I spent about six months in Taiwan. I felt the tension there too . . . but I also felt that the younger generation that has no knowledge of living on the mainland (having been born on the island) is staunchly Pro-Taiwan. That doesn't mean that they feel that the Taiwanese government is the rightful government of all of China that was overthrown by the communists . . . simply that they are Taiwanese of Chinese descent and would like to continue their autonomous rule of the island.
A younger Taiwanese chemical plant operator put it very succinctly for me. He said that he believes in the mainland Chinese "One China Policy" . . .
What's the harm in a game that has Taiwan listed as a country? Nobody's going to say "hey, Taiwan's independent! Kill China!" because it's listed in one lousy game.
It propagates a culture and mentality that Taiwan is independent of China. China is especially worried because an independent Taiwan could open the door to an independence movement in Hong Kong, Macao, . . .
Taiwan really *is* an independent country, whether the People's Republic of China likes it or not.
Uh . . . in a word, "No."
It could perhaps be said that Taiwan is de facto independent, but not truly independent. Taiwan has never declared its independence from China; only 4 countries in the world recognize the Taiwanese government (officially . . . try to find the Taiwanese embassy in the US. It doesn't exist. There is an unofficial non-profit that represents Taiwan in the US, but it is not a recognized diplomatic mission). Taiwan has no seat in the UN.
However, Taiwan has its own currency, government, military, and trade relationships . . . and a defense treaty with the USA.
Taiwan is in limbo . . . somewhere between independence and subjagation . . . with between 200 and 300 missles pointed at it from the other side of the Taiwan strait.
This is not the first, second or third . . . time that someone has done this . . . nor is it the first, second, or third time that its been posted on/.
In fact, the article says:
It is not the first time researchers have had this sort of success in brain-control experiments.
So even the original cited article claims that this is not new . . . I fail to understand why such "repeats" of similar "discoveries" seem to be so "newsworthy"
I remember playing with a device that connected to electrodes that one connected to the head and measured some level of brain activity when I was in high school. This connected to a PC which would draw a virtual strip chart of measured activity. We would move the stripchart pen with our mind . . . isn't this really quite similar?
. . .
I think that part of the problem is the price of the Zaurus series . . . They seem to sit around a $500-$600 price point . . . which is loads higher than the typical pricepoint of the Palm or IPAQ line
Granted, Palm and IPAQ have products at this pricepoint too, but they also have a significant line of products at much lower pricepoints to attract larger volumes of more mainstream users. This volume helps insure that these have a large consumer base and market presence.
However, a few hundred thousand is more than is do-able with friends, family, and second mortgages. So to sum up: too little for VCs, (maybe?) too much for friends and family. Have any others on Slashdot faced this situation? What works here, and what doesn't?"
You forgot one of the 3F's . . . they are "Fools, Friends, and Family" a euphemism for the first place one often looks for funding a business venture.
More seriously, are there any local entrepreneurs who have succeeded in your area? Often they are likely to mentor steer and sometimes invest in an idea especially if you remind them of themself when they were in a similar position.
Just remember, no matter what you do, make sure that you have appropriate secrecy and non-disclosure forms signed before presenting anything to anyone. . . these can be hashed out quite readily by a good lawyer. This is especially true if you don't have any legal protection for your idea (e.g. patent).
. . . as there are fears here that they'd cause more crime and more poverty in the surrounding area due to the envitable rise in gambling addiction.
Why would mega-casinos cause gambling addction to rise in the UK? . . . a country where there are bingo parlors, casinos, slot machines and bookmakers (bookies for you yanks) already legal and seemingly found throughout the country.
Are we somehow to assume that the siren's call of a megacasino is somehow more compelling than that of the bookmaker and bingo parlor located round the corner?
Crypto for a ten year document? Not likely . . .
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 1
Most passports are valid for at least 5 years. In the USA, adult passports are valid for ten years. Do you really think that we could come up with a good crypto today that would be virtually unhackable over a ten year period of time? Think about how much more powerful home PCs will be in 10 years . . .
Of course one could start issuing passports with a shorter expiration time . ..but then one must get into a cost benefit analysis of replacing passports on a much more frequent timeframe . . .
