If they intend to use this for real survey analysis, they have to test (test: see scientific method) whether or not it works and get a sense for the error range. In other words, determine the accuracy and precision (two different things) of their system before using it on a real problem. Otherwise results from it are useless scientifically. I'm sorry good science doesn't instantly gratify you, but this work doeshave scientific value right now.
Catholic is actually an adjective, not a proper noun. It means "universal". The phrase "Catholic church" is like "Red Army"; everyone reads it as part of the name, but it does have an idependant existence. Its just people don't use it independantly very much that they think it must refer to the Roman Catholic Church.
No, but things in low earth orbit, like Mir, are in orbits that decay noticeably (due to aerobraking effects and other things) and require regular boosts to maintain their orbit. In Mir's case this boost is usually provided by the unmanned proton supply craft which deliver supplies and pick up garbage. No more Proton rockets and the orbit will decay, especially after the last of the onboard thrusters use up their fuel.
Unlike people who know someone who has a H1-B, or maybe heard the guy down the hall has one, I am in the US on a H1-B. You cannot change jobs/employers without getting a brand new visa. This is hard to do as few employers are willing to wait three months while waiting to see if your visa is granted. When you so the clock is reset and you start all over again.
In fact the restrictions can be so tight that if your job description changes significantly (through promotion) etc., it no longer falls into under the rubric of the professional qualifications you used to get the visa in the first place (think of a programmer going into sales or management) and your renewal can be affected. (The visa is initially issued for three years with a three year renewal) which requires more INS red tape)
What this means is you're pretty much stuck where you are unless you're very fortunate - finding not one but two employers willing to jump through the INS hoops isn't easy.
It's not a Harrison novel. I remember reading this too. It's definately by A.C. Clarke and one of the characters was missing his legs. And nobody was thrilled to see him arrive on the station either. Can't remember the #$%$#@% name either though...
Yes, but the point here is a) Just what exactly are
those beliefs? They're not articulated here in any way. Is this because the poster doesn't have any worth sharing, is unable to describe them coherently or automatically assumes that everyone here will instinctively share his belief? b) Is getting arrested during a minor interation with a cop the best way to forward that belief? Even if you have decided that direct action, and getting arrested for it, is your best way forward, why waste it on something penny ante like this?
Protest for protest's sake is useless. Protest is only useful when it's advancing a specific goal, not just directionless activity. If you're goal is to draw attention to a topic, then you you need to spell out that topic and make your protest relevant to it.
Why then, here in Manhatten, is Sixth Avenue called "The Avenue of the Americas" and has flags of all the American countries, North and South? (And yes, they are all explicity referred to as "American" countries in the city blurb). It's not called "The Avenue of the North and South Americas" y'know. If you won't let the Columbians identify as just "Americans", you can't either, because by that logic of exclusion, you would be "North American" and nobody could call themselves just American!
Bandwidth downstream isn't the problem - one channel's TV picture runs at about 2 meg a second for example, so that gives you some idea of
the carrying capacity. Bandwidth is divided among users and encrypted, just like it is for cable modem users. Because most people are in line of site of an antenna (because non-market forces dictated they should be) you can transmit back, using a cell style sytem with dynamic frequency allocationm using multiple channels. Upload and download speeds will be similar to aDSL (say 90/640). As for filtering, that's not an infrastructure issue, people can stick whatever filtering they like on top.
The project is still being in the engineering phase, but there have already have been a few stories (check out New Scientist's article in 29 May 1999 issue (you may have to sign up for a free trial registration to their archive)). I know about the project because I know one of the planners. Here's two para's from the article:
Ireland's public broadcaster RTE is developing the technology, called the Wireless Interactive Network for Digital Services (WINDS), with cash from the European Union. Signals broadcast from the main transmitter follow the Digital Video Broadcasting standard used throughout Europe for terrestrial digital TV. The innovation is to make the set-top box that decodes incoming signals also work as a low-power transmitter, sending data signals to the normal roof-top or set-top aerial, which transmits them back to the broadcaster's mast.
The Irish government has allocated 1-megahertz slices of the UHF spectrum to carry the return-path signals, and each slice is split into 1000 channels that are 1 kilohertz wide. The receiver hops between channels until it finds one in its area that is clear.
