I have fond memories of whiling away the hours (and quarters) in Station Break in Penn Station. Also there was a giant arcade on 1st Avenue around ~60th street, next-door to Rodney Dangerfield's comedy club. I loved that place too.
Gait recognition has been around for quite awhile. I worked at a company that deployed a gait biometric system in 2012 or so. It came from an Israeli company, FST Biometrics Results in our case were mixed, but they had several very large customers (e.g. Google) who were using it with good results.
There's a DARPA BAA on the street right now for "Machine Common Sense" that is hoping to address this by asking AI researchers to design AI to learn "common sense" the same way human babies do. One of the examples in the text of the BAA is "I saw the Grand Canyon flying to New York." A context-aware AI or one with "common sense" would understand that this sentence really meant "...WHILE flying to New York" rather than inferring that the Grand Canyon was flying.
"Common sense" in DARPA's context is not really what I would call the widespread understanding of what that phrase means, but is more oriented around understanding basic physics and behaviors and recognizing when something doesn't make sense. They're also taking...um....baby steps with this BAA, just trying to get some basic behavior around recognizing un-physical scenarios and that sort of thing. It's pretty cool though.
That neeeeeever happens in today's world of OS security, now does it? And what happens when researchers find a vulnerability in a computer system? It usually gets patched pretty quickly.
This one will not take long to patch. In the "can you tell which is which?" pictures, I picked the synthetic iris with 100% accuracy, in less than 3 seconds of inspection. Yes, I work actively in the biometrics field...but guess what? So do the folks who build these systems. I will hazard a guess that Neurotech (and L-1, and IrsID, and Fujitsu, and...) has a patch out to defeat this is less than a month.
Then another group of researchers will discover another vulnerability, and the game will continue.
FWIW, liveness checks are part of lots of biometric systems, especially fingerprint systems. My prediction is that we will see liveness check technology appear in iris systems pretty quick now.
Lasers are not normally used in Tokamak reactors. In those systems, the idea is to use magnetic fields to hold a plasma tight enough (and long enough) for fusion to initiate. The energy input (i.e. "heating") is done ohmically, that is, by radio waves that induce electric currents in the gas.
The NIF pursues a different approach, called "inertial confinement fusion." The idea in these systems is to supply a whole load of energy in a very short time, so the hydrogen nuclei don't have time to move apart before the fusion reaction takes place. That is, their inertia is what confines them long enough for the reaction to go. In order to do this, you need a giant load of energy delivered into a very small volume in a very short time. That's why they quote the number as terawatts. The interesting part of this announcement is not just the TW energy rate, but the nanosecond-scale pulse width.
This is actually pretty cool news...
I don't see that "religion" and "evolution" are incompatible, unless you are a literal word-of-god believer in the KJ bible. First, off, evolution is an undeniable fact. You can buy a tube of drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, set up an unusual condition in their habitat, and watch them evolve to adapt to it over the course of a few weeks. Now if you want to say that God directed/guided that evolution, "OK." I don't think science addresses that idea at all.
Where you get into trouble with evolution/natural selection is if you try to insist that the Earth is 5,000 years old, nothing has ever evolved since God created it, the fossil record is bogus, radiocarbon dating is a sham, the cosmic microwave background is unrelated to the Big Bang, etc. Then your only hope of keeping your kids from asking embarrassing questions that point out that you have no grip on basic science is to make sure they never get exposed to these "confusing" ideas (see the recent Lousiana science textbook flap)...so you try to prevent schools from teaching them at all.
It sounds like that may not actually be what's going on in this story, but it's certainly what's going on in Texas, Loisiana, Mississippi, etc.
It's not about "creationism." it's about "young earth creationism," in which the proponents believe that every word of the bible is literally true, and every creature on earth was created in its present form directly by the hand of God less than 5000 years ago. If you allow for an evolutionary path that took (tens or hundreds of) millions of years to evolve a horse or a bird, your 5,000-year-old Earth theory has some major challenges ahead of it.
In the end, this sort of effort is fundamentally about suppressing the challenge, not teaching science.
I use Kompozer myself, but have had reasonable experiences with some of the other tools too. Windows, Mac, Linux...you can get Kompozer for all major platforms.
Please. Please. Please read the article and try to understand it before posting breathless announcements like this one.
From the article, "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency of conventional planar structure of the same materials."
This article announces a breakthrough in efficiency for this type of material. For reference, typical photovoltaic silicon cells run around 10-15% efficiency, and the world record is around 25% efficiency. Thus, the questions you should ask after reading this article are "so what," "why would I build a cell out of this material when conventional silicon beats the living crap out of it," "how do you plan to produce this on an industrial scale," "will this ever see the outside of your lab," and "you need some published articles in order to get promoted, don't you?"
