That's all well and good, in North Carolina. But, how is it going to play as a precedent in other courts? Particularly of interest is the federal level. I haven't kept up on the various decisions lately, but I believe other court rulings have supported the MPAA/RIAA.
I sincerely doubt that a judge in California will see things the same way. Of course, I've been wrong before.
Additionally, what's the motivation for organizations (schools or ISPs) to fight for privacy versus just rolling over? I don't hear much of an outcry from the public over this bullshit, so it's not like they're really trying to protect their images. And, we all know that corporations don't go to much effort just on priciple (schools are a bit better in this regard).
In terms of "selling piracy", the MPAA/RIAA have won. The public really buys into the idea of it being stealing (as opposed to copyright infringment), and doesn't seem to get too pissed off over the draconian punishments that have been handed down. Even people who are fairly technically literate, or well versed in law, often don't see the distinction between theft and infringement. It's pretty sad. Who else is up for forming a non-profit, whose mission is to educate the public on intellectual property issues?
Lastly, if the public doesn't understand the issue all that well, can we really expect much better of the judiciary? In an ideal world, the judiciary represents the populace (of course, I'd hope them to be much smarter than the average asshole on the street though).
The cause of racism is honesty, not overpopulation. Racism has been around, even in times when populations were much smaller. The thing that makes racists stand out from everyone else, is they admit to their true thoughts.
I'm sure there are times when a nego does something you don't like, and you think to yourself, "Figures, he's a dirty nigger." You just want to pretend to go along with the current tolerance in the zeitgeist. But, seriously, how long can that last? As people get more and more fed up with having to deny their true thoughts, and lie to themselves, there will be a backlash. Even worse than the political correctness movement in America are the laws in Europe. They're actually trying to regulate people's thoughts. It's quite sickenning.
In the end, it is inevitable only because people believe that not everyone is created equal (which is absolutely true). Now, you can argue about which group, as a whole, is better than another (and I have a very strong opinion on this). This will never change, because by virtue of the fact that there are different races, the various races will always have identifiable characteristics (physical, mental, and social). It then becomes a question of what you consider to be "more correct" and the associated importance.
You can pretend that these thoughts don't exist all you want. But they do exist. And you, like everyone else, have them.
It is my understanding that LEDs still aren't quite bright enough for use in a projector. I've been toying with the idea of building my own LCD projector, and all the information I've seen on the net has said that LEDs just won't cut it. To get enough light, you need a cluster too big to approximate a point source. Using an array of them as a backlight has other issues for projection, but would work great in place of a CCFL in a standard LCD monitor (even if getting it to work is a bit labor intensive).
Here's one guy's attempt. There are tons of others, if you look around. No successes that I've come across though.
I haven't really kept up with LED technology, so maybe things have changed, but I kind of doubt it's any significant change. I have thought about taking a bunch of LEDs, putting them inside a reflective light box, and taking the light out through a multimode fiber optic cable, to scramble the light. The output of the cable would then act as a point source (with the appropriate lens in place).
Based on this little projector, and the rumors of LCD TVs powered by LED illumination, I'd guess that there are some LEDs out there to get the job done. These may still only be available to OEMs in large quantities though (assuming the OEMs don't have exclusivity on them).
I also have a suspicion that this system is not based on white LEDs (which are really modified blue LEDs, which is surprising, when you consider how good the color temperature ends up being). Instead, it's probably RGBs with dichroics mixing the colors. This would avoid the colorwheel needed in a DLP system, which would take up quite a bit of space and power.
Anyway, enough of this rambling. If this thing hits the market, and the picture quality is good (I'm mostly worried it won't be bright enough), then I'll get one. The speculative price is lower than a typical LCD or DLP projector, and there's no $600/yr operating fee (new bulbs). I wouldn't even worry about the cost of replacing the LEDs, since that's 10-20 years down the road (assuming pretty heavy usage).
I agree with you quite a bit. A lot of Slashdotters live in a fantasy world.
There are people who get PhD's in the natural sciences NOT because they enjoy their academic field of study, but because they know they will make more money with a PhD than a lesser degree.
In general, the PhD is the entry level degree into the field (low level technician jobs notwithstanding since I'd say they're on the periphery of the fields). On top of that, your typical newly minted PhD doesn't make much ($40-50k/yr) as a postdoc. You can quite easily get that with just a bachelor's degree (possibly even a bullshit associate's or certificate of some sort). Even as a tenure track professor most don't earn all that much, especially when you consider the education and hours that have been put in.
In fact, I can't think of one PhD, working off of a single source of income in academia, that is making much money. Sure, taking your PhD to Wall Street to be a quant will get you decent cash, but that isn't really academia anymore. There are others, who have additional sources of income (consulting, books, companies, patents).
prostitutes (indeed, prostitutes in Nevada have been known to work for about 3-4 years, then retire for life with over $1 million in income for their time in bed).