I may not be resident in Ireland any more, but I do try to keep up:)
Hold on.ie, the cavalary is coming - in the form
of digital television. Ireland's geographical seperation and RTE's (the national broadcaster) legal mandate to provide nearly everywhere in Ireland with reception allows for a Very Good Thing. When Digital TV comes in they are planning to add a backchannel, so your TV can talk back to its local transmitter as an Internet node. The connection will be asymmetric and downstream bandwidth will be shared, like a cable modem, but wireless. Speeds will similar to residental aDSL.
I agree - if you read Gene Kranz's book "Failure is Not an Option", at the end he talks a little bit about how to move the space program along.
Number one is getting out and convincing others. Number two is letting Congress know that, yes, this is something you want tax dollars spent on. And remember - snail mail letters make a much bigger impact than emails. Don't know who or where to write to? Check here for the House of Representatives and here for the Senate
...and the real battle for IP is just beginning too. The real work will be turning the sequence into useful information. First what and where are the actual genes, then what proteins do the genes code for and what role the protein plays in metabolism or regulating other genes. Some idea of how much work needs to be done can be gathered from the fact that we don't even know how many genes there are - the most recent estimates for the total number of genes range from about 40,000 to 120,000. This process is called "annotating" and will take years. It's also where all the money lies, since this is what'll be patented as part of biotech companies' IP. Plus, even now, there are tensions (as discussed in this weeks Nature, between the people who are producing the sequences and the people who are analyzing and annotating those sequences. On the one hand, some researchers are dedicating their time to sequencing as quickly as possible and so don't get the chance to follow up anything interesting they come across, on the other hand, just how much credit should they get for providing the raw data for someone else work in annotating?
Finally, don't forget this is just a first draft - there's still a lot of donkey work required to map out tricky regions and to verify already covered regions.
Ah, but the beauty of it is that once you get to the asteroid belt, it can be very cheap to get back. You pick your asteroid and build a mass ejector on it. This drills chunks out of the asteroid and shoots them behind the asteroid using a bucket linear accelerator. The asteroid is pushed forward in reaction. It's like a combination garbage compactor and slow rocket. You'd lose about 80% of the asteroid's mass moving it back to Earth, but if you started with an 80 million tonne nickel-iron asteroid you'd still have more than enough material left to make the trip well worth while. As for the energy requirements - if the nickel-iron asteroid was well placed, the total energy cost would be less than mining and refining an equivalent amount of iron ore from the Earth's crust. This is important especially when you realise that 20-25% of our CO2 emissions are due to iron refining. Plus you'd get enough nickel to last several centuries.
You're right - real risk analyses have to be broadly based. I was just trying to illustrate some of the statistical issues involved to those who felt that just because their plane didn't crash when the RF regs were broken, the regs must be bogus.
The point is not that RF use = instant bad air day, but that RF use - whether it be cell phones or even a regular FM receiver - changes the odds. 99.9% of the time nothing happens. (This is why you're not going to use this as a terrorist weapon.) But sooner or later, a pilot doesn't pay as much attention as he should to a warning light because of false alarms, or somebody mishears a air traffic control alitude correction and you have 300 dead people.
Most safety regulations are built around a cold look at long term odds. For example, (pulling figures out of nowhere) imagine cars with no air bags - 100 people die in auto accidents a year. Then air bags are put in. Now only 40 people die, but 10 of which were somehow the result of being hit with an airbag. It's still better for everyone to use airbags, even though they killed 10 people.
In the long run, it's better for you to reduce the amount of RF crap you're putting out, period.
As was suspected by most scientists, the face is just a photographic artifact, due to lighting conditions, low resolution and extensive image processing of the original Viking picture, similar in nature to the famous, but non-existant "Martian Canals".
It's a pity De Palma didn't seem to bother to read this before creating lost oppurtunity that was "Mission to Mars"...
The best book on the history of computing I've ever read is "Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers" by Stan Augerton. It's out of print now (but you can search for it through Amazon) and stops in the mid-eighties but it deals well with the contentious issues of who-did-what-first in the 1940's between the Germans, the English and the Americans. It's very well illustrated and has a lot of interviews with a lot of key people.
