I write software for a company,
Interactive Motion Technologies, that makes robots used for stroke rehab and other rehab and neuroscience research. Our products are based on research done at
MIT.
I am not familiar with the Rutgers glove in the referenced article, but I think it only senses patient motion, it doesn't move the patient's hand around. Our robots guide patients to move their limbs (shoulder/elbow, wrist, hand, ankle...) while they play various simple video games, letting them move if they can, and assisting their movements if they can't, as a therapist would.
"existing passports will remain valid until they expire" - that is up to ten years, until 2016. So forgers can forge old-style ones until 2016. If the goal is to make passports more secure (and I'm not saying I'm in favor of rfid passports), it seems kind of strange to wait so long to mandate their use.
while it was a stack computer, i always thought the most distinctive feature of the transputer was its parallel design, which could be exploited when programming it in
occam
besides the desire/preference to have open source drivers for license compliance and moral/ethical reasons, there is a more practical reason why source access to drivers is handy. sometimes you need to recompile drivers from source in order to have them play well with operating systems features. for instance, if they need to respect the constraints of real-time systems such as rtlinux, rtai, or xenomai. these systems need to redefine cli/sti (clear/set interrupt) instructions (using macros) so that the real-time micro-kernel handles the interrupts rather than linux. open source drivers let you recompile with #include files that make this possible.
i don't mean to be a jerk here, but the response is kind of disproportionate.
not an unreasonable statement, but consider. hamas (in gaza) and hizbollah (in lebanon) attacked israel during periods of previous calm. they both infiltrated israel and killed and kidnapped israeli soldiers who were not engaged in battle. hizbollah fired rockets at israel, by the hundreds, over a period months and longer. i'm not even going to discuss the dozens of incidents of arab infiltration with the attempts at killing israelis with bombs in public places like schools, dance clubs, cafes, restaurants, beaches, and busses.
israel is not interested in fighting with the arab world, except for the purpose of protecting itself. the arab and muslim world use israel as a scapegoat and as a target to distract their own people from their problems - lack of infrastructure, poverty, and corruption.
in retaliating against hamas and hizbollah, israel isn't playing a tit for tat game, they are trying to prevent them from attacking israeli citizens. hamas or hizbollah are entrenched around israel's borders. israel's defenses are sufficiently strong that hamas and hizbollah can only kill 5 or 10 israelis in an attack.
to ask israel to respond in a proportionate way means that you are asking them to respond by killing only 5 or 10 hamas or hizbollah militants, and leave it at that. this would have absolutely no effect in preventing further terror attacks, and as such, is a pointless suggestion. israel isn't playing a board game, it is trying to solve a grave problem.
one more note about proportion. there are about 6 million jews in israel and 20 million jews in the world. there are about 350 million arabs in the countries surrounding israel. there are about 1250 million muslims in the world. you can look
at a map of the muslim world, and note the size of israel in the middle. note also that israel is a democratic country, with many mosques and christian churches, with many arabs living happily, working, going to schools, elected and participating in the israeli parliament, and so forth. contrast this with the many arab countries that are extremely oppressive to foreigners, and don't allow any non-muslim worship. life is much better for the average muslim in israel than it is for the average muslim in any arab country.
The English language is not designed to be spelled phonetically using our Roman alphabet, in that its vowel sounds are so full of diphthongs. Languages with regular spelling rules are usually based on a smaller set of simple vowel sounds, so that those vowel sounds are usually represented by single vowel letters. The source article has phrases like: "thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents."
It's possible to avoid this problem with a new alphabet, but is that what we want?
I don't like it, especially because current English spelling encodes etymological structure that conveys meaning and relationship between families of words.
It may be argued that a 20 lb PC is portable. It may not be argued that it is "ultra-portable." "Portable ultra-PC," maybe. "Ultra-portable PC," no. (Note that this phrasing is an error in the slashdot lead, not in the article itself.)
You can find Geoff Goodfellow's
note at the
Telecom Digest archives.
Note that the Telecom Digest has been running continuously since 1981, on the Internet and its predecessor (the ARPAnet), and is in some sense, the original ancestor of services like Slashdot.
So it would still be vulnerable to self-guided, underground, suicide gopher torpedoes? Lame.
This question isn't all that silly, and it depends on what the hemispherical field really is. There are at least three alternatives:
the field is an open curved surface with no flat side - shaped like a soup bowl.
the field is a closed hollow surface including a flat side.
the field is a non-hollow solid.
