Well.. disposal of infantry mines is becoming the remnant of yesterdays war.
but i have to concede that you're right when it comes to anti-vehicle mines.
and i guess clearing infantry mines will just become clearing improvised explosives devices. New name same basic principle.
If you read my post, I'm ranting more about how they focus solely on doing things with single expensive units, and the lack of imagination in other roles. Robots are perfect for mine clearance, as long as they're either expandable, or can withstand the punishment they receive.
While like both the darpa and the euro challenges, I also find that they are more a showcase for solving tasks of yesterdays war, with newer and modern toys. So far in warfare, robots are used much like human operated vehicles were used in WWI, for reconnaissance purposes and the fact that they're spending so many resources on maneuvering excersises, is more of a showcase for their limited vision, than the capabilities of robot technology. When they make these big expensive robots for warfare, they forget the primary reason robots are used in the first place; robots are expendable, and partially autonomous.
The last part is where the european challenge at least gets something right. There's no need for fully autonomous vehicles on the battlefield, because the decisions you make on the battlefield require human accountability, when the situation is grave enough to throw away accountability, that's the time you launch the nukes.
So how do we make a robotic system that takes those two benefits into account? My suggestion would be to use swarming, and standby robots. For instance, if I were to launch a robot air assault, with say 500 human controllers involved, i'd use standard hobbyshop vehicles, with advanced communication, some computing power and a weapon on each, keep it cheap, And i'd use somewhere along the line of 10,000 robots. The robots can be dropped from a plane, or send off from the ground, the later option will be cheapest the former will have greater range. The controllers will take control or partial control when they arrive, in early versions full control of a single plane, if there's no available controller, they'll go on standby somewhere close to the battlefield, When a robot goes down, they're allocated a new one from the pool of robots on standby. In a more advanced scenario the robots would create a 3d representation of the battlefield and the controllers will just point out targets, and possibly hit the fire button (for accountability reasons).
But that's just one version, I think that a cool competition goal would be to design a system that can: Take out targets as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and as reliable as possible (reduce collateral damage), the targets can be anything from target dummies, over vehicles to other robots, in scenarios including regular, urban and guerilla warfare, police assignments and terrorist attacks. The reason i stop here is that i don't have the vision to go further, not that others should not try to think beyond it.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say.
But i hope others who don't either will give me the peace and just say whoa, instead of coming with stupid puns, because these are truly cool pictures. so, don't write before you view.
ESA has finally made something which isn't just cool, but looks cool too, and i hope they get the attention they deserve, because their funding needs it badly.
anyway, cheers and enjoy the pics, i hope this'll still be the first post
The stuff that's stolen is probably not aimed getting highly sensitive data, but at getting a bit of cash from selling the hardware:
"He reportedly said he was selling the items for their value as hardware alone."
that lack of organization also suggest the problem isn't huge, a claim also supported by
"Coalition officials regularly survey bazaars across Afghanistan for the presence of contraband materials, but thus far have not uncovered sensitive or classified items"
So it's not large scale, hyperterrorsquads selling supersensitive secret soldier material to themselves. but rather small bits of pieces, that together will probably seem as just that. small bits of pieces. It is however always unfortunate that personal and classified information is handled carelessly, but if we can't even handle this properly at home, why should it be any better in Afghanistan.
I'll give the answer right here: First, get better at handling information security at home, before you start using the technology abroad. Don't give sensitive material to people who haven't been screened on how they handled it (I thought this was already a goal the tried to achieve)
Or possibly, they've picked up on MicroSofts way of doing things, and are starting to put their "requests" under some scrutiny. As they should do with any company.
While worldwide launches are probably a bad thing for the customers. I think it's a very effective way of creating media hype. Then again Nintendo is more fan-consoles than oooh-they're-trendy-consoles.
Kudos to them!
Memory.
For you old farts(i'm 26) who seem to think old games were better than new games remember the following:
point
Your memeory doesn't serve you well (neither does my spelling)
you don't remember the bad things, and you will make the good things seem even better than they were.
When you remember that really good game that you spend hours playing when you were younger, you forget about both the bad sides of the game and the other bad games.
All the good games, i've gone back and revisited, have been good for the first 10 minutes, but few of them i've kept playing for more.
They're fun, but the fun part lies mainly in my memory and in the storytelling, and with the really good lines, i remember the story. A few of them i manage to keep playing (like the original master of orion), a few have better gameplay than current day; I still think Dune 2 is superior in game play to many modern rts' unfortunately the interface is horrid and the bugs are weird.
