Mod parent up! It's cool and all that they're doing a Europa mission, but it's a disappointment to see the arrival dates that far in the future. The glacial pace at which these big missions take place is frustrating to say the least. What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"?? If only NASA could get an 800 billion "bailout"!
Point is, when you "work alone", you don't have to argue with others and get them to understand your viewpoint about the theory. If you try to understand their viewpoint, it isn't "A" today but "B" tomorrow (and if it is, you ignore them until they decided it themselves - something you usually can't do in a "official" small group you are part of).
Not to mention, that as an individual, it's a lot easier to pursue unconventional leads without a lot of planning or justification. If it doesn't pan out, then you only end up wasting your own time, rather than an entire department's time.
Agreed, too much money and effort is spent on getting hardware in the classroom, but software is largely an afterthought. In too many situations, state of the art equipment is being used to run Word and PowerPoint. This happens in business too, and a lot of it is driven by companies convincing administrators they need the latest and greatest in an endless upgrade cycle. Hardly! What schools really need is someone to find or write good software. You're a programmer, find out what a classroom needs and write some software that will help the students learn the topic. It doesn't have to be anything complicated...think Oregon Trail. It was a fun game, and the students at least learned something, and it runs on a 20 year old computer! Or review the software that is out there, and consider donating some copies of it.
Wouldn't it be a far better cost/effort equation to just buy a better HD camera in the damn first place?
I hate to be captain obvious here, but historical footage strikes me as the #1 reason (historical meaning everything up to yesterday). I mean you can't go back and reshoot the millions of hours of footage the world already has, but there's a lot of high resolution photos of the some of the same subjects.
Secondly, the still resolution on most point and shoot cameras is a lot higher than the video resolution, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Good software plus a $200 camera seems like a better solution for 99% of people than a $2000 camera which is still going to have problems of its own.
Thirdly, about 4 minutes into the video they start getting into the really interesting stuff about artifact removal (which is still going to be a problem no matter how nice a camera you have) and object removal, which is just well, really cool.
There are a couple things that I've found really help me remember those sorts of things. The first is to dig up photographs, objects, a map showing names of parks that you may have played at, or even just a list of your old classmates in school. There seems to be something about the human mind in that it is much easier to recall things when prompted. I've found that I often remember a lot more than I think I did when I come across something that brings back memories. The other thing that seems to help is to just set aside a few minutes with nothing else going on, and think back to one of those events you remember... then start looking around and asking yourself questions: live in the moment. Who was sitting next to you in class? Did you ever see a fun science demonstration? Where did you ride your bike? etc.. The types of things an interested person would ask you. Or think about emotions you had; we often times don't remember specific things that are said but I bet you remember how those things made you feel at the time.
It's almost like a Ghost in the Shell type theory. That our "minds" also include all the objects/people/places in our lives. Not that memories are actually stored externally, but that those things act like pointers or keys to the heap of unsorted memories we already have.
Stranger in a strange land? I dunno, I'd leave that one off the list... the first half was good but then it just got way too annoying to read. I was ready to throw the book out the window the 500th time I read someone saying "Thou art God". A good idea, but the second half was way too out of touch with reality (and not in an entertaining way)
I'm actually kind of surprised no one until now has really mentioned any of Asimov's robot series, or the Norby Chronicles written by him and his wife Janet Asimov. Perfect for a pre-teen.
Folks, the 20th century is over. It was great while it lasted, suburbs, drive ins, shopping malls, long distance commutes. But its over. What is going to replace it will not be different fuels, electric cars, whatever. What will replace it is commuting by mass transit, living closer to where you work, moving into high density cities, walking to shops. Biking to work in some places. It will be a lot like Europe in the fifties. The suburbs will vanish.
And you won't like it.
You sir, are absolutely dead wrong. There is too much inertia in the American culture and the infrastructure that has been built up for there to be any massive exodus from suburbia to the city. Mass transit and massive urban rehabilitation projects are expensive and get more expensive with every passing year. Even for transit projects that have net positive revenue, there's so much capital and time involved that it will be decades before any significant difference is made, and by then further-out suburbs replace the older connected ones. Your vision might take place in a very limited sense in isolated areas, but for American cities as a whole, forget it. A lot of people like the quiet of suburbs; the noisy, dirty lifestyle of the city center is not for everyone.
