This is clearly a problem with object recognition and there are certain techniques for doing this that reject the "clutter" in the scene. I'm not sure exactly how this system would work in 3D, but when viewing a planar scene (i.e. objects flat on a table), you can calculate "invariants" associated with the objects in view. Essentially, an invariant is a viewpoint independent representation of the object.
You would clearly have a library of objects (e.g. buildings) on the servers. When a picture is sent, the service would perform some sort of feature extraction, and calculate the invariants of the objects in the scene. It would then see if these objects nearly matched any in the database. If they did, it would project possible matches onto the image and look for edges around the model. If there was good correlation (accepting the fact that the match would not be perfect because of moveable objects) it would return the name of the building.
Prof. Cipolla lectures me on (suprise, surprise...) Computer Vision. You can find his lecture handouts here. (the projection handout, page 46 onwards talks about the process I have just described.)
It doesn't display any results, but clearly it does find them. Look at the bottom and you can still jump to all the blank pages that would contain results (warez "returns" 11 pages).
The whole Wiki approach to this is totally wrong, and it echoes the problems with open source development in general.
Apple has it exactly right. There has to be one common standard that EVERYTHING adheres to. There needs to be central control over the UI. No if's, no but's. It can't be continuously changed and updated, it has to be "right" from the start.
One example I am familiar with is in Windows, Ctrl-X cuts text to the clipboard. That works the same in (almost) every application and is (almost) never used to do anything else. Attention to details and conformity like that is a major part of a good UI.
That is the major flaw in Open Source movement. Every developer has their own ideas about how things should work and there is no compulsion for them to make them work in the same way as Project X. Everyone thinks they know best. And at the end of the day, what can you do? They are devoting their time for free to program the software, so why shouldn't it work the way they want?
But hang on, perhaps the "openness" of open source can come to the rescue again... Why couldn't one "body" (e.g. a company) take useful programs and refactor them into a common UI...? Perhaps I'm just ranting now, but this is what open source/linux needs - some central control. OK, so the hardcore kernel hackers will hate this idea - going against the principles of Free software - but a little control is what open source needs to be accepted by Joe Public.
I think it is more to do with the poor quality of the phone signal and the low volume of the speaker.
As the speech is much less clear (due to high compression*) than when the person is right in front of you, you feel you need to speak more loudly to make them understand (in normal conversations, if you speak more loudly and annunciate better, people can generally understand more easily). This is exacerbated when they "Pardon?" because it cut out in the middle of a word or something and then you assume they didn't hear you because it wasn't loud enough.
The problem is made even worse by the puny speakers on mobile phones which aren't powerful enough to make the other person heard in an environment with lots of background noise. If you can't hear them, you assume you need to shout to make them hear you. (Just think about this next time you have a normal conversation somewhere with lots of noise).
Another issue for mobile to mobile calls is the microphone picking up background noise and/or not being in the correct position to pick up the other persons voice. Again, this makes the voice too quiet, muffled, etc.
It would be interesting to conduct an experiment to measure the volume at which a person speaks on a phone as the voice signal is made progressively more distorted and/or quieter. I bet there is a strong correlation.
* Mobile phone speech is compressed to just 13kb/s for GSM (using a linear predictive coding) which compares to the, admittedly uncompressed, 64kb/s of normal phone signals
can't get to all the same places/use the same routes
Depends where you are I guess, but some routes near me are unsuitable for using a bike on (i.e. too narrow, too steep, too uneven, too rocky, pedestrian only).
Of course, all your points are valid if you are only talking about running on roads.
Well I'm sure humans would still manage to navigate the course without military grade GPS. That is the whole point of the challenge - to make a vehicle that can navigate the course with whatever data a human could manage with.
Of course, it almost goes without saying that additional information is needed in the form of computer vision, laser sensors, etc. This can be used to avoid obstacles and pick the best route over the terrain.
The switchover in 2006 is NOT to HDTV it is to DTV. See this site for more information on why there is a difference.
What I would like to know is whether HDTV is going to be a truly global standard. i.e. will it finally stamp out the issues with PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM ?
I am being a total pedant, but the grandparent didn't say that Gailileo's theory was that the earth is round. In fact, he merely said "in Galileo's time" that theory would not have been accepted, which is no doubt true.
However, it is good to point out that Galileo's controversial theory was that the Earth orbits around the sun, and hence the Earth is not the centre of the Universe (as was the religious doctrine of the time).
Wasn't the monitoring done from a little room in the university electronics department? If so, is it still there?
I think I went to see that when I was about 12 and I was a bit unimpressed to be honest (I guess I was expecing a NASA control room).