I would guess that a force field would be generated from a device situated at a point, and probably emitting a solid field whose force decays proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the device, so it would be non-hollow solid.
Nice attempt at paraphrasing, but while the word 'hemispheric' may translate literally to the phrase 'one half of a vehicle', the real meaning is obfuscated.
Hemispheric does not mean half a vehicle, it means half a sphere. The
hemispheric field, in this case, refers to the half a sphere above the
ground (containing the vehicle), rather than the hemisphere below ground.
Back before the turn of the century, when 100MHz was an unimaginably fast speed for a PC (probably late 1980's), I remember sitting in a meeting discussing rendering window decorations (frames, title bars, buttons etc) with drop shadows, and I suggested, sarcastically, why not
raytrace all the window decorations. People wrinkled their brows and laughed nervously.
So I read the slashdot lead, and it says it analyzes a billion proton collisions per second. So I thought, how much stuff is that? I rtfa and it says:
In the LHC, each pair of colliding protons flying around the collider crashes with the energy of about 14 buzzing mosquitoes -- but all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug.
So we know that a proton is a million times smaller than a mosquito (or half a mosquito?). So a billion protons is equivalent to, uh, a thousand mosquitos. I tried:
http://www.google.com/search?q=1000+mosquitos+to+g rams
to no avail. Foo on Google calculator. But google search points at pages that mostly claim that a mosquito weighs 2mg or so, so a billion protons (1E9) should weigh 2 grams.
But I thought that a mole of protons (6E23 protons) weighed 1 gram. So common knowledge and this article are off by several (14?) orders of magnitude. Hmmm. Or are they the same size but very different in mass?
Or when the author said "a million times smaller," maybe she/he intended "a jillion times smaller."
Photos have gradual changes in color (even when there are abrupt changes in the scene being photographed) and edits don't. But if people are trying to produce edited photos that need to be undetectable, it should be possible to write a filter that fixes edited photos. To do the equivalent of taking a photo of the edited photo. It's easy to seek for someone who isn't hiding. When they try to hide, it's a bit tougher.
I think the graphic design is messy, I'd prefer the section lines all in a group, not interspersed. Also, I agree with those who think the curved bottoms group up. And I think the gray background makes them stand out, when I want them standing back. I'd hope this all would be configurable.
How about a small box on the left side that allows people to "slash" a story if they like it, then you could rank the content based on how many people slash it.;-)
More seriously, it's nice to have the additional sectional info. How about some slashdot polls (or other form or survey) asking people what they think of alternative design ideas?
Box scores are a matter of public record. The NBA's claim was dismissed, and this goes for MLB box scores, as well as data like the record of moves in a chess game.
I imgagine that they would store the image data with a "sanitized" ID string that does not show private information, with that ID string used as a key into a personal information database that's encrypted separately in a HIPAA compliant way. An image without discernible ID info shouldn't violate HIPAA.
That's not a fair comparison at all. Here is a gray scale 16-level version of the
original image.
To change topics, here's what I found strange about the article:
They say:
The contrast ratio is at a low 10:1 and the display can show 4 levels of grey. While this seems low, it is more than adequate for reading in well lighted conditions. Keep in mind that most printed books are at 2 levels (black and white).
The point about books being printed in 2 levels is silly, because they are printed at very high resolution (at least 2400 dpi instead of 100dpi, and you square that because it's a 2D surface, so it's a difference between 5760000 dots per in^2 vs 10000 dpi^2, or 576 times as many dots on the same size screen.
They also say...keep in mind that thin materials can warp and melt quickly. Well, it's a flexible display. It's supposed to bend. Or when they say warp, are they talking about stretching?
The technology does sound promising, but this article seems to be written by a spin doctor.
Re:hats off to Bram, Bill Joy, and ATT
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
And, did you read, and do you still have your copy of that BSD book...
Yes, I worked at Bell Labs in those days, and I still have lots of old UNIX docs. Sounds like you are talking about the 5-volume set of 4BSD manuals, which built on the Bell Labs
UNIX v7 manuals.
Dennis Ritchie has a page with links to them and to other interesting UNIX historical docs.
Re:hats off to Bram, Bill Joy, and ATT
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Credit to Bill Joy also (and to AT&T, for "sc") for the pre-cursors and inspirations for vim.
