Especially his Notre Dame is cool, the parthenon too but no friezes!
Would be nice if someone provided info on techniques so people could build anything they like, perhaps with some software.
The engine is interesting but why? (and humidity) was on my mind.
Also there in fact are 3d printers (like those using LOM method I think) that make a model by laminating many sheets of paper together. Seems to be a superior way to build an actual paper engine, since the blocks you get are actually quite hard, though you can peel sheets off if you really try.
Haven't RTFA but if it only covers how to write a legal file then it likely does not include rendering (how to draw it on the screen / to a printer) nor how to read / write efficiently, either.
It may well be that only MS Office 5.0 or whatever is opened. And let's not talk about Excel cells, or those line drawings in Word that never seem to come out right in OOo.
Only if MS promises to now and forever provide immediately, online a fully open reference implementation and spec for all the formats used throughout Office, including the interfaces for embedding, publishing, accessing etc.. then can it be called open. Of course it will still be to their advantage even if they made a 100% total commitment to this, the question is only how little do they have to do to meet EU regulator approval. I have little faith in regulators, a bit more perhaps for Boston and other municipalities/countries that are requiring use of a non-MS open standard.
The most useful thing for companies right now would be for MS to provide an open source tool that lets them read their tons of old word documents into a database. That isn't going to happen while MS is in a war with Google. And that's why it is only about writing files, and also why as long as Google aims at the desktop there will only be a bare minimum of the way Office really works being implemented.
And how about a tool to convert heavily VB scripted tools into OOo or perl? No, these massive investments are the momentum that keeps the corporate world firmly in MS' pants. Not this decade.
Will it automatically provide full text or scanned image files for works that have gone out of copyright? And do the restrictions against scanning , storage or reproduction also lapse when copyright lapses? This would be massive. Lots of publishers just reissue old work with new copyrights attached to them.
Personally I've read lots of old science fiction from copyright lapsed works, there is some in Gutenberg, and like it quite a bit, though I'd like to find more of them.
For example I'm looking for Perry Rhodan (anything past #128) in English, which is out of print and maybe in old book stores or garage sales though I'm not in the U.S. now.
Web searching is fine but the most important part is to be able to get the works digitized. Then make freely available what is not in copyright, and make it easy to purchase what is. I bet you'll see publishers rushing towards that when they start seeing dollars rolling in.
Thanks for the awesome comment! That Wikipedia article also does a pretty good job of blowing my mind too.. Unfortunately if Einstein doesn't agree with Mach then every particle's action on every other one is not the cause of inertia, and (considering that a satellite recently detected the Earth's frame-dragging) there might be some problem I suppose with using distant objects as the most accurate timepieces. Not that we know what physics is really like out there among the quasars billions of years ago. The International Atomic Time mentioned in Wikipedia seems to be something like what I mention as a relatively accurate, retrospective agreement of what happened at what time, however I didn't catch how they in fact detect drift of the average of the 300 clocks they use. Very cool and aside from the unresolved question of how to ensure reliable, accurate, continuous timekeeping over very long periods of time no matter what natural or manmade disaster might befall us, I think it all does suggest that a user-friendly application of IAT might be a nice thing to have.
Just about this noodliness of the time axis, yes I tried to suggest something like that but not too well I guess. I don't see how we can tell if we are messed up, although with a galactic reference two spaceships might have something interesting to talk about. Seems to suggest that we most likely are in fact living in a somewhat stretchy or maybe even horrendously contorted timeline. Perhaps we might learn something about that by actually trying to keep time based on astronomical phenomena. A tough problem for sure!
How about a new simple Cosmic Time system that works like the trek stardates? (though I'm not sure how those work actually).
IANA time scientist, but it seems to me that a certain amount of fanaticism about removing all the clutter, and a dose of love of science fiction (if you have Perry Rhodan after #128 please email me), it ought to be possible to once and for all have an eminently durable and useful timesystem.
I also have the undoubtedly common experience of reloading ntpd to make sure my laptop is in sync and then checking the time on my mobile phone, but seldom wearing my expensive wristwatch since it has no battery and runs down when I take it off to type. And then I always feel like I'm in the twilight zone when this carefully synchronized time is far different from what the train station says, but I need to know if I have time to eat a burger before the express leaves. All this tells me keeping track of time is tough so I may have made some dreadful mistakes in my first swing at chronology.
Pick a reference point in time as the origin, time zero.
This timesystem gives every point in time a value as the number of seconds (arbitrary precision) plus or minus from the origin.
It would have no connection to solar or lunar calendars, or rotation of the earth, so it would need no leap seconds either.
I would like time to be based on a tree of descending precision clocks: galactic scale observations, multiple stellar observations, solar observations, atomic clocks, then radio-based clocks to be used near their broadcasting antennas. Ideally it would be based on virtual seconds, so in fact you could find out later that an event happened a second before or after you thought it did, because your measurement lacked sufficient precision. But this is probably not useful, so the above tree of precision.
Galactic scale or multiple stellar observations means a spaceship that perhaps lost synchrony with the relativistic frame being dragged around by the Earth would be able to agree on what time it was, without needing to be in radio contact with the Earth.
