A lot of the "star light" sniper scopes use optical amplifiers: a series of plates held at high electrical potentials. When a photon strikes the first plate, it kicks off a few more electrons, which hit the second plate, which kicks off more, and... So these scopes need some sort of light source, star light is enough.
What this guy has done is take advantage of the CCD in the webcam, that most CCDs react quite well to near-IR light, and modifying the camera to filter out the human-eye visible components, leaving the near-IR part to get to the CCD.
So, instead of ripping apart a $500 video recorder, he's done it with a $30 webcam.
most US license plates these days are covered with a layer of retroreflective glass beads that happen to work really well with IR light sources.
The cops want front license plates because their radar and lidar guns work WAYYYY better when reflecting off of a front license plate on most cars than without the front plate.
This issue gets rehashed periodically by Car & Driver, Road & Track and Motor Trend.
Re:Many high-end web-cams have day/night and pan/t
on
Infrared Webcam HOWTO
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· Score: 1
A 500W Halogen light would probably work (as long as you don't mind all the wasted visible light), as would an array of IR LEDs.
With the Halogen lights, use your IR-modded video camera to look at the shadowed areas, where people would think they're not visible.
It's effectively the same thing as this story but it's about what happens if you just stick the filter on a pair of goggles and use them during bright sunlight.
Nothing. Your eyes aren't sensitive to near-infrared light. But many CCDs in video cameras and digital cameras are.
CCD-based video and digital still cameras do this as well. Point your TV remote at your video camera. The IR LED should be rather visible through the camera's view finder or monitor window.
CMOS-based video sensors don't do this.
Most of the IR filters on remotes, military MILES sensors, etc., are either visibly a very dark red or purple.
2) Car accidents kill orders of magnitude more people than terrorism.
as much as I hate to say it, accidents happen, often against everyone's best intentions. In this case, intent matters a whole hell of a lot more than the outcome. Killed is killed, yes, but how it happened (and why) matters too, sometimes more than anything.
Do you support torture to be used against bad drivers who fail their driving tests?
Yes, for drunk drivers. The willingness to suspend one's ability to "safely" operate a motor vehicle, and then actually drive a car, to me is as intentful as Mr Road Rage acting out some Grand Theft Auto fantasy. Both seem to equally say, loudly and proudly, "fuck everyone else".
Well, people get fired from universities from getting caught running queries on privileged information... this kind of problem possible at a much lower level than just the NSA. Sysadmins who can look at any e-mail message on their servers. DBAs who have read-write access to all employee and student information. etc etc etc.
Look at all the shit that Checkpoint has brought onto itself.
well, the first go-around, the Articles of Confederation, with a federal government about as symbolic and weak as the Commissioner's Office for Major League Baseball, was just about as close to an utter failure as could be. So they made a second, much better, implementation known today as the Constitution.
Make no mistake, times will come where the US government will be punished for their self-righteousness they currently show to the world.
Right. What will really happen is that China and India will become the economic superpowers, with enough military tech of their own to push back the US if they need to. By then, the US economy will be in the crapper, and Europe, having long ago sucked up to China and India, will be smuggly laughing, "suckers! got what you deserved!"
What is it now... 2-3 billion people, vs 600 million (Europe+USA)? The economic math behind this will catch up to both soon enough...
I know, the US government is far easier to attack than "terrorists", "rebels", etc., who do not wear an Officially Licensed Product of the World Military League to identify themselves.
But let's apply the sword equally to both sides, OK?
The *intent* of the Geneva Convention was to preserve some semblance of honor in treating military captives after WWI, and that is still as applicable today as ever. But should it really be binding on one side that has signed on to it, fighting against some amorphous blob that hasn't?
Of course, it doesn't prohibit PoWs from being shot if they're trying to escape their captors, either. It also doesn't apply to soldiers acting deceptively (i.e., by trying to infiltrate by wearing their opponent's uniforms, attacking after showing signs of surrender, etc.), spies, etc.
Come back to us after you manage to have a real-world discussion with al-Zarqawi about teleological ideas of human rights.