I think that the stories of the retiring hookers are a bit exaggerated, as I'm sure most of them do not really save/invest well. Some do, of course, but I'd think they're in the minority. Besides that, $1million is really a pretty bare minimum for retirement (throwing off only $50k/yr in interest).
In reality, getting into a field for a love of it is a luxury few can afford, and (I think) pretty much only simpletons can enjoy. Anyone who is doing any IT support/administration (like some people here), and claims to love it, must have some mild form of retardation.
I do what many people would consider interesting stuff, and I even release some open source software (funded by NIH grants). And, although I get some job satisfaction, I could be doing more interesting things with my time.
I think that people who have lots of job satisfaction are the same ones easily amused by shiny objects. It's for that reason that I love to be served by retarded people at fast food restaurants. They love their job, and are proud of it, and actually put in some effort to get your order right. Meanwhile, the teenagers or dirty skins hate you and would love to shit in your food.
The point being, in general (there are some exceptions to this rule), you need to be rather simple to be amused by a job (otherwise it wouldn't be a job).
I have long contended that the happiest people in the world are the retards, with the caveat that they fall into the right level of retardedness (functional, but not smart enough to realize how fucked they are).
False color is good for looking at geometric data. If you want to know where objects lie in an image, you can overlay and false color some intensity maps at a few different wavelengths. That is very useful. A lot of the time, it's done just to impress the peasants, of course.
With this data, the temporality of it renders it pretty much worthless to the human ear. Anything you can detect by ear will very easily be seen in a simple Fourier transform or similar technique. A Fourier transform and a plot against logarithmic time is probably the best (most efficient and informative) way to visualize it.
Image processing is still not very good at identifying features, unless those features are very well stereotyped. This happens to be a part of my current work, albeit with time-series acquired microscopic images (EM, laser scanning, etc). The human eye/brain will pick up on visual cues that the best algorithms will miss. The algorithms themselves are generally designed/trained based on analysis conducted by eye.
Picking out 2/3D phenomena is where false color images can be useful. Simple grayscale intensity images are often just as good or better (I worked for a professor that insisted on keeping color channels separate during viewing). Listening to 1D data, you won't learn anything new that the computer couldn't have told you.
I know this was done just for the sake of doing something neat. And, I don't fault it for that. What does bother me, however, is that now you'll have some NYT-reading, liberal artsy, pseudo-intellectual douchebags running around thinking that the Universe plays an audible tone. In the end, they only get half the facts down and make up the rest, then go on to propogate that misinformation.
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand. Is it worth it to only give them half the facts? Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that/.ers complain about.
I have some experience in astronomy. I understand gravity and the cosmic microwave background and have gone through the calculations for a handful of Big Bang parameterizations.
That being said, I don't understand the purpose of this. Doing the acoustic analysis is fine and informative. Making an audible sound out of it is nonsense. It's almost entirely arbitrary, as the sound is not audible. It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image. It really tells you nothing you didn't already know, it's just a pretty picture. Hardly worthy of all the press it is getting.
I don't believe that it improves people's understanding of fundamental phenomena. In fact, I'd say that, if anything, it gives them the impression that they understand more than they really do. And that's usually a bad situation.
The public just likes to have shiny objects dangled in front of them, they rarely (bother to) understand the significance of said objects.
It shouldn't just give the location of the child. For a lot of people, that's totally useless. Most people couldn't tell you the difference between latitude/longitude and UTM coordinates. Instead, it should guide them to their child... let the parents page through instructions. Not only would this be more useful for them, they could get charged by the page, so our corporate overlords should be pleased as well (afterall, reuniting a parent and child isn't satisfying enough).
Secondly, what ever happened to Darwinism? The lost children should starve and/or form their own feral societies. Only the best would survive to re-enter society, hopefully as very productive, since they'll have lots of useful skills.
Lastly, where the hell are all the wolves? Aren't they supposed to take care of the lost children?
In all honesty, this probe won't tell us anything we don't already know. At the time the idea was proposed, it was useful. Since then, we've made more precise measurements of gravity and observed relativistic effects.
The only way this probe will really teach us anything (outside of the engineering that went into its construction) is if it fails, spectacularly. Sadly, those "eureka" moments don't happen very often, and I wouldn't hold out much hope for one here. Then again, the Hipparcos data has caused some debate, while its mission was somewhat routine (although highly precise).
We already know that relativity is wrong (in the same sense that classical mechanics is wrong). This experiment is not designed to figure out exactly how relativity is wrong, rather it is designed to tell us if relativity is wrong at all. Since we already know the answer to that question, it isn't very helpful.
I'm not blaming the guys that worked on this project. There were political/financial/logistical issues that made this launch 20+ years too late to be useful. The PhDs awarded during this project are good, they did some nice work, most notably in materials science and fabrication, but other areas as well. It's just not very meaningful in the areas of physics/cosomology.
Oh well, that's what happens when science is a slave to beauracracy.