People tend to take the easy way out and will survive this crisis just like fuel prices in the 70's and every other major economic event with the least change (or the least expense) possible. If I had to bet, the future is probably going to involve manufacturing normal gasoline (not biodiesel, ethanol, etc..) from some sort of biomass, or more likely continuing the trend towards battery technology in cars. Or continuing to drive the same oil consuming cars we do now, only with a switchover to cleaner grid electricity (nuclear, solar, wind, carbon-sequestered coal, etc..)
I stopped being a Negroponte fan a while back. The OLPC is an amazing program that has been destroyed by his bad business decisions. He has fought from the very beginning against providing the OLPC to 1st world countries. So instead of simply selling them to anyone for $200 and letting the economies of scale drive the price down, he has doomed the project from ever reaching the goal of a $100 laptop. By forcing 1st world customers (who actually have money) to pay $400 in the give one get one, he has eliminated the vast majority of potential buyers. So what if he allows Windows on the system? It will never be successful until they stop fighting market forces.
When I was really young, I watched a lot of shows that weren't geared towards my age group and still enjoyed them a lot. She may not get all the concepts but that's ok I think. Kids in general are a lot brighter than most people give them credit for. Most of the science specials these days go overboard to keep it simple anyway.
I'm going to guess one of the parties being sued is going to try to kill this patent in short order, but who really knows? Of note, the patent (US7321783) is likely claiming priority to US6278884 which was filed in April '97 so any useful prior art would likely have to be around that time frame or before
Sounds like a great argument for doing both! There are vastly different technologies needed for respective moon and mars trips, so therefore both have useful technical challenges to overcome.
That would be nice to see the extra battlefield in RTS games. Would be even better with a multitouch display setup to select and move characters around on the large map. Just thinking out loud some ideas:
1. Easiest but most nauseating would be to macro up your PC so you can just hit a key to quickly scroll in one or more directions. (e.g., for a move down operation, do a 'unselect units and then arrow down 4 times' key combo)
2. An interesting but very hard to implement idea would be to have some sort system that redraws the minimap on another monitor, only expands it to take up the entire screen area. Bonus points if you could make it so that mouse clicks and movements on the expanded map would be translated to precise movements within the minimap.
Hmm... say you are able to accomplish the plasma cooling in an open system in orbit. A big cloud of ionized gas in orbit around the planet= magnetosphere = potential magnetic field which Venus is sorely lacking.
Not sure about your comment about "gravitational lensing", there isn't enough mass to do anything of the sort. The sun barely deflects light as it is. Now using magnetic fields to trap material in space in order to refract light such that you create a lens.... maybe.
It seems like a high sharp, drumbeat (or any other like sound) would be useful although I think one would have to look at an actual waveform to see what happens in the 1.25ms nearby, to see if it would be useful for phase synchronization at that level of precision. I suppose if planned ahead of time, someone could generate a loud pulse of sound lasting a discrete amount of time, say.625ms or less to see what other microphones pick it up and use that to determine an offset for any given mic.
One thing I am wondering is what happens to different frequencies depending on location in the room, since there are peaks and troughs in the intensity based on the wavelength of the particular frequency and the location of the instruments/speakers. The other thing I'm wondering is if there is a way of using the 'beats' caused by interfering frequencies at a particular location to determine any of the higher frequency components.
Isn't that the whole point though of using multiple offset signals, so that one can obtain the data at some point in between the original waveform, thereby essentially doubling the effective sampling rate? What precisely is being sliced off the signals?
I think that's great, it's too bad more people don't do the same. Of course, it's not a perfect system. I suppose popularity and money generally trump those shifts in opinion. I wonder if one could figure out an equation for how all those factors relate...
It does help, even if you don't subscribe to the notion that an outside candidate can win. Parties will generally shift stances on issues to where they are losing a lot of votes. A strong showing for an outside candidate brings those issues into the public forum. Look how much influence extremist and minority groups have on all the major parties. Maybe your candidate wont win this election, but the tide of opinion you've helped generate will steer the parties in that direction the next time around. Why waste your vote on someone you don't really support? Using a vote for a candidate that doesn't win will at least voice your disapproval of the old guard candidates.