The first mistake lies in comparing the great old games to the games that disappointed us, if you wanna compare bards tale, do it to something like the elder scrolls series instead of a game we'll all happily forget next year.
The second mistake is forgetting all about the disappointing games in the past or all the horrid pacman clones
that were sold to diehard fans, all the pong alike games or the front/side -scroller inferno with thousands of ever more similar games.
Anyway if you want a good game, without paying for hyped graphics, indie games have a lot to offer.
The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present, is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.
i guess we have to disagree on this...
I'm currently reading up on the meeting minutes. but as far as i remember, the people representing microsoft, basically said everything was a bad idea. I'll have to get back on this, but i just got back from a night of drinking, so it might take two days:P. so it might have to be made a journal entry.
That being said, what you mentioned is not unimportant.
My primary guide is science, so fact means a lot to me, and i won't let this hang unanswered in the ether.
besides, who says i haven't been mislead
As a game dev, i do appriciate what ms does in on that scene, but i prefer OpenGL to DX, even though microsoft managed to hamper the OGL group from developing the standard for a long while.
My biggest problem with microsoft is that they work pro-software patents. It annoys me so much more even than their stronghand approach to the software market.
I'm also aware that microsoft does more for game dev than dx, but dx is their major effort. And the other things they do rely on dx. which unfortunately is os specific. Which is also more or less the sole reason for me using my windows partition more than any other.
I refuse to feel shame. I admit MS does A LOT to support gaming and game dev. Unfortunately they do one REALLY REALLY bad thing to all small software companies.
I'm a citizen of Denmark, a European Union country. I'm a computer science student and game developer. It's my belief that if the EU loses this, EU will be prevented from properly acting as a market watchdog in the future, hampering competition on european markets. Read it likes this: it will cost me money and oppertunities.
It is also my belief that if Microsoft Corp. loses this, it will cost them money, and seeing as I'm a software developer I like that prospect, due to the way Microsoft Corp. works to stiffle innovation by promoting software patents (here i should also bash ibm, sun and others!). [blah] While it is my view that software patents CAN be implemented in a decent way, I think that our current patent system is not up to speed with modern society, most importantly patent durations are WAAAY too long.[/blah]
Hopefully a big slap on the wrist of Microsoft Corp. will increase my chances of having success as a computer scientist.
This article comes close to saying that we'll have this in humans soon, probably to keep you interested.
Let me set this straight, you won't be able to get a cool regeneration ability.
a. we don't know how this would work with the rest of the human genome
b. we have rules against testing a
c. the technology isn't complete for changing a humans dna
d. we have rules blocking a lot of research into c
e. It would be cool, so it's not going to be publicly available.
On the other hand, this is interesting research, and could help a lot in several fields of medicine, though i believe it would be mainly transplant medicine, and anything usable is still 10-20 years into the future.
So get your hopes up for your kids, but realize this, you will die the same way as your grandparents.
Well... inmarsat bgan doesn't have the best reputation from the people I know who've had to deal with their systems. whether it was coercion or just heavy lobbyism i'm not sure (hell i'm not sure what the difference is) but the companies that are forced to use them are often as big (or bigger revenue wise) take a company as maersk or bp. that being said i'm well aware that the bill will always be send on to the end user. but hey, someone's got to pay up for technological progress and prosperity.
and no, their customer support service does not work in firefox (which was my friends biggest grief). ps. sorry for biting the trolls tail
I really can't see this as anything that'll come as a surprise to anyone, nor the fact that apache came first.
I also have a feeling that the apache guys see this the same way, as it is nowhere to be found at http://apache.org/foundation/news.html/.
but i guess any round number is worth celebrating, after all free as in drunk, is as important as any other freedom;)
that Hollywood movies don't always get their facts right.
It reminds me of the roaring fast-running t-rex which couldn't see stuff when it was standing still.
I can understand that Hollywood needs to come up with these things, if something haven't been studied thoroughly.
What i don't understand is why we bother reading about whether this uninteresting tidbit of information is true, for the whenever it's been part of a movie.
well, if the people writing the encryption are in china, they're not exporting it but importing it. which is yet another reason to offshore if you're multinational.
so imposing an export ban on software is kinda hard. seeing as it's hard to determine where it originates, without accessing the machines it was made on, - even that can be faked.
It has that sleek look that means mothers will buy it. and the specs don't look bad.
it's a 2 by 4 setup, and 1.8 centimetres (about 0.7 inches) and it definately looks like something dads would buy for their kids:D
The fact that Brazil does not have any major IT industry that will benefit from Brazil only using propriatary software.
