This is similar to medline, where professional researchers and librarians have pre-indexed the material with known keywords (on medline called MESH headings). The key is that unlimited free-text searching is usually much poorer versus use of predefined keywords.
Since there is a committee that predefines the keyword, and a modern search engine (on medline for instance Ovid), will map your free text to the MESH heading to which all articles have been mapped by a review committee. This is simply shifting the time to lookup to someone else. These articles are essentially "pre-looked-up". However, it makes the search much better, as someone who actually knows how to search, has pre-classified the articles with all the relevant search terms. Free text searches like google, on these massive databases typically return thousands of articles with marginal relevance.
And like most users of these specialized DB's, there are professional librarians available at most sites (or available via phone/email) to assist in searches, since these are mostly for business purposes (where time is money).
Did anyone notice that the length of flight was 10 seconds? If it carried enough fuel for a sustained flight, it would be more impressive for a mach 7 flight. I realize this is a proof of concept flight.
It is interesting to me that we have decided to spend billions of dollars in securing federal and other governmental institutions from terrorist attack, and yet a vital institution of the government is left relatively unguarded. Although the paper system before can also be flawed (see Florida), in the post-9/11 era, where we willingly made air-travel painful, have metal detectors and ID checks in all governmental buildings, truck-barriers out front we entrust our governmental selection process to an unencrypted storage and encryption system. This is not to say the prior system could not be manipulated, and the massivel volume of paper information made a true recount virtually impossible, but making a printout means that an individual machine, or spot audits can look for tampering.
Amusingly, as a physician, the rules for how I can transmit simple data require both a stricter level of paper-trail (I have to document in the medical record the consent of the patient to release records and where I sent them) and a stronger encryption (sending medical information via unsecured Fax or modem is against HIPPA rules) than people tolerate on their votes.
For many years, the grocery industry has been doing the same thing. I remember working for Kraft-General-foods in the mid 1980's, and getting this kind of data. It wasn't real-time (came in a month or 2 later), but every scanned purchase at a register was recorded, for both ours and our competitor's products by state/region/chain.
it's not like the store didn't know when they sold an item anyway (people have been tracking sales probably since the invention of numbers, just on paper), and as long as it isn't recorded with my name, who cares? This is simply a matter of convience, the old stores who recorded that they sold an item to you on carbon-paper receipts could have done this, it would simply have been really painful to do so.
The concept is fairly clear, as just because you are sitting still, doesn't mean that I can shoot you (US tanks didn't move that fast in desert storm, but the enemy had a hard time shooting them in the hail of fire they were under from those tanks). While modern warfare seems to be against the terrorist states, that doesn't mean that they don't have sophisticated weapon systems to try and shoot them down (and yes I realize they can be shot down with simple arms occaisionally).
Making one (the issue with the rotors) is not that hard (theory, I realize, actually making one is really hard, but so is making a non-stealth helicopter too).
There are 2 schools of thought in relation to stealth. Absorbtion (very hard, and I can probably overcome it with more transmisison power) and reflection away from you (much easier). There was a test of radar-detectability of cars (car&driver or something) with speed-radars, and the corvette was the lowest (this was some time ago).
Most people thought it was that the car was fiberglass (not true, as the frame underneath had plenty of metal) but rather that the radiator was tilted way back, which reflected the radar away (up) from the receiver. This is also why the F-117 is all angular, it is very hard to get a radar reflection, as no facet is facing towards you (they also use absorbtive/transparent materials).
Take a mirror, and lay it flat in a dark room. Shine a flashlight at an oblique angle, and the mirror is almost invisible (but you see stuff past it with the deflected beam). One thing you may see (it's on the stealth airplanes) is covering the intakes/exhausts with deflecting gratings (helps diffuse thermal stuff as well), which will deflect away from the observer, rather than the verticle wall of spinning turbine blades. The mirror trick is how that F-117 was shot down back in the late 90's in bosnia, which was thought to be one radar (the flashlight) shining across, with a receiver across the valley (like standing by the wall and figuring out the deflection of the beam and back-calculating the location of the deflecting object)
If you look at the apache. you will notice the canopy is angular, which was designed to do the same thing with sunlight (less reflections back to the observer).. The blades can be made of low-radar crossection material (heck fiberglass would be virtually invisible as an example, as would carbon fiber or ceramics), but you also need to make it balistically tolerant (cermaics shatter when shot for instance), and flexible to survive the rigors of hard flying. Making it silent is probably much harder than making it radar low-observable.
With the proliferation of shoulder fired heat-seaking missles, one also must make your copter heat stealthy as well, and often tricks like blowing the exhaust up into the rotor wash spreads the heat signature out to hide it, and make it hard to lock up.