As a casual user, I really can't justify ponying up the dollars they demand...so I went looking for alternatives. GIMP for Photoshop (recent GIMP versions are very good, BTW), Inkspace for Illustrator, etc. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to move off Adobe's products altogether.
I run an engineering division within my company. I have ~40 developers and a total staff of around 110. This includes biz dev guys, testers, systems engineers, production engineers (builds, installers), etc. We do mostly contracting work, with a small amount of licensed product sales.
We have standardized on a single language (C#), and it has worked for us. We have a significant base of legacy code, including C++, Java, and Visual Basic. I can tell you from personal experience that 90% of the agony we endure is related to the legacy code, specifically maintenance of said code. Keeping enough people up-to-speed with skills to work in more than one or two languages is a tough challenge. Organizationally speaking, my life would be vastly easier if we could get down to 100% of our code in a single language.
Of course, that's never going to happen, so we do try to retain the people who have experience with our legacy code base. We also try to assign new people to work on the legacy code whenever it looks like we're getting short of experience in any one area.
I'm a coder by trade and experience -- this management stuff is definitely new to me. I have always personally enjoyed learning new languages/techs/whatever as a developer...but from an architectural and business standpoint, I can definitely point to reasons to standardize on a single language or development platform. We are transitioning to a product line architecture, where deliveries are based on off-the-shelf in-house components (new development as necessary, of course). Customers *hate* it when we tell them "after you install this, you'll have.Net 1.1, Java 1.5 and VisualBasic runtimes on your machine, along with all the support libraries, etc." They would much prefer a homogeneous environment with minimal footprint.
There are also issues within a product line with mixed-platform development. Unless you work *really* hard on decoupling components at exactly the right places, mixing platforms makes it difficult or even impossible to develop a solid product line. I'm starting to think that it's actually impossible without going to a full-out service based architecture.
So don't dismiss the idea of standardizing on a single language. Just because you're a developer and you want to play with the latest cool toys, that doesn't mean there is a defensible business reason to allow that.
I have had an HTPC in my stereo cabinet for ~3 years now. About 6 months ago I switched motherboard/cpu/etc and put it all in the exact Antec case the review describes. For the most part, the case is perfect. It only has two small problems: (1) the front of the case is silver, and it's basically impossible to find silver DVD drives so you end up with a sore-thumb black or beige drive in your shiny silver case, and (2) the Antec case is so open to air flow that noise from inside the case is poorly muffled. My CPU fan is quiet, but the !@&^# northbridge fan is really loud, and the case does nothing to help that.
I solved problem (1) by buying a DVD writer that came with replaceable front plates; I took the beige set and spray-painted it silver with garden-variety paint from Home Depot before attaching it to the drive. The match with the case color is surprisingly good. I would have preferred a black front to the case, however...
Buy an ATi All-In-Wonder card; they come with an RF remote control. The remote uses a small receiver that attaches via USB. The receiver is easily hidden from sight, since it does not need to have an optical line-of-sight to the remote. The remote itself allows you fabulous control over all the ATi applications, and even has a mouse/cursor button that lets you drive the PC easily. Fairly decent tool, all things considered.
Snowcrash, IMO, was one of the great works of our time. The same can not be said of Cryptonomicon or Quicksilver. Cryptonomicon suffered from endless diversions from the story, and the end was like the end of Monty Python & the Holy Grail or Matrix: Revolutions or so many other stories where the author did not have a start-to-finish vision of how the story would unfold. That is, the story just ended, with little meat or satisfaction for the reader.
Quicksilver, honestly, was a burden to read. The story had its moments, but when you're 700 pages into a book and have little or no idea where it's going and little or no motivation to keep reading, I submit that the author has basically failed. I frequently felt like the author was writing just to "hear himself type." I'll probably read The Confusion just because I hate to leave thing unfinished, but if it's similarly burdensome, I think I'll just have to give up on Stephenson altogether.
To the commenter who asked why Stephenson features gay characters and their homosexuality so prominently, all I can tell you is that Turing was, in fact, gay, and it was a major issue for him and for the people who worked around him. It's not surprising to me that any story on cryptography would feature Turing and his homosexuality. I can't say as much about Newton simply because I'm only familiar with the history of his work rather than the history of the man.
Who ever said Stephenson needs an editor is right on. Quicksilver is a 300 or 400 page story told in 900 pages. Keeping the length down would do a great service towards making the thing more interesting and readable. But somehow I suspect that neither of these issues are high on Stephenson's list.:(
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I have fond memories of whiling away the hours (and quarters) in Station Break in Penn Station. Also there was a giant arcade on 1st Avenue around ~60th street, next-door to Rodney Dangerfield's comedy club. I loved that place too.
