I have noticed that too. I even turned it on and everytime I dial a number after the call was put through I can hear a distinctive beep. Then I moved my cellphone by my tower and there were some spots (I guess by the sound card) that the beeps really get amplified.
Or perhaps in movie theatres, but then jamming would be easier than painting I think. Also, doctors or any person who has to be on-call might object to that.
I thought of that too. Why not use GPS instead. It's a problem of machine learning and classification. Given a picture of a street corner, what features make that street corner in any light and weather conditions different than other hundreds of thousands of corners. Also, what about the angle at which the image is taken?
The database to work will have to understand what 3D objects are (at least in the specific domain) and have an idea of what features of the object are important (like signs for example, so it will need a very good OCR system then too).
That becomes a knowledge representation issue.
There have been many projects like this before attempted. But until a computer knows what a "chair" is, or what "statue" or a "tree" is, it will just not work right. To have a computer understand concepts though is a much larger and more interesting accomplishment.
By the same reasoning, how about someone planting gps devices on police cruisers in a small town, then tracking their location? If it is only the expectation of privacy that should keep cops from doing such things,then that would seem reasonable, since the location of a cop car is also very obvious and visible in public.
And what if the owner has a scanner that would find there gps tracking devices, can they have them, or will the cops come after them claiming the person stole the device?
Actually I have heard of someone who has done something like it, except it wasn't a gps device it was a simple beacon and they had a radio scanner connected to a laptop that would somehow calculate the approximate the distance to the beacon(s). But I should run since the cops are probably planing a gps device on my car already.
Put all the grammas and the 13 year olds in jail with the murderers. It's all the same. We don't want the "poor" label owners and producers to miss out on that new Ferrari, that would be a crime to leave them "unfulfilled". The artists who are underpaid will remain underpaid, it's the big guys upstairs who don't want to take a small cut in the million dollar salaries. They have all the legal and political connections. I am not saying the guilty shouldn't be punished but jailtime is a little too much.
I grew up in Eastern Europe in the late 80's. Once I went into this electronics store with my mom looking for a new TV and there we saw this keyboard like thing called "BYTE" that would hook into the TV and you could write programs and play games on it. I told my mom how cool that thing looked, and how we had something similar at school in our informatics (computer science) class at school.
I knew there was no chance of getting it, I could just look at it and salivate. But surprizingly my mom looked at it and asked me if I would want to have one. Of course I said yes. So we got a new black and white TV (this was around 1992, and yes we were poor) and what turned out to be a low quality clone of ZX Spectrum with a blazing fast 3.5 Mhz Z80 processor and a whooping 48K of ram (out of which 16K was used for video memory).
And so it started. All the programs could be stored on audio tapes and could be loaded from a simple tape player. But the most wonderful thing was that it had a full keyboard, a BASIC interpreter and easy access to memory (anyone remember the peek and poke instructions?). Of course there were so many games and applications for it. I remember how excited I felt when I wrote my first assembly program. Then I found a pascal and C compiler for it. After a while though, the cheap keyboard made out of rubber failed. The metal had worn out under the keys. Then the modding started. I had spend a whole week scavenging magnetic vacuum contacts from this archaic fax machine of the size of a huge refrigerator from my dad's work. Then I cut a hole in my machine and painstakingly sodered each contact and each new key. Then I made labels and glued them onto the keys. But why stop then? I also made a seperate keypad to be used instead of my worn-out Kempstone joystick.
Now more than a decade later I am a grad student in computer science in US and have my own family and for all of it I have to thank my mom. She was forced to quit school after 7th grade and nobody better than her knew what it meant not be educated. Another time she came home with a book about electronics. It had stuff about lasers, plasma etching of circuits, superconductivity and all this other cool stuff that she had no idea what it was but she knew I would love it, and she was right. Thank you mom!
Sorry pressed submit too early
I was just wanted to conlude that it seem because the profession of an engineer involved in military techonolgy was so prestigious they had a lot of really good people working on building those rockets. I just don't think in US an aerospace engineer has the same status as they would have in ex-Soviet Union. I don't think they got paid nearly as much as the western designers and engineers, they were motivated by recognition and interest mostly.
