If Microsoft is ripping off anyone, it is Sony. The Wiimote requires the user to hold an object that is aware of its own position. The Xbox360 (a originally reported way back in May) has a camera that watches the user's actions using image mapping and similar software. Very different. This setup is just like the PS2's EyeCandy, which has been available for a long time.
I predict that XBox360's camera will not be heavily used by most users but will be viewed as a novelty. Will users be able to use their own photographs as avatars? It seems silly that something being billed in part as a media device would refuse to import photographs into games.
The government already has to provide a number of documents in foreign languages for everyone's benefit. A spanish translation of the Constituion isn't all that outlandish.
It is too bad that these new ideas are so poorly implemented and described. The ideas seem appealing at first glance, but they ultimately do not survive close scruntiny.
Sometimes it seems that the only really new ideas being tossed around (outside of lab research and the like) in science are from Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science. (I do not include creationism in this category because it is not new, so spare me the flames regardless of how you feel about it.) Scientists are great at empirically testing this and that theory but they often have problems altering their own perceptions on existing and accepted information.
I agree with the review that this form of geometry should never supplant the status quo:
Don't forget that his advocacy is to replace classical geometry and trigonometry, (especially lines and angles), at school level. He doesn't suggest retaining it and using his methods as a adjunct and/or complement, especially since some of those guys and gals will become architects, surveyors etc. etc.
Were the academic institutions which set college and university curricula, to take Wildberger at his word, by eliminating regular trigonometry and geometry and replacing it with his concepts, it would be the downfall of current mathematical knowledge and standards for years to come. What's more, the damage would take years from which to recover; an almost irreparable predicament in education.
description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel.
A reason to be even more afraid of Sony's rootkit!
Anyway, this is an interesting article. This research has a lot of promise in coming years and decades as better understanding brain chemistry advances pharmaceuticals and medical treatments. From TFA: "This study shows a unique role for nitric oxide. It may help us to someday understand what goes wrong in diseases that affect cognitive processing, such as attention deficit disorder or schizophrenia, and it adds to our fundamental understanding of how we perceive the world around us."
People have been comparing brains to computers almost as long as they have been comparing computers to brains. The Computational Theory of Mind looks at the mind (the brain's software as some have described it) in pretty a logical way, not too far away from computational reasoning. These comparisons are useful for understanding larger concepts but they generally fall apart when you get to the nuts and bolts of it. For example, the brain processes many shades of grey instead of a computer's binary perception. Neural networks and, to a lessor extent, quantum computing seek to emulate some of the processes of the brain.
On an aside, if you are interested in learning more about machine intelegence, I highly recomend reading Ray Kurzweil's books.
There were several developers on-hand speaking to the con-goers, and the one that came up to me began 'Hi there. Do you have any complaints about the game?'
I can only imagine what the response would be if Microsoft did this for any of its software.
Althought the reactons to DDO have been mild at best, by seeking consumer input they are much more likely to improve it in future iterations. Corporations pay lots of money to learn about their markets; it is nice to see this company cutting out the middleman and asking directly.
If cell phones didn't work at high altitude, why would the FCC/FAA ban them? If people pulled them out and always saw zero signal they wouldn't be trying to make calls.
By choosing not to ship any proprietary or binary drivers, Fedora does differ from other distributions. Ubuntu is one example, as there is very strong language about their commitment to Free and open source software, right up until the line stating that they include binary-only drivers on their CDs and in their repositories.
Now I know that there has been controversy over OpenOffice's use of Java because it is not truly FOSS. Where do users draw the line? I must confess that I care more about quality and useability of the end product than about the OpenSourceness of the components therein. I use OoO2.0's Java enabled features and I use Ubuntu when I run Linux. I do see the other side of the argument, however, and I am glad that Fedora is there to support it. I also agreee with Spevack's suggestion that users demand FOSS drivers.
this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analog recordings.
