All the photos from cameras have been digitally enhanced. What the camera itself produces is not een viewable by a human. Software either in the camera, or in the PC software in the case of RAW image files, converts the matrix of RGB values into a photo.
While someone could certainly question the accuracy of the enhancement process, there is no good reason enhanced photos could not be admissible as evidence. It would not surprise me to find that it is very common to do simple enhancements anyway since CCTV cameras really tend to suck.
okay, then I am truly amazed. I guess it just seems so far-fetched that I didn't think it was really doing that.
Even a human brain can't do that. We can't look at an object and determine it's 3D spatial details without additional information. For one thing, we use stereo vision. Then we use our knowledge of scale (cars are about that big, and people are about that big) and light (sun is over there, light bulb is over there). But a computer doesn't know those things.
I figured this might be possible if it knew the positions that the images were taken, and the position of the subject. Then it would essentially be using super-stereo: multiple images from multiple angles to generate depth information. But generating depth information without knowing position or angle or distance seems mathematically impossible to me. At least with a human brain, you can fool someone by doing faux finishing and trompe l'oeil. Maybe I need to make a Parthenon and try to fool this software into creating a 3D image out of it.:)
Also, how can it determine your position without knowing the angle and zoom of the lens? (Maybe it really doesn't. Maybe someone with a 3x zoom lens looks 3x closer in their plot, than they actually were - for what they are doing I guess it doesn't matter. The "apparent" position of the photo versus where the person was actually standing is irrelevant)
So lastly... if it can determine a rough 3D layout, could it not use the images to texture that layout, then generate a 3D model? This would turn sculptors into 3D modelers.
If they win, they will have invsestors beating down their door. And they will break into the market of the fastest growing personal computer manufacturer. Plus, it will resolve a long standing legal question as to the validity of EULAs. I see no down side here for them at all.
I've seen some of these articles about Photosynth, and there seems to be a lot of hype. But... I don't get it.
I see that Photosynth can glue a series of images together so that you can zoom into and move around a scene and get an epileptic-seizure of correlated viewpoints. This group seems to have made a virtual walk-through using this. But I am unclear: 1) What is the point 2) What is the breakthrough
As for #1, Photosynth is ugly. I would much rather have a few good quality same-lighting photos to look at than to have my eyes torn out trying to make sense of this. So unless my brain works differently from everyone else's, the point is not an aesthetic one. It must be a technological one. Is it the promise that we could one day use this to combine amateur images into a real 3D image? Why would this matter when doing that with professional images is easy to do and looks much better?
As for #2, without reading the entire paper I'm unclear how much of this was done automatically. If someone manually entered the GPS coordinates and direction of these photos and then wrote a program to glue them together, I see a lot of hard work but no science. If this required creating a rough 3D layout and it was able to extract the positions programatically, then that is impressive. If it was able to make this entirely from nothing other than the images, then holy moly that's amazing. But I can't tell from the video which of these it is.
Can someone explain this to me and why I should be interested?
A friend of mine and I were looking for a 3rd room mate to share the costs with. We previously had a female friend of ours and we got along just fine (she got married and moved out) so we figured male or female was okay, so long as the personalities matched-up. So he put an ad online.
One of the responses was from a girl who said she was fun and easy to get along with and had no problem rooming with guys. My friend was about to call her, but I noticed that her email address was some sort of obfuscated leet-speak, and after staring at it for a moment I realized it was her bra size + some other personality attributes. I decifered it and did a google search only to find some prom pictures that would make a porn star blush. We decided to keep searching. (Yes, many readers will call me crazy for that. Choose your roommates carefully guys.)
Lesson learned: email addresses can say a lot about someone.
I agree with you, where you spend tax money is definitely a trade-off with no perfect right or wrong. But there are a lot of issues that are not merely trade-offs, but that have real right and wrong answers. These are the types of things that come-up on Slashdot all the time. Issues of human rights, technology, and pure science. Things like the Kansas school board decisions, Ethanol subsidies, and "clean" coal. These are things where science and reason can deduce that there really is a wrong answer.