Wow. Not bad, three out of three points are cobblers, let's take them one by one:
>(1) Business attracts people interested in money. Government attracts people interested in power. I find the the second kind more repugnant and much more dangerous.
Money as an end to power is a well documented phenomenom. Read the biographies of many very wealthy people and you will see that for them, money is more than just something you buy stuff with, but a way of keeping score. Government does also attract people interested in public service.
>(2) A government can do much nastier things to you than a corporation can. The absolute worse thing that a corporation can do is sue you into bankrupcy. A government, OTOH, can put you in jail, confiscate your property and do other most unpleasant things.
People living downwind of the United Carbide Plant in Bhopal might disagree. Or those on board that ValueJet crash. Or the strikers who were killed during anti-union riots in the US. Or the poor bastard living in the Nigerean deltas being screwed over by big oil. Or the people screwed by big tobacco who lied when they knew smoking was a)addictive and b) killed. Or - well you get the point.
>(3) If I dislike a corporation, I can more or less ignore it: not use its services and products, turn away from it's advertising, etc. Now a government is much, much harder to ignore.
In a lot of countries, whose economies are weaker than large corporations that's not true. Even in the First World, it's very difficult for me to ignore, say, car manafacturers, even though I don't own a car.
"They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan.
I know there is a fondness for the underdog, bringing down the close-minded orthodoxy and opening up a brave new dawn, etc, etc, but I would remind everybody that the reason the scientific community is sceptical of far out claims is because most of the time they're right to be. We remember the triumphs of paradigm busting: Gallileo, Mandlebrot, Einstein. For very good reasons we forget the failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Just because part of the military-industrial complex is funding it is no seal of authority either; remember all the reports of the Cold War intelligence services - on both sides - funding psychic distance viewing?
All greenglow has are some unpeer-reviewed reports and some highly criticised publications. Measuring weight reduction of a superconducting spinning disk, especially with the magnitudes of loss suggested, is not a difficult experiment. The fact that theses results have not been duplicated, despite the fact that superconductors are common materials these days in most university physics departments should raise the flag of sceptisism for everybody: Extreme claims require extreme evidence
"Slated for release in 2001" - because we all know how good Microsoft are at meeting their release dates. This looks like Microsoft's usual trick of making product annoucements when they don't even have a working product, just to get people to hold off on buying someone elses technology. They did it with Windows itself (remember when Windows was just a stop gap to maintain Microsoft's ability to leverage DOS?), Pen Windows (remember that?) and the Microsoft Network. Unfortunately I think the Market Droids have made an error here - it's not like console technology is some new, unproven, region of the electronic frontier, nor is it like Nintendo or Sony don't have huge brand recognition either. (unlike those poor chumps at GO computing who got squished by Pen Windows)
Ah, my male friends, you must try Boxer Briefs: As aesthically pleasing as boxers, while providing the support of briefs! (Hanes make them). See? There is a third way...
Yes, 3D capture from 1 camera video has been done
on
Minolta 3D Camera
·
· Score: 1
I can't find a link, but a team from Louvain in Belgium developed software that would take a video feed, work out depth cues (moving around helped), create a mesh and overlay the texture from the video feed. (not in real time though) If you wanted a complete object you had to walk around it of course, but it worked well for pan shots too. You ended up with something like the 3D views of the Mars Pathfinder project. They had another system for stills - you would take one regular photo of e.g. someone's face and then another while shining a grid pattern onto their face using an overhead projector. Not as well defined as using a laser to measure distances or anything, but pretty good for knockabout use.
The agreement in question is the Outer Space Treaty and it's been around since 1967. The US, the UK and Russia were founder signatories. The most relevant piece here is "outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means".
So, even if its not technically illegal to claim a piece of the Moon or Mars as your real estate in the US, the claim has no force outside the jurisdiction of the US, and the US is forbidden from extending it's sovereign territory into space. So it's pretty worthless having a claim on the Sea of Tranquility if your claim isn't actually valid there...