What sort of fire hazard is this place? Assuming the hydrogen is stored in a combustible state (which is very likely), and that a very large volume will be stored (which is also very likely), this could be a bit of a death trap.
Note, that's not to be confused with the DivX standard used by those nasty "pirates". There are other types of disposable DVDs floating around. The main one that comes to mind now is the one that oxidizes when you open the package.
Anyway, it especially pissed off the Slashdot crowd.
How about you listen to the music, watch the band, interact with those around you... that's the reason for going to a concert, afterall.
The glow of a PDA wouldn't bother me, but the asshole using it would. For example, I was at a concert in July, and some douchebag was complaining that I was blocking his view. The jackass was actually sitting down (he's lucky not to have been trampled) and talking on his cell phone. Sitting down is bad enough, but to actually be on the phone at a fucking concert defies all reason. So, without discussing it, me and this big fat guy both hammered him really good. Everyone nearby was pleased with that.
Also, I'd never bring my PDA (assuming I would ever own a PDA) to a concert, since I wouldn't want it getting broken.
I work with femto-second lasers. I have used them in living cells for a variety of applications. Two of which involve destroying structures inside of living cells. Of course, these structures are placed into the cells by us (injection, knock-in, electroporation, etc). It's not an extremely new technique, it's just being used in a slightly new way. Some of the similar techniques are known as uncaging, FRAP, and more.
Personally, I rarely find anything that groundbreakingly new in Nature. Well, that's not exactly true. There is plenty of new data, and new applications and/or refinements of old techniques. There generally aren't wholly original techniques or completely new instruments discussed in that journal. My personal preference for that sort of thing are some physics journals.
One other thing, that may be of interest to/., semiconductor nanocrystals are starting to pop up in similar research. They are quite useful, if still hard to work with (they don't behave like most biological molecules). I got interested in quantum dots about a year ago, and have done a bit of work with them, but would like to do some more (when I find the time).
why goverments around the world are encouraging everyone to use the internet
This is a good question. I've often wondered it myself. A lot of it seems to be a buzzword driven hype factor. Especially when you consider the legal quagmires that have arisen from it (VoIP competition with CLECs, DRMcopyright, etc). Polititcians just hear that it's cool, and spout the shit they think their constituents (or lobbyists) want to hear, they usually don't know dick themselves.
is there really enough of a reason for everybody to need to?
Nope. Plain and simple. I guarantee that the Hilton sisters would live quite well, without ever knowing about the Internet (maybe they don't know). I'm sure there are dirt farmers in Africa that couldn't give half a hairy shit about it, and wouldn't really gain much by using it.
Is the internet suitable for everybody?
As above, no.
Will it ever be?
Probably not. At least, not directly. Lots of people who don't use the Internet will see benefits that result from other people using it. They, themselves, may never experience any benefit by direct usage.
Take our jungle-bunny dirt farmer, for example. He will collect more international aid, due to the Internet. Maybe one of the aid workers will let him mess around with a laptop that has a satellite connection. Assuming said dirt farmer can read (and knows a language that doesn't involve clicking), he really won't get anything out of it. Even with some training, he still probably wouldn't get anything out of it.
Could this be the most effective attempt on their part, so far? It's hard to argue against them, without being labelled as a supporter of kiddie-porn. It doesn't matter how legitimate your claims against this bill, you'll still have to put up with the obnoxious cries of, "think of the children!"
This is really slick, on their part, because they can try to humiliate their opponents, reglardless of the validity of their arguments. How can people easily claim that this is just profiteering and securing a closed market in which to play?
Obviously, I don't want to see this go through, and it likely won't (not on the first try, anyway). But, it is an interesting tactic.
I don't know, maybe I overestimate the public. Back when the $90billion lawsuits were filed, I thought there would be some public outrage. When they filed all those subpeonas, I thought there would be lots of anger. Instead, everyone just shrugged their shoulders, said "sucks for them", and went on like nothing ever happened.
I guess this is why things are so fucked up, huh? This is why SCO (the RIAA, the MPAA, DirecTV, the NAACP, etc) get away with all their shit. Unless someone is directly affected, they don't give a shit. Nobody seems worried that they'll be next. Why doesn't anyone ever think that "it could happen to them"?
Outside of a few issues, generally championed by zealots, nobody gives a damn. Am I the only one that's even a little surprised and/or disheartened by the amount of apathy towards this (and other issues)?
I've never written an OS kernel, nor do I ever plan to. I don't want to know the intricate details of doing so. However, I would like to have a general idea of how the different kernels are designed. For example, I've heard that the NT kernel is actually quite good (sans the integrated GUI), but can not validate this myself (without a non-trivial amount of research).
I'm not looking to invest hours in reading over this stuff, I'm just looking for a technical (but not highly detailed) 15 minute description. Anyone have some good links for kernel (Linux, BSD, NT, proprietary UNIXes, BeOS, Plam 9, Eros, etc.) design documentation? Specifically, architectural overviews, component diagrams, and stuff like that. I think I, and others with a casual interest in these things would find them really informative. Comparisons between different designs/implementations would also be nice.