The problem is that some times voters and politicians make the wrong decision, the scientifically probably wrong decision. They do it either because they don't know enough, or because it lines the right person's pockets. Those are the kinds of decisions that make me scared.
That same logic works the other way around. If the workers banded together in the same way the companies did in your example, the companies would have no employees. Neither side has more power than the other - the difference is that one side is more organized than the other. It is easier to get a majority of evil CEOs to do the evil thing, than to get a majority of individuals to do the right thing.
Now, this example won't apply to everyone, but I was faced with a non-compete clause with an employer, and I told my boss no way. It went back and forth with the CEO and various people, and in the end my boss decided to accept the contract I gave them that had the clause removed. It wasn't worth arguing over. (They even had the audacity to tell me that the clause was unenforcable, but they still wanted me to sign it). So you really do have power here, even as an individual. It helps to be someone they really need though.
What is the power source for these drives? Was deep-space I powered purely by solar power? Can that produce enough power to be useful? Or is something like an RTG or a nuclear power source more appropriate? I am also curious as to how much plasma they need to carry with them. I assume they eventually run out, but I gather that a very small amount lasts for a long time.
It would be awesome to see a purely electrically powered engine that required no fuel mass at all. I guess this is the closest thing we can get?
Mod parent up. Only 2 years ago it was impractical to sniff all traffic and identify P2P and insert reset packets. It was unreasonable to record all phone conversations. It was unreasonable to have thousands of cameras around the UK monitoring everything. It was unreasonable to have cameras that recognize license plates and automatically bill you for running red lights.
I guess McCarthy wasn't conservative either. He was a Republican. People need to stop this Republican == conservative thing. Although you have educated me: I didn't really think the party was corrupted THAT long ago. And I didn't realize that he was so far ahead of his time:(
This sounds like those tricks where someone writes a code module that compiles in both a C++ compiler and a Pascal compiler, by playing with anomolies in the syntax of the language. Only someone has made a JAR file that looks like a valid GIF file.
I fail to see how this will work though. Even if I could craft such a file, it will have.GIF extension which will make it serve-up as image/gif MIME type so it won't be loaded by the JVM. Now we know that older versions of Internet Explorer will look at the file content not the MIME type - do they still do that? If so, I guess IE might see the file as a JAR not a GIF, but nothing else would. Also - won't that GIF file be in an tag? Surely even IE won't run the JVM for something that isn't in an tag right?
I can put a Java file on my MySpace page anyway, so disguising it as a GIF doesn't really change things. I guess the benefit to the hacker here is that they could do it on sites that normally don't serve Java. And since Java can do basically the same things that Javascript can, it's another XSS attack vector.
Overall, this isn't anything I'm too worried about. Although I'll be very impressed if someone can get a JAR to run from an tag. Also, Kudos to anybody who can make a GIF appear as a JAR. They get points for being inventive.
Thanks to those who replied clarifying. Although this thread just goes to show how many geeks can't answer a question without insulting the intelligence of the person asking it. Pardon me for not knowing the latest HTML draft specifications. Sheesh.
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All the photos from cameras have been digitally enhanced. What the camera itself produces is not een viewable by a human. Software either in the camera, or in the PC software in the case of RAW image files, converts the matrix of RGB values into a photo.
While someone could certainly question the accuracy of the enhancement process, there is no good reason enhanced photos could not be admissible as evidence. It would not surprise me to find that it is very common to do simple enhancements anyway since CCTV cameras really tend to suck.
okay, then I am truly amazed. I guess it just seems so far-fetched that I didn't think it was really doing that.
Even a human brain can't do that. We can't look at an object and determine it's 3D spatial details without additional information. For one thing, we use stereo vision. Then we use our knowledge of scale (cars are about that big, and people are about that big) and light (sun is over there, light bulb is over there). But a computer doesn't know those things.
