So, I can buy a unique Pasmo card but I have to use a credit card to charge it? So sure - my name is NOT registered to the Pasmo card, but it IS registered to the card used to charge it, and thus I am once again trackable. Unless I use barter or cash to charge it. Oh wait...
No, you can charge them with cash at any train station. Using a credit card is optional.
All they have done on the hardware side is stick a bunch of point grey camera units in a circular holder. Of course it is going to be expensive!
Point grey cameras are indeed convenient for testing, but are not suitable for this at all. A $15 image sensor results in a ~$300 pointgrey camera (not including a lens, which is needed either way).
It could be made a LOT more inexpensive by actually designing the hardware like they implied.
I had it done in Japan, and instead of giving you Valium they have a young female nurse hold your hands:)
The actual procedure was interesting, but I was nervous about accidentally moving my eye to look at the interesting pattern of flashes (although I know it compensates for movement).
My vision was amaaazing for about a week, but then I started to get really dry eyes. Now 3 years later my vision is apparently good in focus, but it is usually blurry because my eyes are so dry. Drops only help for about 5sec.
So it is nice to be able to work etc without glasses/contacts, but at night my vision is terribly blurry unless I can keep my eyes moist.
Make sure you don't have any possible issue with dry eyes before you consider LASIK!
It's not just mathematicians working for the NSA who are at fault; at this point, anyone working there is knowingly helping evil prevail. Anyone who doesn't quit is a scumbag.
If there was no risk of becoming homeless and starving, people would have a lot more choice in the matter...
Of course the problem with placebos is that they essentially require lying to the patient. If you are honest and actually tell the patient "it's just a sugar pill" then it's not going to have any affect.
You would think that, but actually there was a study where the patents were TOLD that it was a placebo (and explained what a placebo is) and it still worked (!). I saw it in a documentary on youtube a week or so ago but can't find it now.
I can't comprehend how someone could not enjoy ANY music, music is the fundamental pre-cursor to language, not only is it deeply ingrained into humans but species as diverse as whales and grasshoppers use music to communicate with each other.
Interesting to know that 1-3% are like me. I will clarify this for you.
I have zero interest in music. I have never bought (or pirated) a CD or mp3 in my life. Why people are so obsessed with music I can't understand at all. It's like how some people looove stamp collecting, I don't understand that obsession either.
It's not a DISlike of music, it's just no interest. Sure some music has a good beat, or a catchy tune, and I won't complain if someone plays music, but I would never actually choose to play music myself.
Besides this I am pretty much the same as everyone else, I'm not autistic or anything. I'm an engineer, with friends and a girlfriend, hobbies and a good job. Music just isn't any more interesting to me than bird noises etc.
I use the stairs when going up to my office in the morning and at lunch. If there are people there, I do my usual 2 steps at a time, fast pace but not enough to make people look at me funny. If there's nobody around, I run up as fast as possible, then recover for a min at the top.
At first I couldn't make it all the way running, but I can get up the 6 floors in ~24 seconds now and can breathe normally enough after that people in the office don't notice. It's not that much, but better than nothing.
It has been shown many times in studies that people are able to read a lot of emotion by looking at another person's eyes.
This is also the main reason most manga and anime authors prefer to draw big eyes. They're a much easier way to transmit emotions than body postures, allowing for a faster drawing process...
That reminds me of something interesting I noticed - in "western" countries the emoticons are focussed on the mouth,:):(:p etc But in Japan, they are mainly about the eyes, like ^_^ (others mangled by slashdot)
What a ridiculously disproportionate penalty, I thought only the US was that screwed up. I blame Sony.
I'm living in Japan, so lately I have been renting a "seedbox" in the Netherlands for $15/month. I can download whatever I want to through the web interface, then copy it via sftp. I'm sure solutions like this will start becoming a lot more common soon.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Yeah, I bet countries like china would never even CONSIDER dosing kids from birth to get an advantage...
I don't know why this is being hyped so much... from my brief look it seems pretty dodgy. I'm not an expert in data transmission, but I have reviewed quite a few papers.
Two main points stand out:
1. They have two lasers of different wavelengths just so they can use the phrase "wavelength division multiplexing", but the lasers point at separate photodiodes! The lasers could be the same wavelength and it would make no difference. Doing this adds nothing to their paper and lowers my impression of the research quality.
2. Their adaptive filter seems to require that the receivers already know the correct data in order to measure the amplitude/phase error and adapt. Why would you need to transmit the data if it is already known at the receiver???
Do you not realize that collision avoidance becomes rather more difficult when the things you're trying to avoid colliding with are themselves moving? They're not setting up a pattern to fly in, the computer is calculating trajectories for each robot such that they won't interfere with each other at any point in the future. A rather taller order.
