The first rule of war is 'Forget the Rules'. The enemy isn't going to follow the rules.
I.E.Ds are against the rules. Some I.E.Ds could be considered to be simple robotic devices.
The general conventions surrounding warfare and the treatment of prisoners have already been set out.
There is no difference between killing the enemy with a standard tank which is a machine, a remote controlled tank which is a machine, a robotic tank which is also a machine, or a robot which is, yet again, a machine.
One would hope that a machine of war is designed well enough so as not to kill your own people. Then again, we've been accidentally shooting, bombing, and poisoning our own people occasionally since the beginning of time. So there'd be no difference if a robotic tank messed up as opposed to a human driven one. The only real difference would be the operator could just lie and say "There was a malfunction" instead of lying and saying:
"I thought I heard the order to drop bombs. We were under fire. We didn't know it was 'friendlies' performing an excercise... It was the 'fog of war' ". [This quote brought to you by the U.S. National Guard in Afghanistan]
People who operate machines of war never just own up and say, "Jeeze, I screwed up and killed 9 of our own people. I'd like to send my personal appologies to thier widows and kids."
I agree that tools may be able to provide some solutions, however, it has not been shown that these tools will provide better medical treatment or follow up than having well trained diagnositicians, a current medical reference set, and a good staff.
In fact such tools can make diagnosis worse since a medical database does not and cannot have the same level of diagnostic intelligence as a human doctor.
Another issue is 'Who produces the system'. We currently have a problem with doctors who have been trained with textbooks produced by drug companies. There are obvious biases in many texts to deferr the doctor to the use of a product rather than possible better treatments.
It's well and fine to have a statistic like 161 exabytes of data, but what's the point. Is that data any more useful to people than the selective data that was used to run the world 50, 60 or 100 years ago?
We as individuals are only capable of assimilating a limited amount of information so most of those exabytes are just rolling around like so many gears in an old machine. If they are minimally used or never used they simply become a storage liability.
As an example, the internet has not made *better* doctors. Even with all the latest information at thier finger tips professionals are still only the sum of what they can mentally absorb. Too much data, or wrong data (ie: wikipedia) can lead to the same levels of inefficiency seen prior to the 'information age'. What would a single doctor do with 160 exabytes of reading material, schedule it into the work day?
Also, if the amount of information is rated purely on bytes but not in *useful content* the stats get skewed. Things like movies and music should be ranked by the length of script and/or notation. That would make the numbers much less than 160 exabytes.
Saying that the whole world produced 160 exabytes of information is like saying the whole world used 50 billion tonnes of water....was that water just running down the pipe into the sewar or did somebody actually drink it to sustain life?
I looked at the technical specs on Apple's website.
Now, although many cellphones come with a GPS chip built in, There is no explicit mention of GPS in the tech specs.
Also, it would be a definate leap in technology if plugin applications could get access to an available GPS stream. Having a GPS chip in your cellphone is one thing, being able to use it in applications is another.
I'm sure this is a nice device but, unless it has a GPS in it that can be programmed around, this phone is as useless as any other geographically crippled handheld.
The ability to look up maps on google earth is nice but, unless you actually *know* where you are, you may as well be reading comic book for directions.
"hat's actually a pretty interesting concept. If there is truly a large methane lake, could we build a space probe boat? It could cover a lot of area quickly, and it could drop a tethered instrument to collect deep samples. It would be an interesting and unique engineering problem."
Probably better off with an amphibious version of the mars rovers.....
There has already been a probe. Huygens landed in 2005, but not in a dark backscatter area.
"Does the low gravity, (presumably) high surface stress, and large lake size create large waves? The circulation is already known to be vigorous to produce ice-sand dunes. That would make an interesting Master's project. I don't think there are *any* other driving mechanisms other than wind."
Titan has an average surface pressure of about ~150 kPa and it is atmosphere is 98% nitrogen. So, the physics of the atmosphere should relatively the same as Earth at ~101 kPa except for the relative planetary gravitational difference ~1/10 Earth. The difference in gravity would make the winds continue moving in a hypermotive manner compared to earth, possibly even following the rotation of the more dense parts of the planet (turning core??).
Titan also has cryovolcanism due to the internal structure of a very large and solid core with a layer of liquid and then a frozen crust. A very small tidal pull on the core, relative to the crust, should make things crack and squirt all over the place. The gravitational effect of other local bodies would be marginal but perhaps enough to drive some of the volcanism. Again,this is just speculation on my part. It's difficult to tell how much sloshing the core does unless a series of seismometers were planted on the surface.