Joy wrote vi, with help from Mark Horton, both then at UC Berkeley. This back around 1980, on PDP-11s, and eventually Vaxen. If by se, you mean the Bell Labs PWB screen editor, that was quite a clumsy piece of software meant to compete with vi, and with the ports of emacs to UNIX (separate versions by Gosling and Zimmerman, predating the GNU effort). I am shocked that anyone remembers PWB se, it was short-lived and pretty obscure. How obscure? Is there one ref to it on the web? That's obscure!
While you're thanking, you might want to thank the UNIX folks who brought us "ed," Ken Thompson (and Kernighan wrote the docs, as always). The ed command set survives as the basis for vi/vim:command mode - including the regexes. ed was based on editors that came before it of course, especially QED.
companies are moving their facilities away from the usa to places like india and china, because doing business in the usa is relatively expensive.
people and companies are considering not rebuilding in new orleans, because surviving there might prove too expensive. the water in new orleans might be fetid, but new orleans, even now, is pretty attractive when compared to mars.
i'm a bit puzzled how anyone is going to justify doing business on mars. the only way i could see it working is if some government is wasting huge amounts of money to go to mars already, and they are willing to waste more for services. (hello halliburton/kbr.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am not familiar with the Rutgers glove in the referenced article, but I think it only senses patient motion, it doesn't move the patient's hand around. Our robots guide patients to move their limbs (shoulder/elbow, wrist, hand, ankle...) while they play various simple video games, letting them move if they can, and assisting their movements if they can't, as a therapist would.
"existing passports will remain valid until they expire" - that is up to ten years, until 2016. So forgers can forge old-style ones until 2016. If the goal is to make passports more secure (and I'm not saying I'm in favor of rfid passports), it seems kind of strange to wait so long to mandate their use.
If you're interested in rounding (and who isn't?) you might want to read An introduction to different rounding algorithms.
while it was a stack computer, i always thought the most distinctive feature of the transputer was its parallel design, which could be exploited when programming it in occam
besides the desire/preference to have open source drivers for license compliance and moral/ethical reasons, there is a more practical reason why source access to drivers is handy. sometimes you need to recompile drivers from source in order to have them play well with operating systems features. for instance, if they need to respect the constraints of real-time systems such as rtlinux, rtai, or xenomai. these systems need to redefine cli/sti (clear/set interrupt) instructions (using macros) so that the real-time micro-kernel handles the interrupts rather than linux. open source drivers let you recompile with #include files that make this possible.
not an unreasonable statement, but consider. hamas (in gaza) and hizbollah (in lebanon) attacked israel during periods of previous calm. they both infiltrated israel and killed and kidnapped israeli soldiers who were not engaged in battle. hizbollah fired rockets at israel, by the hundreds, over a period months and longer. i'm not even going to discuss the dozens of incidents of arab infiltration with the attempts at killing israelis with bombs in public places like schools, dance clubs, cafes, restaurants, beaches, and busses.
israel is not interested in fighting with the arab world, except for the purpose of protecting itself. the arab and muslim world use israel as a scapegoat and as a target to distract their own people from their problems - lack of infrastructure, poverty, and corruption.
in retaliating against hamas and hizbollah, israel isn't playing a tit for tat game, they are trying to prevent them from attacking israeli citizens. hamas or hizbollah are entrenched around israel's borders. israel's defenses are sufficiently strong that hamas and hizbollah can only kill 5 or 10 israelis in an attack.
to ask israel to respond in a proportionate way means that you are asking them to respond by killing only 5 or 10 hamas or hizbollah militants, and leave it at that. this would have absolutely no effect in preventing further terror attacks, and as such, is a pointless suggestion. israel isn't playing a board game, it is trying to solve a grave problem.
one more note about proportion. there are about 6 million jews in israel and 20 million jews in the world. there are about 350 million arabs in the countries surrounding israel. there are about 1250 million muslims in the world. you can look at a map of the muslim world, and note the size of israel in the middle. note also that israel is a democratic country, with many mosques and christian churches, with many arabs living happily, working, going to schools, elected and participating in the israeli parliament, and so forth. contrast this with the many arab countries that are extremely oppressive to foreigners, and don't allow any non-muslim worship. life is much better for the average muslim in israel than it is for the average muslim in any arab country.
It's possible to avoid this problem with a new alphabet, but is that what we want?
I don't like it, especially because current English spelling encodes etymological structure that conveys meaning and relationship between families of words.
It may be argued that a 20 lb PC is portable. It may not be argued that it is "ultra-portable." "Portable ultra-PC," maybe. "Ultra-portable PC," no. (Note that this phrasing is an error in the slashdot lead, not in the article itself.)