Solar observation means a diode could set your house based on the sun maybe, or at least you could do this possibly without a big telescope.
Atomic clocks would be the main reference points in daily use, but if they all broke down in say a war we could still pick a new epoch based on the above astronomical observations and wouldn't lose our connection with history or ability to continue precisely timing events that had started before the discontinuity in atomic timekeeping.
It does seem that this will require people to recognize that while time marches ahead (at the same pace as far as we can tell), in reality it is not possible to perfectly measure it or to say with 100% certainty what time it is at any given instant. If people are unwilling to accept that, then we will end up having to just use atomic clocks and then reset to a different epoch if they ever get out of synch with the galaxy. (which I would not be surprised if it happened to tell you the truth).
Anyway then you can build a bunch of open source algorithms to easily convert between Cosmic Time and whatever braindead human perception based timesystem you desire, though the answer might come out as NULL if you choose a silly system that has a calendar discontinuity, Y2K implementation problem or limited precision.
This also would be interesting in that you could easily visualize a Cosmic Time timesystem as a number line, and align it with other parallel or even convoluted ones.
Multiplication and division to change scale, heck use it in place of SMPTE tv encoding
Pick an arbitrary origin for an organization or agreement among parties, saying for example that the new ZeroTime[Contract1] is at Cosmic Time second X.
Easily use idealized YMDHMS notation if you want. Not connected to Earth of course, but we'll use a 365 day year, 30 day month, and 24 hour day for now. You could say 6m5d2h20s from
Just pick a 20 ton asteroid (or larger) that is following near the same orbit as the big bad one. It could even be just crossing the orbit once and a while. This will allow a much cheaper and longer term mission with much observation of the dangerous object (including possibly cutting part of it out for storage elsewhere) and Martin Lo's work on the interplanetary superhighway may in fact find both the dinosaur killers and the civilization savers at the same time. Put an ion drive on that and wait a year! Now if we can find an asteroid with the xeon or whatever it uses and plaster solar panels all over it that will be sweet. Hey let's try it with a non-dangerous asteroid and get some practice!
Boy I feel really sorry for any young aspiring scientists who may be living in Kansas. Don't you think they ought to be able to bring a class action suit against the individuals who voted for ID because it is endangering their future, reducing the value of their tax-paid education, and non-constitutional?
How about using lawyers for something useful. That backwards state is never going to get its school system back on track until fools realize they better not stick their noses where they are most ignorant.. because they will be bankrupted in short time. On the other hand, if Columbine was caused by shattered geeks I would not wish to bet on the life expectancy of those ID loving criminals.
I sure am glad I didn't grow up in Kansas. It is interesting to look at it from a country like Japan which has plenty of spirituality but is not dumb enough to endanger the economy by teaching ID in school. Some people are laughing their asses off of course, but what is chilling is that mostly it is a good opportunity to further dissect the (brain-damaged?) American psyche, if such a thing exists and is not in fact a mishmash conglomeration of extremists from both sides. It was also noted that in the U.S. profs must do what the school board says, but that in S. Australia over 90 schools are teaching ID even though they are not operating under any such stricture. It's like the U.S. is willingly killing its brain cells one at a time, it is so painful to read news about the U.S. anymore.
You are correct and I suppose if confronted with the choice of using the latest graphics card or not I would take the plunge, if it is that important to the system performance.
But this will welcome the sony rootkit and all kinds of drm that require you to be complicit. In other words, drm requires you to hold your hands behind your back so they can slip the handcuffs over them, you are putting yourself in irons willfully.
Personally I abhor this and one of the major reasons I use open source is the pleasant feeling I have using it.. this feeling is a direct consequence of a system entirely built on GPL and the mindset of the system's founding individuals who also are against binary code in the kernel.
So my answer would have to be that they must keep their binary crap in their own hardware, which currently does not fall under the "linked code" tripwire in the GPL, not yet at least.
You may be correct about the secrets in code bit, but I need more proof to be swayed by it.
Put it this way. If I'm willing to shell out top dollar for the fastest graphics card or to buy a printer from a manufacturer I like, I wouldn't mind a binary driver if absolutely necessary. But I would definitely not buy it if it required adding a whole core layer that attacks the security of my system. I recently made a printer purchase based on my expectation of linux code (should have picked a different one, but it turned out correct in the end). I do not want to have my linux laptop able to spy on me, and I think this is all a slippery slope. The manufacturers have enough bucks to build the hardware, they can put some effort into solving these problems and guess what?
I bet they could make some headway at doing so if they really needed to do so. My uninformed guess is that the software driver is not in fact the most important part of their system, and that they will sell a lot more units if they and everyone else use open source drivers. Graphics cards can be the thin side of a wedge if we allow binary kernel drivers and while I tend to think "whatever solves the problem" from an engineering perspective if "I want it now", this viewpoint places a zero value on the other aspects of an open source system and I think it is worth more than that.
If you add a binary layer you will get trusted computing. Simultaneously you will be giving up any chance of exponential growth a la open source in the realm of drivers which it could be argued, really need the kind of exponentially fast growth and reusability of open source.