Russian military technology is known to be very reliable. They might not have always had the latest technical and computer gizmos but they always had reliable equipment. The DNEPR was built during the golden era of Soviet Military. I don't know about this country but back in Soviet Union the profession of a rocket engineer or even any kind of engineer involved in military technology was highly prestigious. They funneled so much money into defence and they went to great lengths to instill this pride of the "Great Soviet" military in young boys that all you wanted to do is be drafted (even though it was mandatory for every young adult male ) and couldn't wait to go fly those planes or go to college to learn to build them. I am not sure
What about the evil scenario like the one from Superman, would it be possible using many nukes to nudge it out of place and start the chain of events? Is that even possible in theory.
There was a tape a while ago of Jirinovsky, a russian ultra-nationalistic party leader that threatened Americans with something like that, how they (Russians) would be able to change the axis the earth or cause a tsunami and sink New York. Sounded like a tin-foil hat theory but now I am starting to wonder. Anybody else know more about this?
This is sounds like pseudoscience to me and someone feeling the need to invent some new crazy thing to get a PhD thesis going. This all stems from applying different intuitive "explanations" to the results of the quantum physics. The math works out alright but it seems that people have a need to understand and have an intuitive plan or schematics in their head. The computer scientist might imagine an array as a bucket or a counter with items on it. The electrical engineer might think of the current as water flowing through the wires etc. This seems to work up to a point. Quantum physics on the other hand doesn not seem to have any decent intuitive explanation that everyone's mom or uncle can read in a "how stuff works" book and have a clear grasp of what is going on. This hasn't stopped physicists from applying different interpretation to the quantum phenomena based on classical world. The authors from the article in Nature adopted what I believe is called Copenhagen Interpretation, where a state of the system is changed by measuring it. So there is a distinction between the macroworld where the measuring device is and the quantumwold where the system being measured is considered. The problem is that the measuring apparatus itself lives in a quantum world and everthing else is part of a larger quantum world. Check out wiki for Copenhagen interpetation, which the authers seem to adopt and the many-worlds interpretation which might not work out so well for these guys.
(look around in here).
So take these nice new ideas with a grain of salt. If you want to know that happens go through the math at least 3 times and then all you see is the math which everyone seems to agree on.
It seems that for an electrical device it might be easier use to electromagnetic energy without the need to convert chemical energy from biomass. I remember someone at the university talking about having a small robot just land near a power line and recharge its batteries using induction. Or I imagine in an urban environment there might be other powerful sources of EM energy. But obviously in a remote location, flies and apples would work better.
Any engineers who know more about this?
There is the libecc project on sourceforge: here, they use C++ and assembly. But it seems it is still in beta but it is actively being developed. You can try your own or get involved. When I took a Data Encoding class I found some nice Java applets that illustrate the concept but obviously are not practical.
Most data out there is not encrypted it thus it would be possible to scan for specific keywords. The companies that route the Internet backbone probably already to this. It is a great way to spy on everyone. But the ones who want to hide will easily be able to do so. RSA and even better, Elliptical Curve combined with authentication, steganography and other such things should do the trick.
And what about everyone using GMT? That is as nutty as it gets. Time of day is realated to the (surprise) time of day for most people. People want to come to work at 8 regardless if they are in Japan, UK or US. They want to say "I had tea and crumpets at 4 in the afternoon" and have everyone understand what time that refers to. And whenever GMT is most usefull for such things as navigation or any kind of global coordination of events it is already used.
For a comment on a geek playground (read "Slashdot") that is a pretty good description of the God's purpose for the Bible. You are the first person, I've seen on Slashdot that seems to have any knowledge of church history. I would agree with you and I don't think the Bible was meant to be a history, math, cryptography, astrology or sociology manual. It pertains only to God's relationship to humanity, faith and salvation. It discusses and mentions specific places and names but overall that is not the purpose.
Anyway back to discussing Linux and how we don't like Microsoft.
I think most people would agree that they would like to keep their conversations private, even if they talk about the weather. But most people will not go through complicated motions of setting up complicated security options. I for example, am guilty, I don't want Uncle Sam, or Papa Putin to read my emails, and I did generate public and private keys, I've tried using them, but I just don't bother anymore, it's too much of a hassle.
