as fast as medicine has been increasing life expectancy. To make matters worse, living longer is costing more and more and that raises the expense of medical benifits plans which were also a large part of those retirement packages.
In short the wages of current workers at companies that offer and are stuck with these plans are directly affected and the potential exists (see recent airline pension plan debacles) for the added liability of this increasing cost of providing pension plans to drag a company into the red in a hurry. Profit margians are razor thin and it dosn't take to much to adversely affect them. In this case liabilities entered into several decades ago are coming due in a BIG way and I fear we have only seen the lightest rumbles of the potential problems it could cause.
It is to some extent the same problem facing SS and the baby boomer bubble albeit without the added complexity of a potentially smaller work force trying to provide for a longer lived retired population.
Now if you want to understand CEO compensation plans consider how to get out of this mess. Offer a plan that is mostly at cost to the employee like 401K. IE they choose to deffer part of their check into a pension plan rather than you adding it to their compensation package. As an incentive you then say you will match funds. Matching plans normally come with what is known as a period of time in which you become vested in the plan. Most times if you are not with the company long enough to become vested then any extraneous contributions by the company in matching funds is defaulted back to the company.
Now the companies have some nasty options. One, not push 401k very well, and two find a way to have a roll over rate t
Is this assumption that our power supply cannot be hardened in the same way as the Telco system thus making this whole discussion moot since power would then be just as reliable as telephone service. And before you say cost I have to call bull shit. Every major metro area buries its plumbing and those systems of tunnles are more than large enough and comprehensive enough to run wires everywhere that power runs above ground now.
Also if you do large underground connecting tunnles you introduce the possibility of just being precise about it and enabling laser power transmission systems. Or perhaps beaming microwaves down a metal pipe. Wonder if that would work ? After all the metal walls of a microwave contain the emmissions of the magnetron, not abosrb it. Imagine its efficiency would have something to do with the absobtion of power by the air in the tunnel unless you created a vacume....
Hmm science experiment... a metal tube a few cm in diameter (large enough to contain the wave), with a magnetron at one end and a 2.4ghz antenna at another attached to a multimeter to measure power transmission efficiency. The recieving antenna would have be capable of absorbing as much energy was was being out put... otherwise you would probably harm the magnetron.
That dosn't make much sense. Are you saying PoE would have to be managed from connection to connection ? Once you charge the line then all ethernet cabling plugged in would be live unless you also had a method for switching power inside say routers. And if that is part of the standard then everyone would have to upgrade routers as well.
Homes and businesses ??? Who needs em :-) Eh think of a 3-4 story parking garage that covers the major downtown streets in a city. Top layer becomes pedestrian right of way, next layer handles light cart traffic and so on.
More advanced would be to put all the heavy stuff underground. We have drilled miles and miles of tunnels for mines and subways. Just expand on the same concept. This dosn't affect surface building much at all. Make a grid system which allows proper spacing for foundation securing of major building areas and then create tunnel access to parking/loading and mass trasist areas. Surface streets become golf cart type zones with light structure over/under passes for pedestrian right of ways.
Another thought would be requiring a public floor of down town building developemnt to be given over via imminent domain for a connecting series of Gerbile tunnels connecting all down down buildings. You could put these several stories up and link major thorough fares into into them from outliying areas utilizing pedestrian overpasses and tunnels. If this were done on a massive scale then a modular system that could be constructed in days could be created rather easily. In this way a segway might actually work. Say your apartment building was a part of this area that was conencted and the tunnels had a right of way for low powered electric vehicles like a segway and it connected you your office building. Sheltered travel to and from work on an electric bike/segway or something similar. Or the parking lot leads to a system of cart paths utilizing old surface streets essentially doubling traffic capacity just because of the smaller size or you drop down intot he mass trasit system which is designed to have access to all blocks in some form of fasion. Say trains for major arteries and trams/busses for conencting less traveled networks. However they are on unimpeeded right of ways so they can run on regular schedules.
If your not in an apartment but instead live in a residential area then say the residential community has these connections.
I think more than anything a modern city needs to find someway to manage multiple means of travel and keep them seperated. IE have a pedestrian system that does not impinge or become obstructed by vehicle travel.
I would like to see a system that could allow for 4-5 types of right of way. Say
1- Pedestrian. Except for residential there would be no mingling of pedestrian right of way and vehicle right of way. The pedestrian right of way would be non-powered only. Foot/pedal etc... Maybe powered in the class of segway/electric bike/scooter. Say 20/mph limitation.