Sad to hear that the City is down to one...
Gait recognition has been around for quite awhile. I worked at a company that deployed a gait biometric system in 2012 or so. It came from an Israeli company, FST Biometrics Results in our case were mixed, but they had several very large customers (e.g. Google) who were using it with good results.
There's a DARPA BAA on the street right now for "Machine Common Sense" that is hoping to address this by asking AI researchers to design AI to learn "common sense" the same way human babies do. One of the examples in the text of the BAA is "I saw the Grand Canyon flying to New York." A context-aware AI or one with "common sense" would understand that this sentence really meant "...WHILE flying to New York" rather than inferring that the Grand Canyon was flying.
"Common sense" in DARPA's context is not really what I would call the widespread understanding of what that phrase means, but is more oriented around understanding basic physics and behaviors and recognizing when something doesn't make sense. They're also taking...um....baby steps with this BAA, just trying to get some basic behavior around recognizing un-physical scenarios and that sort of thing. It's pretty cool though.
Read about the BAA here. . Download the ~1.9MB PDF for the full text of the BAA.
That neeeeeever happens in today's world of OS security, now does it? And what happens when researchers find a vulnerability in a computer system? It usually gets patched pretty quickly.
This one will not take long to patch. In the "can you tell which is which?" pictures, I picked the synthetic iris with 100% accuracy, in less than 3 seconds of inspection. Yes, I work actively in the biometrics field...but guess what? So do the folks who build these systems. I will hazard a guess that Neurotech (and L-1, and IrsID, and Fujitsu, and...) has a patch out to defeat this is less than a month.
Then another group of researchers will discover another vulnerability, and the game will continue.
FWIW, liveness checks are part of lots of biometric systems, especially fingerprint systems. My prediction is that we will see liveness check technology appear in iris systems pretty quick now.
Lasers are not normally used in Tokamak reactors. In those systems, the idea is to use magnetic fields to hold a plasma tight enough (and long enough) for fusion to initiate. The energy input (i.e. "heating") is done ohmically, that is, by radio waves that induce electric currents in the gas. The NIF pursues a different approach, called "inertial confinement fusion." The idea in these systems is to supply a whole load of energy in a very short time, so the hydrogen nuclei don't have time to move apart before the fusion reaction takes place. That is, their inertia is what confines them long enough for the reaction to go. In order to do this, you need a giant load of energy delivered into a very small volume in a very short time. That's why they quote the number as terawatts. The interesting part of this announcement is not just the TW energy rate, but the nanosecond-scale pulse width. This is actually pretty cool news...
I don't see that "religion" and "evolution" are incompatible, unless you are a literal word-of-god believer in the KJ bible. First, off, evolution is an undeniable fact. You can buy a tube of drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, set up an unusual condition in their habitat, and watch them evolve to adapt to it over the course of a few weeks. Now if you want to say that God directed/guided that evolution, "OK." I don't think science addresses that idea at all.
Where you get into trouble with evolution/natural selection is if you try to insist that the Earth is 5,000 years old, nothing has ever evolved since God created it, the fossil record is bogus, radiocarbon dating is a sham, the cosmic microwave background is unrelated to the Big Bang, etc. Then your only hope of keeping your kids from asking embarrassing questions that point out that you have no grip on basic science is to make sure they never get exposed to these "confusing" ideas (see the recent Lousiana science textbook flap)...so you try to prevent schools from teaching them at all.
It sounds like that may not actually be what's going on in this story, but it's certainly what's going on in Texas, Loisiana, Mississippi, etc.
It's not about "creationism." it's about "young earth creationism," in which the proponents believe that every word of the bible is literally true, and every creature on earth was created in its present form directly by the hand of God less than 5000 years ago. If you allow for an evolutionary path that took (tens or hundreds of) millions of years to evolve a horse or a bird, your 5,000-year-old Earth theory has some major challenges ahead of it. In the end, this sort of effort is fundamentally about suppressing the challenge, not teaching science.
I use Kompozer myself, but have had reasonable experiences with some of the other tools too. Windows, Mac, Linux...you can get Kompozer for all major platforms.
Please. Please. Please read the article and try to understand it before posting breathless announcements like this one. From the article, "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency of conventional planar structure of the same materials." This article announces a breakthrough in efficiency for this type of material. For reference, typical photovoltaic silicon cells run around 10-15% efficiency, and the world record is around 25% efficiency. Thus, the questions you should ask after reading this article are "so what," "why would I build a cell out of this material when conventional silicon beats the living crap out of it," "how do you plan to produce this on an industrial scale," "will this ever see the outside of your lab," and "you need some published articles in order to get promoted, don't you?"