Hey, if I was dropping off a $5million check in my Ferarri, I think I could put up with some loss of privacy.
I've watched some of this Celebrities Uncensored show, and I'll never get over how these fuckers feel violated in some way. They live a life of exceeding priveledge, giving back essentially nothing in return. Any one of them could be easily replaced (and there are plenty of losers waiting to pounce, should the opportunity arise). Don't go seeking to be famous, and then shun it once you get it. Take some responsibility.
Admittedly, John Carmack is quite a different case than Shannen Dougherty. He didn't necessarily seek fame. He's not excessively famous either, but I could see it getting to be a bit of a pain-in-the-ass for him. The same goes for Romero (although I think he enjoys fame more). I've never met either of them, but Romero and I have a friend in common, so I'm basing my opinions on what I've heard from that source.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit... the point is, it might not be so great to have everyone peering into your life, but they've certainly been compensated for their discomfort. The same goes for Bill Gates, George Clooney, Princess Diana, and whoever else.
Interesting, but I don't put much faith into it.
on
The Death of A Universe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The fact is, we are rather unsure of what will happen as the universe ends.
When I was an undergraduate, my astrophysics and cosmology courses went into a number of models. The problem isn't that any of these models are inherently wrong. The real problem is that we don't have the observational evidence to choose and properly parameterize any particular model. Hasn't anyone else noticed the constant influx of observations that favor one model or another? I don't think these observations are necessarily wrong either, they are just pushing our techniques to their limits.
Not long ago, a new and very interesting model was published. It fits well with observations. Anyone with a passing interest in cosmology and/or string theory should read that paper, it's very short and easily digestable. This idea is, of course, very interesting. Is it actually the way the universe works? Hmmm, I don't know. We just don't have the observational capability to say with a high degree of certainty how the universe will evolve on a long timescale.
Sure, I like hearing about the latest measurements and calculations. But, I take it all with a megaparsec-scale cloud of sodium. It's interesting, but not too meaningful, most of the time.
This debate is definitely going to go on for some years to come. In fact, it may well not have a good answer for 5-15 gigayears.
And, is there much gained by using XML over some/any other scheme?
Is it very sensitive to errors, like most XML applications? If one XML file/tag gets corrupted, is the whole windowing system fucked until someone goes in on the command-line to fix it?
I use custom designed amplifiers because they work better for my application. I could buy off-the-shelf stuff (~$500~$10,000 range), but that won't be exactly what I want. I use custom software too... know why? Because it's designed specifically for the job. That same software shouldn't really be used for other fields of research, neither should my amplifiers. The thing about this stuff is that it takes a lot of time to maintain (plus initial development). That means grad students, postdocs, and technicians who may spend over 90% of their time just keeping systems in working order and/or adding features. The benefits of customized hardware/software, in this instance, is worth the headaches associated with it.
All of my optics is commodity stuff (some is rare/exotic, but it's still basically black-box purchasing). I don't have the facilities to make coated optics, nor do I need anything that specialized, so... I just buy it.
When I was in telecom, we used Oracle and Solaris and Apache. It worked, and the cost of developing the same functionality in-house was ridiculously high (plus we'd never get to designing our products that sit on top of it).
Eventually, it always comes down to a comparison between the cost (man hours, equipment, etc) of custom building and of integrating stuff from OEMs.
So, the question our labs need to answer is, does clustered COTS hardware get the job done? Supplementary to that, is it cost-effective to buy/design it in light of the previous answer?
In any field where you are pushing the limits of technology, you have to make such trade-offs. Personally, I don't care who has the absolute fastest supercomputer (measured in flops, factoring-time, whatever)... what really counts is, who does the best research with the supercomputers.
Those t-shirts are okay, but I won't be buying any of them. I'd certainly buy a product, that kicked a little bit back to Slashdot, if said product was decent. I'd much rather buy some of the cool-as-hell t-shirts from T-Shirt Hell, especially the more offensive ones. I love my School Shootings Tour shirt.
Maybe I'll get something from Stile, or, I've heard there's official Goatse merchandise on the way... Wow, a legitimate link to Goatse, who saw that one coming?
The problem here is that there are lots of people out there rutting away, spawning fucked up kids all over the place. It's not my fault that these people have no self-control, and I shouldn't have to pay for it. If I'm going to be responsible for children born to other people, I want the right to approve their conception beforehand.
I definitely disagree (and you didn't respond to this) with the idea that you're not responsible for the future of society
I certainly believe we're all responsible for the future of society. So, do I get any say in you raising your kids? I don't want to raise other people's kids, but since I'm now responsible for their upbringing, I should get some input. Can I slap them around when they're acting like shitstains? How come I wasn't involved in your choice to not have an abortion?
If you can't handle the responsibilities of being an adult in this society, perhaps you should consider looking for another society to live in.