2- Light vehicle. I mean Golf Cart light. Strict HP/speed max limitation on the vehicle but not on the paths themselves. Use elevated and sunken tram ways as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. max of 40mph
3- Regular Vehicle traffic. Highway through traffic, right of way to parking lots etc... Max 100mph. Again avoid intersecting traffic as much as possible.
4- Frieght. Transfer trucks busses etc... access to industrial and commercial areas for delivery or perhaps central unloading zones that utilize lighter vehicles for last mile pallet delivery.
5- Mass Transit. If mass transit were isolated and designed from the begining to have its own right of way then scheduling can be far more consistent and if designed from the get go far more possible to solve the point to point travel inefficiency most systems face.
You would have to pretty much build a city from the ground up to manage something like this as it would require multiplane usage to enable roughly equivalent access to almost all points. You could probably have pedestrian and light vehicle more or less in the same plane and use tunnels and light strcutures for elevating the traffic out of each others way. Then utilize deeper/higher structures for the other. Mostly I would suggest burying the heavy/transit/regular vehicle traffic which would allow you to route the exhaust fumes for management. Require electric or other non-polluting method of power for light vehicles and keep it above ground.
Regulate speed largely via hardware limitations rather than operator limitations and do as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. By this I don't mean regulators on the equipment. I mean keep like vehicles in similar zones of travel and keep them headed the same direction. If you have roughly equivalent vehicles together traveling at similar speeds and rarely if ever encountering intersecting traffic then speed isn't much of a concern.
The primary idea would be to make light vehicle traffic the primary means of personal transportation around a city. Cars as we think of them would become more of a long distance/rural solution for personal travel essentially limiting them to primary arteries and as possible off ramps into common areas of commerce (ie the mall/grocery store etc...). The design limitations and requirements of the light vehicles would be the ability to survive most any concievable wreck possible. IE the intersection of technology to protect passangers in Head on/T-bone collisions. This should drasticly reduce the amout of traffic deaths. No more pedestrian/vehicle interaction. NO more massive inequality of mass interactions and largely reduced chances of intersecting traffic creating worst case scenario crashes. Also with keeping the light vehicles cheap and that much safer would reduce insurance and maintenece costs.
Freight keeps the craziest mix of vehicle classes apart. No more massive 18 wheelers and honda civics mixing it up. Also should allow again for tighter schedules and create less congestion. Also having them on specific roadways would mean not having to over engineer general right of ways to handle their level of stress. Mass Transist systems almost HAVE to have their own right of way else they are useless (see most buss systems in any congested metropolis)
There is always induction powering. You could have an induction top imbedded in a desk or just a pad that you sit your periphials on for the most part and get power that way which would solve the wire/battery problem for power.
I think a bigger issue would be number of channles for keepin things from cross talking. Would probably need to have some ability for cross communication between nearby devices for managing which channles are in use for what. Probably wind up being a fiasco like IRQ management in DOS/windows for a while.
No no no you can't have a mouse your neighbor already uses all the moust allowed channles. Sheesh.
Its only a hand geometry scanner? Ummm what exactly do you think fingerprint DB for criminals consists of ?
It is possible that the geometry used does not use sufficient points to hold up in court but we would need better stats on the machine and legal requirements to know for sure. It is not something as simple as an overlay, it is comparison of matching points and geometry that matches finger prints.
I am not so sure this thing is a bad idea really ( or good for that matter ). Afterall, if we want to start using biometrics instead of suitably non dictionary passwords then we have to get used to this idea of having this information available for comparison. What strikes me as worrisome about this is if such DB's get created ad hoc then they are just creating collection points for the information that may later be much more important than checking up on who is using a particular disney pass. And unlike passwords your biometrics don't change with time should they become compromised. All in all that is one of the primary reasons I am not to terribly sure biometrics are a good idea for primary/money ID system.... its actually to good in some ways.
Blue Tooth headphones or headsets (for higher quality). INterleaved with your cell phone you could have it drop out the show sound and automatically pause/DVR while you take a call and resume when end. Or any number of other possibilities. The directional speakers others have mentioned from Norris are allso very interesting.