Finally for all those who are talking about survivability, the apache is highly balistically tolerant (military speak for armored), and is also designed to allow for survivability of the pilots in the event of being shot down. There is a test film (or marketing PR film) which showed the apache taking direct fire on a test range from a.50 caliber machine gun with no internal damage, or blade damage (I realize it was staged "just so", but none-the-less impressive...).
So this is similar to the real life virus Hepatitis D, which is slightly damaged and can't infect a host cell unless actively infected with hepatitis B. It has interesting implications for biology that one can look at the spread of dependent pathogens using computer models, by looking at the spread of these piggyback worms.
So they got them at least at educational if not below educational (must be extra discounting for thousand+ machines). They then use them for 6 months, tax free (educational institution) and then sell them only $200 off list? The apple store for education lists the G5 DP 2.0 GHz with 512mb and 160gb drive at $2699. Hmmm... Doesn't seem like it's such a deal for people, and seems like a virtual profit for them!
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
In truth there are few legitimate uses for more than say 10gb/month. It is true there are a few, and some people do these activities (such as streaming video, backup/synch of their work/home machines).
I would guess the majority of these users are downloading video, warez or music. There are very few other sources of multiple GB per month of data (I'm not saying none, but let's be honest, most people aren't doing those activities). Given the DMCA/RIAA silliness of late, they probably are worried about liability for supporting these activities...
Unfortunately the smell test you speak of would pass the test. The ILS doesn't "Land" the plane, anymore than GPS would, it is simply a navigational aid which tells a pilot under instrument conditions (i.e. can't see well) where the runway is. If you remember this occurs in the Bruce Willis movie "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" where the terrorist reset the "ground level" on the ILS, and the pilots who were landing in the fog/snow and couldn't see the ground, fly the plane into the ground (manually but they "see" the ground being lower than it really is). For a description click here (http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/ILS.htm)
This could certainly happen, although whether it could be interfered with by this BPL system is unknown.
Of course this will cost tens-of-thousands, so not too many people will want this. The optical-surgery lasers are REALLY expensive (admittedly, accidental cheese cutting by a few thousands of an inch don't matter, while not seeing is a big deal) so any robotic cheese cutter is going to be out of consumer hands anyway.
This is also for cutting shapes, not slices, so why do consumers want to carve up slices into funny shapes in bulk?
From the ExtremeTech article "emerging connectivity standards like USB..."
How is this emerging? It's been a standard for years (yeah, 2.0 is newer, but still years old)... This does seem kind of silly.
When I have needed to cut down (rarely) I find a slow cut-down over a week (taper) with decreasing quantities around the clock (I often consume it manby times per day over a 24 hour shift) rather than fewer times per day.
In other words, if you consume 1 'dew every 4 hours, first comsume 0.5 'dews every 4 down to off over 4-5 days.
I'm not sure the residents of boston (or at least the future ones) who have lived/worked near the old "distressway" feel this way. I certainly look forward to walking around between downtown and the north-end without that hulking monument to rusted/green steel and greenouse gasses.
Having sat in MANY an hour-long traffic jam going through that for an old job, any traffic improvement will be worthwile.
Seperate expensive/cost-overrun with flop. The flop would imply that this project made traffic worse (during construction doesn't count) or provided no useful features.
MS-Bob was a flop because they spent millions developing it, and it produced a poor-quality product which failed miserably in the marketplace (and at performing the function for which it was written). This project is just simply freakin' expensive (and probably poorly managed?), not a flop.
So verizon (the telco/DSL provider) has the nice loss-leader for those of us who use the DSL service. The converted about 400 payphones throughout NYC to wi-fi hotspots, which use your DSL username/password.
It was pretty cool one day when someone asked me directions to something when I was walking on the street, I opened my powerbook, saw "Verizon Wi-Fi" as an available wi-fi net, and opened up mapquest and gave them directions all in a few seconds. I pay no extra fees for this, and it makes me more loyal to verizon (definately balances out the slightly higher cost of "pro" speed DSL).
Very nice to be able to sit in the park, near a payphone on the corner, and surf the web/check email.
I worry about an 80gb HD in a HDTV recording scenerio. That isn't going to hold a whole lot of programming. I am also sure, that you are not allowed to open it, and add drive space ((I realize tivo doesn't either, but they look the other way as long as you don't want warranty service; cable companies freak when you touch their boxes [since you are undoubtably stealing cable])
Now for those of us with digital cable, a regular HD Tivo would be excellent. Also, it is time for Tivo to allow for large hard-drives (especially with HD), either as a BTO option or as aftermarket without trashing the warranty. Heck, I'd even be willing t send it back to phillips to have it done, if that's what they demand, if it was reasonably priced and big enough.