What collision avoidance? They are all externally controlled, and the controller knows their position to within a few mm due to the very expensive vicon system they are using. All they are doing is moving along preplanned and precalculated trajectories.
As a robotics researcher I'm not really impressed. External control and localisation removes 99% of of the difficulty of the problem. It also makes this research useless for any actual real-world function, it's only good for fancy demos in their specially prepared room. If they did that with only onboard sensors and control, THEN I would be impressed.
I wouldn't call this laser "the same manner as visible-light lasers" really, it lacks one of the fundamental features of a normal laser - self amplification via feedback from mirrors. It sounds like this could be the _basis_ for a laser, as a pump source causes superluminescence, but without feedback it won't be particularly directional. Perhaps if it can be triggered to start the avalanche at one end a directional burst could be achieved though, kind of like a nitrogen laser.
I work in Japan (Tokyo) as an engineer in a small company. I was worried about extreme hours and no holidays when I started, but it is actually OK. Official hours are 9-6, and people actually start to leave around 6:30. The boss is indeed a 50 year old man, but he leaves around 7 (maybe cause he's not married). People sit/sleep at their desks during the hour off for lunch, but nobody does any work unless something is really urgent. I usually leave about 7-7:30, but I leave at 6 sometimes and it's fine.
Over the new year holidays most people took about a week off, but that's about it for the year besides public holidays. There is "golden week" too though, where there is a small gap between a bunch of public holidays, and most people take those off.
It may be different in large rigidly controlled companies though.
This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?
Xilinx (one of the two big FPGA companies) very recently released their "Zynq" family of combined CPU+FPGAs. They contain a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 running at 800 MHz and a pretty decent amount of 28nm FPGA logic, with interconnects between the two. That is basically what you are describing I think. http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm
If these algorithms are profitable they ultimately buy low and sell high, which is good for society. When you buy low, you're providing cash to those who need it most (therefore the willingness to sell low) and when you sell high, you provide the asset when it's needed most. Essentially, a profitable trader (computer or not) helps moderate markets by preventing them from going too low or too high, and pricing things correctly is important to society because resources are allocated by price. I know it's trendy to bash finance but it has an important function in society.
What you described is how trading SHOULD work, where a trader holds a certain stock for at least hours or days. You are correct that this is good and stabilises things.
How it actually seems to happen these days is computers buy stocks on minor fluctuations, then sell them on another fluctuation a couple of microseconds later. That doesn't seem to provide any useful function to me.
Believe it or not sometimes people are better at solving certain problems than computers. This is one of those fuzzy problems with lots of irregularities that a human is excellent at working out with just a little help from a stopwatch.
Actually this is a perfectly normal problem where the results you get out of a computer will depend a lot on how well you define the problem. If you define the shape of the lawn, the size of the cutter, and the turning characteristics of the mower accurately, I have little doubt that a computer can come up with a more optimal solution than a human (even if only by a small amount). A human with a stopwatch is unlikely to try more than about 15 different routes while a computer in simulation can try millions of routes in a short time.
The question is really "is it worth it". A human can easily come up with a decent route just by looking at the lawn, so it is probably not worth the time of making a simulation and running an optimisation to save 5% of the time unless you are a professional golf course mower.
I find it baffling that, in this day and age, one can still read news articles using the imperial system. About space travel, of all things.
Well 6,600 pounds is 2,994 kg, so I suspect that the actual value is 3,000 kg and it has been converted to pounds for for certain poor backwards readers.
The big question though is one that nobody can answer yet with any certainty... will google+ manage to draw enough people away from facebook... will people who already use facebook for everything see a reason to switch... I guess only time will tell.
I expect that almost all the 10 million google+ users also have facebook. What I and probably many people will do it use both for a while and then just stop updating the one they like least. So google+ may be gaining users rapidly, but it isn't actually taking many from facebook...yet.
When I look at a timepiece it's rare that I want to know what time it is. Much more often I want to know "how long since" or "how long until" something. An analog display gives me this info much more quickly than digital.
I agree, though I think that personally I am usually looking for what time it is *not* (not time to go home yet, not time for the meeting etc).
It's funny to ask people what time it is immediately after they have looked at their watch. Most of the time they will have to look at it again, because they don't actually process the time but only notice what time it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I can buy a unique Pasmo card but I have to use a credit card to charge it? So sure - my name is NOT registered to the Pasmo card, but it IS registered to the card used to charge it, and thus I am once again trackable. Unless I use barter or cash to charge it. Oh wait...
No, you can charge them with cash at any train station.
Using a credit card is optional.
That is hardly an "open source" camera.
All they have done on the hardware side is stick a bunch of point grey camera units in a circular holder.
Of course it is going to be expensive!