Having taken many years of math classes in high school and college, I have to agree that I've found that for the most part every class boils down to a few simple concepts. For example, with calculus there's a lot of theory behind integration and differentiation and how they were originally derived, but really all you need to know is a few simple concepts like area under the curve, how to integrate/differentiate some basic cases, and how it works with a real world example (e.g. how acceleration, velocity, and position relate).
My advice is to learn and understand the core concepts that cover 99% of what you would ever need. Ask someone who's taken those classes to boil it down to the essentials. Forget about all but the basic theory (at least for now). So I'd definitely second the advice about visualizing what's going on first, and not getting caught up in the details. In the case of calculus, you're adding up area of rectangles under the curve (once you understand that you're practically halfway there). And definitely don't get discouraged; there's hardly anything in the world that is so complicated a regular person couldn't understand at least the basics, if you can find a good summary (or teacher), IMO.
I second on the bad example. One thing I'd be interested in seeing is a remake of games with the same basic controls, but a lot of extra levels... or a level editor and let the community do the work. For games like Super Mario Bros. have the same controls, just make 50 more levels. New tracks for car racing games, etc. I used to love playing the Need for Speed series but got tired of the same old tracks.
Why avoid using a credit card? Why be paranoid? Why not be proud of what you are reading? Really, the only thing worth being ashamed over are the people that sign crap like this into law and support it.
When I skimmed TFA, it states that this development will take microelectronics into the 3rd dimension, but doesn't really state how these magnetic loops translate into 3 dimensions... does anyone have a better reference for the technology? Also what kind of heat issues will arise (since packing they will be packing more transistors which presumably means more heat) and how can those be dealt with beyond the current ways of using massive cooling systems and shrinking the wire size?
The article talks about how great and fast this is going to be, but doesn't go into how one fabricates wire loops on a semiconductor die, or how one would stack them in 3 dimensions
Maybe there's a way of doing the tax in a capital gains fashion. If the intellectual property is worth next to nothing one year and then suddenly a billion dollar idea the next, fine, they pay capital gains on the increase. Of course then you run into problems with a capital loss.
Or even wackier, how about trading futures on an idea? A company has an IPO for a patent, and then let the market decide what rights to use it are worth. Taxes would then be based off of that. Of course then you run into the problem of what happens when 20 years are up...
Slashdot Mirror
And if you pan upwards, you can see a fleet of UFOs getting ready to attack...
Mod parent up! It's cool and all that they're doing a Europa mission, but it's a disappointment to see the arrival dates that far in the future. The glacial pace at which these big missions take place is frustrating to say the least. What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"?? If only NASA could get an 800 billion "bailout"!
Not to mention, that as an individual, it's a lot easier to pursue unconventional leads without a lot of planning or justification. If it doesn't pan out, then you only end up wasting your own time, rather than an entire department's time.
Agreed, too much money and effort is spent on getting hardware in the classroom, but software is largely an afterthought. In too many situations, state of the art equipment is being used to run Word and PowerPoint. This happens in business too, and a lot of it is driven by companies convincing administrators they need the latest and greatest in an endless upgrade cycle. Hardly! What schools really need is someone to find or write good software. You're a programmer, find out what a classroom needs and write some software that will help the students learn the topic. It doesn't have to be anything complicated...think Oregon Trail. It was a fun game, and the students at least learned something, and it runs on a 20 year old computer! Or review the software that is out there, and consider donating some copies of it.
Wouldn't it be a far better cost/effort equation to just buy a better HD camera in the damn first place?
I hate to be captain obvious here, but historical footage strikes me as the #1 reason (historical meaning everything up to yesterday). I mean you can't go back and reshoot the millions of hours of footage the world already has, but there's a lot of high resolution photos of the some of the same subjects.
Secondly, the still resolution on most point and shoot cameras is a lot higher than the video resolution, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Good software plus a $200 camera seems like a better solution for 99% of people than a $2000 camera which is still going to have problems of its own.
Thirdly, about 4 minutes into the video they start getting into the really interesting stuff about artifact removal (which is still going to be a problem no matter how nice a camera you have) and object removal, which is just well, really cool.