The brenthaven for my 15" aluminum is a great bag as far as holding the powerbook.
However some beefs:
The iPod pocket at the top doesn't have a pass-through
The bag should expand a little more, to accomodate a few other things (like a t-shirt size item)
For this expensive a bag, the zippers can hang up around the bends, when the bag is full. They could learn from Tumi's zippers!
It doesn't look quite like a normal backpack. It's pretty obviously a laptop bag
The outside pencil pocket has a vertical zipper, which allows stuff to fall out if slightly open. It is also a very flat pocket, and holds little in the way of thick items (such as my wallet)
It is only available in jet black
The fabric/bag is very stiff
On the other hand I do like:
the flat folder holders inside, they really keep stuff flat and uncrumpled
The little web pockets in the gadget pocket works well
I have tested the waterproofness during a torential downpour which came out of the blue, and it works perfectly
When our cooling redesign for our new server racks was being considered, we went and talked to the reliability pros: the phone company (say what you want but they really avoid equipment failures!) and the guys as AT&T told us that they don't chill their equipment rooms, but keep it around 80F, which is pretty warm for people, but well within the range for equipment.
This is A) cheaper (smaller unit and less electricity) and B) causes less problems if the HVAC fails (less delta-T)
Remember, unless people are sitting in the server room, then you are only cooling to keep the equipment within its operating range.
The modern digital cell phones (old analog ones are a different story) have been shown not to interfere with telemetry. In fact we not only removed our jammers at the hospital, we installed cell repeaters in the hospital for crises (after 9/11 where we lost some of the wired phones). We also have a verizon tower on side of Bellevue (4 floors from the MICU and 3 from the CCU) and have never had a problem. We also did internal studies with blackberry's, with placing them on monitors, external pacemakers, ventilators, etc and sending messages, with no problems.
That Verizon could make my phone work at the sites of accidents (or near my work for that matter...). Seems all the popular accident sites are in "dead=spots" around NY City.
I have also stopped at numerous accidents (I'm a doc) in rural vermont and norther NY on trips, and had no clue where I am, talking to a state trooper who was 100mi away at the time (who also didn't know any of the landmarks I was near) and having the phone Co be able to locate me would have made it much easier...
As for carrying a GPS, why should I spend $100+ to be a good samaritan (I already carry emergency medical supplies that I paid for...).
IMHO as long as the phone co only gives this info to either itself for billing/service or to the 911 folks, except under warrant, then I'm all for it. I worry about the "kid tracking" services, as the security of whatever web technology they use to serve the info to the parents, is undoubtably crackable (everything is eventually), which means that someone else could track my kids... No thanks!
So the Seimens Telemetry monitoring system in our cardiac ward is Windows CE based. I finally had a crash of a telemetry monitor recently (which is how I found out it was CE based when the splash screen launched). There was a patient on it, and it simply stopped reading his heart rate/EKG. Luckily a reboot fixed it, but these should never crash...
I hope you use no modern medicines, don't eat any animals (somehow it is acceptable to EAT a fish, but not stick a linked gene for a flourescing protein into its DNA) or make any other use of modern genetics. As a doctor, we often make use of technologies that were derived from tagged gene products (how we discover a given gene is activated) or transgenic products. For instance all insulin is now made with a transgenic bacteria with a human insulin gene inserted. Now we could go back to extracting it from cows and pigs, and dealing with the occaisonal human allergic reaction and worse efficacy, but we chose to have a better medicine instead.
Instead of a knee jerk reaction of forbidding everything with the word "genetically engineered" in it (I'm not saying genetic engineering is completely safe, but neither is chemistry for that matter), maybe you should try and understand what they were trying to do by making the fish! The original guys in asia were using it as a tagging technique for some environmental work on fish conservation (that's good for the fish BTW). Now the fact that someone wants to sell that fish (albeit seems a tad silly) that was created for something good, shouldn't condem the creation of transgenic animals.
The "huge advance" of RFID tags has yet to demonstrate a large competitive advantage. Although the presumed benefits of tighter inventory tracking, should result in some cost savings, it has yet to be shown that it will either revolutionize Wal-Mart (I mean, how inefficient is their current UPC laser scanner tracking?) or lower costs to the consumer. You can get a lot of milage out of a high-school student at minimum wage with an Intermec scanner...