It would have been nice to have for my Brother MFC-410CN multiprinter. I waited over 6 months for linux drivers and they were binary apps, often questionable how to get them working and there are functions I doubt are implemented (ethernet connectivity, PC faxing, full scanning capabilities, ultra-high res.,...). If they just opened up an API and source code they would have had lots of help.
Is that really 5 years of continuous habitation? I seem to remember not too long ago that it was temporarily closed and then reopened by a crew that checked the air etc. Is this a phantom memory or is somebody having fun with revisionist history? Doesn't the definition of continuous require a warm body to be there constantly?
Agree with your points except that I can state the Impact ran too hot. On two incidents, two different Impact machine s failed to run and it was determined that pointing a desk fan at it solved the problem. Repeating that trick on the second incident earned me much love from the artists whose show at Canon Artlab was in jepoardy but I loved the Impacts so much it was more like discovering a little bad habit of your favorite nephew. Seems like he grew out of it. By the way yes Impact had a video compositor - green screen type 2 stage configurable video pipeline, of course SGIs (at least before that darned logo change) were the bedrock of the tv shows that had the actors live composited in front of (live interactive animated) CG backgrounds. SGI also rocked on the CAVE at NTT ICC gallery though it was only using a few of its many processors.. mostly due to the great imagery of Jeffrey Shaw and his team. The hardware was the subject of my dreams. Sadly times have changed. The ICC is apparently closing, the Canon Artlab is gone due to funding problems. SGI which once lended me all kinds of machinery lost its (business) clues a long time ago. Hope they get back on their feet somehow, it hurts seeing their lunch getting eaten so often.
Perhaps spending some effort on promoting easily useable visualization outside the car industry would be good. I know a national biotech lab in Japan with an SGI Monster and it isn't used much since people don't really know how to make good use of it, it seems. All the other iron in the room is chugging right away and the SGI is at near 0 load. Made me mad! Anyway GP can send me the Octane he isn't using and I'll pay for postage!
This seems to be the copy protection mentioned here where they say Sony BMG will email you instructions on how to defeat the protection if you complain. Also in a comment on that page:
I wrote BMG and asked for the instructions, here's what they said:
To get around the DRM you have to install their software so you can access the pre-ripped WMA files they've "generously" provided on the disc. Then you hafta burn the WMA files to yet another CD in order to re-rip them into iTunes.
TFA says drm software required for playing, someone else suggests it can be played through iTunes.
Is this CD playable without the drm software after using cdparanoia or some other tool? SonyBMG is now added to my list of labels not to buy due to copy protection, which previously included ToshibaEMI and Avex Trax for their (cdparanoia breakable) copy protection. In fact I don't buy CDs any more, I just keep a copy of cdparanoia around because sometimes people give me CDs as presents and often they seem to have some kind of copy garbling, erm protection.
Without some analytic tools we will only be able to say toxicity is somewhere on the scale between candle soot and ebola.
The Lawrence Livermore Labs story I had not heard before. In fact probably a lot of young people in universities especially overseas have not, and also may not know about the way to dial down toxicity on buckyballs.
The scariness and persistence of the "strings of buckyballs toxicity" issue is massive, and it seems possible that when nanofibers break or are subject to varied chemical environmetns they could become more toxic.
For the moment I'd stay away from nano anything that has not been fused in an oven or been washed in some organic solution, and don't eat the brains, nerves or gonads (ick!) of anything. The human body has a cool immune system but it really isn't high security when you talk about manmade particles especially active things, so while we can stay safer for a while by basing anything we ingest on biological cell based technologies, you could certainly imagine having to install different kinds of filters in the bloodstream to ward off the results of mediocre nanotech labs and bioterrorists. Or did you think that only responsible people can make this stuff?
No, Apple is right on time. They can now go to movie studios and (better) television stations/production outfits worldwide and (maybe exclusively) liscense titles for online sales. They are the only people doing it, making money, they make the players, they are hip and multimedia, Apple is awesome, now.
This may change when other companies come out with portable video players, possibly. Not having a way to record off the TV apparently? That is actually maybe a plus not a minus as far as the TV studios see it. Now Apple has enough cachet worldwide with the music iPods that they can start going to the BBC, the Superbowl, etc.
Personally I think $2 is at the high end of what I might pay.
And I don't know if it can play to the TV or not but if it can, it rocks.
As far as the product of tv for $2, it is not hurt by "why not bittorrent" or "why not my vcr" etc. Maybe "why not my tivo" but the point is people are going to pay for convenience. Have to see whether it is still convenient if you have a possibly copyright encumbered, thing that is difficult to get off your iPod onto your vcr, etc.
Also there may be trouble with territories. For example right off the bat I thought "Great! They should liscense the BBC's new Doctor Who for U.S.!" but oh wait, it's not broadcast in the U.S. yet. Though it might be a nice way to build up a cult audience and then buy it for broadcast in the U.S. (in this way actually Apple should buy an option to get the broadcast liscense too, and the top selling foreign titles it should sell to regions where preferences seem to match).
Anyway I don't use iTunes and don't unfortunately have a new Mac. But it seems that this will migrate more towards an Amazon-like interface or some way to bring more people together talking about shows and selecting new ones previously unknown in the market.