I figured this might be possible if it knew the positions that the images were taken, and the position of the subject. Then it would essentially be using super-stereo: multiple images from multiple angles to generate depth information. But generating depth information without knowing position or angle or distance seems mathematically impossible to me. At least with a human brain, you can fool someone by doing faux finishing and trompe l'oeil. Maybe I need to make a Parthenon and try to fool this software into creating a 3D image out of it. :)
Also, how can it determine your position without knowing the angle and zoom of the lens? (Maybe it really doesn't. Maybe someone with a 3x zoom lens looks 3x closer in their plot, than they actually were - for what they are doing I guess it doesn't matter. The "apparent" position of the photo versus where the person was actually standing is irrelevant)
So lastly... if it can determine a rough 3D layout, could it not use the images to texture that layout, then generate a 3D model? This would turn sculptors into 3D modelers.
If they win, they will have invsestors beating down their door. And they will break into the market of the fastest growing personal computer manufacturer. Plus, it will resolve a long standing legal question as to the validity of EULAs. I see no down side here for them at all.
I've seen some of these articles about Photosynth, and there seems to be a lot of hype. But... I don't get it.
I see that Photosynth can glue a series of images together so that you can zoom into and move around a scene and get an epileptic-seizure of correlated viewpoints. This group seems to have made a virtual walk-through using this. But I am unclear:
1) What is the point
2) What is the breakthrough
As for #1, Photosynth is ugly. I would much rather have a few good quality same-lighting photos to look at than to have my eyes torn out trying to make sense of this. So unless my brain works differently from everyone else's, the point is not an aesthetic one. It must be a technological one. Is it the promise that we could one day use this to combine amateur images into a real 3D image? Why would this matter when doing that with professional images is easy to do and looks much better?
As for #2, without reading the entire paper I'm unclear how much of this was done automatically. If someone manually entered the GPS coordinates and direction of these photos and then wrote a program to glue them together, I see a lot of hard work but no science. If this required creating a rough 3D layout and it was able to extract the positions programatically, then that is impressive. If it was able to make this entirely from nothing other than the images, then holy moly that's amazing. But I can't tell from the video which of these it is.
Can someone explain this to me and why I should be interested?
A friend of mine and I were looking for a 3rd room mate to share the costs with. We previously had a female friend of ours and we got along just fine (she got married and moved out) so we figured male or female was okay, so long as the personalities matched-up. So he put an ad online.
One of the responses was from a girl who said she was fun and easy to get along with and had no problem rooming with guys. My friend was about to call her, but I noticed that her email address was some sort of obfuscated leet-speak, and after staring at it for a moment I realized it was her bra size + some other personality attributes. I decifered it and did a google search only to find some prom pictures that would make a porn star blush. We decided to keep searching. (Yes, many readers will call me crazy for that. Choose your roommates carefully guys.)
Lesson learned: email addresses can say a lot about someone.
I agree with you, where you spend tax money is definitely a trade-off with no perfect right or wrong. But there are a lot of issues that are not merely trade-offs, but that have real right and wrong answers. These are the types of things that come-up on Slashdot all the time. Issues of human rights, technology, and pure science. Things like the Kansas school board decisions, Ethanol subsidies, and "clean" coal. These are things where science and reason can deduce that there really is a wrong answer.
The problem is that some times voters and politicians make the wrong decision, the scientifically probably wrong decision. They do it either because they don't know enough, or because it lines the right person's pockets. Those are the kinds of decisions that make me scared.
I think you will pour fuel into the cell, not replace the cell itself.
That same logic works the other way around. If the workers banded together in the same way the companies did in your example, the companies would have no employees. Neither side has more power than the other - the difference is that one side is more organized than the other. It is easier to get a majority of evil CEOs to do the evil thing, than to get a majority of individuals to do the right thing.