Rural Sourcing's fees are about the same as the overall cost of using an Indian outsourcer, she said--if you consider factors such as communication costs, travel expenses and inconvenience.
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . .
Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
I assumed the stop position as default and then up as one direction and down as another from the default of stop. Your count is plausible and it simplifies the problem even more . . .
Is that a cursor or a mouse pointer? A cursor in a simpler time was a one dimensional element used to indicate where one is in a text stream. Conceivably one could scroll forward and back and reach any place in the text. I don't think that there is any evidence in the article to suggest that the controller must have 2 dimensional control.
He might have two dimensional control, but I find it difficult to assume this based on the article, because I think that the tasks cited in the article can be accomplished without controlling something in a two dimensional plane . . .
First of all, he could have achieved all of those with only 1-degree of freedom (plus time).
But if time were used as dimension of a controller rather than simply a sampling interval, then the time domain would represent a degree of freedom . . . that is still two degrees of freedom.
I wholely agree that resolution, responsiveness, etc. are important in any controller. But the article gave no information aobut these things except that the guy can play pong with 70% accuracy.
Hardly true . ..scanning 100 neurons does not generate 100 degrees of freedom. That would imply that each neuron is a discrete controller that can be stimulated at will by the user. Neurons works in conjunction forming netoworks through axons and synapses and fire in combination with one another. They are not independent control elements. The user is probably firing off a pattern of neurons at a time and this pattern is picked up by the electrodes and interpreted by software. Repeatable neural patterns that are able to be produced on demand are then linked to inputs on the TV, in the pong game etc.
In fact if you had actually paid attention and thought about the article after reading it, it would be rather obvious that the quote
There are 100,000 neurons in a square millimeter of cortex. There are very precise codes in the neurons. The details matter."
Is referring to the details of neural patterns being picked up, not individual neurons. Just as the quote from the article implies, the devil is in the details.
I agree with your statements generally, but in context, I don't think that they are contrary to my original statements.
I agree that population growth delines with rising standards of living, but even if world population were at a standstill and everyone shared the western standard of living as it is now, the environment would be crippled in a matter of years (not decades).
Also, wealthy nations do produce the strictest environmental protection laws (as I said in my previous post Kuznet's curve as interpreted by Yandle demonstrates this); however, one must consider the amount of pollution produced before reaching the inflection point of the Kuznet curve. In other words how much pollution would countries produce on their way to becoming wealthy enough to think about pollution control. And once they start caring about the environment and reducing pollution, how much pollution are they already producing (In other words, a fractional reduction of a huge number is still a huge number).
A current example of this is China . . . with air pollution currently so bad, it is affecting air quality on the west coast of the United States, it will be a long time before China is wealthy enough to consider long term pollution control. And when they do start to reduce pollution, where are the starting from? A 5% reduction in pollution by a future China is a huge reduction, but there is still a huge amount of pollution being produced.
can use his thoughts to control a computer well enough to operate a TV, open e-mail and play Pong with 70% accuracy
The quote really sounds impressive the way they wrote it, but it seems like the patient is using only three degrees of freedom in their control.
Use the mind to make the paddle go up . . . use the mind to make the paddle go down . . .
Use the mind to make the channel go up . . . Use the mind to make the channel go down. Use the mind to switch to volume and repeat . . .
Use the mind to select next email . . . Use the mind to open the email . . . Use the mind to close the email.
I count three degrees of freedom . . . This is no different than the guy that was wired up to use his mind to scroll through and select letters to write emails. It sounds good when one says he can play pong, check email and and control a TV, but the truth is that I think that using the mind to control with three degrees of freedom has been done before. This just sounds better because they framed the control in terms of some common tasks.
I would agree . . . there are lots of applications in manufacturing that depend on realtime applications. Though safety and mission critical apps are still on more fault tolerant Sun, HP-Risc, and big IBM boxes, many of them are moving to the kludgy WinTel monopoly because of easy of maintanence and lower hardware cost. Windows has really made huge inroads on the client side of these large control systems . . . and they are slowing taking over the server side OS.