Though i do admit to not knowing the ins and outs of Brazils software business, i know that governments in contries that do have those IT-Giants are under all sorts of pressure to accomodate for their companies.
Something that would be far more interesting was if a Microsoft nation would adopt similar policies.
What will be really interesting is to see which benefits they do reap from opensource, and whether others will follow suit.
As long as it's without the adds, I think it's great to see what i still consider the best browser to be present on cell phones. Albeit that probably means the cell phones are running CE...
ok, it's been a while since this was posted, but i felt i had to reply... I personally view infinity more as a religion than as a science, and i believe the following things though i have no way of proving it, but the fact that anything else does not make sense TO ME... The universe is infinitely large The universe is infinitely small (everything can be divided into smaller pieces) Time is infinite in the same ways as the universe (a note: i believe that you might slow down the speed of processes by accelerating them, but not Time itself, which is the difference between perceived time, and chronological time)
beyond that i've been reading up on Olber's paradox, and i don't really find it convincing because it fails to take into account that the universe is not transparant (light is affected by gravity, and can be blocked to) and if you bothered to google it yourself you would see that most of the hits actually explain how it's solved.
anyway, thanks for pointing out something which is worth thinking about.
Well in part because our universe is infinitely large. thus it becomes infinity/infinity, so one could theorize that there would only be one wormhole (and argue that that one wormhole would be everywhere) however a more thinking approach would be to suggest that though that infinity/infinity=randomnity just like 0/0 = segfault. well either that or as the article mentions:
Some believe that the act of entering the wormhole will close it, making it unstable
which in turn would mean that any wormhole that had been entered would no longer exist... go figure the reason you haven't found a wormhole.
Just to answer the guy who asks why we're even researching this now, when we're not a type III civilisation. It's called uncertainty, spinoffs and curiosity. in reverse order.
I beg you guys to read the case study! I've never read a more pro-usa piece of literature and find it some of the most, albeit unwillingly, entertaining pieces of propaganda i've read. You might not yourself read it as propaganda, but remember who these things will be presented to. I suddenly realize why the United States of America have taken such disastrous decisions in the present and in the past.
for once, i will add this little abbriviation which i resent: LOL!!! 11 ONE ELEVEN, you guys really did it! The rest of the report is also slightly pro-americano but at least it doesn't plainly ignore the obvious problems that the USA have. Although it does tread very lightly
Slashdot Mirror
Well.. disposal of infantry mines is becoming the remnant of yesterdays war.
but i have to concede that you're right when it comes to anti-vehicle mines.
and i guess clearing infantry mines will just become clearing improvised explosives devices. New name same basic principle.
If you read my post, I'm ranting more about how they focus solely on doing things with single expensive units, and the lack of imagination in other roles. Robots are perfect for mine clearance, as long as they're either expandable, or can withstand the punishment they receive.
While like both the darpa and the euro challenges, I also find that they are more a showcase for solving tasks of yesterdays war, with newer and modern toys. So far in warfare, robots are used much like human operated vehicles were used in WWI, for reconnaissance purposes and the fact that they're spending so many resources on maneuvering excersises, is more of a showcase for their limited vision, than the capabilities of robot technology. When they make these big expensive robots for warfare, they forget the primary reason robots are used in the first place; robots are expendable, and partially autonomous.
The last part is where the european challenge at least gets something right. There's no need for fully autonomous vehicles on the battlefield, because the decisions you make on the battlefield require human accountability, when the situation is grave enough to throw away accountability, that's the time you launch the nukes.
So how do we make a robotic system that takes those two benefits into account?
My suggestion would be to use swarming, and standby robots. For instance, if I were to launch a robot air assault, with say 500 human controllers involved, i'd use standard hobbyshop vehicles, with advanced communication, some computing power and a weapon on each, keep it cheap, And i'd use somewhere along the line of 10,000 robots.
The robots can be dropped from a plane, or send off from the ground, the later option will be cheapest the former will have greater range.
The controllers will take control or partial control when they arrive, in early versions full control of a single plane, if there's no available controller, they'll go on standby somewhere close to the battlefield, When a robot goes down, they're allocated a new one from the pool of robots on standby.
In a more advanced scenario the robots would create a 3d representation of the battlefield and the controllers will just point out targets, and possibly hit the fire button (for accountability reasons).
But that's just one version, I think that a cool competition goal would be to design a system that can: Take out targets as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and as reliable as possible (reduce collateral damage), the targets can be anything from target dummies, over vehicles to other robots, in scenarios including regular, urban and guerilla warfare, police assignments and terrorist attacks.