Anyway, consider that if you didn't have the opportunity to see a show, whether it was broadcast in your area, across the country, or around the world, then it is new as far as you are concerned when you download it, if it isn't too dated. So this could be great for live bands, satellite sports, special interest groups, indie directors, all kinds of stuff.
FWIW I saw something about this a week or two ago on nasa tv (I think it was "realplay http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram" but maybe some other stream). The director was presenting the plan for shuttle replacement and personnel reduction. It sounded like they were going to try to use put personnel in other projects and not fire people. I also saw video animation of the upcoming shuttle replacement and it was extremely cool, including an apparent change in thinking to making less expensive but more useful modules based mainly on current shuttle technology, and which would be 10 times safer than shuttle.
I just opened that stream up again now and it is extremely awesome. I'm watching ISS and ground control. Woman (Bill MacArthur space communicator and friend/past mission participant Pam Melroy) in ground control talking to ISS says, "Or is it just the Diet Coke of evil?". Time now 12:11:46 am JST or 15:16:46 UTC. Watch it!
I can tell you I had a wonderful time in Sicily for 10 days about 20 years ago.
A 25 hour train ride from Paris over the Alps with a beautiful Amherst prospective Italian teacher got me some basic grammar, we stayed with her Italian teacher.
Messina, on the tip of the mainland has a beautiful Carravagio museum with a massive work that shows gorgeous gold highlights (Carravagio's specialty) with artful lighting.
I recommend going before the bridge is completed, assuming it is a train bridge as well. The reason is that the train from Paris actually got itself onto a ferry (!) and then proceded to trundle off onto the rails in Sicily where it would continue around the perimeter in a clockwise fashion. One famous city it goes by is Syracusa, another is Taormina, the vacation spot.
Sicily has welcomed centuries upon centuries of intentional and nonintentional ship crossings so it has ruins going back to the Byzantine Empire I believe.
It has amazing food especially if you can stay with an Italian family with a grandma who will not stop making endless courses at the stove even though you are full - "Mangea, Mangea" (Eat, eat!). The vegetables and fruits are incredible.
At home people drink water with a small amount of smoky tasting wine in the bottom, which is quite refreshing.
People do not stop at traffic lights and apparently you must accompany a woman outdoors at night. Women must not show their shoulders in summertime for fear of being mistaken about their line of work.
There is a wonderful island called Volcan with black volcanic sand. A hydroski ferry will take you there. Apparently the week before we went there, the other ferry exploded. The family was so kind they didn't tell me about it in advance, on the other hand the fact was ignored. Sicily is that kind of place. If you are a couple, go. In the evening at twilight which comes late in summer, couples will "fare passagiata", walking slowly by the water with an arm through an elbow. I remember it very well.
I believe there are lots of kinds of radiation against cancer but that the usual kind (not heavy particles) is basically used to create compton electron pairs which make the same oxygen ions which kill cancer cells. A mask is used to make beam match tumor shape, and beam power / type changes tissue depth / absorption characteristics. Heavier particles tending to go deeper and make more trouble when they reach their deflection depth. Anyway this is about what I can remember from past reading and a tour of a very cool heavy particle (carbon atom) accelerator for anticancer in Japan (1 of 2 in the world, developed at Berkeley which no longer runs it, now only in Japan and Germany). Anyway what I mean to say is that presumably you could draw this thing over a tumor once you cut someone open and it is easier than doing radiation, but I would like to understand how it is better than a scalpel. For example do the radicals produced follow the cancer processes as they ramify through the surrounding tissue.
It sounds like it will hurt good cells too if it is strong enough to kill cancer cells..
What about viruses? They might be stronger due to their solid polyhedral shape? Could frequency be specified to hit flagella or other features (assuming they'd act like antenna)?
And what if you just stand in a giant beam? Would it be much different from say standing in a chamber of ozone? Could similar effects be achieved by radio-based energization of ozone?
Well it is cool but hard to understand. Maybe a surgeon in the room could answer? Seems like the ideal tool for a robotic microsurgeon, blast apart cells one at a time.
Create positive learning experiences for young kids to get them excited about science, provide scientists, engineers and professors they can look up to as role models, and get them away from their parents, local social clubs and tv.
The 6000 year old earthers will eventually die and leave less damage behind them if you disconnect them.
The problem is that the church is so strong in the U.S. that an ultimately cynical demagogue like Bush simply plays to the populace. It is undoubtedly a common political thing.
Another thing, we should take some of the money spent on music, tv, advertising, guns and so on, and spend it on creating real educational experiences for smart kids seeking an oasis. We have the net now, we should be able to fund development of freely distributable educational packages and score them on the net, plus provide engineers, scientists or professors that kids can look up to, and tell kids how to reach them, over the net.
Also I would say that if you have an environment that is detrimental to science learning and personal development, drastically change the environment. Partition the classes, grade localities on their education and how many successful science people come out of it, whatever you have to do. Pour money where you have to, and create useful resources and oases for smart kids.