This is a reference to John Lydon (of Sex Pistols fame) on ITV's "I'm a celebrity... Get me out of here". ITV is funded by advertising revenue and is nothing to do with the BBC.
More details here
How come the Lunokhod were so much faster than the Mars rovers? Lunokhod 2 was able to travel up to 2km/hr where as Spirit/Opportunity travel at 5cm/second max = 180m/hr (http://www.solarviews.com/eng/opportunity.htm).
I would have thought with advances in solar panels and motors that the new rovers would wipe the floor with the old Russian ones. I guess there are lots more instruments/computers to power and you need higher gain radio transmissions from Mars, but that is still a power of ten difference in speed.
Actually, I have now checked the "Oxford Guide To Style" (a good resource for typesetting in British English). Firstly, it says "Acronyms take no points, whether all in caps..., in initial capitals with upper and lower case..., or entirely in lower case"
so N.A.S.A. is incorrect.
It goes on to say "Any all-capital proper-name acronym is, in some house styles, fashioned with a single initial capital if it exceeds four letters (Basic, Unesco, Unicef). It appears the BBC does this with acronyms that exceed three letters. I'm glad I cleared that up for myself
Yeah, I've noticed the BBC do this before with NASA and lots of other acronyms. Like here where they do it with UNESCO and UNEP, even though they capitalise the first letters of the words when explaining the acronyms.
They do seem to keep abbrevations capitalised (e.g. DNA in that article). Strictly speaking, an acronym is an abbrevation that is said as a word, i.e. you say Nasa not N-A-S-A, but you do say D-N-A.
I think I will write to them though because it can't be correct to remove the capitalisation in this way.
I can't believe the arrogance in assuming that anyone else actually cares what you do all day. There are about 58 million people in the UK. Everyday most people get up, walk down the street, and perhaps even pick their nose (shock horror!). Now, when you see someone picking their nose, do you quickly pull out a camera and take a photo to blackmail them with? Do you follow them home and tell their family? If you are normal, you don't do these things. You probably don't take any notice or do anything about it.
CCTV requires someone to actually watch the footage for there to be any real invasion of privacy. Do you honestly think anyone could be bothered to watch 100's of hours of footage on the off chance you picked your nose in one frame?
Now imagine someone is murdered in the otherwise deserted street at 6:00 in the morning. Then the police can look at the tapes and see what happened/who was there. Even then they won't care whether you picked your nose on a tape two weeks previously.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, when you are in public, you can expect other people to see what you are doing. It doesn't make any real difference if it is being filmed. In order for it to be an invasion of privacy they would have to put a camera in your home or somewhere private. I don't think this has happened anywhere yet.
Bottom Line: You're not important and no-one gives a shit about what you do as long as it doesn't affect them.
What is wrong in celebrating their lives and what they stood for? I am sure they died doing the one thing they had always wanted to do. They would have been aware of the risks and they accepted them in order to have the chance of truly living their dreams. They were the priviledged few who got to do something important, serving the greater purpose that is the advancement of human knowledge. How many get that chance?
It is of course very sad for the families, but I bet even they appreciate that those who died would always be left unfulfilled and dissatisfied if they had not taken the chance offered to them (perhaps they would still go even if they knew the consequences..?).
I do not think the actual loss of life was the real disaster: it was seven people who 99.99% of people hadn't even heard of before the accident. I think the true disaster was the tarnishing of a vision: the idea of the human race reaching beyond our home and "exploring the great unknown". The idea that our technology had allowed us to conquer the solar system. And why were we doing it? Just because.
Slightly offtopic, but I really hate it when people ask what the point of space travel is. If those people don't realise, they will NEVER understand why the rest of us look upon astronauts with such envy. In my view, these doubters are missing a key characteristic of humanity - the desire to increase our knowledge and understanding and to make the world a better place.
You are considerably less likely to kill someone else by not crossing at a crosswalk than you are by driving dangerously.
Also, what point is there in crossing at a crosswalk if cars are going too fast to stop?
I don't know much about this, but would it be possible for the receiving ISP to download most of the email (i.e. all except the last byte) and test that using spam filters? If it tested as likely spam then it could send a bounce to the sending server and abort the download of the rest of the message.
Would this be possible?
Yeah, I don't get why the governments don't just introduce an extra, more stringent driving test to drive cars with a mass of more than 1500kg, say.
