That's likely an optical illusion caused by taking the photo with a telephoto lens. Telephoto lenses tend to squash things at different distances together.
This was invented (and patented) in NZ about 5 years ago. I knew one of the people working on it. He told me you have to use a CCD camera to scan the barcode, rather than a basic barcode scanner, to avoid problems with reflections off of the phone.
The article is light on details, I wonder if the system is different or if there is some collaboration going on.
I remember in the early 80's reading about an idea for scavenging energy from cars on down-hill stretches of road. Instead of one big ramp it consisted of a grid of small rounded studs that protruded from the surface of the road. A car passing over the grid would depress the studs, compressing hydraulic oil which would then be accumulated and used to drive a generator. The inventor's argument was that it was just scavenging energy that would be wasted as heat in the car brakes.
I guess I don't really see how this is in any way a 'problem' for the photocopier companies.
Liability. Unless the photocopiers have something along the lines of "Do not sit on the glass" printed prominently on them, one could imagine someone suing the manufacturer after lacerating their posterior after going through the glass.
Sad, but in an increasingly litigous world, stupid lawsuits are only going to increase in frequency.
I was going to write a long and indignant "of course not" response to this, but then I realised that what you asked is a huge non sequitor from any of my other posts.
Just because the Japanese are our friends now does not make a Japanese civilian's life worth any more or less than a Chinese civilian's. Yet, people are so eager to paint the Japanese as the poor victims of white aggression and forget about the Chinese all together. In my household, things are quite different.
You can not state that the civilian population of Japan deserve no sympathy in one breath, and then express outrage when US civilians (contractors) get killed in Iraq.
I didn't say that the Japanese do not deserve sympathy, I said the sympathy would be better placed with the victims of Japanese atrocities.
You had better hope that "what goes around, comes around" isn't a factor here, because currently, there is deficit in the US "terrible shit done to others" account.
Check my profile, I'm not American. America has a record of not caring about the rest of the world, why should the rest of the world care about them?
I don't see how you can have no sympathy for the Japanese people
I had imagined that my statement that the bombings were terrible would have implied that I have some sympathy for the Japanese who suffered and died. I just have far more sympathy for the true victims than for the aggressors.
I am certain that almost all of those children, babies, pregnant women, buddhist monks and nuns and convalescent old folks all bore a collective responsibility
And how many of those women, monks, nuns and old folks did anything to stop the Japanese atrocities? How many of them worked in the munitions plants, or cheered the government? Or even questioned what their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons were doing in China?
How many pregnant Chinese women deserved to have their stomachs slit open with bayonets? How many old Chinese people deserved to be starved to death? How many Chinese children deserved to be brutalised and murdered? How many Allied prisoners deserved to be beheaded with swords, or starved to death, or shot in the back?
It is apparent in the comments attached to this story that the myth of Japanese victimhood is still strong. If the Japanese had not started the war, there would have been no attacks, and people would not have been burned alive, or crushed, or died lingering deaths from radiation poisoning.
I'm sorry those people suffered, and I'm sorry those people died, but I'm not sorry the nuclear attacks happened.
Remember friend, history is written by the victors. The US, like every other major power, has had it's share of atrocities. The difference is the US, as the victor, has generally been able to supress and gloss over its 'incidents', and by the same token, make much noise about the faults of it's fallen foes, for the purpose of looking like the white knight, defending the world against evil.
Never defended the US, being non-USian I don't particularly care how the US is portrayed.
Reading the other comments attached to this story, you can see that the whole "The-Japanese-were-innocent-victims-of-US / Allied / White-aggression" fallacy is still strong. I'm just speaking up for the victims of Japan.
Your reasoning is fallacious. If a japanese kill someone in china, killing an innocent japanese in Nagasaki doesn't "cancel out" anything
The Japanese were in China right up until the surrender. The Japanese were killing people in China right up until the surrender. The strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the surrender. Therefore, the strikes prevented the Japanese (who were, by all reasonable standards, "a nation at war") killing innocent Chinese (and Vietnamese, and Allied prisoners).
Also, if you RTFA, you'll see that the target in Nagasaki, dodgy bomb-aiming aside, was military.
Your kind of reasoning is the same used by those who say the United States "deserved" to lose 3,000 people--mostly civilians--on 9/11, because it was a fair response to the US's Middle Eastern foreign policy.
The US is a democracy, and the US military is an all-volunteer force. So, the people bear some responsiblity for US foreign policy.
There is no question, however, that 9/11 WAS NOT a fair, reasonable or appropriate response, as there were other methods available for influencing US policy that the al Qaeda animals ignored in favour of simply killing people who aren't like them.
Remember, the atomic bombings were designed to END a war. The 9/11 attacks were designed to START one.