That's okay, sounds like the borg decided to do a soft reset and now it's back in the Embrace stage. Scary thing I suppose is.. it seems to be learning.
This is the best reason yet to get a faster computer with a nice video card. It would be nice if someone had a wiki for linux people to mention their experiences. Seems many cards get glitches in zooming. See WorldWind video card page (for windows but maybe same issues on other linux software when zooming this data?)
Speaking of which if anyone has a recommendation for a distro / windowmanager / xserver / video card / machine configuration for this type of thing now would be a good time!
I remember when SGI used to sell a souped up PC for large dataset visualization (not that it sold I think..). My guess would be a motherboard with huge internal bandwidth and I/O, some big SATA drives, a couple gigs of RAM, and the latest video card by (who?)..
I was thinking about that tool for Perl that uses Devel::DProf and a diagramming program (GraphViz I think) to draw flow charts of the program as it runs, showing which routines are called, that would be great.
See graphviz.org's resources section for some links to profilers
I wonder if something like that is avaiable for C++. Found ROCASE which looks like a CASE tool that can "reverse-engineer" (analyze) C++ files and automatically format diagrams for you to help understand the code structure. Post back here if you find it to work well!
Maybe people interested in improving useability could work on summarizing results/insights of all the videos and then tell each project the problems found?
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This guy should talk to CraftROBO.
Especially his Notre Dame is cool, the parthenon too but no friezes!
Would be nice if someone provided info on techniques so people could build anything they like, perhaps with some software.
The engine is interesting but why? (and humidity) was on my mind.
Also there in fact are 3d printers (like those using LOM method I think) that make a model by laminating many sheets of paper together. Seems to be a superior way to build an actual paper engine, since the blocks you get are actually quite hard, though you can peel sheets off if you really try.
Haven't RTFA but if it only covers how to write a legal file then it likely does not include rendering (how to draw it on the screen / to a printer) nor how to read / write efficiently, either.
It may well be that only MS Office 5.0 or whatever is opened. And let's not talk about Excel cells, or those line drawings in Word that never seem to come out right in OOo.
Only if MS promises to now and forever provide immediately, online a fully open reference implementation and spec for all the formats used throughout Office, including the interfaces for embedding, publishing, accessing etc.. then can it be called open. Of course it will still be to their advantage even if they made a 100% total commitment to this, the question is only how little do they have to do to meet EU regulator approval. I have little faith in regulators, a bit more perhaps for Boston and other municipalities/countries that are requiring use of a non-MS open standard.
The most useful thing for companies right now would be for MS to provide an open source tool that lets them read their tons of old word documents into a database. That isn't going to happen while MS is in a war with Google. And that's why it is only about writing files, and also why as long as Google aims at the desktop there will only be a bare minimum of the way Office really works being implemented.
And how about a tool to convert heavily VB scripted tools into OOo or perl? No, these massive investments are the momentum that keeps the corporate world firmly in MS' pants. Not this decade.
Will it automatically provide full text or scanned image files for works that have gone out of copyright? And do the restrictions against scanning , storage or reproduction also lapse when copyright lapses? This would be massive. Lots of publishers just reissue old work with new copyrights attached to them.
Personally I've read lots of old science fiction from copyright lapsed works, there is some in Gutenberg, and like it quite a bit, though I'd like to find more of them.
For example I'm looking for Perry Rhodan (anything past #128) in English, which is out of print and maybe in old book stores or garage sales though I'm not in the U.S. now.
Web searching is fine but the most important part is to be able to get the works digitized. Then make freely available what is not in copyright, and make it easy to purchase what is. I bet you'll see publishers rushing towards that when they start seeing dollars rolling in.
Thanks for the awesome comment! That Wikipedia article also does a pretty good job of blowing my mind too.. Unfortunately if Einstein doesn't agree with Mach then every particle's action on every other one is not the cause of inertia, and (considering that a satellite recently detected the Earth's frame-dragging) there might be some problem I suppose with using distant objects as the most accurate timepieces. Not that we know what physics is really like out there among the quasars billions of years ago. The International Atomic Time mentioned in Wikipedia seems to be something like what I mention as a relatively accurate, retrospective agreement of what happened at what time, however I didn't catch how they in fact detect drift of the average of the 300 clocks they use. Very cool and aside from the unresolved question of how to ensure reliable, accurate, continuous timekeeping over very long periods of time no matter what natural or manmade disaster might befall us, I think it all does suggest that a user-friendly application of IAT might be a nice thing to have.
Just about this noodliness of the time axis, yes I tried to suggest something like that but not too well I guess. I don't see how we can tell if we are messed up, although with a galactic reference two spaceships might have something interesting to talk about. Seems to suggest that we most likely are in fact living in a somewhat stretchy or maybe even horrendously contorted timeline. Perhaps we might learn something about that by actually trying to keep time based on astronomical phenomena. A tough problem for sure!
IANA time scientist, but it seems to me that a certain amount of fanaticism about removing all the clutter, and a dose of love of science fiction (if you have Perry Rhodan after #128 please email me), it ought to be possible to once and for all have an eminently durable and useful timesystem.