The new General Attorney is the very same man that wrote in a memorandum that the Geneva Convention is obsolete
Well, have you looked at some of the things that the Geneva Convention mandates for P.O.W. treatment? There *ARE* some rather quaint things in there. If anything, those parts of the Geneva Convention need to be updated.
Of course, the good ol' Bible has some interesting things to say about slavery, fathers who sell their daughters into servitude, etc., too (i.e., it's just as justified now, if one really is a strict Biblist, as it was 2000 years ago), but no one in their right mind would really willingly do this to their children. Right?
Of course, the Geneva Convention was written to try and preserve some of the vainglorious honor amongst military men. The treatment of US POWs in Vietnam and Korea, however (as I recall, both countries had signed on to the Geneva Convention as well), probably has diminished the Geneva Convention amongst most of the military people.
"We should uphold the Geneva Convention, because it gives our potential PoWs...er, soldiers, the best hope that they will be treated well, if captured, by their captors if we treat PoWs well" is a noble, if just as quaint, notion for the US to hold, but it just doesn't hold up well in the real world.
Without a real judicial system with enforcement powers behind it (the Eurocourt is getting close...), these treaties and pronunciations are really just writing down best wishes and hopes that they will be practiced and upheld. Sort of like major league baseball drug testing.
In the end, it's actions that count, not words. So the US has stooped to levels that start to approach how some of its enemies have openly treated American POWs in the past.
It's too bad in the Padilla case, though, that the US can't come up with a better way to milk the system to keep someone like that locked up legitimately, at least within the confines of the legal system.
If a good defense attorney can drag out a case for years, while his client is out on bail essentially living his life, how come the Dept of Justice can't equally work the system keeping someone like that behind bars indefinitely just through court procedures, different charges, etc.?
Or you could take a look at Echelon where the nogoodniks of the State Terrorist Superpower known as the USA were conducting industrial espionage against our "allies" in Europe.
Hmm... it's been well-reported in the past that France and China have conducted extensive industrial espionage actions in the US (just ask Boeing). Israeli intelligence has also been busted a couple of times as well.
State-sponsored/-sanctioned industrial espionage is very real.
Some of us can't help but look at some of the political dirty tricks being played these days, and wonder if those who are carrying out those tricks are just a bit too familiar with how things started developing in 1930's Europe.
The only thing left now is for someone to have a big "airing out" meeting with both houses of Congress, and have someone start reading out names from the podium, and seeing those called out get escorted out of the room, never to be seen again. For more effect, C-Span should have its feed severely degraded as well.
If you're in SoCal, kill someone. Cut them up into pieces. And move to Mexico before the cops figure it out. Mexico won't extradite you, because of the death sentence in California.
Of course, if you're one sick bastard, a few hundred dollars in the right hands might take care of your sick ass in a couple of years, too, and no one will come looking for your rotting corpse in the middle of the Sonara Desert...
I'd have one if I could get a 1600x1200 17" LCD display. But the only way I can get an LCD like that is with a laptop computer. Those displays are about the sharpest displays I've seen.
I don't need or want a 21 or 22" LCD display to get 1600x1200.
But I'm weird, I suppose. The Samsung SyncMaster 171V LCD (at 1280x1024) has about as sharp of a display as the NCD 21" CRT display I have sitting next to it.
I remember the first time I saw Windows 3.1 on a 21" display way-back when, and I though, finally, a useful Windows display that approached a 17" X terminal/Sun workstation display in usable space vs wasted icon space. At that point, a 15" VGA monitor (at 640x480, no less) was a high-end display. 12" and 14" were far more common for PC displays (and the 9" diagonal Mac classic display was pretty popular, too...).
Well, passive lighting and color LCD just does not work, *ESPECIALLY* in bright daylight.
Active (i.e., backlit) lighting for LCD displays is to make them visible in daylight, oddly enough, to create enough contrast differential, because sunlight, even indirect, is really very bright, and definitely overpowers the contrast differential on passive STN LCDs.