As you note, regarding wind, that would likely be the main driver of any wave action.
Wave/swell detection has already been done for ship wakes and large oceanic swells on Earth. I could dig up a link or two for you but I know there is already a series of techniques for this.
My thought is that 500 metre data covers so much area, the small kinds of waves one might see on a reasonably static body of fluid would just get lost in the spatial averaging. (ie: How big is a ship wake and what resolution do you need to see that?)
There is also the question, 'How much wave action can one expect in this situation?'. On Earth there are huge mechanisms that drive wave action; lunar tides, atmospheric weather, geothermal activity, geophysical activity, etc.. How many of these driving mechanisms are actually present on Titan and are there any additional ones that we aren't ware of yet? We would have to examine wave acation scales based on the understanding of the fluid physical model for Titan and liquid methane, as opposed to a nice warm Earth with water.
"Increased spatial resolution won't help you see 50 km diameter lakes any better."
Better spatial resolution will help in detection of waves. Even at 10-25 metre resolution the experiment would tell us a bit more. At 500 metres things like that look pretty much static.
There is no mention as to what incidence angles or techniques were used with the SAR, so my thoughts regarding differential analysis for liquid waves are purely speculation.
As far as I could tell, from the information provided, the data was a single pass; good for tourism, mediocre for science. But hey!, we learned a lot with things like CZCS and early Landsat too, so hooray for our team.
It would certainly be nice to see the original raw data and documentation for that experiment.
As for my "cheap" comment. I belive I mentioned to someone else that it was a bit over the top, and I apologised.
"The images are blatantly false-colour. The blue areas meant to potray liquid (making people think of water) but could just as easily be ice or lava flows."
Actually the intensity of the backscatter data is what is being shown. The brightness is logarithmic, therefore anything dark is very smooth and anything really bright is very bumpy. Since it is a log scale and there is a good idea what kind of backscatter to absorption ratio to expect from the synthetic aperture radar for various targets, they can conclude that the dark patches are glassy/ice-rink flat.
They can also conclude that the dark patches could be liquid based on change detection, provided they have another series of overlapping data to compare. If the glassy areas undulate slightly between images (waves) they are probably liquid.
Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed. NASA just cheaped out.
Oh, come on. People have no idea that thier soap is made from boiled cows and birth control pills made from horse urine and toothpaste flouride is made from fertilizer by-products.
People have this weird 'soylent green' mentality that as long as they don't know where stuff comes from then it must be made from flowers and sea shells by little sterile elves.
I guess if we boiled people and made soap out of that it would be OK too. I mean, 'it's healthy and it's been processed [boiled] to make it unoffensive', right?
Not being delusional about how close we are, as a society, to still living in caves makes me immature?
Or are you the guy that snips the cow snouts.... Sorry, I wasn't disrespecting your job or anything. After all people do buy your product.
"They can't engineer their way out of anti-consumer corporate shackles."
They could 'Union Carbide'.
After the Bopal incident in India, Union Carbide changed names to avoid the association of the trade name with the poisoning of hundreds of people. 'Praxair' was born.
Microsoft could re-brand as a bunch of smaller more focused divisions, get rid of the old logos, have the old guard make themselves scarce, and end things on the upside rather than waiting for an eventual nose dive into obscurity; a la SCO.
"Standard glucosamine is made out of shellfish shells."
Somebody has been pulling one over on you. Glucosamine is a slaughter house product made from cow snouts. Usually the little piece of cartilage right between the nostrils.
There is a special job for the person who uses the special snout punch snips to extricate the precious tissue from a big pile of cow heads all day long. I wonder what that person eats for lunch...
Now, let's talk now about glycerine soap and where all that glycerine comes from.... Same place.
MMMMmmmm....Let's all eat our cow puss and bathe with it too.
I remember reading a book by Bill Gates called "The Road Ahead" (or something like that). In this book I remember him writing about 'Wang Computers' and how advanced they were for the times and then how they declined because of a series bad choices in focus.
Microsoft is the latest Wang Computers. Many will follow. The problem with Microsoft is an unwillingness to let go of the past (ie: Balmer should have retired WITH Gates).
In order to have new ideas you need new blood. You need young people on the ground floor making decisions about product, not people in the ivory tower from 3 generations ago.
If Microsoft wants new product they need to loosen the reins and invite ingenuity and creativity. Linear thinking is tantamount to extinction.