Except, to al Qaeda, the war had been going on for years before hand. The US people just didn't realise it.
Sympathy for the Chinese is largely misplaced. Chairman Mao, if I recall correctly, was Chinese, made 20 million of his own people starve do death,
Apples and oranges. Mao didn't take over until after WW2 was over. 1949, IIRC.
Also, taking your argument to its logical conclusion, you would seem to be saying that the Chinese deserved the Japanese occupation, because four years after the occupation ended, someone would take power in China who would cause the deaths of a lot of Chinese. Doesn't really follow, does it?
Why bring up the Japanese occupation of China to demonstrate this? Why not keep it limited to the conflict in question?
Because the one led to the other.
Why was Japan involved in the war in the first place? Maybe because they attacked the US unprovoked?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was intended to destroy the US Pacific Fleet. The destruction of that fleet was necessary so that the Japanese could seize resources in the Pacific to continue their war in China. These resouces included oil, which was being embargoed by the US in retaliation to the Japanese massacre in Nanking.
One wonders if people like you have ever gotten out of your wretched little white-bread suburbs, and actually gotten to know, or have even MET, any Japanese people.
Actually, I've been to Japan. I've also worked and socialised with Japanese people. Japanese of my generation are much the same as everyone else, and I got on well with the ones I met. But, they still have quite a victim attitude not just about the two nuclear strikes, but about the entire war.
I also have a Chinese wife, who is from the North-East, the part of China that was occupied. Do you know any Chinese, or have even MET someone who suffered under the occupation? My mother-in-law was born during the occupation, and I'll give you three guesses why she's under five feet tall.
Nuking those cities sucked. Fire-storming Tokyo sucked. But it was a very dirty war, and the nuclear attacked ENDED it. In a dirty war, save your sympathy for the victims, not the aggressors.
The Japanese occupied China for 12 years. In just one incident, they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million Chinese in retaliation for the Doolittle raid on Japan. Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by the Japanese. They performed experiments with chemical and biological weapons on living people. Chinese are still being injured by leftover stocks of Japanese chemical weapons, yet the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did.
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around". The Japanese people were treated a hell of a lot better after their surrender than any of the peoples they conquered.
Haven't seen the movie yet, but I can speculate about some of these timeframe problems.
> We see a Corellian freighter at the end of the > movie that looks little different to the one at > the beginning of episode 4 some 20+ years later.
The Millenium Falcon was an old, much reworked ship. How many smugglers would be flying top-of-the-line ships?
> Yet the Republic is already flying fighters that > look like X-Wings in Episode 3 that don't look > that much different in Episode 4.
The rebels were resource-poor and had to make do with what they had. So, the X-Wing is just a small evolution from the Republic fighters.
> Okay, so maybe you would still use a 20 year old > freighter by the time episode 4 comes along but > why would you send an important "diplomat" (i.e. > Princess Leia) on a ship as old as that?
Well, the US President still flies on a 747, which is a 30+ year old design. The ship Leia was on could have been significantly upgraded in the intervening 20 years, and as a senatorial ship it definitely would have been well maintained.
> Also, if the Death Star took 20 odd years to > build, how come the second Death Star was > virtually finished so quickly between the > episode 4 and episode 6?
Contruction of the second Death Star may have commenced before the first was destroyed, with the design changes being made retroactively. The construction crew on the second Death Star could have been much larger. Also, the second Death Star was only partially completed, while the first was fully operational. The reactor and main gun of the second Death Star were fully operational, but the engines, hyperdrive, fuel tanks, barracks, hangers etc may not have been built. Can you imagine how long would it take to put in the toilets for a million crew?
We also don't know how long the first Death Star had been operational before it was destroyed. The dialogue between the Imperial generals suggests that it was fairly new, but the rebels had had enough time to find out about it and to steal the plans. As it was a new design, the first Death Star may have gone through an extensive shake-down period.
Not saying that these aren't continuity errors, just saying that they aren't necessarily so.
> 1) Like it or not the US no longer holds to the no weapons in space treaty. Bush pulled out of that a couple years ago.
Bush pulled out of the ABM treaty. I believe this is a different treaty.
> One of the military thriller wirters used that for a book a while back... can't remember which one but the title was Silver Tower.
Dale Brown. I remember that book, one of the first techno-thrillers I ever read.
Of course, in Silver Tower, the establishment of US military forces in space led to a Russian attack on the titular Silver Tower space station, with many American deaths.
Where I work, a group is using this technique to identify insect pest species.
If, for example, a group of insect eggs, or even just some parts of an insect like the legs, were found in a shipping container, then it can be extremely difficult to identify the insect species by morphology. By sampling and barcoding the DNA in the eggs or fragments then it can be determined which insect was present, and therefore whether a potential pest was present in the container.