There are a couple things that I've found really help me remember those sorts of things. The first is to dig up photographs, objects, a map showing names of parks that you may have played at, or even just a list of your old classmates in school. There seems to be something about the human mind in that it is much easier to recall things when prompted. I've found that I often remember a lot more than I think I did when I come across something that brings back memories. The other thing that seems to help is to just set aside a few minutes with nothing else going on, and think back to one of those events you remember... then start looking around and asking yourself questions: live in the moment. Who was sitting next to you in class? Did you ever see a fun science demonstration? Where did you ride your bike? etc.. The types of things an interested person would ask you. Or think about emotions you had; we often times don't remember specific things that are said but I bet you remember how those things made you feel at the time.
It's almost like a Ghost in the Shell type theory. That our "minds" also include all the objects/people/places in our lives. Not that memories are actually stored externally, but that those things act like pointers or keys to the heap of unsorted memories we already have.
Stranger in a strange land? I dunno, I'd leave that one off the list... the first half was good but then it just got way too annoying to read. I was ready to throw the book out the window the 500th time I read someone saying "Thou art God". A good idea, but the second half was way too out of touch with reality (and not in an entertaining way)
I'm actually kind of surprised no one until now has really mentioned any of Asimov's robot series, or the Norby Chronicles written by him and his wife Janet Asimov. Perfect for a pre-teen.
Folks, the 20th century is over. It was great while it lasted, suburbs, drive ins, shopping malls, long distance commutes. But its over. What is going to replace it will not be different fuels, electric cars, whatever. What will replace it is commuting by mass transit, living closer to where you work, moving into high density cities, walking to shops. Biking to work in some places. It will be a lot like Europe in the fifties. The suburbs will vanish.
And you won't like it.
You sir, are absolutely dead wrong. There is too much inertia in the American culture and the infrastructure that has been built up for there to be any massive exodus from suburbia to the city. Mass transit and massive urban rehabilitation projects are expensive and get more expensive with every passing year. Even for transit projects that have net positive revenue, there's so much capital and time involved that it will be decades before any significant difference is made, and by then further-out suburbs replace the older connected ones. Your vision might take place in a very limited sense in isolated areas, but for American cities as a whole, forget it. A lot of people like the quiet of suburbs; the noisy, dirty lifestyle of the city center is not for everyone.
People tend to take the easy way out and will survive this crisis just like fuel prices in the 70's and every other major economic event with the least change (or the least expense) possible. If I had to bet, the future is probably going to involve manufacturing normal gasoline (not biodiesel, ethanol, etc..) from some sort of biomass, or more likely continuing the trend towards battery technology in cars. Or continuing to drive the same oil consuming cars we do now, only with a switchover to cleaner grid electricity (nuclear, solar, wind, carbon-sequestered coal, etc..)
See Gasoline from biomass
I stopped being a Negroponte fan a while back. The OLPC is an amazing program that has been destroyed by his bad business decisions. He has fought from the very beginning against providing the OLPC to 1st world countries. So instead of simply selling them to anyone for $200 and letting the economies of scale drive the price down, he has doomed the project from ever reaching the goal of a $100 laptop. By forcing 1st world customers (who actually have money) to pay $400 in the give one get one, he has eliminated the vast majority of potential buyers. So what if he allows Windows on the system? It will never be successful until they stop fighting market forces.
When I was really young, I watched a lot of shows that weren't geared towards my age group and still enjoyed them a lot. She may not get all the concepts but that's ok I think. Kids in general are a lot brighter than most people give them credit for. Most of the science specials these days go overboard to keep it simple anyway.
I'm going to guess one of the parties being sued is going to try to kill this patent in short order, but who really knows? Of note, the patent (US7321783) is likely claiming priority to US6278884 which was filed in April '97 so any useful prior art would likely have to be around that time frame or before
Sounds like a great argument for doing both! There are vastly different technologies needed for respective moon and mars trips, so therefore both have useful technical challenges to overcome.
That would be nice to see the extra battlefield in RTS games. Would be even better with a multitouch display setup to select and move characters around on the large map. Just thinking out loud some ideas:
1. Easiest but most nauseating would be to macro up your PC so you can just hit a key to quickly scroll in one or more directions. (e.g., for a move down operation, do a 'unselect units and then arrow down 4 times' key combo)
2. An interesting but very hard to implement idea would be to have some sort system that redraws the minimap on another monitor, only expands it to take up the entire screen area. Bonus points if you could make it so that mouse clicks and movements on the expanded map would be translated to precise movements within the minimap.