Most of the stuff in the anarchists cookbook is wrong the rest is laughable. If you want to blow off a limb doing something stupid, go hunting with the vice president instead. At least he'll do it right.
Is it just me or is the whole idea of this school flawed.
First off, *THE BUILDING*; In this day and age of networks why would you need to spend money on a school building when the same school network could reach the kids home.
Now, to be honest, I understand the need to warehouse the kids during the day while both parents work at thier four, 18 hour, low paid jobs. There is also the question of socialization of children and the desire to promote the group dynamic. These things can be done in much better ways, that are far more productive and wholesome that the current 'factory' method.
The problem here is that Microsoft has used traditional linear thinking to design this school. There is no lateral design going on here. A blackboard, which is completely unnecessary by the way, may be electronic but it's still just a blackboard.
How about this system as an alternative:
a.)The kids get laptops and a high-speed connection at home.
b.)There are no schools per se, just testing facilities that allow testing of attained skills at all educational levels. These facilities also have regularly scheduled socialization events for various school ages that *must* be attended. Those found not to be socializing at these events are truant. Two events per week for pre-teens, one event per week for teens.
c.)Students are required to meet with instructor/counsellors once each week, online, to make sure everyones education stays on the rails.
There are benefits of this type of system.
The number of school buildings required by the community drops by factor of ten. This reduces the amount of money required to maintain property, as opposed to maintaining educational standards.
The amount of *negative* social contact kids get from schools is minimized.
The positive aspects of school are strictly monitored and standardised.
The use of open coursewares, where standard curriculum is designed and agreed upon by qualified people can be promoted. (ie: opensource school curriculum)
It removes the parents ability to blame someone else for 'Johnny's' behaviour problems. Some weaker parents will step up to the plate for a change.
Most of the things people consider to be recycling
are actually *NOT*.
Making rubber sidewalks from old tires is *DOWNCYCLING*.
The process of making the sidewalks contaminates the
rubber material so it can't be used again. What do
we do with the rubber sidewalks when they are no good anymore?
True recycling would turn those old tires back into tires
again. Making the tire companies responsible for deposit,
return and recycling services for thier product
(back into tires again) would be more to the point.
Perhaps we would then see tire technology change
so that the product could be remanufactured easily.
The same goes for fabrics made from old plastic
milk bottles. What do you do with the rags when
they are not of use again?
Sooner or later downcycled stuff ends up in the
landfill.
It's better to make materials from renewable sources
that break down without landfilling. ie: instead
of styrene foams use silica ceramic foams.
The problem is energy and the cost of production
for these newer materials. You may save landfill space
but you burn huge amounts of energy to produce them.
>The other thing is about the "airbrushing UFOs out of photos.."
The idea of UFOs in photos is interesting and very telling since there is no such thng as a satellite *PHOTO* anymore much less the need to *AIRBRUSH* a photo. These must have been rather old sat images....
Satellite images have been digital since the mid 1970s. It's far more convenient to use a downlink to get the pics than try to spot a parachuting film canister at sea.
There needs to be a proper ISO specification for April fools. I know that the 2.6 kernel for linux has the beginnings of this and there has been some word from MS insiders that similar technology could be built into Vista this year (but would cause more delays).
Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman are both bullish (gnuish) regarding the addition of AF technology to linux under the 2.6 kernel.
There was also a write up recently in Dr. Dobbs Journal regarding the use of ISO AF in the development of frontline middleware tool chains. These would be used in a purely algorithmic sense to gleen statistical data from long haul fiber.
But without a proper ISO spec it would appear that AF may stay in purely in the domain of temporal periodics.
Every 100 years somebody (spelled *F*O*O*L*) stands up and says "We've reached the limits of the known world. All that can be discovered has been discovered.". Each time, maybe 10 years later, there's a big discovery right after that and everything is unknown again.
Pretending to be able to predict the future is rather prattish.
Slashdot Mirror
The first rule of war is 'Forget the Rules'.
The enemy isn't going to follow the rules.
I.E.Ds are against the rules. Some I.E.Ds
could be considered to be simple robotic devices.
The general conventions surrounding warfare
and the treatment of prisoners have already
been set out.
There is no difference between killing the
enemy with a standard tank which is a machine,
a remote controlled tank which is a machine,
a robotic tank which is also a machine, or
a robot which is, yet again, a machine.
One would hope that a machine of war is designed
well enough so as not to kill your own people.