For a country that depends on agriculture, like New Zealand does, this is a very important technology.
Slashdot Mirror
That's likely an optical illusion caused by taking the photo with a telephoto lens. Telephoto lenses tend to squash things at different distances together.
This was invented (and patented) in NZ about 5 years ago. I knew one of the people working on it. He told me you have to use a CCD camera to scan the barcode, rather than a basic barcode scanner, to avoid problems with reflections off of the phone.
The article is light on details, I wonder if the system is different or if there is some collaboration going on.
I remember in the early 80's reading about an idea for scavenging energy from cars on down-hill stretches of road. Instead of one big ramp it consisted of a grid of small rounded studs that protruded from the surface of the road. A car passing over the grid would depress the studs, compressing hydraulic oil which would then be accumulated and used to drive a generator. The inventor's argument was that it was just scavenging energy that would be wasted as heat in the car brakes.
Liability. Unless the photocopiers have something along the lines of "Do not sit on the glass" printed prominently on them, one could imagine someone suing the manufacturer after lacerating their posterior after going through the glass.
Sad, but in an increasingly litigous world, stupid lawsuits are only going to increase in frequency.
It was HMS Conqueror. HMS Invincible is an aircraft carrier.
I was going to write a long and indignant "of course not" response to this, but then I realised that what you asked is a huge non sequitor from any of my other posts.
Just because the Japanese are our friends now does not make a Japanese civilian's life worth any more or less than a Chinese civilian's. Yet, people are so eager to paint the Japanese as the poor victims of white aggression and forget about the Chinese all together. In my household, things are quite different.
I am a New Zealander. Live in Canterbury. With my Chinese wife.
Gives me a different perspective on the Japanese.
I didn't say that the Japanese do not deserve sympathy, I said the sympathy would be better placed with the victims of Japanese atrocities.
You had better hope that "what goes around, comes around" isn't a factor here, because currently, there is deficit in the US "terrible shit done to others" account.
Check my profile, I'm not American. America has a record of not caring about the rest of the world, why should the rest of the world care about them?
Pointing out Japanese war crimes is racist, yet their Chinese victims don't rate a mention?
/. hypocrites to understand that.
All this sympathy for the victims of the atomic bombings, but nary a word about Japan's victims?
Japan started the war. Japan is responsible for the people killed by Japanese, Japan is responsible for the Japanese who died.
I save the bulk of my sympathy for the real victims.
But I don't expect
I had imagined that my statement that the bombings were terrible would have implied that I have some sympathy for the Japanese who suffered and died. I just have far more sympathy for the true victims than for the aggressors.
An humane and enlightened attitude - yet you are strangely silent on your sympathy for the victims of the Japanese aggression.
And how many of those women, monks, nuns and old folks did anything to stop the Japanese atrocities? How many of them worked in the munitions plants, or cheered the government? Or even questioned what their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons were doing in China?
How many pregnant Chinese women deserved to have their stomachs slit open with bayonets? How many old Chinese people deserved to be starved to death? How many Chinese children deserved to be brutalised and murdered? How many Allied prisoners deserved to be beheaded with swords, or starved to death, or shot in the back?
It is apparent in the comments attached to this story that the myth of Japanese victimhood is still strong. If the Japanese had not started the war, there would have been no attacks, and people would not have been burned alive, or crushed, or died lingering deaths from radiation poisoning.
I'm sorry those people suffered, and I'm sorry those people died, but I'm not sorry the nuclear attacks happened.
Never defended the US, being non-USian I don't particularly care how the US is portrayed.
Reading the other comments attached to this story, you can see that the whole "The-Japanese-were-innocent-victims-of-US / Allied / White-aggression" fallacy is still strong. I'm just speaking up for the victims of Japan.
The Japanese were in China right up until the surrender. The Japanese were killing people in China right up until the surrender. The strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the surrender. Therefore, the strikes prevented the Japanese (who were, by all reasonable standards, "a nation at war") killing innocent Chinese (and Vietnamese, and Allied prisoners).
Also, if you RTFA, you'll see that the target in Nagasaki, dodgy bomb-aiming aside, was military.
The US is a democracy, and the US military is an all-volunteer force. So, the people bear some responsiblity for US foreign policy.
There is no question, however, that 9/11 WAS NOT a fair, reasonable or appropriate response, as there were other methods available for influencing US policy that the al Qaeda animals ignored in favour of simply killing people who aren't like them.
Remember, the atomic bombings were designed to END a war. The 9/11 attacks were designed to START one.
Except, to al Qaeda, the war had been going on for years before hand. The US people just didn't realise it.