The reason i stop here is that i don't have the vision to go further, not that others should not try to think beyond it.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say. But i hope others who don't either will give me the peace and just say whoa, instead of coming with stupid puns, because these are truly cool pictures. so, don't write before you view. ESA has finally made something which isn't just cool, but looks cool too, and i hope they get the attention they deserve, because their funding needs it badly. anyway, cheers and enjoy the pics, i hope this'll still be the first post
So it's not large scale, hyperterrorsquads selling supersensitive secret soldier material to themselves. but rather small bits of pieces, that together will probably seem as just that. small bits of pieces. It is however always unfortunate that personal and classified information is handled carelessly, but if we can't even handle this properly at home, why should it be any better in Afghanistan.
I'll give the answer right here: First, get better at handling information security at home, before you start using the technology abroad.
Don't give sensitive material to people who haven't been screened on how they handled it (I thought this was already a goal the tried to achieve)
This can't possibly be the first post (fsm)
Or possibly, they've picked up on MicroSofts way of doing things, and are starting to put their "requests" under some scrutiny.
As they should do with any company.
While worldwide launches are probably a bad thing for the customers. I think it's a very effective way of creating media hype. Then again Nintendo is more fan-consoles than oooh-they're-trendy-consoles.
Kudos to them!
You can alter the "worth" of the different modifiers
the link i think is this one: http://slashdot.org/my/comments/#karma_bonus
Memory.
For you old farts(i'm 26) who seem to think old games were better than new games remember the following: point Your memeory doesn't serve you well (neither does my spelling)
you don't remember the bad things, and you will make the good things seem even better than they were. When you remember that really good game that you spend hours playing when you were younger,
you forget about both the bad sides of the game and the other bad games. All the good games, i've gone back and revisited, have been good for the first 10 minutes, but few of them i've kept playing for more.
They're fun, but the fun part lies mainly in my memory and in the storytelling, and with the really good lines, i remember the story. A few of them i manage to keep playing (like the original master of orion), a few have better gameplay than current day; I still think Dune 2 is superior in game play to many modern rts' unfortunately the interface is horrid and the bugs are weird.
The first mistake lies in comparing the great old games to the games that disappointed us, if you wanna compare bards tale, do it to something like the elder scrolls series instead of a game we'll all happily forget next year. The second mistake is forgetting all about the disappointing games in the past or all the horrid pacman clones that were sold to diehard fans, all the pong alike games or the front/side -scroller inferno with thousands of ever more similar games. Anyway if you want a good game, without paying for hyped graphics, indie games have a lot to offer.
The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present,
is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.
i guess we have to disagree on this... I'm currently reading up on the meeting minutes. but as far as i remember, the people representing microsoft, basically said everything was a bad idea. I'll have to get back on this, but i just got back from a night of drinking, so it might take two days :P. so it might have to be made a journal entry.
That being said, what you mentioned is not unimportant.
My primary guide is science, so fact means a lot to me, and i won't let this hang unanswered in the ether.
besides, who says i haven't been mislead
As a game dev, i do appriciate what ms does in on that scene, but i prefer OpenGL to DX, even though microsoft managed to hamper the OGL group from developing the standard for a long while.
My biggest problem with microsoft is that they work pro-software patents. It annoys me so much more even than their stronghand approach to the software market.
I'm also aware that microsoft does more for game dev than dx, but dx is their major effort. And the other things they do rely on dx. which unfortunately is os specific. Which is also more or less the sole reason for me using my windows partition more than any other. I refuse to feel shame. I admit MS does A LOT to support gaming and game dev. Unfortunately they do one REALLY REALLY bad thing to all small software companies.
I'm a citizen of Denmark, a European Union country. I'm a computer science student and game developer.
It's my belief that if the EU loses this, EU will be prevented from properly acting as a market watchdog in the future, hampering competition on european markets.
Read it likes this: it will cost me money and oppertunities.
It is also my belief that if Microsoft Corp. loses this, it will cost them money, and seeing as I'm a software developer I like that prospect, due to the way Microsoft Corp. works to stiffle innovation by promoting software patents (here i should also bash ibm, sun and others!).
[blah] While it is my view that software patents CAN be implemented in a decent way, I think that our current patent system is not up to speed with modern society, most importantly patent durations are WAAAY too long.[/blah]
Hopefully a big slap on the wrist of Microsoft Corp. will increase my chances of having success as a computer scientist.
This is when I realize that I shouldn't make stupid (albeit funny) comments when you have mod points.
this sure will make the cancerward a more cheerful place...