Passive LCD works for monochromatic LCDs, maybe to about 4 degrees of darkness per pixel. The nadir for grey-scale LCDs was just before color LCD displays became common, and they did well to replicate a 16-level brightness (mapped CGA colors to brightness levels).
Passive STN color LCDs suck painfully, which is why you are lucky to find them only on REALLY CHEAP laptops anymore.
Why stop at white? Think of the.000005% advantage you would get when power is then modulated at the sub-pixel level. Green screens, here we come...again!
What will Microsoft do, though? Office pretty much defaults to a very white-dominated scheme. Word is pretty scary with a dark background and light letters. I bet the Excel engineers don't want to go back to the Multiplan (MS's first competitor against Lotus 1-2-3) skin. Access would be OK, though.
They'll need to look at some of the various Winamp skins that actually work well with a mostly dark background, because MS's high-contrast themes/skins are pretty garish, almost in a lime green/hot pink way, without using either of those colors.
s you are launching smaller sats more often, you have more flight opportunities, so if there IS a failure, you can recover from it quickly.
Also, as you are launching smaller satellites (but maybe more per launch, so the throw weight per launch is the same, so no difference) more often, you have more economies of scale, because instead of keeping 10 Delta 3 and Delta 4 packages, Boeing gets a bigger contract to keep more launch packages ready to launch or in the preparation pipeline, and while the total cost is higher, the cost per launch goes down due to economies of scale.
I think faster-better-cheaper also brought on the newer launch control facility that was highlighted in Wired a few years ago, where a few people working at much better workstations were able to monitor far more things that needed human monitoring, as well as better software monitoring a bunch of other more mundane stuff, which sort of started as a backroom hack by a couple of engineers that actually worked.
The "touchy-feely" space program is the result of an agency without an inherent PR advantage. So the PR people were brought in to try and get more buy-in by Congress (and by extension, voters).
The result of high-profile screwups that make Congress look bad then become massively redundant paper trail systems that are intended to reduce risk, but really are just to cover the appropriate asses if something goes bad.
Sure, accountability is a good thing, but not if the process inherently clogs the entire process.
No, because for them to "profit" computationally, the new CPUs would have had to come out before 3 months.
Sometimes the measure of efficiency is called "you have X Euros to spend on this project".
While not technically the most efficient, if said mobos+PCU+Power supply cost $250, compared to utilizing a bunch of blade-like units that effectively cost $500 per CPU unit, then you go with the less "efficient" solution.
Sort of like all those render farms we've seen pictures of, where they just have 1000 or so white-box PCs set up together, not a few 96-CPU Microway blade systems, or a couple of decked out SGI Altrix systems.
The chances are not high that maze would have grown to the size it is today without us purposely doing the cross polination, but it could have happened.
Well, it happened with tumbleweed, aka Russian Thistle. We can't find where it originated. The theory seems to be that it came over from the Caucasus region, but there isn't anything there now that resembles Russian Thistle. Corn is the same way. We can't seem to find what plant maize, and eventually corn, were derived from.
But what about locusts? We know that there isn't some species of grasshopper that is a locust. We think that there is some sort of environmental trigger that causes grasshoppers to grow to about 3-4x their size, and turn into what we would call a locust.
You could do away with the bamboo, but you're gonna wipe every other plant out, and then good luck getting back what you really want to grow there. 2,4,D will probably do the trick. I plan on spraying some on a big patch of blackberries soon to kill them off, so I can make a big pile of dry blackberry canes and burn them. Again. But, ooo, it persists in the soil. So it's a toss-up.
Are you sure it's really bamboo, and not Reed canary grass?
You're kind of wrong about this. Think papilloma virus. The DNA of the cell is altered by the virus to the point that the cell becomes cancerous, as an unintended consequence.
There are bacteria and other parasites that do things like this as well.
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A lot of the "star light" sniper scopes use optical amplifiers: a series of plates held at high electrical potentials. When a photon strikes the first plate, it kicks off a few more electrons, which hit the second plate, which kicks off more, and... So these scopes need some sort of light source, star light is enough.