I thought that the DMCA did that already. These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape. Regardless of how you feel, the DMCA specifically outlaws this. According to TFA, the problem is that the means by which the program strips DRM is through converting it to digital and by outlawing the program the judge could outlaw AD conversions.
I disagree with your profiling of a terrorist. This is from a summery of a larger report with the same conclusion:
If anything, then, terrorists are notable for their normality, for their ability to blend into the background and remain unnoticed. Those recruited tend to be of average appearance, normal in behaviour in the situation they are in, fairly young - between 20 and 25 - and reasonably well educated, often to university level.
[...]encouraged meetings between players of differing backgrounds, supplying the 'social horizon-broadening...sorely lacking in American societyI disagree with you. After all, where else can an elf ranger fall in love with a mining dwarf? What better real life skills could you ask for?
It turns out that the FAA only requires 2 extinguishers per aircraft. The original spec required Halon extinguishers, but that substance has since been banned. After thinking about this I am even more glad that the terrorists were captured.
I use the following example because it would never work as a terrorist plot but it illustrates my point. Compare the effectiveness of this video of two absolute idiots to the following proceedure from TFA:
TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.
I was shocked to hear the media talking about the possibility of bring nitroglycerin onto an airplane. The entire reason that dynamite was invented is because the liquid is horribly volitile. Some people have speculated that the terrorists were not attempting a large scale explosion as CNN and Fox News would have you believe. Instead they were waiting until the plane was in the middle of the Atlantic and starting a fairly large fire. There are many substances that can create a dangerous fire on an airplane in the middle of the ocean at 30,000 feet. There is no need for a Holywood style explosion at all. I am being intentionally vague in this post, but three men with drink containers full of certain substances starting three fires at three different parts of the plane would be extremely difficult to control, especially considering the lack of fire surpression systems in the passenger cabin. I am not a firefighter (rookie EMT and will be training to be a rescuer) but I cannot imagine trying to put out three fires with the 1-2 fire extingueshers available.
The first World Trade Center bombing and OK City show that everyday chamicals can be combined with horrific results. In those situations, however, there were truckloads of the two ingredients. I agree in part with TFA that it would be hard to perform an explosion the size of Pan-Am 103's with liquids, but that is not necesary.
It is worth noting that Facebook's developers very quickly implement stable and functional new features. Facebook is always adding more features. Just today it added a special "badge" that allows you to post dynamically updating information from Facebook on your website, blog, or message board. While I agree that this could take some work off of the developers, I do not think that they will stop working feverishly to constantly improve the service.
I hate to compare the two services, but Facebook again has trumped MySpace. In addition to a infinitely superior interface and no adware,
Facebook is first to release an API. A quick Google search shows that this is a wanted feature.
Google search is the most popular on the Internet. As a matter of fact it has been forever enshrined in the dictionary as such. Google will continue to be profitable
I do disagree with TFA in that it treats other services as inconsequential. There is a reason that Yahoo! ranks #1 on lists of most popular websites. Although there are GMail and a customized homepage, Yahoo! still beats them on those fronts. The search market is pretty well defined. In order for Google to become an even bigger success it must become extremely successful in its side businesses. I refuse to accept TFA's arguement that it doesn't matter because they aren't spend that much money on it.
I wonder what extremely skilled individuals have an entire year to spare. It could be an interesting sabatical for a university professor but most people who are physically fit enough for such a mission probably have other jobs and families and such to attend to.
I also wonder what (if any) medical requirements they will have for the pretend crew. On the space shuttle one of the astronauts has to have an advanced medical license and they carry a first aid kit that would probably make your local ambulance company drool (I'm a rookie EMT so I'm very interested in this aspect).
This reminds me of the movie (Rocket Man?) where they had isolation testing on the ground and the main charector almost drove everyone else to madness by singing loudly and off key.
Rather than Nokia's 770, to me Road's phone more closely resembles Nokia's 9XXX series.
Whatever it is that has the name 9XXX, I want one.