This harkens back to the debate of fancy tape robots vs. high-school students to flip tapes... (the students tended to jam less often, but could get hung-over)
Of course, given the reliability of the elevators at my work, I'd be a little scared to get into an elevator that goes up a few hundred miles on a carbon fiber tube...
Slashdot Mirror
Since there is a committee that predefines the keyword, and a modern search engine (on medline for instance Ovid), will map your free text to the MESH heading to which all articles have been mapped by a review committee. This is simply shifting the time to lookup to someone else. These articles are essentially "pre-looked-up". However, it makes the search much better, as someone who actually knows how to search, has pre-classified the articles with all the relevant search terms. Free text searches like google, on these massive databases typically return thousands of articles with marginal relevance.
And like most users of these specialized DB's, there are professional librarians available at most sites (or available via phone/email) to assist in searches, since these are mostly for business purposes (where time is money).
Jet Fuel is kerosene... Your capri would stall, as it is not particulary flammable.
Did anyone notice that the length of flight was 10 seconds? If it carried enough fuel for a sustained flight, it would be more impressive for a mach 7 flight. I realize this is a proof of concept flight.
Amusingly, as a physician, the rules for how I can transmit simple data require both a stricter level of paper-trail (I have to document in the medical record the consent of the patient to release records and where I sent them) and a stronger encryption (sending medical information via unsecured Fax or modem is against HIPPA rules) than people tolerate on their votes.
it's not like the store didn't know when they sold an item anyway (people have been tracking sales probably since the invention of numbers, just on paper), and as long as it isn't recorded with my name, who cares? This is simply a matter of convience, the old stores who recorded that they sold an item to you on carbon-paper receipts could have done this, it would simply have been really painful to do so.
Making one (the issue with the rotors) is not that hard (theory, I realize, actually making one is really hard, but so is making a non-stealth helicopter too).
There are 2 schools of thought in relation to stealth. Absorbtion (very hard, and I can probably overcome it with more transmisison power) and reflection away from you (much easier). There was a test of radar-detectability of cars (car&driver or something) with speed-radars, and the corvette was the lowest (this was some time ago).
Most people thought it was that the car was fiberglass (not true, as the frame underneath had plenty of metal) but rather that the radiator was tilted way back, which reflected the radar away (up) from the receiver. This is also why the F-117 is all angular, it is very hard to get a radar reflection, as no facet is facing towards you (they also use absorbtive/transparent materials).
Take a mirror, and lay it flat in a dark room. Shine a flashlight at an oblique angle, and the mirror is almost invisible (but you see stuff past it with the deflected beam). One thing you may see (it's on the stealth airplanes) is covering the intakes/exhausts with deflecting gratings (helps diffuse thermal stuff as well), which will deflect away from the observer, rather than the verticle wall of spinning turbine blades. The mirror trick is how that F-117 was shot down back in the late 90's in bosnia, which was thought to be one radar (the flashlight) shining across, with a receiver across the valley (like standing by the wall and figuring out the deflection of the beam and back-calculating the location of the deflecting object)
If you look at the apache. you will notice the canopy is angular, which was designed to do the same thing with sunlight (less reflections back to the observer).. The blades can be made of low-radar crossection material (heck fiberglass would be virtually invisible as an example, as would carbon fiber or ceramics), but you also need to make it balistically tolerant (cermaics shatter when shot for instance), and flexible to survive the rigors of hard flying. Making it silent is probably much harder than making it radar low-observable.
With the proliferation of shoulder fired heat-seaking missles, one also must make your copter heat stealthy as well, and often tricks like blowing the exhaust up into the rotor wash spreads the heat signature out to hide it, and make it hard to lock up.
Finally for all those who are talking about survivability, the apache is highly balistically tolerant (military speak for armored), and is also designed to allow for survivability of the pilots in the event of being shot down. There is a test film (or marketing PR film) which showed the apache taking direct fire on a test range from a .50 caliber machine gun with no internal damage, or blade damage (I realize it was staged "just so", but none-the-less impressive...).
So this is similar to the real life virus Hepatitis D, which is slightly damaged and can't infect a host cell unless actively infected with hepatitis B. It has interesting implications for biology that one can look at the spread of dependent pathogens using computer models, by looking at the spread of these piggyback worms.
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
I would guess the majority of these users are downloading video, warez or music. There are very few other sources of multiple GB per month of data (I'm not saying none, but let's be honest, most people aren't doing those activities). Given the DMCA/RIAA silliness of late, they probably are worried about liability for supporting these activities...
This could certainly happen, although whether it could be interfered with by this BPL system is unknown.
This is also for cutting shapes, not slices, so why do consumers want to carve up slices into funny shapes in bulk?