Point grey cameras are indeed convenient for testing, but are not suitable for this at all.
A $15 image sensor results in a ~$300 pointgrey camera (not including a lens, which is needed either way).
It could be made a LOT more inexpensive by actually designing the hardware like they implied.
I had it done in Japan, and instead of giving you Valium they have a young female nurse hold your hands :)
The actual procedure was interesting, but I was nervous about accidentally moving my eye to look at the interesting pattern of flashes (although I know it compensates for movement).
My vision was amaaazing for about a week, but then I started to get really dry eyes.
Now 3 years later my vision is apparently good in focus, but it is usually blurry because my eyes are so dry.
Drops only help for about 5sec.
So it is nice to be able to work etc without glasses/contacts, but at night my vision is terribly blurry unless I can keep my eyes moist.
Make sure you don't have any possible issue with dry eyes before you consider LASIK!
It's not just mathematicians working for the NSA who are at fault; at this point, anyone working there is knowingly helping evil prevail. Anyone who doesn't quit is a scumbag.
If there was no risk of becoming homeless and starving, people would have a lot more choice in the matter...
Of course the problem with placebos is that they essentially require lying to the patient. If you are honest and actually tell the patient "it's just a sugar pill" then it's not going to have any affect.
You would think that, but actually there was a study where the patents were TOLD that it was a placebo (and explained what a placebo is) and it still worked (!). I saw it in a documentary on youtube a week or so ago but can't find it now.
Basically, brains are wierd.
I can't comprehend how someone could not enjoy ANY music, music is the fundamental pre-cursor to language, not only is it deeply ingrained into humans but species as diverse as whales and grasshoppers use music to communicate with each other.
Interesting to know that 1-3% are like me.
I will clarify this for you.
I have zero interest in music. I have never bought (or pirated) a CD or mp3 in my life.
Why people are so obsessed with music I can't understand at all.
It's like how some people looove stamp collecting, I don't understand that obsession either.
It's not a DISlike of music, it's just no interest.
Sure some music has a good beat, or a catchy tune, and I won't complain if someone plays music, but I would never actually choose to play music myself.
Besides this I am pretty much the same as everyone else, I'm not autistic or anything.
I'm an engineer, with friends and a girlfriend, hobbies and a good job.
Music just isn't any more interesting to me than bird noises etc.
I use the stairs when going up to my office in the morning and at lunch.
If there are people there, I do my usual 2 steps at a time, fast pace but not enough to make people look at me funny.
If there's nobody around, I run up as fast as possible, then recover for a min at the top.
At first I couldn't make it all the way running, but I can get up the 6 floors in ~24 seconds now and can breathe normally enough after that people in the office don't notice. It's not that much, but better than nothing.
It has been shown many times in studies that people are able to read a lot of emotion by looking at another person's eyes.
This is also the main reason most manga and anime authors prefer to draw big eyes. They're a much easier way to transmit emotions than body postures, allowing for a faster drawing process...
That reminds me of something interesting I noticed - in "western" countries the emoticons are focussed on the mouth, :) :( :p etc
But in Japan, they are mainly about the eyes, like ^_^ (others mangled by slashdot)
What a ridiculously disproportionate penalty, I thought only the US was that screwed up.
I blame Sony.
I'm living in Japan, so lately I have been renting a "seedbox" in the Netherlands for $15/month.
I can download whatever I want to through the web interface, then copy it via sftp.
I'm sure solutions like this will start becoming a lot more common soon.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Yeah, I bet countries like china would never even CONSIDER dosing kids from birth to get an advantage...
Try looking at http://www.4dsystems.com.au/
They sell touchscreens around that size with a controller that you can either program using a C-like language, or send commands to from an AVR etc.
I don't know why this is being hyped so much... from my brief look it seems pretty dodgy.
I'm not an expert in data transmission, but I have reviewed quite a few papers.
Two main points stand out:
1. They have two lasers of different wavelengths just so they can use the phrase "wavelength division multiplexing", but the lasers point at separate photodiodes! The lasers could be the same wavelength and it would make no difference.
Doing this adds nothing to their paper and lowers my impression of the research quality.
2. Their adaptive filter seems to require that the receivers already know the correct data in order to measure the amplitude/phase error and adapt.
Why would you need to transmit the data if it is already known at the receiver???
I would reject this paper.
OK, that's not true, I stopped taking the Olympics seriously when Roy and HG got involved.
Roy and HG's coverage is the only one worth watching these days.
Do you not realize that collision avoidance becomes rather more difficult when the things you're trying to avoid colliding with are themselves moving? They're not setting up a pattern to fly in, the computer is calculating trajectories for each robot such that they won't interfere with each other at any point in the future. A rather taller order.