Let's try rephrasing that, a bit: If you can't handle the responsibilities of being a parent in this society, perhaps you should consider not having children in the first place. If you're really poor, don't have kids. If you're a general fuck up, don't have kids. If you're a criminal, don't have kids. If you're stupid/ugly/unproductive, don't have kids. Don't expect me to help you (or your useless kid) out, just because you made a poor decision. It's pretty simple really.
That being said, I have no problem assuring good schooling and things like that. In fact, I see it as quite necessary. I just don't think I should have to help out families that never should've existed in the first place.
This was interesting, but still rather rough, when I saw it demonstrated at CeBit in 2001. None of the operators were on board, yet. They must have liked what they saw, and jumped on it right away, to get it ready for the public by now. One of the features demonstrated involved sending a bar code to the phone. This bar code would then be your ticket into the movie. That seems like a rather weak security model to me, but who knows.
I suppose it's neat technology. Although, it's not terribly innovative. Personally, I have little interest in using this, but the consumer-masses may just love it. At least they're putting 3G to some use...
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, in North Carolina. But, how is it going to play as a precedent in other courts? Particularly of interest is the federal level. I haven't kept up on the various decisions lately, but I believe other court rulings have supported the MPAA/RIAA.
I sincerely doubt that a judge in California will see things the same way. Of course, I've been wrong before.
Additionally, what's the motivation for organizations (schools or ISPs) to fight for privacy versus just rolling over? I don't hear much of an outcry from the public over this bullshit, so it's not like they're really trying to protect their images. And, we all know that corporations don't go to much effort just on priciple (schools are a bit better in this regard).
In terms of "selling piracy", the MPAA/RIAA have won. The public really buys into the idea of it being stealing (as opposed to copyright infringment), and doesn't seem to get too pissed off over the draconian punishments that have been handed down. Even people who are fairly technically literate, or well versed in law, often don't see the distinction between theft and infringement. It's pretty sad. Who else is up for forming a non-profit, whose mission is to educate the public on intellectual property issues? Lastly, if the public doesn't understand the issue all that well, can we really expect much better of the judiciary? In an ideal world, the judiciary represents the populace (of course, I'd hope them to be much smarter than the average asshole on the street though).
The cause of racism is honesty, not overpopulation. Racism has been around, even in times when populations were much smaller. The thing that makes racists stand out from everyone else, is they admit to their true thoughts.
I'm sure there are times when a nego does something you don't like, and you think to yourself, "Figures, he's a dirty nigger." You just want to pretend to go along with the current tolerance in the zeitgeist. But, seriously, how long can that last? As people get more and more fed up with having to deny their true thoughts, and lie to themselves, there will be a backlash. Even worse than the political correctness movement in America are the laws in Europe. They're actually trying to regulate people's thoughts. It's quite sickenning.
In the end, it is inevitable only because people believe that not everyone is created equal (which is absolutely true). Now, you can argue about which group, as a whole, is better than another (and I have a very strong opinion on this). This will never change, because by virtue of the fact that there are different races, the various races will always have identifiable characteristics (physical, mental, and social). It then becomes a question of what you consider to be "more correct" and the associated importance.
You can pretend that these thoughts don't exist all you want. But they do exist. And you, like everyone else, have them.
It is my understanding that LEDs still aren't quite bright enough for use in a projector. I've been toying with the idea of building my own LCD projector, and all the information I've seen on the net has said that LEDs just won't cut it. To get enough light, you need a cluster too big to approximate a point source. Using an array of them as a backlight has other issues for projection, but would work great in place of a CCFL in a standard LCD monitor (even if getting it to work is a bit labor intensive).
Here's one guy's attempt. There are tons of others, if you look around. No successes that I've come across though.
I haven't really kept up with LED technology, so maybe things have changed, but I kind of doubt it's any significant change. I have thought about taking a bunch of LEDs, putting them inside a reflective light box, and taking the light out through a multimode fiber optic cable, to scramble the light. The output of the cable would then act as a point source (with the appropriate lens in place).
Based on this little projector, and the rumors of LCD TVs powered by LED illumination, I'd guess that there are some LEDs out there to get the job done. These may still only be available to OEMs in large quantities though (assuming the OEMs don't have exclusivity on them).
I also have a suspicion that this system is not based on white LEDs (which are really modified blue LEDs, which is surprising, when you consider how good the color temperature ends up being). Instead, it's probably RGBs with dichroics mixing the colors. This would avoid the colorwheel needed in a DLP system, which would take up quite a bit of space and power.
Anyway, enough of this rambling. If this thing hits the market, and the picture quality is good (I'm mostly worried it won't be bright enough), then I'll get one. The speculative price is lower than a typical LCD or DLP projector, and there's no $600/yr operating fee (new bulbs). I wouldn't even worry about the cost of replacing the LEDs, since that's 10-20 years down the road (assuming pretty heavy usage).