What this guy has done is take advantage of the CCD in the webcam, that most CCDs react quite well to near-IR light, and modifying the camera to filter out the human-eye visible components, leaving the near-IR part to get to the CCD.
So, instead of ripping apart a $500 video recorder, he's done it with a $30 webcam.
most US license plates these days are covered with a layer of retroreflective glass beads that happen to work really well with IR light sources.
The cops want front license plates because their radar and lidar guns work WAYYYY better when reflecting off of a front license plate on most cars than without the front plate.
This issue gets rehashed periodically by Car & Driver, Road & Track and Motor Trend.
A 500W Halogen light would probably work (as long as you don't mind all the wasted visible light), as would an array of IR LEDs.
With the Halogen lights, use your IR-modded video camera to look at the shadowed areas, where people would think they're not visible.
It's effectively the same thing as this story but it's about what happens if you just stick the filter on a pair of goggles and use them during bright sunlight.
Nothing. Your eyes aren't sensitive to near-infrared light. But many CCDs in video cameras and digital cameras are.
CCD-based video and digital still cameras do this as well. Point your TV remote at your video camera. The IR LED should be rather visible through the camera's view finder or monitor window.
CMOS-based video sensors don't do this.
Most of the IR filters on remotes, military MILES sensors, etc., are either visibly a very dark red or purple.
2) Car accidents kill orders of magnitude more people than terrorism.
as much as I hate to say it, accidents happen, often against everyone's best intentions. In this case, intent matters a whole hell of a lot more than the outcome. Killed is killed, yes, but how it happened (and why) matters too, sometimes more than anything.
Do you support torture to be used against bad drivers who fail their driving tests?
Yes, for drunk drivers. The willingness to suspend one's ability to "safely" operate a motor vehicle, and then actually drive a car, to me is as intentful as Mr Road Rage acting out some Grand Theft Auto fantasy. Both seem to equally say, loudly and proudly, "fuck everyone else".
Well, people get fired from universities from getting caught running queries on privileged information... this kind of problem possible at a much lower level than just the NSA. Sysadmins who can look at any e-mail message on their servers. DBAs who have read-write access to all employee and student information. etc etc etc.
Look at all the shit that Checkpoint has brought onto itself.
well, the first go-around, the Articles of Confederation, with a federal government about as symbolic and weak as the Commissioner's Office for Major League Baseball, was just about as close to an utter failure as could be. So they made a second, much better, implementation known today as the Constitution.
Make no mistake, times will come where the US government will be punished for their self-righteousness they currently show to the world.
Right. What will really happen is that China and India will become the economic superpowers, with enough military tech of their own to push back the US if they need to. By then, the US economy will be in the crapper, and Europe, having long ago sucked up to China and India, will be smuggly laughing, "suckers! got what you deserved!"
What is it now... 2-3 billion people, vs 600 million (Europe+USA)? The economic math behind this will catch up to both soon enough...
I know, the US government is far easier to attack than "terrorists", "rebels", etc., who do not wear an Officially Licensed Product of the World Military League to identify themselves.
But let's apply the sword equally to both sides, OK?
The *intent* of the Geneva Convention was to preserve some semblance of honor in treating military captives after WWI, and that is still as applicable today as ever. But should it really be binding on one side that has signed on to it, fighting against some amorphous blob that hasn't?
Of course, it doesn't prohibit PoWs from being shot if they're trying to escape their captors, either. It also doesn't apply to soldiers acting deceptively (i.e., by trying to infiltrate by wearing their opponent's uniforms, attacking after showing signs of surrender, etc.), spies, etc.
Come back to us after you manage to have a real-world discussion with al-Zarqawi about teleological ideas of human rights.
The new General Attorney is the very same man that wrote in a memorandum that the Geneva Convention is obsolete
Well, have you looked at some of the things that the Geneva Convention mandates for P.O.W. treatment? There *ARE* some rather quaint things in there. If anything, those parts of the Geneva Convention need to be updated.