I also have the undoubtedly common experience of reloading ntpd to make sure my laptop is in sync and then checking the time on my mobile phone, but seldom wearing my expensive wristwatch since it has no battery and runs down when I take it off to type. And then I always feel like I'm in the twilight zone when this carefully synchronized time is far different from what the train station says, but I need to know if I have time to eat a burger before the express leaves. All this tells me keeping track of time is tough so I may have made some dreadful mistakes in my first swing at chronology.
Just pick a 20 ton asteroid (or larger) that is following near the same orbit as the big bad one. It could even be just crossing the orbit once and a while. This will allow a much cheaper and longer term mission with much observation of the dangerous object (including possibly cutting part of it out for storage elsewhere) and Martin Lo's work on the interplanetary superhighway may in fact find both the dinosaur killers and the civilization savers at the same time. Put an ion drive on that and wait a year! Now if we can find an asteroid with the xeon or whatever it uses and plaster solar panels all over it that will be sweet. Hey let's try it with a non-dangerous asteroid and get some practice!
Boy I feel really sorry for any young aspiring scientists who may be living in Kansas. Don't you think they ought to be able to bring a class action suit against the individuals who voted for ID because it is endangering their future, reducing the value of their tax-paid education, and non-constitutional?
How about using lawyers for something useful. That backwards state is never going to get its school system back on track until fools realize they better not stick their noses where they are most ignorant.. because they will be bankrupted in short time. On the other hand, if Columbine was caused by shattered geeks I would not wish to bet on the life expectancy of those ID loving criminals.
I sure am glad I didn't grow up in Kansas. It is interesting to look at it from a country like Japan which has plenty of spirituality but is not dumb enough to endanger the economy by teaching ID in school. Some people are laughing their asses off of course, but what is chilling is that mostly it is a good opportunity to further dissect the (brain-damaged?) American psyche, if such a thing exists and is not in fact a mishmash conglomeration of extremists from both sides. It was also noted that in the U.S. profs must do what the school board says, but that in S. Australia over 90 schools are teaching ID even though they are not operating under any such stricture. It's like the U.S. is willingly killing its brain cells one at a time, it is so painful to read news about the U.S. anymore.
But this will welcome the sony rootkit and all kinds of drm that require you to be complicit. In other words, drm requires you to hold your hands behind your back so they can slip the handcuffs over them, you are putting yourself in irons willfully.
Personally I abhor this and one of the major reasons I use open source is the pleasant feeling I have using it.. this feeling is a direct consequence of a system entirely built on GPL and the mindset of the system's founding individuals who also are against binary code in the kernel.
So my answer would have to be that they must keep their binary crap in their own hardware, which currently does not fall under the "linked code" tripwire in the GPL, not yet at least.
You may be correct about the secrets in code bit, but I need more proof to be swayed by it.
Put it this way. If I'm willing to shell out top dollar for the fastest graphics card or to buy a printer from a manufacturer I like, I wouldn't mind a binary driver if absolutely necessary. But I would definitely not buy it if it required adding a whole core layer that attacks the security of my system. I recently made a printer purchase based on my expectation of linux code (should have picked a different one, but it turned out correct in the end). I do not want to have my linux laptop able to spy on me, and I think this is all a slippery slope. The manufacturers have enough bucks to build the hardware, they can put some effort into solving these problems and guess what?
I bet they could make some headway at doing so if they really needed to do so. My uninformed guess is that the software driver is not in fact the most important part of their system, and that they will sell a lot more units if they and everyone else use open source drivers.
Graphics cards can be the thin side of a wedge if we allow binary kernel drivers and while I tend to think "whatever solves the problem" from an engineering perspective if "I want it now", this viewpoint places a zero value on the other aspects of an open source system and I think it is worth more than that.
If you add a binary layer you will get trusted computing. Simultaneously you will be giving up any chance of exponential growth a la open source in the realm of drivers which it could be argued, really need the kind of exponentially fast growth and reusability of open source.
...). If they just opened up an API and source code they would have had lots of help.
It would have been nice to have for my Brother MFC-410CN multiprinter. I waited over 6 months for linux drivers and they were binary apps, often questionable how to get them working and there are functions I doubt are implemented (ethernet connectivity, PC faxing, full scanning capabilities, ultra-high res.,
1. Who's teh Yahoo posted as CmdrTaco on TFA?
2. Is teh plaque right side up, or must read from AlphaGeek's perspective? (sit on his lap?) um, not?
3. If Y yahoos quit for google, who will throw teh chair?
4. Dude. Is Neal Stephenson pissed or what?
Glide EffortlessLY!!!
Please! They need to buy an adverb first, then start shopping for clues.
Is that really 5 years of continuous habitation? I seem to remember not too long ago that it was temporarily closed and then reopened by a crew that checked the air etc. Is this a phantom memory or is somebody having fun with revisionist history? Doesn't the definition of continuous require a warm body to be there constantly?