In general, the PhD is the entry level degree into the field (low level technician jobs notwithstanding since I'd say they're on the periphery of the fields). On top of that, your typical newly minted PhD doesn't make much ($40-50k/yr) as a postdoc. You can quite easily get that with just a bachelor's degree (possibly even a bullshit associate's or certificate of some sort). Even as a tenure track professor most don't earn all that much, especially when you consider the education and hours that have been put in.
In fact, I can't think of one PhD, working off of a single source of income in academia, that is making much money. Sure, taking your PhD to Wall Street to be a quant will get you decent cash, but that isn't really academia anymore. There are others, who have additional sources of income (consulting, books, companies, patents).
I think that the stories of the retiring hookers are a bit exaggerated, as I'm sure most of them do not really save/invest well. Some do, of course, but I'd think they're in the minority. Besides that, $1million is really a pretty bare minimum for retirement (throwing off only $50k/yr in interest).
In reality, getting into a field for a love of it is a luxury few can afford, and (I think) pretty much only simpletons can enjoy. Anyone who is doing any IT support/administration (like some people here), and claims to love it, must have some mild form of retardation. I do what many people would consider interesting stuff, and I even release some open source software (funded by NIH grants). And, although I get some job satisfaction, I could be doing more interesting things with my time.
I think that people who have lots of job satisfaction are the same ones easily amused by shiny objects. It's for that reason that I love to be served by retarded people at fast food restaurants. They love their job, and are proud of it, and actually put in some effort to get your order right. Meanwhile, the teenagers or dirty skins hate you and would love to shit in your food. The point being, in general (there are some exceptions to this rule), you need to be rather simple to be amused by a job (otherwise it wouldn't be a job).
I have long contended that the happiest people in the world are the retards, with the caveat that they fall into the right level of retardedness (functional, but not smart enough to realize how fucked they are).
False color is good for looking at geometric data. If you want to know where objects lie in an image, you can overlay and false color some intensity maps at a few different wavelengths. That is very useful. A lot of the time, it's done just to impress the peasants, of course.
/.ers complain about.
With this data, the temporality of it renders it pretty much worthless to the human ear. Anything you can detect by ear will very easily be seen in a simple Fourier transform or similar technique. A Fourier transform and a plot against logarithmic time is probably the best (most efficient and informative) way to visualize it.
Image processing is still not very good at identifying features, unless those features are very well stereotyped. This happens to be a part of my current work, albeit with time-series acquired microscopic images (EM, laser scanning, etc). The human eye/brain will pick up on visual cues that the best algorithms will miss. The algorithms themselves are generally designed/trained based on analysis conducted by eye.
Picking out 2/3D phenomena is where false color images can be useful. Simple grayscale intensity images are often just as good or better (I worked for a professor that insisted on keeping color channels separate during viewing). Listening to 1D data, you won't learn anything new that the computer couldn't have told you.
I know this was done just for the sake of doing something neat. And, I don't fault it for that. What does bother me, however, is that now you'll have some NYT-reading, liberal artsy, pseudo-intellectual douchebags running around thinking that the Universe plays an audible tone. In the end, they only get half the facts down and make up the rest, then go on to propogate that misinformation.
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand. Is it worth it to only give them half the facts? Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that
I have some experience in astronomy. I understand gravity and the cosmic microwave background and have gone through the calculations for a handful of Big Bang parameterizations.
That being said, I don't understand the purpose of this. Doing the acoustic analysis is fine and informative. Making an audible sound out of it is nonsense. It's almost entirely arbitrary, as the sound is not audible. It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image. It really tells you nothing you didn't already know, it's just a pretty picture. Hardly worthy of all the press it is getting.
I don't believe that it improves people's understanding of fundamental phenomena. In fact, I'd say that, if anything, it gives them the impression that they understand more than they really do. And that's usually a bad situation.
The public just likes to have shiny objects dangled in front of them, they rarely (bother to) understand the significance of said objects.
It shouldn't just give the location of the child. For a lot of people, that's totally useless. Most people couldn't tell you the difference between latitude/longitude and UTM coordinates. Instead, it should guide them to their child... let the parents page through instructions. Not only would this be more useful for them, they could get charged by the page, so our corporate overlords should be pleased as well (afterall, reuniting a parent and child isn't satisfying enough).
Secondly, what ever happened to Darwinism? The lost children should starve and/or form their own feral societies. Only the best would survive to re-enter society, hopefully as very productive, since they'll have lots of useful skills.
Lastly, where the hell are all the wolves? Aren't they supposed to take care of the lost children?
First post? I doubt it...
In all honesty, this probe won't tell us anything we don't already know. At the time the idea was proposed, it was useful. Since then, we've made more precise measurements of gravity and observed relativistic effects.
The only way this probe will really teach us anything (outside of the engineering that went into its construction) is if it fails, spectacularly. Sadly, those "eureka" moments don't happen very often, and I wouldn't hold out much hope for one here. Then again, the Hipparcos data has caused some debate, while its mission was somewhat routine (although highly precise).