With the current growth and popularity of Linux on the handheld, the OS is rapidly approaching ubiquity. This trend will accelerate with the much awaited release of the Linux version of Palm OS.
Glad to hear a voice of reason. The media love to hype potential stories for maximum effect.
If the writeup is correct, however, we could get some awesome Northern Lights. The negative repercussions would most likely be limited to fleeting disruptions in some radio traffic. Some phone calls and television feeds may have momentary issues, but even at its worst I doubt all of the doomsday predictions that claim we will arrive back at the stone age from having everything in orbit nuked.
I really hope that no one confuses the maker of the Profit Pod with Apple. There is a slight difference in the websites. I know that there are music related products out there that have tried to use the suffix "pod" in order to score some points from Apple, just like a Korean company started marketing the Super Shuffle. These products are questionable, but there is no way that a data collection device for arcade machines infringes on Apple or the iPod product family. Microsoft isn't attacking OpenOffice and WordPerfect Office. I think Apple is really out on a limb on some of their cease-and-desist operations.
I believe that installation is one of Linux's biggest stumbling blocks to larger adaoption. I spend most of my Linux time running Live CDs where there is no OS installation at all (I love you Ubuntu). The issue for many home users is software installation. While there have been significant inroads made in this area over that past few years, it has generally not yet reached Windows' "double click the.exe to run" simplicity. Linux has a huge following among the geeks, nerds, and geeky nerds. It is also growing into mobile devices where people will have no idea they are running Linux and schools on the desktop. The biggest market that needs to be tapped is the "average" computer user at home. People need to feel that Linux is user friendly and can easily do everything that they want to do. Firefox and OoO (both of which I run on my WinXP laptop) have brought it that much closer to the goal. Now easier software installation is the next step.
I have never tried to create a setup like the one that you are attempting, but I have had good experiences with Logitech webcams. Is there an existing program that combines the 3-camera stereo image or are you starting from scratch? What computer system are you using? Make sure that you are not running so many things off of USB (or IEEE1394) that you cannot keep up the throughput from your webcam. This could happen, for example, if you are streaming at maximum quality and saving all of the data to an external webcam. I wish you all the luck.
I attend a large private university in America and I only learned about Kurt Godel through a biography project last year. I have written many bios in my time and Godel is an incredible person. Even Einstein was good friends with him. Godel contributed so many great ideas to the world and is so poorly recognized.
It is not that hard to wire an altimeter to a laptop through an RS-232 or USB port to detonate at high altitude, but that is beside the point. There will never be absolute security on airliners, but we can try our best. The only alternative left would be to ban all electronics in checked baggage which would be impossible.
You have to worry about two kinds of security: physical protection from damage and theft deterence. For both functions I recomend using multiple layers. Those those free Priority Mail boxes work well for small laptops. Also use some bubble wrap inside. Put that inside of another bag with lots of clothing and other padding around it and a TSA approved luggage lock on the outside.
I am pleased by the massive growth of spaceport proposals lately. If all of the proposals come to fruition (which is unlikely) there will be as many spaceports as there are major airline hubs today.
I hope that the Canadian government doesn't present too many miles of red tape. Won't there be negative impact to launching from a high latitude? I know that other spaceports boast about how close to the equator they are.
The biggest difference between this facility and other proposals is the larger scope of this project. Instead of $20mil a shot tourists, the Canadians are playing catch up with the Americans, Russians, Europeans, etc. to have a real non-commercial space program. From TFA:
Earlier this year, the pair began negotiations with the province and other players in the aerospace industry to build a facility and spacecraft they hope will eventually shuttle astronauts and supplies to the international space station.
Anyway, I have seen just about every one of the "fake news" infomercials. Being a nightowl helps. Anyway, should be obvious to anyone that these are fake. The begining and the end of the infomercials have disclaimers that affirm their paid commericial status. I think that they should have disclaimers on the bottom of the screen that remind channel surfers of this fact, but overall they are not well hidden.
Hey Mods, guess what? By modding this comment up and making three easy payments of $19.99, you will have expended less than $60! Mod now! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead!