Overnight you have eliminated an enormous number of SUV's, 4x4's, etc. All of this without really penalising the people that actually _need_ to use them at all. It is also a good idea purely from a safety point of view, because these larger vehicles are inherently more dangerous for pedestrians and other road users due to their greater momentum, poorer handling and reduced maneovreability
What I can't believe is that for a 200GBP pen you only get a 2 year warranty. With comparable pens from all other manufacturers you get a lifetime warranty. The reason for this is apparently that the black resin-type material they use for the barrels is very fragile. Just dropping the pen on a desk can sometimes crack it.
Also I don't like the way they try to prevent people from selling them online. OK, so maybe it is best to try out a pen first, but come on - you should get the choice. (I know they can be found online, but not at official suppliers.)
I think the accusations of pretentiousness in other comments are valid, although I can almost excuse that because it is James Bond's pen of choice.
I almost bought one once, but for the above reasons decided not to. I went with a Cross Townsend in Translucent Green Lacquer instead - very smooth, and pretty.
Where is that, exactly? I look around, I see no habitat destroyed
You must be quite myopic then, because I don't think any reputable scientist believes we are not destroying habitats all around us. You say things are better than 200 years ago, but that is barely an instant in the natural timeframe. We are talking about out impact over the last 1000 years at least.
Perhaps you would also like to look towards the environment outside your own backdoor step. Have you not read about what happens to your old PC's in china when you chuck them away? What about the habitat's destroyed every time there is a major oil spill of a ship on the way to the US?
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. I have an exam on this a week tomorrow, so now I can kid myself that reading slashdot is "revision".
You would clearly have a library of objects (e.g. buildings) on the servers. When a picture is sent, the service would perform some sort of feature extraction, and calculate the invariants of the objects in the scene. It would then see if these objects nearly matched any in the database. If they did, it would project possible matches onto the image and look for edges around the model. If there was good correlation (accepting the fact that the match would not be perfect because of moveable objects) it would return the name of the building.
Prof. Cipolla lectures me on (suprise, surprise...) Computer Vision. You can find his lecture handouts here. (the projection handout, page 46 onwards talks about the process I have just described.)
Nice bug... erm, I mean "feature".
The whole Wiki approach to this is totally wrong, and it echoes the problems with open source development in general.
Apple has it exactly right. There has to be one common standard that EVERYTHING adheres to. There needs to be central control over the UI. No if's, no but's. It can't be continuously changed and updated, it has to be "right" from the start.
One example I am familiar with is in Windows, Ctrl-X cuts text to the clipboard. That works the same in (almost) every application and is (almost) never used to do anything else. Attention to details and conformity like that is a major part of a good UI.
That is the major flaw in Open Source movement. Every developer has their own ideas about how things should work and there is no compulsion for them to make them work in the same way as Project X. Everyone thinks they know best. And at the end of the day, what can you do? They are devoting their time for free to program the software, so why shouldn't it work the way they want?
But hang on, perhaps the "openness" of open source can come to the rescue again... Why couldn't one "body" (e.g. a company) take useful programs and refactor them into a common UI...? Perhaps I'm just ranting now, but this is what open source/linux needs - some central control. OK, so the hardcore kernel hackers will hate this idea - going against the principles of Free software - but a little control is what open source needs to be accepted by Joe Public.
As the speech is much less clear (due to high compression*) than when the person is right in front of you, you feel you need to speak more loudly to make them understand (in normal conversations, if you speak more loudly and annunciate better, people can generally understand more easily). This is exacerbated when they "Pardon?" because it cut out in the middle of a word or something and then you assume they didn't hear you because it wasn't loud enough.
The problem is made even worse by the puny speakers on mobile phones which aren't powerful enough to make the other person heard in an environment with lots of background noise. If you can't hear them, you assume you need to shout to make them hear you. (Just think about this next time you have a normal conversation somewhere with lots of noise).
Another issue for mobile to mobile calls is the microphone picking up background noise and/or not being in the correct position to pick up the other persons voice. Again, this makes the voice too quiet, muffled, etc.
It would be interesting to conduct an experiment to measure the volume at which a person speaks on a phone as the voice signal is made progressively more distorted and/or quieter. I bet there is a strong correlation.
* Mobile phone speech is compressed to just 13kb/s for GSM (using a linear predictive coding) which compares to the, admittedly uncompressed, 64kb/s of normal phone signals
Depends where you are I guess, but some routes near me are unsuitable for using a bike on (i.e. too narrow, too steep, too uneven, too rocky, pedestrian only).
Of course, all your points are valid if you are only talking about running on roads.
Of course, it almost goes without saying that additional information is needed in the form of computer vision, laser sensors, etc. This can be used to avoid obstacles and pick the best route over the terrain.
What I would like to know is whether HDTV is going to be a truly global standard. i.e. will it finally stamp out the issues with PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM ?