In Ireland, Internet on tap from a TV is already well under way as part of the Irish National broadcaster's move to the European Digital Standard (this tech won't work with the HDTV standard due to the limititions of that approach). It's called Wireless Interactive Network for Digital Services (WINDS). Here's a New Scientist report. By using spare channels in a heavily mulitplexed system and small transmitter in a set top box talking to the local broadcast antennae, TVs will have an ayschronous internet connection. While you can use it to "Web TV" normal programming you can also use it as a "regular" IP connection, with upload speeds somewhat faster than a 56K modem and download speeds like that of low end DSL. So if you're anywhere in Ireland and you have a digital TV (or a digital phone) - you'll be wired with high speed Internet access.
Slashdot Mirror
Error!
Unlike people who know someone who has a H1-B, or maybe heard the guy down the hall has one, I am in the US on a H1-B. You cannot change jobs/employers without getting a brand new visa. This is hard to do as few employers are willing to wait three months while waiting to see if your visa is granted. When you so the clock is reset and you start all over again.
In fact the restrictions can be so tight that if your job description changes significantly (through promotion) etc., it no longer falls into under the rubric of the professional qualifications you used to get the visa in the first place (think of a programmer going into sales or management) and your renewal can be affected. (The visa is initially issued for three years with a three year renewal) which requires more INS red tape)
What this means is you're pretty much stuck where you are unless you're very fortunate - finding not one but two employers willing to jump through the INS hoops isn't easy.
It's not a Harrison novel. I remember reading this too. It's definately by A.C. Clarke and one of the characters was missing his legs. And nobody was thrilled to see him arrive on the station either. Can't remember the #$%$#@% name either though...
Why do so many assume that a secretary has to be female?
Protest for protest's sake is useless. Protest is only useful when it's advancing a specific goal, not just directionless activity. If you're goal is to draw attention to a topic, then you you need to spell out that topic and make your protest relevant to it.
Why then, here in Manhatten, is Sixth Avenue called "The Avenue of the Americas" and has flags of all the American countries, North and South? (And yes, they are all explicity referred to as "American" countries in the city blurb). It's not called "The Avenue of the North and South Americas" y'know. If you won't let the Columbians identify as just "Americans", you can't either, because by that logic of exclusion, you would be "North American" and nobody could call themselves just American!
The project is still being in the engineering phase, but there have already have been a few stories (check out New Scientist's article in 29 May 1999 issue (you may have to sign up for a free trial registration to their archive)). I know about the project because I know one of the planners. Here's two para's from the article:
Ireland's public broadcaster RTE is developing the technology, called the Wireless Interactive Network for Digital Services (WINDS), with cash from the European Union. Signals broadcast from the main transmitter follow the Digital Video Broadcasting standard used throughout Europe for terrestrial digital TV. The innovation is to make the set-top box that decodes incoming signals also work as a low-power transmitter, sending data signals to the normal roof-top or set-top aerial, which transmits them back to the broadcaster's mast.
The Irish government has allocated 1-megahertz slices of the UHF spectrum to carry the return-path signals, and each slice is split into 1000 channels that are 1 kilohertz wide. The receiver hops between channels until it finds one in its area that is clear.
I may not be resident in Ireland any more, but I do try to keep up :)
Number one is getting out and convincing others. Number two is letting Congress know that, yes, this is something you want tax dollars spent on. And remember - snail mail letters make a much bigger impact than emails. Don't know who or where to write to? Check here for the House of Representatives and here for the Senate
Finally, don't forget this is just a first draft - there's still a lot of donkey work required to map out tricky regions and to verify already covered regions.
Actually it was cancelled because of the Test Ban Treaty on atmospheric nuclear tests.
Ah, but the beauty of it is that once you get to the asteroid belt, it can be very cheap to get back. You pick your asteroid and build a mass ejector on it. This drills chunks out of the asteroid and shoots them behind the asteroid using a bucket linear accelerator. The asteroid is pushed forward in reaction. It's like a combination garbage compactor and slow rocket. You'd lose about 80% of the asteroid's mass moving it back to Earth, but if you started with an 80 million tonne nickel-iron asteroid you'd still have more than enough material left to make the trip well worth while. As for the energy requirements - if the nickel-iron asteroid was well placed, the total energy cost would be less than mining and refining an equivalent amount of iron ore from the Earth's crust. This is important especially when you realise that 20-25% of our CO2 emissions are due to iron refining. Plus you'd get enough nickel to last several centuries.