I think that Linux has a real opportunity here because the mission critical systems are almost all Unix based. It wouldn't be that big a leap to migrate to Linux; customers are already UNIX skilled. However, the Linux community seems to have done very little to convince people like Honeywell, Foxboro, Yokogawa, Fisher-Provox and ABB (The leaders in large scale manufacturing digital control systems) that Linux would be a suitable alternative in their marketplace.
the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate.
Uh . . . that doesn't look like a debate to me. In a debate, there should be some interaction between the parties . . . some followup response and rebuttal.
This would more accurately be characterized as text based interview of the candidates (or mare accurately, their campaigns . ..I can't believe that the candidates personally wrote these answers). Though this information has value, lets not jade young voters by telling them something is a debate when its merely answers to questions . . .
Rising standards of living solve most of the pressing problems facing the world today.
Perhaps, but not pollution . . . as global prosperity increases, so does global pollution. Efficiency of energy and resource usage increases, but overall consumption also increases such that overall there is a net increase in environental impact. One may argue that Kuznet's curve predicts that as people become more wealthy, they care more about the environment. this has been shown to be true in many locals; however, I'm not convinced that this has been demonstrated on a global scale. In other words Kuznet's curve might hold true except that "Not in My BackYard" pushes environmental damage to remote locations . . . e.g. Yucca mountain, developing countries, etc.
Additionally, poor people in developing couuntries don't throw away broken VCRs and DVD players and buy new ones . . . they fix them because it is economically viable to do so. In the US, we even throw away cars just because they are ugly or old. I would agree that our technology makes our use of energy and resources more efficient in manufacturing, but we also also tend to produce enormous amounts of trash due to product packaging and the fact that it is cheaper to buy a new item than fix an old one.
Many have postulated that the environment would be stressed to the breaking point if everyone in the world lived like the most privledged people (western developed world). PBS's NOVA did a fantastic two part series on this and other issues. The website is here.
From the NY times article Regardless of how they get Media Center computers, Mr. Brooks said people like them when they get them home. Microsoft's surveys, he said, found that more than 90 percent of the owners of the Media Center computers are satisfied with them, far more than the percentage of basic PC owners. Eight out of nine, he said, would recommend the product to a friend.
That doesn't surprise me but I think that the figure is intrinsically misleading . . . at only 3% of the market, these media PC's are probably primarily bought by the diehard enthusiast types. These are exactly the same group that would be most likely to be very satisfied with the product. The average Joe that is much more fickle and impatient currently wouldn't even consider buying one of these for his/her living room . . . at least not until they become much more mainstream . . .
The first chapter, in the good tradition of all first chapters in the world, is an introduction. It's a very well written introduction about why do we need ORM solutions in OO applications.
It's ironic that the reviewer acknowledges that introductions are a "good tradition" but then fails to write an good introduction himself . . . I like many had no idea what Hibernate is until I read some of the posts by gracious/.'ers that took the time to post a description of Hibernate. Additonally isn't it good writing style to define your jargon acronyms before using them like this: Object Oriented (OO) or Customer Relations Management (CRM)? The author completely fails to do this.
Why didn't the reviewer do that? I can only suppose that his box is so small that he didn't know that many regular/.'ers have no idea what he is talking about. And I can only guess that the/. editor that posted this and failed to give a description of Hibernate is living in the same box. . .
Uhh its actually.001 watt . ..there is a ".00" in front of that "One." the following quote is from the wired article, but it is confirmed by visiting the Radio ReVolt Website
At least that's the idea behind Radio Re-Volt: One Person.00One Watt, a project by Minneapolis' Walker Art Center that intends to open the radio airwaves to the general public, one small radio station at a time.
I'd like to see how good these roller skating robots could handle a good solid roller hockey body check. Now that would be a real test of robotic balance.
Seriously, the robot dancer/skater/stairclimber are all interesting but they run through what I assume is a static algorithm . . . what about inducing some disturbance and writing an algorithm to reject the disturbance to the robot's balance system.
Slashdot Mirror
A younger Taiwanese chemical plant operator put it very succinctly for me. He said that he believes in the mainland Chinese "One China Policy" . . .
But his version is "One China and One Taiwan."