As a casual user, I really can't justify ponying up the dollars they demand...so I went looking for alternatives. GIMP for Photoshop (recent GIMP versions are very good, BTW), Inkspace for Illustrator, etc. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to move off Adobe's products altogether.
We have standardized on a single language (C#), and it has worked for us. We have a significant base of legacy code, including C++, Java, and Visual Basic. I can tell you from personal experience that 90% of the agony we endure is related to the legacy code, specifically maintenance of said code. Keeping enough people up-to-speed with skills to work in more than one or two languages is a tough challenge. Organizationally speaking, my life would be vastly easier if we could get down to 100% of our code in a single language.
Of course, that's never going to happen, so we do try to retain the people who have experience with our legacy code base. We also try to assign new people to work on the legacy code whenever it looks like we're getting short of experience in any one area.
I'm a coder by trade and experience -- this management stuff is definitely new to me. I have always personally enjoyed learning new languages/techs/whatever as a developer...but from an architectural and business standpoint, I can definitely point to reasons to standardize on a single language or development platform. We are transitioning to a product line architecture, where deliveries are based on off-the-shelf in-house components (new development as necessary, of course). Customers *hate* it when we tell them "after you install this, you'll have .Net 1.1, Java 1.5 and VisualBasic runtimes on your machine, along with all the support libraries, etc." They would much prefer a homogeneous environment with minimal footprint.
There are also issues within a product line with mixed-platform development. Unless you work *really* hard on decoupling components at exactly the right places, mixing platforms makes it difficult or even impossible to develop a solid product line. I'm starting to think that it's actually impossible without going to a full-out service based architecture.
So don't dismiss the idea of standardizing on a single language. Just because you're a developer and you want to play with the latest cool toys, that doesn't mean there is a defensible business reason to allow that.
No cliches? What about "...last best hope" ? My wife and I have ridiculed that phrase for years now.
I have had an HTPC in my stereo cabinet for ~3 years now. About 6 months ago I switched motherboard/cpu/etc and put it all in the exact Antec case the review describes. For the most part, the case is perfect. It only has two small problems: (1) the front of the case is silver, and it's basically impossible to find silver DVD drives so you end up with a sore-thumb black or beige drive in your shiny silver case, and (2) the Antec case is so open to air flow that noise from inside the case is poorly muffled. My CPU fan is quiet, but the !@&^# northbridge fan is really loud, and the case does nothing to help that. I solved problem (1) by buying a DVD writer that came with replaceable front plates; I took the beige set and spray-painted it silver with garden-variety paint from Home Depot before attaching it to the drive. The match with the case color is surprisingly good. I would have preferred a black front to the case, however...
Buy an ATi All-In-Wonder card; they come with an RF remote control. The remote uses a small receiver that attaches via USB. The receiver is easily hidden from sight, since it does not need to have an optical line-of-sight to the remote. The remote itself allows you fabulous control over all the ATi applications, and even has a mouse/cursor button that lets you drive the PC easily. Fairly decent tool, all things considered.
Snowcrash, IMO, was one of the great works of our time. The same can not be said of Cryptonomicon or Quicksilver. Cryptonomicon suffered from endless diversions from the story, and the end was like the end of Monty Python & the Holy Grail or Matrix: Revolutions or so many other stories where the author did not have a start-to-finish vision of how the story would unfold. That is, the story just ended, with little meat or satisfaction for the reader.
:(
Quicksilver, honestly, was a burden to read. The story had its moments, but when you're 700 pages into a book and have little or no idea where it's going and little or no motivation to keep reading, I submit that the author has basically failed. I frequently felt like the author was writing just to "hear himself type." I'll probably read The Confusion just because I hate to leave thing unfinished, but if it's similarly burdensome, I think I'll just have to give up on Stephenson altogether.
To the commenter who asked why Stephenson features gay characters and their homosexuality so prominently, all I can tell you is that Turing was, in fact, gay, and it was a major issue for him and for the people who worked around him. It's not surprising to me that any story on cryptography would feature Turing and his homosexuality. I can't say as much about Newton simply because I'm only familiar with the history of his work rather than the history of the man.
Who ever said Stephenson needs an editor is right on. Quicksilver is a 300 or 400 page story told in 900 pages. Keeping the length down would do a great service towards making the thing more interesting and readable. But somehow I suspect that neither of these issues are high on Stephenson's list.