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I predict that XBox360's camera will not be heavily used by most users but will be viewed as a novelty. Will users be able to use their own photographs as avatars? It seems silly that something being billed in part as a media device would refuse to import photographs into games.
Wikipedia: Rational Geometry. I do not see any problems.
Sometimes it seems that the only really new ideas being tossed around (outside of lab research and the like) in science are from Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science. (I do not include creationism in this category because it is not new, so spare me the flames regardless of how you feel about it.) Scientists are great at empirically testing this and that theory but they often have problems altering their own perceptions on existing and accepted information.
I agree with the review that this form of geometry should never supplant the status quo:
Anyway, this is an interesting article. This research has a lot of promise in coming years and decades as better understanding brain chemistry advances pharmaceuticals and medical treatments. From TFA: "This study shows a unique role for nitric oxide. It may help us to someday understand what goes wrong in diseases that affect cognitive processing, such as attention deficit disorder or schizophrenia, and it adds to our fundamental understanding of how we perceive the world around us."
People have been comparing brains to computers almost as long as they have been comparing computers to brains. The Computational Theory of Mind looks at the mind (the brain's software as some have described it) in pretty a logical way, not too far away from computational reasoning. These comparisons are useful for understanding larger concepts but they generally fall apart when you get to the nuts and bolts of it. For example, the brain processes many shades of grey instead of a computer's binary perception. Neural networks and, to a lessor extent, quantum computing seek to emulate some of the processes of the brain.
On an aside, if you are interested in learning more about machine intelegence, I highly recomend reading Ray Kurzweil's books.
Althought the reactons to DDO have been mild at best, by seeking consumer input they are much more likely to improve it in future iterations. Corporations pay lots of money to learn about their markets; it is nice to see this company cutting out the middleman and asking directly.
If cell phones didn't work at high altitude, why would the FCC/FAA ban them? If people pulled them out and always saw zero signal they wouldn't be trying to make calls.
I thought that the DMCA did that already. These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape. Regardless of how you feel, the DMCA specifically outlaws this. According to TFA, the problem is that the means by which the program strips DRM is through converting it to digital and by outlawing the program the judge could outlaw AD conversions.
I use the following example because it would never work as a terrorist plot but it illustrates my point. Compare the effectiveness of this video of two absolute idiots to the following proceedure from TFA:
I was shocked to hear the media talking about the possibility of bring nitroglycerin onto an airplane. The entire reason that dynamite was invented is because the liquid is horribly volitile. Some people have speculated that the terrorists were not attempting a large scale explosion as CNN and Fox News would have you believe. Instead they were waiting until the plane was in the middle of the Atlantic and starting a fairly large fire. There are many substances that can create a dangerous fire on an airplane in the middle of the ocean at 30,000 feet. There is no need for a Holywood style explosion at all. I am being intentionally vague in this post, but three men with drink containers full of certain substances starting three fires at three different parts of the plane would be extremely difficult to control, especially considering the lack of fire surpression systems in the passenger cabin. I am not a firefighter (rookie EMT and will be training to be a rescuer) but I cannot imagine trying to put out three fires with the 1-2 fire extingueshers available.
The first World Trade Center bombing and OK City show that everyday chamicals can be combined with horrific results. In those situations, however, there were truckloads of the two ingredients. I agree in part with TFA that it would be hard to perform an explosion the size of Pan-Am 103's with liquids, but that is not necesary.
I hate to compare the two services, but Facebook again has trumped MySpace. In addition to a infinitely superior interface and no adware, Facebook is first to release an API. A quick Google search shows that this is a wanted feature.
I do disagree with TFA in that it treats other services as inconsequential. There is a reason that Yahoo! ranks #1 on lists of most popular websites. Although there are GMail and a customized homepage, Yahoo! still beats them on those fronts. The search market is pretty well defined. In order for Google to become an even bigger success it must become extremely successful in its side businesses. I refuse to accept TFA's arguement that it doesn't matter because they aren't spend that much money on it.