What collision avoidance?
They are all externally controlled, and the controller knows their position to within a few mm due to the very expensive vicon system they are using.
All they are doing is moving along preplanned and precalculated trajectories.
As a robotics researcher I'm not really impressed.
External control and localisation removes 99% of of the difficulty of the problem.
It also makes this research useless for any actual real-world function, it's only good for fancy demos in their specially prepared room.
If they did that with only onboard sensors and control, THEN I would be impressed.
I wouldn't call this laser "the same manner as visible-light lasers" really, it lacks one of the fundamental features of a normal laser - self amplification via feedback from mirrors.
It sounds like this could be the _basis_ for a laser, as a pump source causes superluminescence, but without feedback it won't be particularly directional.
Perhaps if it can be triggered to start the avalanche at one end a directional burst could be achieved though, kind of like a nitrogen laser.
I work in Japan (Tokyo) as an engineer in a small company. I was worried about extreme hours and no holidays when I started, but it is actually OK.
Official hours are 9-6, and people actually start to leave around 6:30. The boss is indeed a 50 year old man, but he leaves around 7 (maybe cause he's not married).
People sit/sleep at their desks during the hour off for lunch, but nobody does any work unless something is really urgent.
I usually leave about 7-7:30, but I leave at 6 sometimes and it's fine.
Over the new year holidays most people took about a week off, but that's about it for the year besides public holidays. There is "golden week" too though, where there is a small gap between a bunch of public holidays, and most people take those off.
It may be different in large rigidly controlled companies though.
Translation (probably):
"We make things run in parallel".
Doesn't sound so impressive though does it!
This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?
Xilinx (one of the two big FPGA companies) very recently released their "Zynq" family of combined CPU+FPGAs. They contain a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 running at 800 MHz and a pretty decent amount of 28nm FPGA logic, with interconnects between the two. That is basically what you are describing I think.
http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm
If these algorithms are profitable they ultimately buy low and sell high, which is good for society. When you buy low, you're providing cash to those who need it most (therefore the willingness to sell low) and when you sell high, you provide the asset when it's needed most. Essentially, a profitable trader (computer or not) helps moderate markets by preventing them from going too low or too high, and pricing things correctly is important to society because resources are allocated by price. I know it's trendy to bash finance but it has an important function in society.
What you described is how trading SHOULD work, where a trader holds a certain stock for at least hours or days.
You are correct that this is good and stabilises things.
How it actually seems to happen these days is computers buy stocks on minor fluctuations, then sell them on another fluctuation a couple of microseconds later.
That doesn't seem to provide any useful function to me.
Believe it or not sometimes people are better at solving certain problems than computers. This is one of those fuzzy problems with lots of irregularities that a human is excellent at working out with just a little help from a stopwatch.
Actually this is a perfectly normal problem where the results you get out of a computer will depend a lot on how well you define the problem. If you define the shape of the lawn, the size of the cutter, and the turning characteristics of the mower accurately, I have little doubt that a computer can come up with a more optimal solution than a human (even if only by a small amount). A human with a stopwatch is unlikely to try more than about 15 different routes while a computer in simulation can try millions of routes in a short time.
The question is really "is it worth it". A human can easily come up with a decent route just by looking at the lawn, so it is probably not worth the time of making a simulation and running an optimisation to save 5% of the time unless you are a professional golf course mower.
I find it baffling that, in this day and age, one can still read news articles using the imperial system. About space travel, of all things.
Well 6,600 pounds is 2,994 kg, so I suspect that the actual value is 3,000 kg and it has been converted to pounds for for certain poor backwards readers.
100% true. also, does anybody know of a distro that can be installed like wubi?
Linux Mint?
Note that most FPGAs (and all of Xilinx's) are SRAM based - the bitstream has to generally be loaded from an external memory IC at boot-time.
Not true, the Xilinx Spartan-3AN can store the bitstream in internal flash memory.
That is the only family with that feature though.
The big question though is one that nobody can answer yet with any certainty... will google+ manage to draw enough people away from facebook... will people who already use facebook for everything see a reason to switch... I guess only time will tell.
I expect that almost all the 10 million google+ users also have facebook. What I and probably many people will do it use both for a while and then just stop updating the one they like least. So google+ may be gaining users rapidly, but it isn't actually taking many from facebook...yet.
When I look at a timepiece it's rare that I want to know what time it is. Much more often I want to know "how long since" or "how long until" something. An analog display gives me this info much more quickly than digital.
I agree, though I think that personally I am usually looking for what time it is *not* (not time to go home yet, not time for the meeting etc).
It's funny to ask people what time it is immediately after they have looked at their watch.
Most of the time they will have to look at it again, because they don't actually process the time but only notice what time it is not.