It propagates a culture and mentality that Taiwan is independent of China. China is especially worried because an independent Taiwan could open the door to an independence movement in Hong Kong, Macao, . . .
Uh . . . in a word, "No."
It could perhaps be said that Taiwan is de facto independent, but not truly independent. Taiwan has never declared its independence from China; only 4 countries in the world recognize the Taiwanese government (officially . . . try to find the Taiwanese embassy in the US. It doesn't exist. There is an unofficial non-profit that represents Taiwan in the US, but it is not a recognized diplomatic mission). Taiwan has no seat in the UN.
However, Taiwan has its own currency, government, military, and trade relationships . . . and a defense treaty with the USA.
Taiwan is in limbo . . . somewhere between independence and subjagation . . . with between 200 and 300 missles pointed at it from the other side of the Taiwan strait.
In fact, the article says: It is not the first time researchers have had this sort of success in brain-control experiments.
So even the original cited article claims that this is not new . . . I fail to understand why such "repeats" of similar "discoveries" seem to be so "newsworthy"
I remember playing with a device that connected to electrodes that one connected to the head and measured some level of brain activity when I was in high school. This connected to a PC which would draw a virtual strip chart of measured activity. We would move the stripchart pen with our mind . . . isn't this really quite similar? . . .
Granted, Palm and IPAQ have products at this pricepoint too, but they also have a significant line of products at much lower pricepoints to attract larger volumes of more mainstream users. This volume helps insure that these have a large consumer base and market presence.
You forgot one of the 3F's . . . they are "Fools, Friends, and Family" a euphemism for the first place one often looks for funding a business venture.
More seriously, are there any local entrepreneurs who have succeeded in your area? Often they are likely to mentor steer and sometimes invest in an idea especially if you remind them of themself when they were in a similar position.
Just remember, no matter what you do, make sure that you have appropriate secrecy and non-disclosure forms signed before presenting anything to anyone. . . these can be hashed out quite readily by a good lawyer. This is especially true if you don't have any legal protection for your idea (e.g. patent).
Why would mega-casinos cause gambling addction to rise in the UK? . . . a country where there are bingo parlors, casinos, slot machines and bookmakers (bookies for you yanks) already legal and seemingly found throughout the country.
Are we somehow to assume that the siren's call of a megacasino is somehow more compelling than that of the bookmaker and bingo parlor located round the corner?
Of course one could start issuing passports with a shorter expiration time . . .but then one must get into a cost benefit analysis of replacing passports on a much more frequent timeframe . . .
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . . Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
What am I supposed to do with these images? 1.2Mp today is like including 8 track functionality or minidisc digital input on a stereo system . . .
I think I'd rather pay less and have a smaller device that didn't have substandard features included . . .
I assumed the stop position as default and then up as one direction and down as another from the default of stop. Your count is plausible and it simplifies the problem even more . . .
He might have two dimensional control, but I find it difficult to assume this based on the article, because I think that the tasks cited in the article can be accomplished without controlling something in a two dimensional plane . . .
But if time were used as dimension of a controller rather than simply a sampling interval, then the time domain would represent a degree of freedom . . . that is still two degrees of freedom.
I wholely agree that resolution, responsiveness, etc. are important in any controller. But the article gave no information aobut these things except that the guy can play pong with 70% accuracy.
"Capricorn One" anyone?
In fact if you had actually paid attention and thought about the article after reading it, it would be rather obvious that the quote
There are 100,000 neurons in a square millimeter of cortex. There are very precise codes in the neurons. The details matter."
Is referring to the details of neural patterns being picked up, not individual neurons. Just as the quote from the article implies, the devil is in the details.
I agree that population growth delines with rising standards of living, but even if world population were at a standstill and everyone shared the western standard of living as it is now, the environment would be crippled in a matter of years (not decades).
Also, wealthy nations do produce the strictest environmental protection laws (as I said in my previous post Kuznet's curve as interpreted by Yandle demonstrates this); however, one must consider the amount of pollution produced before reaching the inflection point of the Kuznet curve. In other words how much pollution would countries produce on their way to becoming wealthy enough to think about pollution control. And once they start caring about the environment and reducing pollution, how much pollution are they already producing (In other words, a fractional reduction of a huge number is still a huge number).