Then again, we've been accidentally shooting, bombing, and
poisoning our own people occasionally since the beginning of time.
So there'd be no difference if a robotic tank messed up as
opposed to a human driven one. The only real difference would be
the operator could just lie and say "There was a malfunction" instead
of lying and saying:
"I thought I heard the order to drop bombs.
We were under fire. We didn't know it was 'friendlies'
performing an excercise...
It was the 'fog of war' ".
[This quote brought to you by the U.S. National Guard in Afghanistan]
People who operate machines of war never just own up and say,
"Jeeze, I screwed up and killed 9 of our own people. I'd like to
send my personal appologies to thier widows and kids."
So, robots...what the hell is the difference?
I agree that tools may be able to provide some solutions, however, it
has not been shown that these tools will provide better medical treatment
or follow up than having well trained diagnositicians, a current medical
reference set, and a good staff.
In fact such tools can make diagnosis worse since a medical database
does not and cannot have the same level of diagnostic intelligence
as a human doctor.
Another issue is 'Who produces the system'.
We currently have a problem with doctors who have been trained with textbooks
produced by drug companies. There are obvious biases in many texts to deferr
the doctor to the use of a product rather than possible better treatments.
It's well and fine to have a statistic like 161 exabytes
...was that water just running down the pipe into the sewar or
of data, but what's the point. Is that data any more useful
to people than the selective data that was used to run the world
50, 60 or 100 years ago?
We as individuals are only capable of assimilating a limited amount
of information so most of those exabytes are just rolling around
like so many gears in an old machine. If they are minimally used or
never used they simply become a storage liability.
As an example, the internet has not made *better* doctors.
Even with all the latest information at thier finger tips
professionals are still only the sum of what they can
mentally absorb. Too much data, or wrong data (ie: wikipedia)
can lead to the same levels of inefficiency seen prior to
the 'information age'. What would a single doctor do with
160 exabytes of reading material, schedule it into the work day?
Also, if the amount of information is rated purely on bytes
but not in *useful content* the stats get skewed. Things like
movies and music should be ranked by the length of script
and/or notation. That would make the numbers much less than
160 exabytes.
Saying that the whole world produced 160 exabytes of information
is like saying the whole world used 50 billion tonnes of water.
did somebody actually drink it to sustain life?
Mechanistic stats are stupid.
Apparently Google employees eat crap.
All Microsoft needs to do is wait a couple years
and Google will just die of a heart attack...
I guess you don't need to be smart to be an engineer.
I looked at the technical specs on Apple's website.
Now, although many cellphones come with a GPS chip built in,
There is no explicit mention of GPS in the tech specs.
Also, it would be a definate leap in technology if plugin
applications could get access to an available GPS stream.
Having a GPS chip in your cellphone is one thing, being able
to use it in applications is another.
I'm sure this is a nice device but, unless
it has a GPS in it that can be programmed
around, this phone is as useless as any
other geographically crippled handheld.
The ability to look up maps on google earth
is nice but, unless you actually *know*
where you are, you may as well be reading
comic book for directions.
"hat's actually a pretty interesting concept. If there is truly a large methane lake, could we build a space probe boat? It could cover a lot of area quickly, and it could drop a tethered instrument to collect deep samples. It would be an interesting and unique engineering problem."
Probably better off with an amphibious version of the mars rovers.....
There has already been a probe. Huygens landed in 2005, but not in a dark backscatter area.
"Does the low gravity, (presumably) high surface stress, and large lake size create large waves? The circulation is already known to be vigorous to produce ice-sand dunes. That would make an interesting Master's project. I don't think there are *any* other driving mechanisms other than wind."
,this is just speculation on my part.
Titan has an average surface pressure of about ~150 kPa and it is atmosphere is 98% nitrogen.
So, the physics of the atmosphere should relatively the same as Earth at ~101 kPa except for
the relative planetary gravitational difference ~1/10 Earth. The difference in gravity
would make the winds continue moving in a hypermotive manner compared to earth, possibly
even following the rotation of the more dense parts of the planet (turning core??).
Titan also has cryovolcanism due to the internal structure of a very large and solid core
with a layer of liquid and then a frozen crust. A very small tidal pull on the core,
relative to the crust, should make things crack and squirt all over the place.
The gravitational effect of other local bodies would be marginal but perhaps enough
to drive some of the volcanism. Again
It's difficult to tell how much sloshing the core does unless a series of seismometers
were planted on the surface.