Of course, the good ol' Bible has some interesting things to say about slavery, fathers who sell their daughters into servitude, etc., too (i.e., it's just as justified now, if one really is a strict Biblist, as it was 2000 years ago), but no one in their right mind would really willingly do this to their children. Right?
Of course, the Geneva Convention was written to try and preserve some of the vainglorious honor amongst military men. The treatment of US POWs in Vietnam and Korea, however (as I recall, both countries had signed on to the Geneva Convention as well), probably has diminished the Geneva Convention amongst most of the military people.
"We should uphold the Geneva Convention, because it gives our potential PoWs...er, soldiers, the best hope that they will be treated well, if captured, by their captors if we treat PoWs well" is a noble, if just as quaint, notion for the US to hold, but it just doesn't hold up well in the real world.
Without a real judicial system with enforcement powers behind it (the Eurocourt is getting close...), these treaties and pronunciations are really just writing down best wishes and hopes that they will be practiced and upheld. Sort of like major league baseball drug testing.
In the end, it's actions that count, not words. So the US has stooped to levels that start to approach how some of its enemies have openly treated American POWs in the past.
It's too bad in the Padilla case, though, that the US can't come up with a better way to milk the system to keep someone like that locked up legitimately, at least within the confines of the legal system.
If a good defense attorney can drag out a case for years, while his client is out on bail essentially living his life, how come the Dept of Justice can't equally work the system keeping someone like that behind bars indefinitely just through court procedures, different charges, etc.?
Or you could take a look at Echelon where the nogoodniks of the State Terrorist Superpower known as the USA were conducting industrial espionage against our "allies" in Europe.
Hmm... it's been well-reported in the past that France and China have conducted extensive industrial espionage actions in the US (just ask Boeing). Israeli intelligence has also been busted a couple of times as well.
State-sponsored/-sanctioned industrial espionage is very real.
Some of us can't help but look at some of the political dirty tricks being played these days, and wonder if those who are carrying out those tricks are just a bit too familiar with how things started developing in 1930's Europe.
The only thing left now is for someone to have a big "airing out" meeting with both houses of Congress, and have someone start reading out names from the podium, and seeing those called out get escorted out of the room, never to be seen again. For more effect, C-Span should have its feed severely degraded as well.
or the external activities of scum like the CIA helping rightwing terrorists to power in Latin America.
No more, or less, evil than the scum like the KGB helping the leftwing terrorists trying to usurp power in Latin America.
You obviously live in a Red State/Red County.
If you're in SoCal, kill someone. Cut them up into pieces. And move to Mexico before the cops figure it out. Mexico won't extradite you, because of the death sentence in California.
Of course, if you're one sick bastard, a few hundred dollars in the right hands might take care of your sick ass in a couple of years, too, and no one will come looking for your rotting corpse in the middle of the Sonara Desert...
Hmm... really annoying copy protection... like SecuRom.
I'd have one if I could get a 1600x1200 17" LCD display. But the only way I can get an LCD like that is with a laptop computer. Those displays are about the sharpest displays I've seen.
I don't need or want a 21 or 22" LCD display to get 1600x1200.
But I'm weird, I suppose. The Samsung SyncMaster 171V LCD (at 1280x1024) has about as sharp of a display as the NCD 21" CRT display I have sitting next to it.
I remember the first time I saw Windows 3.1 on a 21" display way-back when, and I though, finally, a useful Windows display that approached a 17" X terminal/Sun workstation display in usable space vs wasted icon space. At that point, a 15" VGA monitor (at 640x480, no less) was a high-end display. 12" and 14" were far more common for PC displays (and the 9" diagonal Mac classic display was pretty popular, too...).
Well, passive lighting and color LCD just does not work, *ESPECIALLY* in bright daylight.
Active (i.e., backlit) lighting for LCD displays is to make them visible in daylight, oddly enough, to create enough contrast differential, because sunlight, even indirect, is really very bright, and definitely overpowers the contrast differential on passive STN LCDs.