Apples and oranges. Mao didn't take over until after WW2 was over. 1949, IIRC.
Also, taking your argument to its logical conclusion, you would seem to be saying that the Chinese deserved the Japanese occupation, because four years after the occupation ended, someone would take power in China who would cause the deaths of a lot of Chinese. Doesn't really follow, does it?
Becuse it would have much better if they had died fighting off an Allied invasion with spears.
Because the one led to the other.
Why was Japan involved in the war in the first place? Maybe because they attacked the US unprovoked?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was intended to destroy the US Pacific Fleet. The destruction of that fleet was necessary so that the Japanese could seize resources in the Pacific to continue their war in China. These resouces included oil, which was being embargoed by the US in retaliation to the Japanese massacre in Nanking.
Actually, I've been to Japan. I've also worked and socialised with Japanese people. Japanese of my generation are much the same as everyone else, and I got on well with the ones I met. But, they still have quite a victim attitude not just about the two nuclear strikes, but about the entire war.
I also have a Chinese wife, who is from the North-East, the part of China that was occupied. Do you know any Chinese, or have even MET someone who suffered under the occupation? My mother-in-law was born during the occupation, and I'll give you three guesses why she's under five feet tall.
Nuking those cities sucked. Fire-storming Tokyo sucked. But it was a very dirty war, and the nuclear attacked ENDED it. In a dirty war, save your sympathy for the victims, not the aggressors.
is largely misplaced.
The Japanese occupied China for 12 years. In just one incident, they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million Chinese in retaliation for the Doolittle raid on Japan. Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by the Japanese. They performed experiments with chemical and biological weapons on living people. Chinese are still being injured by leftover stocks of Japanese chemical weapons, yet the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did.
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around". The Japanese people were treated a hell of a lot better after their surrender than any of the peoples they conquered.
We don't use sheep for power, we use hobbits.
Haven't seen the movie yet, but I can speculate about some of these timeframe problems.
> We see a Corellian freighter at the end of the
> movie that looks little different to the one at
> the beginning of episode 4 some 20+ years later.
The Millenium Falcon was an old, much reworked ship. How many smugglers would be flying top-of-the-line ships?
> Yet the Republic is already flying fighters that
> look like X-Wings in Episode 3 that don't look
> that much different in Episode 4.
The rebels were resource-poor and had to make do with what they had. So, the X-Wing is just a small evolution from the Republic fighters.
> Okay, so maybe you would still use a 20 year old
> freighter by the time episode 4 comes along but
> why would you send an important "diplomat" (i.e.
> Princess Leia) on a ship as old as that?
Well, the US President still flies on a 747, which is a 30+ year old design. The ship Leia was on could have been significantly upgraded in the intervening 20 years, and as a senatorial ship it definitely would have been well maintained.
> Also, if the Death Star took 20 odd years to
> build, how come the second Death Star was
> virtually finished so quickly between the
> episode 4 and episode 6?
Contruction of the second Death Star may have commenced before the first was destroyed, with the design changes being made retroactively. The construction crew on the second Death Star could have been much larger. Also, the second Death Star was only partially completed, while the first was fully operational. The reactor and main gun of the second Death Star were fully operational, but the engines, hyperdrive, fuel tanks, barracks, hangers etc may not have been built. Can you imagine how long would it take to put in the toilets for a million crew?
We also don't know how long the first Death Star had been operational before it was destroyed. The dialogue between the Imperial generals suggests that it was fairly new, but the rebels had had enough time to find out about it and to steal the plans. As it was a new design, the first Death Star may have gone through an extensive shake-down period.
Not saying that these aren't continuity errors, just saying that they aren't necessarily so.
> 1) Like it or not the US no longer holds to the no weapons in space treaty. Bush pulled out of that a couple years ago.
Bush pulled out of the ABM treaty. I believe this is a different treaty.
> One of the military thriller wirters used that for a book a while back... can't remember which one but the title was Silver Tower.
Dale Brown. I remember that book, one of the first techno-thrillers I ever read.
Of course, in Silver Tower, the establishment of US military forces in space led to a Russian attack on the titular Silver Tower space station, with many American deaths.
Where I work, a group is using this technique to identify insect pest species.
If, for example, a group of insect eggs, or even just some parts of an insect like the legs, were found in a shipping container, then it can be extremely difficult to identify the insect species by morphology. By sampling and barcoding the DNA in the eggs or fragments then it can be determined which insect was present, and therefore whether a potential pest was present in the container.
For a country that depends on agriculture, like New Zealand does, this is a very important technology.
Hmm, 18 right out of the 20 questions I did before I got bored. Not too bad, I think, for a non-citizen.
Wonder how US high school kids would do?