If the tools were simpler to use and if a couple of law suits about how people were interogated and their property searched based on the content of snooped emails would hit the media, then more people would start using encryption/authentication regularly. Right now if the govt. sees you using it, immediatly they assume some terrorist or illegal activity. Encryption should be the norm not the exception, maybe some day it will be.
Chances are that you run linux so download it from
sourceforge originally it was developed on SGI and people posted links to that, the sourceforge version is probably more up to date. Enjoy, I tried it but didn't find it that useful. Reason is that the display is flat, i.e. 2D and twisting and turning in 3D using odd combinations of 3 mouse buttons and 3 keys (Ctrl,Alt,Shift ) just to open a folder is somehow too much work, a simple command line or double click works better.
I think they failed because they didn't sense the change in the PC market. Back in the early and up to mid 90's professional 3D graphics and visualization was synonimous with SGI. I worked for a company that developed one of the major CAD/CAE/CAM product and everyone on their desk had an SGI. If you were a co-op like me you had an older one, if you are the manager you had a R12000 one with 1Gb or ram. In the basement in the "vault" we had a quad R12000 with 4 Gb or ram to crunch huge matrices for CAE. Then around the year 2000 consumer 3D graphics cards and CPUs became more and more powerful and caught up with SGI's products. I could spend about $1000 and get a PC that was 3 times as fast as the SGI on my desk at work which was probably bought for $4000. SGI just couldn't stay ahead of the market and they never lowered the prices to make their machines competitive with PC. I still don't know many people who have or had an SGI at home, they were just too darn expensive.
Another thing is, after the tech bubble burst companies that before had plenty to spend all of the sudden had to cut corners, and one of the corners were the very expensive SGI workstations that could be replaced by Linux boxes or Windows PCs.
Don't worry, instead of just one precise missile they'll just fire a whole bunch of unprecise ones. Trust me "collateral damage" won't be concern for some nation like that. Or if it is China, they surely can develop a missile that as it gets closer can recognize the target by visual clues.
I wonder where they found this nice group of injured dogs to test that stuff on. I can just see, "get the bat Bill, swing hard and crack its spine, then we'll cure it with PEG". I know it will help people but still makes me wonder.
Slashdot Mirror
I have noticed that too. I even turned it on and everytime I dial a number after the call was put through I can hear a distinctive beep. Then I moved my cellphone by my tower and there were some spots (I guess by the sound card) that the beeps really get amplified.
you won't have voices coming from the fillings since you are wearing the tin foil hat ;-)
Or perhaps in movie theatres, but then jamming would be easier than painting I think. Also, doctors or any person who has to be on-call might object to that.
Yap, at just about 1.9 GHz (or at .9 or 1.8 GHz for my European friends).
Would you have to climb up the chimney to call your friends?
The database to work will have to understand what 3D objects are (at least in the specific domain) and have an idea of what features of the object are important (like signs for example, so it will need a very good OCR system then too). That becomes a knowledge representation issue.
There have been many projects like this before attempted. But until a computer knows what a "chair" is, or what "statue" or a "tree" is, it will just not work right. To have a computer understand concepts though is a much larger and more interesting accomplishment.
By the same reasoning, how about someone planting gps devices on police cruisers in a small town, then tracking their location? If it is only the expectation of privacy that should keep cops from doing such things,then that would seem reasonable, since the location of a cop car is also very obvious and visible in public.
And what if the owner has a scanner that would find there gps tracking devices, can they have them, or will the cops come after them claiming the person stole the device?
Actually I have heard of someone who has done something like it, except it wasn't a gps device it was a simple beacon and they had a radio scanner connected to a laptop that would somehow calculate the approximate the distance to the beacon(s). But I should run since the cops are probably planing a gps device on my car already.
If having a slew of "buxom virtual ladies" is wrong then I don't want to be right.
Or even better:
"Made by people, for people, from people!"
Put all the grammas and the 13 year olds in jail with the murderers. It's all the same. We don't want the "poor" label owners and producers to miss out on that new Ferrari, that would be a crime to leave them "unfulfilled". The artists who are underpaid will remain underpaid, it's the big guys upstairs who don't want to take a small cut in the million dollar salaries. They have all the legal and political connections. I am not saying the guilty shouldn't be punished but jailtime is a little too much.