We already know that relativity is wrong (in the same sense that classical mechanics is wrong). This experiment is not designed to figure out exactly how relativity is wrong, rather it is designed to tell us if relativity is wrong at all. Since we already know the answer to that question, it isn't very helpful.
I'm not blaming the guys that worked on this project. There were political/financial/logistical issues that made this launch 20+ years too late to be useful. The PhDs awarded during this project are good, they did some nice work, most notably in materials science and fabrication, but other areas as well. It's just not very meaningful in the areas of physics/cosomology.
Oh well, that's what happens when science is a slave to beauracracy.
What sort of fire hazard is this place? Assuming the hydrogen is stored in a combustible state (which is very likely), and that a very large volume will be stored (which is also very likely), this could be a bit of a death trap.
Tom Petty would not approve.
I'm not really concerned about the danger of the place. Maybe his neighbors are though. I was just pointing out one of the drawbacks...
They tried stuff like this, it sucked.
Note, that's not to be confused with the DivX standard used by those nasty "pirates". There are other types of disposable DVDs floating around. The main one that comes to mind now is the one that oxidizes when you open the package.
Anyway, it especially pissed off the Slashdot crowd.
How about you listen to the music, watch the band, interact with those around you... that's the reason for going to a concert, afterall.
The glow of a PDA wouldn't bother me, but the asshole using it would. For example, I was at a concert in July, and some douchebag was complaining that I was blocking his view. The jackass was actually sitting down (he's lucky not to have been trampled) and talking on his cell phone. Sitting down is bad enough, but to actually be on the phone at a fucking concert defies all reason. So, without discussing it, me and this big fat guy both hammered him really good. Everyone nearby was pleased with that.
Also, I'd never bring my PDA (assuming I would ever own a PDA) to a concert, since I wouldn't want it getting broken.
I work with femto-second lasers. I have used them in living cells for a variety of applications. Two of which involve destroying structures inside of living cells. Of course, these structures are placed into the cells by us (injection, knock-in, electroporation, etc). It's not an extremely new technique, it's just being used in a slightly new way. Some of the similar techniques are known as uncaging, FRAP, and more.
/., semiconductor nanocrystals are starting to pop up in similar research. They are quite useful, if still hard to work with (they don't behave like most biological molecules). I got interested in quantum dots about a year ago, and have done a bit of work with them, but would like to do some more (when I find the time).
Personally, I rarely find anything that groundbreakingly new in Nature. Well, that's not exactly true. There is plenty of new data, and new applications and/or refinements of old techniques. There generally aren't wholly original techniques or completely new instruments discussed in that journal. My personal preference for that sort of thing are some physics journals.
One other thing, that may be of interest to
Take our jungle-bunny dirt farmer, for example. He will collect more international aid, due to the Internet. Maybe one of the aid workers will let him mess around with a laptop that has a satellite connection. Assuming said dirt farmer can read (and knows a language that doesn't involve clicking), he really won't get anything out of it. Even with some training, he still probably wouldn't get anything out of it.
Could this be the most effective attempt on their part, so far? It's hard to argue against them, without being labelled as a supporter of kiddie-porn. It doesn't matter how legitimate your claims against this bill, you'll still have to put up with the obnoxious cries of, "think of the children!"
This is really slick, on their part, because they can try to humiliate their opponents, reglardless of the validity of their arguments. How can people easily claim that this is just profiteering and securing a closed market in which to play?
Obviously, I don't want to see this go through, and it likely won't (not on the first try, anyway). But, it is an interesting tactic.
I don't know, maybe I overestimate the public. Back when the $90billion lawsuits were filed, I thought there would be some public outrage. When they filed all those subpeonas, I thought there would be lots of anger. Instead, everyone just shrugged their shoulders, said "sucks for them", and went on like nothing ever happened.
I shouldn't be surprised. People just like to stick their heads in the sand. They let lots of bad things go on, and take no action. Why should this be any different? Still, it's hard to accept that nobody cares.
I guess this is why things are so fucked up, huh? This is why SCO (the RIAA, the MPAA, DirecTV, the NAACP, etc) get away with all their shit. Unless someone is directly affected, they don't give a shit. Nobody seems worried that they'll be next. Why doesn't anyone ever think that "it could happen to them"?
Outside of a few issues, generally championed by zealots, nobody gives a damn. Am I the only one that's even a little surprised and/or disheartened by the amount of apathy towards this (and other issues)?
I've never written an OS kernel, nor do I ever plan to. I don't want to know the intricate details of doing so. However, I would like to have a general idea of how the different kernels are designed. For example, I've heard that the NT kernel is actually quite good (sans the integrated GUI), but can not validate this myself (without a non-trivial amount of research).