Passive LCD works for monochromatic LCDs, maybe to about 4 degrees of darkness per pixel. The nadir for grey-scale LCDs was just before color LCD displays became common, and they did well to replicate a 16-level brightness (mapped CGA colors to brightness levels).
Passive STN color LCDs suck painfully, which is why you are lucky to find them only on REALLY CHEAP laptops anymore.
Why stop at white? Think of the .000005% advantage you would get when power is then modulated at the sub-pixel level. Green screens, here we come...again!
What will Microsoft do, though? Office pretty much defaults to a very white-dominated scheme. Word is pretty scary with a dark background and light letters. I bet the Excel engineers don't want to go back to the Multiplan (MS's first competitor against Lotus 1-2-3) skin. Access would be OK, though.
They'll need to look at some of the various Winamp skins that actually work well with a mostly dark background, because MS's high-contrast themes/skins are pretty garish, almost in a lime green/hot pink way, without using either of those colors.
s you are launching smaller sats more often, you have more flight opportunities, so if there IS a failure, you can recover from it quickly.
Also, as you are launching smaller satellites (but maybe more per launch, so the throw weight per launch is the same, so no difference) more often, you have more economies of scale, because instead of keeping 10 Delta 3 and Delta 4 packages, Boeing gets a bigger contract to keep more launch packages ready to launch or in the preparation pipeline, and while the total cost is higher, the cost per launch goes down due to economies of scale.
I think faster-better-cheaper also brought on the newer launch control facility that was highlighted in Wired a few years ago, where a few people working at much better workstations were able to monitor far more things that needed human monitoring, as well as better software monitoring a bunch of other more mundane stuff, which sort of started as a backroom hack by a couple of engineers that actually worked.
The "touchy-feely" space program is the result of an agency without an inherent PR advantage. So the PR people were brought in to try and get more buy-in by Congress (and by extension, voters).
The result of high-profile screwups that make Congress look bad then become massively redundant paper trail systems that are intended to reduce risk, but really are just to cover the appropriate asses if something goes bad.
Sure, accountability is a good thing, but not if the process inherently clogs the entire process.
CFR22 Part 11 comes to mind, also...
And the industrial activities of...oh...Johns-Manville were purely benevolent, especially w.r.t. asbestos?
OK, let's clarify it.
Ignorant is just not being aware.
Stupid is choosing to remain in a state of ignorance after being told what is happening.
Most people are stupid.
No, because for them to "profit" computationally, the new CPUs would have had to come out before 3 months.
Sometimes the measure of efficiency is called "you have X Euros to spend on this project".
While not technically the most efficient, if said mobos+PCU+Power supply cost $250, compared to utilizing a bunch of blade-like units that effectively cost $500 per CPU unit, then you go with the less "efficient" solution.
Sort of like all those render farms we've seen pictures of, where they just have 1000 or so white-box PCs set up together, not a few 96-CPU Microway blade systems, or a couple of decked out SGI Altrix systems.
The chances are not high that maze would have grown to the size it is today without us purposely doing the cross polination, but it could have happened.
Well, it happened with tumbleweed, aka Russian Thistle. We can't find where it originated. The theory seems to be that it came over from the Caucasus region, but there isn't anything there now that resembles Russian Thistle. Corn is the same way. We can't seem to find what plant maize, and eventually corn, were derived from.
But what about locusts? We know that there isn't some species of grasshopper that is a locust. We think that there is some sort of environmental trigger that causes grasshoppers to grow to about 3-4x their size, and turn into what we would call a locust.
You could do away with the bamboo, but you're gonna wipe every other plant out, and then good luck getting back what you really want to grow there. 2,4,D will probably do the trick. I plan on spraying some on a big patch of blackberries soon to kill them off, so I can make a big pile of dry blackberry canes and burn them. Again.
But, ooo, it persists in the soil. So it's a toss-up.
Are you sure it's really bamboo, and not Reed canary grass?
You're kind of wrong about this. Think papilloma virus. The DNA of the cell is altered by the virus to the point that the cell becomes cancerous, as an unintended consequence.
There are bacteria and other parasites that do things like this as well.