From the ExtremeTech article "emerging connectivity standards like USB..." How is this emerging? It's been a standard for years (yeah, 2.0 is newer, but still years old)... This does seem kind of silly.
In other words, if you consume 1 'dew every 4 hours, first comsume 0.5 'dews every 4 down to off over 4-5 days.
Having sat in MANY an hour-long traffic jam going through that for an old job, any traffic improvement will be worthwile.
Seperate expensive/cost-overrun with flop. The flop would imply that this project made traffic worse (during construction doesn't count) or provided no useful features.
MS-Bob was a flop because they spent millions developing it, and it produced a poor-quality product which failed miserably in the marketplace (and at performing the function for which it was written). This project is just simply freakin' expensive (and probably poorly managed?), not a flop.
It was pretty cool one day when someone asked me directions to something when I was walking on the street, I opened my powerbook, saw "Verizon Wi-Fi" as an available wi-fi net, and opened up mapquest and gave them directions all in a few seconds. I pay no extra fees for this, and it makes me more loyal to verizon (definately balances out the slightly higher cost of "pro" speed DSL).
Very nice to be able to sit in the park, near a payphone on the corner, and surf the web/check email.
I worry about an 80gb HD in a HDTV recording scenerio. That isn't going to hold a whole lot of programming. I am also sure, that you are not allowed to open it, and add drive space ((I realize tivo doesn't either, but they look the other way as long as you don't want warranty service; cable companies freak when you touch their boxes [since you are undoubtably stealing cable])
Now for those of us with digital cable, a regular HD Tivo would be excellent. Also, it is time for Tivo to allow for large hard-drives (especially with HD), either as a BTO option or as aftermarket without trashing the warranty. Heck, I'd even be willing t send it back to phillips to have it done, if that's what they demand, if it was reasonably priced and big enough.
However some beefs:
On the other hand I do like:
This is A) cheaper (smaller unit and less electricity) and B) causes less problems if the HVAC fails (less delta-T)
Remember, unless people are sitting in the server room, then you are only cooling to keep the equipment within its operating range.
The modern digital cell phones (old analog ones are a different story) have been shown not to interfere with telemetry. In fact we not only removed our jammers at the hospital, we installed cell repeaters in the hospital for crises (after 9/11 where we lost some of the wired phones). We also have a verizon tower on side of Bellevue (4 floors from the MICU and 3 from the CCU) and have never had a problem. We also did internal studies with blackberry's, with placing them on monitors, external pacemakers, ventilators, etc and sending messages, with no problems.
I have also stopped at numerous accidents (I'm a doc) in rural vermont and norther NY on trips, and had no clue where I am, talking to a state trooper who was 100mi away at the time (who also didn't know any of the landmarks I was near) and having the phone Co be able to locate me would have made it much easier...
As for carrying a GPS, why should I spend $100+ to be a good samaritan (I already carry emergency medical supplies that I paid for...).
IMHO as long as the phone co only gives this info to either itself for billing/service or to the 911 folks, except under warrant, then I'm all for it. I worry about the "kid tracking" services, as the security of whatever web technology they use to serve the info to the parents, is undoubtably crackable (everything is eventually), which means that someone else could track my kids... No thanks!
So the Seimens Telemetry monitoring system in our cardiac ward is Windows CE based. I finally had a crash of a telemetry monitor recently (which is how I found out it was CE based when the splash screen launched). There was a patient on it, and it simply stopped reading his heart rate/EKG. Luckily a reboot fixed it, but these should never crash...
Instead of a knee jerk reaction of forbidding everything with the word "genetically engineered" in it (I'm not saying genetic engineering is completely safe, but neither is chemistry for that matter), maybe you should try and understand what they were trying to do by making the fish! The original guys in asia were using it as a tagging technique for some environmental work on fish conservation (that's good for the fish BTW). Now the fact that someone wants to sell that fish (albeit seems a tad silly) that was created for something good, shouldn't condem the creation of transgenic animals.
The "huge advance" of RFID tags has yet to demonstrate a large competitive advantage. Although the presumed benefits of tighter inventory tracking, should result in some cost savings, it has yet to be shown that it will either revolutionize Wal-Mart (I mean, how inefficient is their current UPC laser scanner tracking?) or lower costs to the consumer. You can get a lot of milage out of a high-school student at minimum wage with an Intermec scanner... This harkens back to the debate of fancy tape robots vs. high-school students to flip tapes... (the students tended to jam less often, but could get hung-over)
Of course, given the reliability of the elevators at my work, I'd be a little scared to get into an elevator that goes up a few hundred miles on a carbon fiber tube...