I was amused by something in the article that said that too many adjectives in the description ("riveting!") is a predictor of a negative outcome for a film. That reminds me of a rule of thumb for restaurants that a friend suggested -- if the name of the dish is full of adjectives, it'll taste bad. Amusingly, I just did a Google search for "restaurant menu adjectives", and most of the hits on the first page were for middle-school lesson plans where kids add adjectives to menus to make the food seem more appetizing!
No, this is not a spinoff of space-industry research. This technology was developed in the academic community. At least some of it is military-funded. Here's an earlier story on this technology from a few years back:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010217/fob2. asp
Nono, it's legal to give someone the original CD, and it's legal to rip the music and put it on your iPod and listen in the subway, and it's legal to let someone else listen to your iPod, but it's illegal to permanently give someone else the ripped music, either by burning a copy of the CD for them or by giving them the MP3.
One of the divisions of the ongoing RoboCup competition (robotic soccer) is the Sony Four-Legged League, where researchers, including some pretty high-powered robotics groups from major universities, hack teams of Aibos to play soccer against other teams of Aibos.
RoboCup Four-Legged League
There are two interesting things about Clippy. One is that it's a shockingly obnoxious bit of UI code. The other is that the underlying engine is one of the most practically successful bits of Artificial Intelligence research ever devised, the Bayesian network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network). Bayes nets, aka belief nets, describe the interrelations among a set of facts about the world, and the causal (or at least correlational) relations among those facts. Given a partial set of information about the state of the world (or your Excel document), the net can induce the most likely causes for those facts. Like, what you're trying to do with your Excel document, and why it's not working. Too bad M$ chose to make it completely annoying...
One question I haven't seen answered about the proposals for post-shuttle spacecraft is whether or not there will be the capability to return significant amounts of equipment for orbit? And not just trash from the space station, but also completed experiments, things like that. One of the big advantages of the shuttle system is that it can return large payloads to earth without particularly strong G forces during the de-orbit. What's the station going to do without the shuttle, even if we can send people up there, if it can't bring stuff back?
Slashdot Mirror
I was amused by something in the article that said that too many adjectives in the description ("riveting!") is a predictor of a negative outcome for a film. That reminds me of a rule of thumb for restaurants that a friend suggested -- if the name of the dish is full of adjectives, it'll taste bad. Amusingly, I just did a Google search for "restaurant menu adjectives", and most of the hits on the first page were for middle-school lesson plans where kids add adjectives to menus to make the food seem more appetizing!
No, this is not a spinoff of space-industry research. This technology was developed in the academic community. At least some of it is military-funded. Here's an earlier story on this technology from a few years back: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010217/fob2. asp
Ooh! Ooh! Think of the possibilities! I want cous.co.us! And there's also rau.co.us... and vis.co.us...
Nono, it's legal to give someone the original CD, and it's legal to rip the music and put it on your iPod and listen in the subway, and it's legal to let someone else listen to your iPod, but it's illegal to permanently give someone else the ripped music, either by burning a copy of the CD for them or by giving them the MP3.
One of the divisions of the ongoing RoboCup competition (robotic soccer) is the Sony Four-Legged League, where researchers, including some pretty high-powered robotics groups from major universities, hack teams of Aibos to play soccer against other teams of Aibos.
RoboCup
Four-Legged League
There are two interesting things about Clippy. One is that it's a shockingly obnoxious bit of UI code. The other is that the underlying engine is one of the most practically successful bits of Artificial Intelligence research ever devised, the Bayesian network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network). Bayes nets, aka belief nets, describe the interrelations among a set of facts about the world, and the causal (or at least correlational) relations among those facts. Given a partial set of information about the state of the world (or your Excel document), the net can induce the most likely causes for those facts. Like, what you're trying to do with your Excel document, and why it's not working. Too bad M$ chose to make it completely annoying...
One question I haven't seen answered about the proposals for post-shuttle spacecraft is whether or not there will be the capability to return significant amounts of equipment for orbit? And not just trash from the space station, but also completed experiments, things like that. One of the big advantages of the shuttle system is that it can return large payloads to earth without particularly strong G forces during the de-orbit. What's the station going to do without the shuttle, even if we can send people up there, if it can't bring stuff back?
For PalmOS devices, there's an app called "Secret!" with an encrypted database. It comes with a conduit for Palm Desktop too. Very very useful.