This article comes close to saying that we'll have this in humans soon, probably to keep you interested. Let me set this straight, you won't be able to get a cool regeneration ability.
a. we don't know how this would work with the rest of the human genome
b. we have rules against testing a
c. the technology isn't complete for changing a humans dna
d. we have rules blocking a lot of research into c
e. It would be cool, so it's not going to be publicly available.
On the other hand, this is interesting research, and could help a lot in several fields of medicine, though i believe it would be mainly transplant medicine, and anything usable is still 10-20 years into the future. So get your hopes up for your kids, but realize this, you will die the same way as your grandparents.
Well... inmarsat bgan doesn't have the best reputation from the people I know who've had to deal with their systems.
whether it was coercion or just heavy lobbyism i'm not sure (hell i'm not sure what the difference is) but the companies that are forced to use them are often as big (or bigger revenue wise) take a company as maersk or bp.
that being said i'm well aware that the bill will always be send on to the end user.
but hey, someone's got to pay up for technological progress and prosperity.
and no, their customer support service does not work in firefox (which was my friends biggest grief).
ps. sorry for biting the trolls tail
I really can't see this as anything that'll come as a surprise to anyone, nor the fact that apache came first. I also have a feeling that the apache guys see this the same way, as it is nowhere to be found at http://apache.org/foundation/news.html/. but i guess any round number is worth celebrating, after all free as in drunk, is as important as any other freedom ;)
that Hollywood movies don't always get their facts right. It reminds me of the roaring fast-running t-rex which couldn't see stuff when it was standing still. I can understand that Hollywood needs to come up with these things, if something haven't been studied thoroughly. What i don't understand is why we bother reading about whether this uninteresting tidbit of information is true, for the whenever it's been part of a movie.
well, if the people writing the encryption are in china, they're not exporting it but importing it.
which is yet another reason to offshore if you're multinational.
so imposing an export ban on software is kinda hard. seeing as it's hard to determine where it originates, without accessing the machines it was made on, - even that can be faked.
It has that sleek look that means mothers will buy it. and the specs don't look bad. it's a 2 by 4 setup, and 1.8 centimetres (about 0.7 inches) and it definately looks like something dads would buy for their kids :D
The fact that Brazil does not have any major IT industry that will benefit from Brazil only using propriatary software.
Though i do admit to not knowing the ins and outs of Brazils software business, i know that governments in contries that do have those IT-Giants are under all sorts of pressure to accomodate for their companies.
Something that would be far more interesting was if a Microsoft nation would adopt similar policies.
What will be really interesting is to see which benefits they do reap from opensource, and whether others will follow suit.
As long as it's without the adds, I think it's great to see what i still consider the best browser to be present on cell phones. Albeit that probably means the cell phones are running CE...
ok, it's been a while since this was posted, but i felt i had to reply...
I personally view infinity more as a religion than as a science, and i believe the following things though i have no way of proving it, but the fact that anything else does not make sense TO ME...
The universe is infinitely large
The universe is infinitely small (everything can be divided into smaller pieces)
Time is infinite in the same ways as the universe (a note: i believe that you might slow down the speed of processes by accelerating them, but not Time itself, which is the difference between perceived time, and chronological time)
beyond that i've been reading up on Olber's paradox, and i don't really find it convincing because it fails to take into account that the universe is not transparant (light is affected by gravity, and can be blocked to) and if you bothered to google it yourself you would see that most of the hits actually explain how it's solved.
anyway, thanks for pointing out something which is worth thinking about.
thus it becomes infinity/infinity, so one could theorize that there would only be one wormhole (and argue that that one wormhole would be everywhere)
however a more thinking approach would be to suggest that though that infinity/infinity=randomnity just like 0/0 = segfault.
well either that or as the article mentions:
which in turn would mean that any wormhole that had been entered would no longer exist... go figure the reason you haven't found a wormhole.
Just to answer the guy who asks why we're even researching this now, when we're not a type III civilisation. It's called uncertainty, spinoffs and curiosity. in reverse order.
I beg you guys to read the case study! I've never read a more pro-usa piece of literature and find it some of the most, albeit unwillingly, entertaining pieces of propaganda i've read.
You might not yourself read it as propaganda, but remember who these things will be presented to.
I suddenly realize why the United States of America have taken such disastrous decisions in the present and in the past.
for once, i will add this little abbriviation which i resent:
LOL!!! 11 ONE ELEVEN, you guys really did it!
The rest of the report is also slightly pro-americano but at least it doesn't plainly ignore the obvious problems that the USA have. Although it does tread very lightly