I knew there was no chance of getting it, I could just look at it and salivate. But surprizingly my mom looked at it and asked me if I would want to have one. Of course I said yes. So we got a new black and white TV (this was around 1992, and yes we were poor) and what turned out to be a low quality clone of ZX Spectrum with a blazing fast 3.5 Mhz Z80 processor and a whooping 48K of ram (out of which 16K was used for video memory).
And so it started. All the programs could be stored on audio tapes and could be loaded from a simple tape player. But the most wonderful thing was that it had a full keyboard, a BASIC interpreter and easy access to memory (anyone remember the peek and poke instructions?). Of course there were so many games and applications for it. I remember how excited I felt when I wrote my first assembly program. Then I found a pascal and C compiler for it. After a while though, the cheap keyboard made out of rubber failed. The metal had worn out under the keys. Then the modding started. I had spend a whole week scavenging magnetic vacuum contacts from this archaic fax machine of the size of a huge refrigerator from my dad's work. Then I cut a hole in my machine and painstakingly sodered each contact and each new key. Then I made labels and glued them onto the keys. But why stop then? I also made a seperate keypad to be used instead of my worn-out Kempstone joystick.
Now more than a decade later I am a grad student in computer science in US and have my own family and for all of it I have to thank my mom. She was forced to quit school after 7th grade and nobody better than her knew what it meant not be educated. Another time she came home with a book about electronics. It had stuff about lasers, plasma etching of circuits, superconductivity and all this other cool stuff that she had no idea what it was but she knew I would love it, and she was right. Thank you mom!
Sorry pressed submit too early
I was just wanted to conlude that it seem because the profession of an engineer involved in military techonolgy was so prestigious they had a lot of really good people working on building those rockets. I just don't think in US an aerospace engineer has the same status as they would have in ex-Soviet Union. I don't think they got paid nearly as much as the western designers and engineers, they were motivated by recognition and interest mostly.
Russian military technology is known to be very reliable. They might not have always had the latest technical and computer gizmos but they always had reliable equipment. The DNEPR was built during the golden era of Soviet Military. I don't know about this country but back in Soviet Union the profession of a rocket engineer or even any kind of engineer involved in military technology was highly prestigious. They funneled so much money into defence and they went to great lengths to instill this pride of the "Great Soviet" military in young boys that all you wanted to do is be drafted (even though it was mandatory for every young adult male ) and couldn't wait to go fly those planes or go to college to learn to build them. I am not sure
There was a tape a while ago of Jirinovsky, a russian ultra-nationalistic party leader that threatened Americans with something like that, how they (Russians) would be able to change the axis the earth or cause a tsunami and sink New York. Sounded like a tin-foil hat theory but now I am starting to wonder. Anybody else know more about this?
This is sounds like pseudoscience to me and someone feeling the need to invent some new crazy thing to get a PhD thesis going. This all stems from applying different intuitive "explanations" to the results of the quantum physics. The math works out alright but it seems that people have a need to understand and have an intuitive plan or schematics in their head. The computer scientist might imagine an array as a bucket or a counter with items on it. The electrical engineer might think of the current as water flowing through the wires etc. This seems to work up to a point. Quantum physics on the other hand doesn not seem to have any decent intuitive explanation that everyone's mom or uncle can read in a "how stuff works" book and have a clear grasp of what is going on. This hasn't stopped physicists from applying different interpretation to the quantum phenomena based on classical world. The authors from the article in Nature adopted what I believe is called Copenhagen Interpretation, where a state of the system is changed by measuring it. So there is a distinction between the macroworld where the measuring device is and the quantumwold where the system being measured is considered. The problem is that the measuring apparatus itself lives in a quantum world and everthing else is part of a larger quantum world. Check out wiki for Copenhagen interpetation, which the authers seem to adopt and the many-worlds interpretation which might not work out so well for these guys. (look around in here). So take these nice new ideas with a grain of salt. If you want to know that happens go through the math at least 3 times and then all you see is the math which everyone seems to agree on.