However, it is good to point out that Galileo's controversial theory was that the Earth orbits around the sun, and hence the Earth is not the centre of the Universe (as was the religious doctrine of the time).
Wasn't the monitoring done from a little room in the university electronics department? If so, is it still there? I think I went to see that when I was about 12 and I was a bit unimpressed to be honest (I guess I was expecing a NASA control room).
I believe it is possible for the scanners to tell whether the eye is dead (by looking for movement).
This is a reference to John Lydon (of Sex Pistols fame) on ITV's "I'm a celebrity... Get me out of here". ITV is funded by advertising revenue and is nothing to do with the BBC. More details here
I would have thought with advances in solar panels and motors that the new rovers would wipe the floor with the old Russian ones. I guess there are lots more instruments/computers to power and you need higher gain radio transmissions from Mars, but that is still a power of ten difference in speed.
Here is a nice picture too.
It goes on to say "Any all-capital proper-name acronym is, in some house styles, fashioned with a single initial capital if it exceeds four letters (Basic, Unesco, Unicef). It appears the BBC does this with acronyms that exceed three letters. I'm glad I cleared that up for myself
They do seem to keep abbrevations capitalised (e.g. DNA in that article). Strictly speaking, an acronym is an abbrevation that is said as a word, i.e. you say Nasa not N-A-S-A, but you do say D-N-A.
I think I will write to them though because it can't be correct to remove the capitalisation in this way.
CCTV requires someone to actually watch the footage for there to be any real invasion of privacy. Do you honestly think anyone could be bothered to watch 100's of hours of footage on the off chance you picked your nose in one frame?
Now imagine someone is murdered in the otherwise deserted street at 6:00 in the morning. Then the police can look at the tapes and see what happened/who was there. Even then they won't care whether you picked your nose on a tape two weeks previously.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, when you are in public, you can expect other people to see what you are doing. It doesn't make any real difference if it is being filmed. In order for it to be an invasion of privacy they would have to put a camera in your home or somewhere private. I don't think this has happened anywhere yet.
Bottom Line: You're not important and no-one gives a shit about what you do as long as it doesn't affect them.
It is of course very sad for the families, but I bet even they appreciate that those who died would always be left unfulfilled and dissatisfied if they had not taken the chance offered to them (perhaps they would still go even if they knew the consequences..?).
I do not think the actual loss of life was the real disaster: it was seven people who 99.99% of people hadn't even heard of before the accident. I think the true disaster was the tarnishing of a vision: the idea of the human race reaching beyond our home and "exploring the great unknown". The idea that our technology had allowed us to conquer the solar system. And why were we doing it? Just because.
Slightly offtopic, but I really hate it when people ask what the point of space travel is. If those people don't realise, they will NEVER understand why the rest of us look upon astronauts with such envy. In my view, these doubters are missing a key characteristic of humanity - the desire to increase our knowledge and understanding and to make the world a better place.
You are considerably less likely to kill someone else by not crossing at a crosswalk than you are by driving dangerously.
Also, what point is there in crossing at a crosswalk if cars are going too fast to stop?
OK, having re-read the grandparent, I realise that is what he is saying anyway.
I don't know much about this, but would it be possible for the receiving ISP to download most of the email (i.e. all except the last byte) and test that using spam filters? If it tested as likely spam then it could send a bounce to the sending server and abort the download of the rest of the message.
Would this be possible?
Overnight you have eliminated an enormous number of SUV's, 4x4's, etc. All of this without really penalising the people that actually _need_ to use them at all. It is also a good idea purely from a safety point of view, because these larger vehicles are inherently more dangerous for pedestrians and other road users due to their greater momentum, poorer handling and reduced maneovreability
You will probably get a lot of spam on hotmail even if you never post your address anywhere.
+1 True and Informative
Also I don't like the way they try to prevent people from selling them online. OK, so maybe it is best to try out a pen first, but come on - you should get the choice. (I know they can be found online, but not at official suppliers.)
I think the accusations of pretentiousness in other comments are valid, although I can almost excuse that because it is James Bond's pen of choice.
I almost bought one once, but for the above reasons decided not to. I went with a Cross Townsend in Translucent Green Lacquer instead - very smooth, and pretty.
You must be quite myopic then, because I don't think any reputable scientist believes we are not destroying habitats all around us. You say things are better than 200 years ago, but that is barely an instant in the natural timeframe. We are talking about out impact over the last 1000 years at least.
Perhaps you would also like to look towards the environment outside your own backdoor step. Have you not read about what happens to your old PC's in china when you chuck them away? What about the habitat's destroyed every time there is a major oil spill of a ship on the way to the US?