As you note, regarding wind, that would likely be the main driver of any wave action.
Wave/swell detection has already been done for ship wakes and
large oceanic swells on Earth. I could dig up a link or two for you
but I know there is already a series of techniques for this.
My thought is that 500 metre data covers so much area, the small kinds
of waves one might see on a reasonably static body of fluid would just get
lost in the spatial averaging.
(ie: How big is a ship wake and what resolution do you need to see that?)
There is also the question, 'How much wave action can one expect in this situation?'.
On Earth there are huge mechanisms that drive wave action; lunar tides, atmospheric weather,
geothermal activity, geophysical activity, etc.. How many of these driving mechanisms are
actually present on Titan and are there any additional ones that we aren't ware of yet?
We would have to examine wave acation scales based on the
understanding of the fluid physical model for Titan and liquid methane, as opposed to
a nice warm Earth with water.
"Increased spatial resolution won't help you see 50 km diameter lakes any better."
Better spatial resolution will help in detection of waves. Even at 10-25 metre resolution
the experiment would tell us a bit more. At 500 metres things like that look pretty much static.
There is no mention as to what incidence angles or techniques were used with the SAR,
so my thoughts regarding differential analysis for liquid waves are purely speculation.
As far as I could tell, from the information provided, the data was a single pass;
good for tourism, mediocre for science. But hey!, we learned a lot with things like
CZCS and early Landsat too, so hooray for our team.
It would certainly be nice to see the original raw data and documentation for that experiment.
As for my "cheap" comment. I belive I mentioned to someone else that it was a bit over the top,
and I apologised.
They should just land a probe on it....
"Cheaped out? "
Yeah, that was a bit over the top. Sorry about that.
"The images are blatantly false-colour. The blue areas meant to potray liquid (making people think of water) but could just as easily be ice or lava flows."
Actually the intensity of the backscatter data is what is being shown.
The brightness is logarithmic, therefore anything dark is very smooth
and anything really bright is very bumpy. Since it is a log scale and
there is a good idea what kind of backscatter to absorption ratio to expect
from the synthetic aperture radar for various targets, they can conclude that
the dark patches are glassy/ice-rink flat.
They can also conclude that the dark patches could be liquid based on
change detection, provided they have another series of overlapping data
to compare. If the glassy areas undulate slightly between images (waves)
they are probably liquid.
Having noted this, 500 metres is kind of crappy resolution for
SAR data. You'd think they'd make a closer flyby or put a better
instrument onboard. I believe 1 (one) metre resolution SAR was available
from instruments at the same altitude when cassini was designed.
NASA just cheaped out.
Oh, come on.
People have no idea that thier soap is
made from boiled cows and birth control
pills made from horse urine and toothpaste
flouride is made from fertilizer by-products.
People have this weird 'soylent green' mentality
that as long as they don't know where stuff comes
from then it must be made from flowers and sea shells
by little sterile elves.
I guess if we boiled people and made soap out of
that it would be OK too. I mean,
'it's healthy and it's been processed [boiled] to make it unoffensive', right?
Not being delusional about how close we are, as a society,
to still living in caves makes me immature?
Or are you the guy that snips the cow snouts....
Sorry, I wasn't disrespecting your job or anything.
After all people do buy your product.
"They can't engineer their way out of anti-consumer corporate shackles."
They could 'Union Carbide'.
After the Bopal incident in India, Union Carbide changed names to avoid
the association of the trade name with the poisoning of hundreds of
people. 'Praxair' was born.
Microsoft could re-brand as a bunch of smaller more focused divisions,
get rid of the old logos, have the old guard make themselves scarce,
and end things on the upside rather than waiting for an eventual
nose dive into obscurity; a la SCO.
"Standard glucosamine is made out of shellfish shells."
Somebody has been pulling one over on you.
Glucosamine is a slaughter house product made from
cow snouts. Usually the little piece of cartilage
right between the nostrils.
There is a special job for the person
who uses the special snout punch snips to
extricate the precious tissue from a big
pile of cow heads all day long.
I wonder what that person eats for lunch...
Now, let's talk now about glycerine soap and where
all that glycerine comes from....
Same place.
MMMMmmmm....Let's all eat our cow puss
and bathe with it too.
I remember reading a book by Bill Gates called "The Road Ahead"
(or something like that). In this book I remember him writing about
'Wang Computers' and how advanced they were for the times and then
how they declined because of a series bad choices in focus.
Microsoft is the latest Wang Computers. Many will follow.