Hmm... say you are able to accomplish the plasma cooling in an open system in orbit. A big cloud of ionized gas in orbit around the planet= magnetosphere = potential magnetic field which Venus is sorely lacking.
Not sure about your comment about "gravitational lensing", there isn't enough mass to do anything of the sort. The sun barely deflects light as it is. Now using magnetic fields to trap material in space in order to refract light such that you create a lens.... maybe.
It seems like a high sharp, drumbeat (or any other like sound) would be useful although I think one would have to look at an actual waveform to see what happens in the 1.25ms nearby, to see if it would be useful for phase synchronization at that level of precision. I suppose if planned ahead of time, someone could generate a loud pulse of sound lasting a discrete amount of time, say .625ms or less to see what other microphones pick it up and use that to determine an offset for any given mic.
One thing I am wondering is what happens to different frequencies depending on location in the room, since there are peaks and troughs in the intensity based on the wavelength of the particular frequency and the location of the instruments/speakers. The other thing I'm wondering is if there is a way of using the 'beats' caused by interfering frequencies at a particular location to determine any of the higher frequency components.
Isn't that the whole point though of using multiple offset signals, so that one can obtain the data at some point in between the original waveform, thereby essentially doubling the effective sampling rate? What precisely is being sliced off the signals?
I think that's great, it's too bad more people don't do the same. Of course, it's not a perfect system. I suppose popularity and money generally trump those shifts in opinion. I wonder if one could figure out an equation for how all those factors relate...
It does help, even if you don't subscribe to the notion that an outside candidate can win. Parties will generally shift stances on issues to where they are losing a lot of votes. A strong showing for an outside candidate brings those issues into the public forum. Look how much influence extremist and minority groups have on all the major parties. Maybe your candidate wont win this election, but the tide of opinion you've helped generate will steer the parties in that direction the next time around. Why waste your vote on someone you don't really support? Using a vote for a candidate that doesn't win will at least voice your disapproval of the old guard candidates.
Having taken many years of math classes in high school and college, I have to agree that I've found that for the most part every class boils down to a few simple concepts. For example, with calculus there's a lot of theory behind integration and differentiation and how they were originally derived, but really all you need to know is a few simple concepts like area under the curve, how to integrate/differentiate some basic cases, and how it works with a real world example (e.g. how acceleration, velocity, and position relate).
My advice is to learn and understand the core concepts that cover 99% of what you would ever need. Ask someone who's taken those classes to boil it down to the essentials. Forget about all but the basic theory (at least for now). So I'd definitely second the advice about visualizing what's going on first, and not getting caught up in the details. In the case of calculus, you're adding up area of rectangles under the curve (once you understand that you're practically halfway there). And definitely don't get discouraged; there's hardly anything in the world that is so complicated a regular person couldn't understand at least the basics, if you can find a good summary (or teacher), IMO.
Good choices... Rogue Squadron 3D with more levels would be fun too
I second on the bad example. One thing I'd be interested in seeing is a remake of games with the same basic controls, but a lot of extra levels... or a level editor and let the community do the work. For games like Super Mario Bros. have the same controls, just make 50 more levels. New tracks for car racing games, etc. I used to love playing the Need for Speed series but got tired of the same old tracks.
Why avoid using a credit card? Why be paranoid? Why not be proud of what you are reading? Really, the only thing worth being ashamed over are the people that sign crap like this into law and support it.
When I skimmed TFA, it states that this development will take microelectronics into the 3rd dimension, but doesn't really state how these magnetic loops translate into 3 dimensions... does anyone have a better reference for the technology? Also what kind of heat issues will arise (since packing they will be packing more transistors which presumably means more heat) and how can those be dealt with beyond the current ways of using massive cooling systems and shrinking the wire size?
The article talks about how great and fast this is going to be, but doesn't go into how one fabricates wire loops on a semiconductor die, or how one would stack them in 3 dimensions
Maybe there's a way of doing the tax in a capital gains fashion. If the intellectual property is worth next to nothing one year and then suddenly a billion dollar idea the next, fine, they pay capital gains on the increase. Of course then you run into problems with a capital loss.
Or even wackier, how about trading futures on an idea? A company has an IPO for a patent, and then let the market decide what rights to use it are worth. Taxes would then be based off of that. Of course then you run into the problem of what happens when 20 years are up...