Agree with your points except that I can state the Impact ran too hot. On two incidents, two different Impact machine s failed to run and it was determined that pointing a desk fan at it solved the problem. Repeating that trick on the second incident earned me much love from the artists whose show at Canon Artlab was in jepoardy but I loved the Impacts so much it was more like discovering a little bad habit of your favorite nephew. Seems like he grew out of it. By the way yes Impact had a video compositor - green screen type 2 stage configurable video pipeline, of course SGIs (at least before that darned logo change) were the bedrock of the tv shows that had the actors live composited in front of (live interactive animated) CG backgrounds. SGI also rocked on the CAVE at NTT ICC gallery though it was only using a few of its many processors.. mostly due to the great imagery of Jeffrey Shaw and his team. The hardware was the subject of my dreams. Sadly times have changed. The ICC is apparently closing, the Canon Artlab is gone due to funding problems. SGI which once lended me all kinds of machinery lost its (business) clues a long time ago. Hope they get back on their feet somehow, it hurts seeing their lunch getting eaten so often.
Perhaps spending some effort on promoting easily useable visualization outside the car industry would be good. I know a national biotech lab in Japan with an SGI Monster and it isn't used much since people don't really know how to make good use of it, it seems. All the other iron in the room is chugging right away and the SGI is at near 0 load. Made me mad! Anyway GP can send me the Octane he isn't using and I'll pay for postage!
Is this CD playable without the drm software after using cdparanoia or some other tool? SonyBMG is now added to my list of labels not to buy due to copy protection, which previously included ToshibaEMI and Avex Trax for their (cdparanoia breakable) copy protection. In fact I don't buy CDs any more, I just keep a copy of cdparanoia around because sometimes people give me CDs as presents and often they seem to have some kind of copy garbling, erm protection.
All you need is ColorForth. To be clear, this IDE driver's kind of compact.
Some more links.
Without some analytic tools we will only be able to say toxicity is somewhere on the scale between candle soot and ebola.
The Lawrence Livermore Labs story I had not heard before. In fact probably a lot of young people in universities especially overseas have not, and also may not know about the way to dial down toxicity on buckyballs.
The scariness and persistence of the "strings of buckyballs toxicity" issue is massive, and it seems possible that when nanofibers break or are subject to varied chemical environmetns they could become more toxic.
For the moment I'd stay away from nano anything that has not been fused in an oven or been washed in some organic solution, and don't eat the brains, nerves or gonads (ick!) of anything. The human body has a cool immune system but it really isn't high security when you talk about manmade particles especially active things, so while we can stay safer for a while by basing anything we ingest on biological cell based technologies, you could certainly imagine having to install different kinds of filters in the bloodstream to ward off the results of mediocre nanotech labs and bioterrorists. Or did you think that only responsible people can make this stuff?
No, Apple is right on time. They can now go to movie studios and (better) television stations/production outfits worldwide and (maybe exclusively) liscense titles for online sales. They are the only people doing it, making money, they make the players, they are hip and multimedia, Apple is awesome, now.
This may change when other companies come out with portable video players, possibly. Not having a way to record off the TV apparently? That is actually maybe a plus not a minus as far as the TV studios see it. Now Apple has enough cachet worldwide with the music iPods that they can start going to the BBC, the Superbowl, etc.
Personally I think $2 is at the high end of what I might pay.
And I don't know if it can play to the TV or not but if it can, it rocks.
As far as the product of tv for $2, it is not hurt by "why not bittorrent" or "why not my vcr" etc. Maybe "why not my tivo" but the point is people are going to pay for convenience. Have to see whether it is still convenient if you have a possibly copyright encumbered, thing that is difficult to get off your iPod onto your vcr, etc.
Also there may be trouble with territories. For example right off the bat I thought "Great! They should liscense the BBC's new Doctor Who for U.S.!" but oh wait, it's not broadcast in the U.S. yet. Though it might be a nice way to build up a cult audience and then buy it for broadcast in the U.S. (in this way actually Apple should buy an option to get the broadcast liscense too, and the top selling foreign titles it should sell to regions where preferences seem to match).
Anyway I don't use iTunes and don't unfortunately have a new Mac. But it seems that this will migrate more towards an Amazon-like interface or some way to bring more people together talking about shows and selecting new ones previously unknown in the market.
Anyway, consider that if you didn't have the opportunity to see a show, whether it was broadcast in your area, across the country, or around the world, then it is new as far as you are concerned when you download it, if it isn't too dated. So this could be great for live bands, satellite sports, special interest groups, indie directors, all kinds of stuff.
FWIW I saw something about this a week or two ago on nasa tv (I think it was "realplay http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram" but maybe some other stream). The director was presenting the plan for shuttle replacement and personnel reduction. It sounded like they were going to try to use put personnel in other projects and not fire people. I also saw video animation of the upcoming shuttle replacement and it was extremely cool, including an apparent change in thinking to making less expensive but more useful modules based mainly on current shuttle technology, and which would be 10 times safer than shuttle.
I just opened that stream up again now and it is extremely awesome. I'm watching ISS and ground control. Woman (Bill MacArthur space communicator and friend/past mission participant Pam Melroy) in ground control talking to ISS says, "Or is it just the Diet Coke of evil?". Time now 12:11:46 am JST or 15:16:46 UTC. Watch it!
I can tell you I had a wonderful time in Sicily for 10 days about 20 years ago.