Reminds me of Logan's Run. The idea of chipping people you want to control gives me pause.
Microsoft is the George W Bush of VMS.
You can find Geoff Goodfellow's note at the Telecom Digest archives. Note that the Telecom Digest has been running continuously since 1981, on the Internet and its predecessor (the ARPAnet), and is in some sense, the original ancestor of services like Slashdot.
- the field is an open curved surface with no flat side - shaped like a soup bowl.
- the field is a closed hollow surface including a flat side.
- the field is a non-hollow solid.
I would guess that a force field would be generated from a device situated at a point, and probably emitting a solid field whose force decays proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the device, so it would be non-hollow solid.Back before the turn of the century, when 100MHz was an unimaginably fast speed for a PC (probably late 1980's), I remember sitting in a meeting discussing rendering window decorations (frames, title bars, buttons etc) with drop shadows, and I suggested, sarcastically, why not raytrace all the window decorations. People wrinkled their brows and laughed nervously.
But I thought that a mole of protons (6E23 protons) weighed 1 gram. So common knowledge and this article are off by several (14?) orders of magnitude. Hmmm. Or are they the same size but very different in mass?
Or when the author said "a million times smaller," maybe she/he intended "a jillion times smaller."
Photos have gradual changes in color (even when there are abrupt changes in the scene being photographed) and edits don't. But if people are trying to produce edited photos that need to be undetectable, it should be possible to write a filter that fixes edited photos. To do the equivalent of taking a photo of the edited photo. It's easy to seek for someone who isn't hiding. When they try to hide, it's a bit tougher.
How about a small box on the left side that allows people to "slash" a story if they like it, then you could rank the content based on how many people slash it. ;-)
More seriously, it's nice to have the additional sectional info. How about some slashdot polls (or other form or survey) asking people what they think of alternative design ideas?
Box scores are a matter of public record. The NBA's claim was dismissed, and this goes for MLB box scores, as well as data like the record of moves in a chess game.
I imgagine that they would store the image data with a "sanitized" ID string that does not show private information, with that ID string used as a key into a personal information database that's encrypted separately in a HIPAA compliant way. An image without discernible ID info shouldn't violate HIPAA.
Oops. I read 4-level image as 4-bit (16 level) image. The exmaple was still not fair, here's a 4-level gray image. Not as good as 16-level, but better than acariquara's image.
That's not a fair comparison at all. Here is a gray scale 16-level version of the original image. To change topics, here's what I found strange about the article: They say:
The point about books being printed in 2 levels is silly, because they are printed at very high resolution (at least 2400 dpi instead of 100dpi, and you square that because it's a 2D surface, so it's a difference between 5760000 dots per in^2 vs 10000 dpi^2, or 576 times as many dots on the same size screen.
They also say ...keep in mind that thin materials can warp and melt quickly. Well, it's a flexible display. It's supposed to bend. Or when they say warp, are they talking about stretching?
The technology does sound promising, but this article seems to be written by a spin doctor.
Yes, I worked at Bell Labs in those days, and I still have lots of old UNIX docs. Sounds like you are talking about the 5-volume set of 4BSD manuals, which built on the Bell Labs UNIX v7 manuals. Dennis Ritchie has a page with links to them and to other interesting UNIX historical docs.
Joy wrote vi, with help from Mark Horton, both then at UC Berkeley. This back around 1980, on PDP-11s, and eventually Vaxen. If by se, you mean the Bell Labs PWB screen editor, that was quite a clumsy piece of software meant to compete with vi, and with the ports of emacs to UNIX (separate versions by Gosling and Zimmerman, predating the GNU effort). I am shocked that anyone remembers PWB se, it was short-lived and pretty obscure. How obscure? Is there one ref to it on the web? That's obscure!
While you're thanking, you might want to thank the UNIX folks who brought us "ed," Ken Thompson (and Kernighan wrote the docs, as always). The ed command set survives as the basis for vi/vim :command mode - including the regexes. ed was based on editors that came before it of course, especially QED.
this is one of those things they don't want you to know.
people and companies are considering not rebuilding in new orleans, because surviving there might prove too expensive. the water in new orleans might be fetid, but new orleans, even now, is pretty attractive when compared to mars.
i'm a bit puzzled how anyone is going to justify doing business on mars. the only way i could see it working is if some government is wasting huge amounts of money to go to mars already, and they are willing to waste more for services. (hello halliburton/kbr.)