It seems that for an electrical device it might be easier use to electromagnetic energy without the need to convert chemical energy from biomass. I remember someone at the university talking about having a small robot just land near a power line and recharge its batteries using induction. Or I imagine in an urban environment there might be other powerful sources of EM energy. But obviously in a remote location, flies and apples would work better.
Any engineers who know more about this?
There is the libecc project on sourceforge: here, they use C++ and assembly. But it seems it is still in beta but it is actively being developed. You can try your own or get involved. When I took a Data Encoding class I found some nice Java applets that illustrate the concept but obviously are not practical.
Most data out there is not encrypted it thus it would be possible to scan for specific keywords. The companies that route the Internet backbone probably already to this. It is a great way to spy on everyone. But the ones who want to hide will easily be able to do so. RSA and even better, Elliptical Curve combined with authentication, steganography and other such things should do the trick.
And what about everyone using GMT? That is as nutty as it gets. Time of day is realated to the (surprise) time of day for most people. People want to come to work at 8 regardless if they are in Japan, UK or US. They want to say "I had tea and crumpets at 4 in the afternoon" and have everyone understand what time that refers to. And whenever GMT is most usefull for such things as navigation or any kind of global coordination of events it is already used.
For a comment on a geek playground (read "Slashdot") that is a pretty good description of the God's purpose for the Bible. You are the first person, I've seen on Slashdot that seems to have any knowledge of church history. I would agree with you and I don't think the Bible was meant to be a history, math, cryptography, astrology or sociology manual. It pertains only to God's relationship to humanity, faith and salvation. It discusses and mentions specific places and names but overall that is not the purpose.
Anyway back to discussing Linux and how we don't like Microsoft.
I think most people would agree that they would like to keep their conversations private, even if they talk about the weather. But most people will not go through complicated motions of setting up complicated security options. I for example, am guilty, I don't want Uncle Sam, or Papa Putin to read my emails, and I did generate public and private keys, I've tried using them, but I just don't bother anymore, it's too much of a hassle.
If the tools were simpler to use and if a couple of law suits about how people were interogated and their property searched based on the content of snooped emails would hit the media, then more people would start using encryption/authentication regularly. Right now if the govt. sees you using it, immediatly they assume some terrorist or illegal activity. Encryption should be the norm not the exception, maybe some day it will be.
Chances are that you run linux so download it from sourceforge originally it was developed on SGI and people posted links to that, the sourceforge version is probably more up to date. Enjoy, I tried it but didn't find it that useful. Reason is that the display is flat, i.e. 2D and twisting and turning in 3D using odd combinations of 3 mouse buttons and 3 keys (Ctrl,Alt,Shift ) just to open a folder is somehow too much work, a simple command line or double click works better.
I think they failed because they didn't sense the change in the PC market. Back in the early and up to mid 90's professional 3D graphics and visualization was synonimous with SGI. I worked for a company that developed one of the major CAD/CAE/CAM product and everyone on their desk had an SGI. If you were a co-op like me you had an older one, if you are the manager you had a R12000 one with 1Gb or ram. In the basement in the "vault" we had a quad R12000 with 4 Gb or ram to crunch huge matrices for CAE. Then around the year 2000 consumer 3D graphics cards and CPUs became more and more powerful and caught up with SGI's products. I could spend about $1000 and get a PC that was 3 times as fast as the SGI on my desk at work which was probably bought for $4000. SGI just couldn't stay ahead of the market and they never lowered the prices to make their machines competitive with PC. I still don't know many people who have or had an SGI at home, they were just too darn expensive.
Another thing is, after the tech bubble burst companies that before had plenty to spend all of the sudden had to cut corners, and one of the corners were the very expensive SGI workstations that could be replaced by Linux boxes or Windows PCs.
Don't worry, instead of just one precise missile they'll just fire a whole bunch of unprecise ones. Trust me "collateral damage" won't be concern for some nation like that. Or if it is China, they surely can develop a missile that as it gets closer can recognize the target by visual clues.
I wonder where they found this nice group of injured dogs to test that stuff on. I can just see, "get the bat Bill, swing hard and crack its spine, then we'll cure it with PEG". I know it will help people but still makes me wonder.