A 25 hour train ride from Paris over the Alps with a beautiful Amherst prospective Italian teacher got me some basic grammar, we stayed with her Italian teacher.
Messina, on the tip of the mainland has a beautiful Carravagio museum with a massive work that shows gorgeous gold highlights (Carravagio's specialty) with artful lighting.
I recommend going before the bridge is completed, assuming it is a train bridge as well. The reason is that the train from Paris actually got itself onto a ferry (!) and then proceded to trundle off onto the rails in Sicily where it would continue around the perimeter in a clockwise fashion. One famous city it goes by is Syracusa, another is Taormina, the vacation spot.
Sicily has welcomed centuries upon centuries of intentional and nonintentional ship crossings so it has ruins going back to the Byzantine Empire I believe.
It has amazing food especially if you can stay with an Italian family with a grandma who will not stop making endless courses at the stove even though you are full - "Mangea, Mangea" (Eat, eat!). The vegetables and fruits are incredible.
At home people drink water with a small amount of smoky tasting wine in the bottom, which is quite refreshing.
People do not stop at traffic lights and apparently you must accompany a woman outdoors at night. Women must not show their shoulders in summertime for fear of being mistaken about their line of work.
There is a wonderful island called Volcan with black volcanic sand. A hydroski ferry will take you there. Apparently the week before we went there, the other ferry exploded. The family was so kind they didn't tell me about it in advance, on the other hand the fact was ignored. Sicily is that kind of place. If you are a couple, go. In the evening at twilight which comes late in summer, couples will "fare passagiata", walking slowly by the water with an arm through an elbow. I remember it very well.
I believe there are lots of kinds of radiation against cancer but that the usual kind (not heavy particles) is basically used to create compton electron pairs which make the same oxygen ions which kill cancer cells. A mask is used to make beam match tumor shape, and beam power / type changes tissue depth / absorption characteristics. Heavier particles tending to go deeper and make more trouble when they reach their deflection depth. Anyway this is about what I can remember from past reading and a tour of a very cool heavy particle (carbon atom) accelerator for anticancer in Japan (1 of 2 in the world, developed at Berkeley which no longer runs it, now only in Japan and Germany). Anyway what I mean to say is that presumably you could draw this thing over a tumor once you cut someone open and it is easier than doing radiation, but I would like to understand how it is better than a scalpel. For example do the radicals produced follow the cancer processes as they ramify through the surrounding tissue.
It sounds like it will hurt good cells too if it is strong enough to kill cancer cells..
What about viruses? They might be stronger due to their solid polyhedral shape? Could frequency be specified to hit flagella or other features (assuming they'd act like antenna)?
And what if you just stand in a giant beam? Would it be much different from say standing in a chamber of ozone? Could similar effects be achieved by radio-based energization of ozone?
Well it is cool but hard to understand. Maybe a surgeon in the room could answer? Seems like the ideal tool for a robotic microsurgeon, blast apart cells one at a time.
Create positive learning experiences for young kids to get them excited about science, provide scientists, engineers and professors they can look up to as role models, and get them away from their parents, local social clubs and tv.
The 6000 year old earthers will eventually die and leave less damage behind them if you disconnect them.
The problem is that the church is so strong in the U.S. that an ultimately cynical demagogue like Bush simply plays to the populace. It is undoubtedly a common political thing.
Another thing, we should take some of the money spent on music, tv, advertising, guns and so on, and spend it on creating real educational experiences for smart kids seeking an oasis. We have the net now, we should be able to fund development of freely distributable educational packages and score them on the net, plus provide engineers, scientists or professors that kids can look up to, and tell kids how to reach them, over the net.
Also I would say that if you have an environment that is detrimental to science learning and personal development, drastically change the environment. Partition the classes, grade localities on their education and how many successful science people come out of it, whatever you have to do. Pour money where you have to, and create useful resources and oases for smart kids.
That's okay, sounds like the borg decided to do a soft reset and now it's back in the Embrace stage. Scary thing I suppose is.. it seems to be learning.
This is the best reason yet to get a faster computer with a nice video card. It would be nice if someone had a wiki for linux people to mention their experiences. Seems many cards get glitches in zooming. See WorldWind video card page (for windows but maybe same issues on other linux software when zooming this data?) Speaking of which if anyone has a recommendation for a distro / windowmanager / xserver / video card / machine configuration for this type of thing now would be a good time! I remember when SGI used to sell a souped up PC for large dataset visualization (not that it sold I think..). My guess would be a motherboard with huge internal bandwidth and I/O, some big SATA drives, a couple gigs of RAM, and the latest video card by (who?)..
I was thinking about that tool for Perl that uses Devel::DProf and a diagramming program (GraphViz I think) to draw flow charts of the program as it runs, showing which routines are called, that would be great.
See graphviz.org's resources section for some links to profilers
I wonder if something like that is avaiable for C++. Found ROCASE which looks like a CASE tool that can "reverse-engineer" (analyze) C++ files and automatically format diagrams for you to help understand the code structure. Post back here if you find it to work well!
Maybe people interested in improving useability could work on summarizing results/insights of all the videos and then tell each project the problems found?