I also wonder what (if any) medical requirements they will have for the pretend crew. On the space shuttle one of the astronauts has to have an advanced medical license and they carry a first aid kit that would probably make your local ambulance company drool (I'm a rookie EMT so I'm very interested in this aspect).
This reminds me of the movie (Rocket Man?) where they had isolation testing on the ground and the main charector almost drove everyone else to madness by singing loudly and off key.
With the current growth and popularity of Linux on the handheld, the OS is rapidly approaching ubiquity. This trend will accelerate with the much awaited release of the Linux version of Palm OS.
If the writeup is correct, however, we could get some awesome Northern Lights. The negative repercussions would most likely be limited to fleeting disruptions in some radio traffic. Some phone calls and television feeds may have momentary issues, but even at its worst I doubt all of the doomsday predictions that claim we will arrive back at the stone age from having everything in orbit nuked.
Above all you must remember this: Don't Panic!
I really hope that no one confuses the maker of the Profit Pod with Apple. There is a slight difference in the websites. I know that there are music related products out there that have tried to use the suffix "pod" in order to score some points from Apple, just like a Korean company started marketing the Super Shuffle. These products are questionable, but there is no way that a data collection device for arcade machines infringes on Apple or the iPod product family. Microsoft isn't attacking OpenOffice and WordPerfect Office. I think Apple is really out on a limb on some of their cease-and-desist operations.
I believe that installation is one of Linux's biggest stumbling blocks to larger adaoption. I spend most of my Linux time running Live CDs where there is no OS installation at all (I love you Ubuntu). The issue for many home users is software installation. While there have been significant inroads made in this area over that past few years, it has generally not yet reached Windows' "double click the .exe to run" simplicity. Linux has a huge following among the geeks, nerds, and geeky nerds. It is also growing into mobile devices where people will have no idea they are running Linux and schools on the desktop. The biggest market that needs to be tapped is the "average" computer user at home. People need to feel that Linux is user friendly and can easily do everything that they want to do. Firefox and OoO (both of which I run on my WinXP laptop) have brought it that much closer to the goal. Now easier software installation is the next step.
I have never tried to create a setup like the one that you are attempting, but I have had good experiences with Logitech webcams. Is there an existing program that combines the 3-camera stereo image or are you starting from scratch? What computer system are you using? Make sure that you are not running so many things off of USB (or IEEE1394) that you cannot keep up the throughput from your webcam. This could happen, for example, if you are streaming at maximum quality and saving all of the data to an external webcam. I wish you all the luck.
I attend a large private university in America and I only learned about Kurt Godel through a biography project last year. I have written many bios in my time and Godel is an incredible person. Even Einstein was good friends with him. Godel contributed so many great ideas to the world and is so poorly recognized.
You have to worry about two kinds of security: physical protection from damage and theft deterence. For both functions I recomend using multiple layers. Those those free Priority Mail boxes work well for small laptops. Also use some bubble wrap inside. Put that inside of another bag with lots of clothing and other padding around it and a TSA approved luggage lock on the outside.
I hope that the Canadian government doesn't present too many miles of red tape. Won't there be negative impact to launching from a high latitude? I know that other spaceports boast about how close to the equator they are.
The biggest difference between this facility and other proposals is the larger scope of this project. Instead of $20mil a shot tourists, the Canadians are playing catch up with the Americans, Russians, Europeans, etc. to have a real non-commercial space program. From TFA:
Anyway, I have seen just about every one of the "fake news" infomercials. Being a nightowl helps. Anyway, should be obvious to anyone that these are fake. The begining and the end of the infomercials have disclaimers that affirm their paid commericial status. I think that they should have disclaimers on the bottom of the screen that remind channel surfers of this fact, but overall they are not well hidden.
Hey Mods, guess what? By modding this comment up and making three easy payments of $19.99, you will have expended less than $60! Mod now! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead! Apply directly to forehead!