The problem with Microsoft is an unwillingness to let go
of the past (ie: Balmer should have retired WITH Gates).
In order to have new ideas you need new blood. You need
young people on the ground floor making decisions about product,
not people in the ivory tower from 3 generations ago.
If Microsoft wants new product they need to loosen the
reins and invite ingenuity and creativity. Linear
thinking is tantamount to extinction.
My 2 bits...
Most of the stuff in the anarchists cookbook is wrong
the rest is laughable. If you want to blow off
a limb doing something stupid, go hunting with
the vice president instead. At least he'll do it right.
Dude, yes I am.
Take a flying leap.
Is it just me or is the whole idea of this school flawed.
First off, *THE BUILDING*; In this day and age of networks
why would you need to spend money on a school building when
the same school network could reach the kids home.
Now, to be honest, I understand the need to warehouse the kids
during the day while both parents work at thier four, 18 hour,
low paid jobs. There is also the question of socialization of
children and the desire to promote the group dynamic. These
things can be done in much better ways, that are far more
productive and wholesome that the current 'factory' method.
The problem here is that Microsoft has used traditional linear
thinking to design this school. There is no lateral design going
on here. A blackboard, which is completely unnecessary by the way,
may be electronic but it's still just a blackboard.
How about this system as an alternative:
a.)The kids get laptops and a high-speed connection at home.
b.)There are no schools per se, just testing facilities that
allow testing of attained skills at all educational levels.
These facilities also have regularly scheduled socialization
events for various school ages that *must* be attended.
Those found not to be socializing at these events are truant.
Two events per week for pre-teens, one event per week for teens.
c.)Students are required to meet with instructor/counsellors
once each week, online, to make sure everyones education stays
on the rails.
There are benefits of this type of system.
The number of school buildings required by the community drops
by factor of ten. This reduces the amount of money required
to maintain property, as opposed to maintaining educational standards.
The amount of *negative* social contact kids get from schools is
minimized.
The positive aspects of school are strictly monitored and
standardised.
The use of open coursewares, where standard curriculum is
designed and agreed upon by qualified people can be promoted.
(ie: opensource school curriculum)
It removes the parents ability to blame someone else for
'Johnny's' behaviour problems. Some weaker parents will step
up to the plate for a change.
Most of the things people consider to be recycling are actually *NOT*. Making rubber sidewalks from old tires is *DOWNCYCLING*. The process of making the sidewalks contaminates the rubber material so it can't be used again. What do we do with the rubber sidewalks when they are no good anymore? True recycling would turn those old tires back into tires again. Making the tire companies responsible for deposit, return and recycling services for thier product (back into tires again) would be more to the point. Perhaps we would then see tire technology change so that the product could be remanufactured easily. The same goes for fabrics made from old plastic milk bottles. What do you do with the rags when they are not of use again? Sooner or later downcycled stuff ends up in the landfill. It's better to make materials from renewable sources that break down without landfilling. ie: instead of styrene foams use silica ceramic foams. The problem is energy and the cost of production for these newer materials. You may save landfill space but you burn huge amounts of energy to produce them.
That ad is shit.
>The other thing is about the "airbrushing UFOs out of photos.."
The idea of UFOs in photos is interesting and very telling
since there is no such thng as a satellite *PHOTO* anymore
much less the need to *AIRBRUSH* a photo. These
must have been rather old sat images....
Satellite images have been digital since the mid 1970s.
It's far more convenient to use a downlink to get the
pics than try to spot a parachuting film canister at sea.
Wouldn't be cheaper to hire illegal immigrants like everyone else..
There needs to be a proper ISO specification for April fools.
I know that the 2.6 kernel for linux has the beginnings of this
and there has been some word from MS insiders that similar technology
could be built into Vista this year (but would cause more delays).
Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman are both bullish (gnuish)
regarding the addition of AF technology to linux under the 2.6
kernel.
There was also a write up recently in Dr. Dobbs Journal regarding
the use of ISO AF in the development of frontline middleware tool
chains. These would be used in a purely algorithmic sense to gleen
statistical data from long haul fiber.
But without a proper ISO spec it would appear that AF
may stay in purely in the domain of temporal periodics.
Every 100 years somebody (spelled *F*O*O*L*) stands up and says
"We've reached the limits of the known world. All that can be
discovered has been discovered.". Each time, maybe 10 years later,
there's a big discovery right after that and everything is unknown
again.
Pretending to be able to predict the future is rather prattish.