Now, this example won't apply to everyone, but I was faced with a non-compete clause with an employer, and I told my boss no way. It went back and forth with the CEO and various people, and in the end my boss decided to accept the contract I gave them that had the clause removed. It wasn't worth arguing over. (They even had the audacity to tell me that the clause was unenforcable, but they still wanted me to sign it). So you really do have power here, even as an individual. It helps to be someone they really need though.
Why the assumption that the Mojave experiment campaign was a failure?
I've never heard of it until now.
I don't think Deep Space one had an RTG. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article, and I can't find it on NASA's site about DS1 either
Caps would be great, but there is something fundamentally wrong with society if someone could sue the doctor when the child was going to die anyway.
In theory, there would be no standing to sue under the good samaritan laws.
What is the power source for these drives? Was deep-space I powered purely by solar power? Can that produce enough power to be useful? Or is something like an RTG or a nuclear power source more appropriate? I am also curious as to how much plasma they need to carry with them. I assume they eventually run out, but I gather that a very small amount lasts for a long time.
It would be awesome to see a purely electrically powered engine that required no fuel mass at all. I guess this is the closest thing we can get?
Will this all become moot once ipv6 assigns everyone a static IP? Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but it seems inevitable.
Mod parent up. Only 2 years ago it was impractical to sniff all traffic and identify P2P and insert reset packets. It was unreasonable to record all phone conversations. It was unreasonable to have thousands of cameras around the UK monitoring everything. It was unreasonable to have cameras that recognize license plates and automatically bill you for running red lights.
Why is it against the terms of use of the iPhone?
I guess McCarthy wasn't conservative either. He was a Republican. People need to stop this Republican == conservative thing. Although you have educated me: I didn't really think the party was corrupted THAT long ago. And I didn't realize that he was so far ahead of his time :(
This sounds like those tricks where someone writes a code module that compiles in both a C++ compiler and a Pascal compiler, by playing with anomolies in the syntax of the language. Only someone has made a JAR file that looks like a valid GIF file.
I fail to see how this will work though. Even if I could craft such a file, it will have .GIF extension which will make it serve-up as image/gif MIME type so it won't be loaded by the JVM. Now we know that older versions of Internet Explorer will look at the file content not the MIME type - do they still do that? If so, I guess IE might see the file as a JAR not a GIF, but nothing else would. Also - won't that GIF file be in an tag? Surely even IE won't run the JVM for something that isn't in an tag right?
I can put a Java file on my MySpace page anyway, so disguising it as a GIF doesn't really change things. I guess the benefit to the hacker here is that they could do it on sites that normally don't serve Java. And since Java can do basically the same things that Javascript can, it's another XSS attack vector.
Overall, this isn't anything I'm too worried about. Although I'll be very impressed if someone can get a JAR to run from an tag. Also, Kudos to anybody who can make a GIF appear as a JAR. They get points for being inventive.
I really am surprised that they patched Windows 2000. But Microsoft has never released an OS to replace XP yet. :)
That's not a conservative ideology. It's a neocon ideology.
I would agree with the principle of power, but it isn't the information they want. It's your fear.
I don't know of anyone kidnapped on US soil. The only cases I've heard of are those people helping the military in Iraq.
At least that have to pay you for it.
Who runs a critical server like DNS on a version of the OS that is 5 years old?
None of that answers the question. Do the FCC's internet principles apply to wireless carriers or not?
P2P traffic eats much more bandwidth than other types of traffic, and bandwidth isn't infinite.
Then they should put a limit on the bandwidth. I can waste bandwidth on P2P, or on non-P2P. I can use bandwidth efficiently on P2P, or on non-P2P.
Thanks to those who replied clarifying. Although this thread just goes to show how many geeks can't answer a question without insulting the intelligence of the person asking it. Pardon me for not knowing the latest HTML draft specifications. Sheesh.