I'm not looking to invest hours in reading over this stuff, I'm just looking for a technical (but not highly detailed) 15 minute description. Anyone have some good links for kernel (Linux, BSD, NT, proprietary UNIXes, BeOS, Plam 9, Eros, etc.) design documentation? Specifically, architectural overviews, component diagrams, and stuff like that. I think I, and others with a casual interest in these things would find them really informative. Comparisons between different designs/implementations would also be nice.
Hey, if I was dropping off a $5million check in my Ferarri, I think I could put up with some loss of privacy.
I've watched some of this Celebrities Uncensored show, and I'll never get over how these fuckers feel violated in some way. They live a life of exceeding priveledge, giving back essentially nothing in return. Any one of them could be easily replaced (and there are plenty of losers waiting to pounce, should the opportunity arise). Don't go seeking to be famous, and then shun it once you get it. Take some responsibility.
Admittedly, John Carmack is quite a different case than Shannen Dougherty. He didn't necessarily seek fame. He's not excessively famous either, but I could see it getting to be a bit of a pain-in-the-ass for him. The same goes for Romero (although I think he enjoys fame more). I've never met either of them, but Romero and I have a friend in common, so I'm basing my opinions on what I've heard from that source.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit... the point is, it might not be so great to have everyone peering into your life, but they've certainly been compensated for their discomfort. The same goes for Bill Gates, George Clooney, Princess Diana, and whoever else.
The fact is, we are rather unsure of what will happen as the universe ends.
When I was an undergraduate, my astrophysics and cosmology courses went into a number of models. The problem isn't that any of these models are inherently wrong. The real problem is that we don't have the observational evidence to choose and properly parameterize any particular model. Hasn't anyone else noticed the constant influx of observations that favor one model or another? I don't think these observations are necessarily wrong either, they are just pushing our techniques to their limits.
Not long ago, a new and very interesting model was published. It fits well with observations. Anyone with a passing interest in cosmology and/or string theory should read that paper, it's very short and easily digestable. This idea is, of course, very interesting. Is it actually the way the universe works? Hmmm, I don't know. We just don't have the observational capability to say with a high degree of certainty how the universe will evolve on a long timescale.
Sure, I like hearing about the latest measurements and calculations. But, I take it all with a megaparsec-scale cloud of sodium. It's interesting, but not too meaningful, most of the time.
This debate is definitely going to go on for some years to come. In fact, it may well not have a good answer for 5-15 gigayears.
How many asses does it have? I suspect it's less than five.
Specialized hardware (almost) always outperforms commodity stuff.
I use custom designed amplifiers because they work better for my application. I could buy off-the-shelf stuff (~$500~$10,000 range), but that won't be exactly what I want. I use custom software too... know why? Because it's designed specifically for the job. That same software shouldn't really be used for other fields of research, neither should my amplifiers. The thing about this stuff is that it takes a lot of time to maintain (plus initial development). That means grad students, postdocs, and technicians who may spend over 90% of their time just keeping systems in working order and/or adding features. The benefits of customized hardware/software, in this instance, is worth the headaches associated with it.
All of my optics is commodity stuff (some is rare/exotic, but it's still basically black-box purchasing). I don't have the facilities to make coated optics, nor do I need anything that specialized, so... I just buy it.
When I was in telecom, we used Oracle and Solaris and Apache. It worked, and the cost of developing the same functionality in-house was ridiculously high (plus we'd never get to designing our products that sit on top of it).
Eventually, it always comes down to a comparison between the cost (man hours, equipment, etc) of custom building and of integrating stuff from OEMs.
So, the question our labs need to answer is, does clustered COTS hardware get the job done? Supplementary to that, is it cost-effective to buy/design it in light of the previous answer?
In any field where you are pushing the limits of technology, you have to make such trade-offs. Personally, I don't care who has the absolute fastest supercomputer (measured in flops, factoring-time, whatever)... what really counts is, who does the best research with the supercomputers.
Those t-shirts are okay, but I won't be buying any of them. I'd certainly buy a product, that kicked a little bit back to Slashdot, if said product was decent. I'd much rather buy some of the cool-as-hell t-shirts from T-Shirt Hell, especially the more offensive ones. I love my School Shootings Tour shirt.
Maybe I'll get something from Stile, or, I've heard there's official Goatse merchandise on the way... Wow, a legitimate link to Goatse, who saw that one coming?
That being said, I have no problem assuring good schooling and things like that. In fact, I see it as quite necessary. I just don't think I should have to help out families that never should've existed in the first place.
This was interesting, but still rather rough, when I saw it demonstrated at CeBit in 2001. None of the operators were on board, yet. They must have liked what they saw, and jumped on it right away, to get it ready for the public by now. One of the features demonstrated involved sending a bar code to the phone. This bar code would then be your ticket into the movie. That seems like a rather weak security model to me, but who knows.
I suppose it's neat technology. Although, it's not terribly innovative. Personally, I have little interest in using this, but the consumer-masses may just love it. At least they're putting 3G to some use...