Well I wouldn't post that sheet music if you happen to have it. Just like performances are copyrighted so to are compositions. When a company adapts a symphony it retains copyright on the work of compiling a new composition. Simple versions for youth orchestras etc... transposing into a different key or some such.
School Band/symphony/prchestra directors have to deal with that mess all the time even when dealing with such as this.
Well its not like they go out of the way to make telephone systems friendly. Statefull call systems that utilized caller ID information to maintain state for a user and enable customization of menu options would go a long way in that direction. Think Browser interface that allows you to create macros/bookmarks.
As for feeling... there is a certain element of what a musician does that you will not replicate without managing to create a process capable of passing a turing test in a musical context. However, while there are indeed an infinite number of ways they can be combined it is more like the infinity of points between 0-1, not 0 to infinity. IE music places some pretty severe bounds on what you can do next and remain in context of the current piece.
So, I doubt such methods would manage to provide creativity. On the otherhand you could digitially sample all known recordings of a song by ANY artist that has played it if you could create a more general parsing routine with some heuristics for combining different methods. IE Power Electric with Soft Acoustic interpretation likely not a good mix withen a single song, but are quite possible for two differnt performances depending on setting. Classic example of that, Clapton Playing Layla.
Now the kicker that with what I was suggesting your not trying to create a system that can be creative on its own. You are creating one that cannot be immediately placed as 'automated' and you can steal from hundreds of thousands of samples of real creativity. Quite possible thousands of directly related samples of the song in question. IE think an IPOD full of renditions of a particular song classed acording to beat patterns/ speeds, style etc. Then dial in the kind of performance you want with a reactive process to a single live player... So a random nature that varies the performance with a random seed in whatever you choose as the 'lead' element.
Again this is not a replacement for musicians. It is just an aide.
Yes but that just brings up the next likely step for music automation and that is fuzzing the edges a bit. For example instead of sampling the stienway for a single tone to use for that note across a dynamic range how about you sample thousands of strokes and sample another layer or two to reproduce a more valid range. Also allow for a tune drift function that allows the individual values to float withen a range of acceptable values.
In effect you try to create something similar to brownian motion to the tone quality and musical execution. IE instead of set values/lengths of tones rigidly adhered to and perfection of timing you create a set of varibles that execute randomly across an acceptable range forming a HUGE range of possible combinations.
It still won't replace live musicians but it would likely go a long way to eliminating that fake perfection feel synthesized music always has.
in refference to this particular invention I found the decision to go with plucking to be an odd decision. It seems to me some kind of back and forth mechanisim utilizing an actual guitar pick would have resulted in a sound much more equivalent with something a live player would produce. Instead they wound up with what amounts to a 6 string harpsichord. A neat technical problem for applied engineering education though.
Yes but unlike your trash can, water etc... an open wireless router is using a public resource in radio bandwidth expressly allocated for wireless communication. The process requires authentication albeit in the case of an open network it is anonymous authentication, but an authentication none the less. IE you DO have permission to use the router because without permission you cannot rout information to and recieve information from it. In all of your examples you have to take something without asking. In the case of the router you do ask for and recieve permission from the router that has been left open.
So the man did not trespass on this persons property as he was on the street which allows public access. He requests and receives access via public airwaves being utilized by the router. If he does the same with an open network at say an airport or starbucks he is perfectly withen his rights. Why is he not withen his rights sitting in the street accessing an open network ?
Indeed you can... its called an orbit ! Or in other words the means of falling in such a manner that your path never intersects the object of gravitational pull by curving around the mass at such a rate that your acceleration is evenly counteracted by the attraction of gravity leaving you with 0 gravity acting on you.
So long as people belive that it will remain so. But the numbers suggest that such a wide sweeping change would indeed be possible with a full turnout of the voting age public. Right now the highest turn out is for a presidential and it has rarely crossed 30%. That means 60% of the voting age population did not vote. If that 60% decided to vote for joe schmuck on a write in joe schmuck would win the election. That is the system we have. Not that we use it very often.
Hell to tell the truth it would be an unmitigated disaster if everyone that could went to the polls. They simply are not capable of processing that many people in the given amount of time. Known in the political science world as the crisis of over participation.
Eh thought about that after I posted... most of the research towers use vacume. And I know the free fall ride at six flags over georgia was not compensated. Metal wheels on metal rails don't really create all that much friction and at the speeds it was dealing with wind resistence never had much chance to impact the experience.