A current example of this is China . . . with air pollution currently so bad, it is affecting air quality on the west coast of the United States, it will be a long time before China is wealthy enough to consider long term pollution control. And when they do start to reduce pollution, where are the starting from? A 5% reduction in pollution by a future China is a huge reduction, but there is still a huge amount of pollution being produced.
The quote really sounds impressive the way they wrote it, but it seems like the patient is using only three degrees of freedom in their control.
Use the mind to make the paddle go up . . . use the mind to make the paddle go down . . .
Use the mind to make the channel go up . . . Use the mind to make the channel go down. Use the mind to switch to volume and repeat . . .
Use the mind to select next email . . . Use the mind to open the email . . . Use the mind to close the email.
I count three degrees of freedom . . . This is no different than the guy that was wired up to use his mind to scroll through and select letters to write emails. It sounds good when one says he can play pong, check email and and control a TV, but the truth is that I think that using the mind to control with three degrees of freedom has been done before. This just sounds better because they framed the control in terms of some common tasks.
I think that Linux has a real opportunity here because the mission critical systems are almost all Unix based. It wouldn't be that big a leap to migrate to Linux; customers are already UNIX skilled. However, the Linux community seems to have done very little to convince people like Honeywell, Foxboro, Yokogawa, Fisher-Provox and ABB (The leaders in large scale manufacturing digital control systems) that Linux would be a suitable alternative in their marketplace.
This would more accurately be characterized as text based interview of the candidates (or mare accurately, their campaigns . . .I can't believe that the candidates personally wrote these answers). Though this information has value, lets not jade young voters by telling them something is a debate when its merely answers to questions . . .
Perhaps, but not pollution . . . as global prosperity increases, so does global pollution. Efficiency of energy and resource usage increases, but overall consumption also increases such that overall there is a net increase in environental impact. One may argue that Kuznet's curve predicts that as people become more wealthy, they care more about the environment. this has been shown to be true in many locals; however, I'm not convinced that this has been demonstrated on a global scale. In other words Kuznet's curve might hold true except that "Not in My BackYard" pushes environmental damage to remote locations . . . e.g. Yucca mountain, developing countries, etc.
Additionally, poor people in developing couuntries don't throw away broken VCRs and DVD players and buy new ones . . . they fix them because it is economically viable to do so. In the US, we even throw away cars just because they are ugly or old. I would agree that our technology makes our use of energy and resources more efficient in manufacturing, but we also also tend to produce enormous amounts of trash due to product packaging and the fact that it is cheaper to buy a new item than fix an old one.
Many have postulated that the environment would be stressed to the breaking point if everyone in the world lived like the most privledged people (western developed world). PBS's NOVA did a fantastic two part series on this and other issues. The website is here.
That doesn't surprise me but I think that the figure is intrinsically misleading . . . at only 3% of the market, these media PC's are probably primarily bought by the diehard enthusiast types. These are exactly the same group that would be most likely to be very satisfied with the product. The average Joe that is much more fickle and impatient currently wouldn't even consider buying one of these for his/her living room . . . at least not until they become much more mainstream . . .
If not, then why is it on /.?
It's ironic that the reviewer acknowledges that introductions are a "good tradition" but then fails to write an good introduction himself . . . I like many had no idea what Hibernate is until I read some of the posts by gracious /.'ers that took the time to post a description of Hibernate. Additonally isn't it good writing style to define your jargon acronyms before using them like this: Object Oriented (OO) or Customer Relations Management (CRM)? The author completely fails to do this.
Why didn't the reviewer do that? I can only suppose that his box is so small that he didn't know that many regular /.'ers have no idea what he is talking about. And I can only guess that the /. editor that posted this and failed to give a description of Hibernate is living in the same box. . .
At least that's the idea behind Radio Re-Volt: One Person .00One Watt, a project by Minneapolis' Walker Art Center that intends to open the radio airwaves to the general public, one small radio station at a time.
Seriously, the robot dancer/skater/stairclimber are all interesting but they run through what I assume is a static algorithm . . . what about inducing some disturbance and writing an algorithm to reject the disturbance to the robot's balance system.