You're right - real risk analyses have to be broadly based. I was just trying to illustrate some of the statistical issues involved to those who felt that just because their plane didn't crash when the RF regs were broken, the regs must be bogus.
Most safety regulations are built around a cold look at long term odds. For example, (pulling figures out of nowhere) imagine cars with no air bags - 100 people die in auto accidents a year. Then air bags are put in. Now only 40 people die, but 10 of which were somehow the result of being hit with an airbag. It's still better for everyone to use airbags, even though they killed 10 people.
In the long run, it's better for you to reduce the amount of RF crap you're putting out, period.
As was suspected by most scientists, the face is just a photographic artifact, due to lighting conditions, low resolution and extensive image processing of the original Viking picture, similar in nature to the famous, but non-existant "Martian Canals".
It's a pity De Palma didn't seem to bother to read this before creating lost oppurtunity that was "Mission to Mars"...
The best book on the history of computing I've ever read is "Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers" by Stan Augerton. It's out of print now (but you can search for it through Amazon) and stops in the mid-eighties but it deals well with the contentious issues of who-did-what-first in the 1940's between the Germans, the English and the Americans. It's very well illustrated and has a lot of interviews with a lot of key people.
>(1) Business attracts people interested in money. Government attracts people interested in power. I find the the second kind more repugnant and much more dangerous.
Money as an end to power is a well documented phenomenom. Read the biographies of many very wealthy people and you will see that for them, money is more than just something you buy stuff with, but a way of keeping score. Government does also attract people interested in public service.
>(2) A government can do much nastier things to you than a corporation can. The absolute worse thing that a corporation can do is sue you into bankrupcy. A government, OTOH, can put you in jail, confiscate your property and do other most unpleasant things.
People living downwind of the United Carbide Plant in Bhopal might disagree. Or those on board that ValueJet crash. Or the strikers who were killed during anti-union riots in the US. Or the poor bastard living in the Nigerean deltas being screwed over by big oil. Or the people screwed by big tobacco who lied when they knew smoking was a)addictive and b) killed. Or - well you get the point.
>(3) If I dislike a corporation, I can more or less ignore it: not use its services and products, turn away from it's advertising, etc. Now a government is much, much harder to ignore.
In a lot of countries, whose economies are weaker than large corporations that's not true. Even in the First World, it's very difficult for me to ignore, say, car manafacturers, even though I don't own a car.
I know there is a fondness for the underdog, bringing down the close-minded orthodoxy and opening up a brave new dawn, etc, etc, but I would remind everybody that the reason the scientific community is sceptical of far out claims is because most of the time they're right to be. We remember the triumphs of paradigm busting: Gallileo, Mandlebrot, Einstein. For very good reasons we forget the failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Just because part of the military-industrial complex is funding it is no seal of authority either; remember all the reports of the Cold War intelligence services - on both sides - funding psychic distance viewing?
All greenglow has are some unpeer-reviewed reports and some highly criticised publications. Measuring weight reduction of a superconducting spinning disk, especially with the magnitudes of loss suggested, is not a difficult experiment. The fact that theses results have not been duplicated, despite the fact that superconductors are common materials these days in most university physics departments should raise the flag of sceptisism for everybody: Extreme claims require extreme evidence
"Slated for release in 2001" - because we all know how good Microsoft are at meeting their release dates. This looks like Microsoft's usual trick of making product annoucements when they don't even have a working product, just to get people to hold off on buying someone elses technology. They did it with Windows itself (remember when Windows was just a stop gap to maintain Microsoft's ability to leverage DOS?), Pen Windows (remember that?) and the Microsoft Network. Unfortunately I think the Market Droids have made an error here - it's not like console technology is some new, unproven, region of the electronic frontier, nor is it like Nintendo or Sony don't have huge brand recognition either. (unlike those poor chumps at GO computing who got squished by Pen Windows)
Ah, my male friends, you must try Boxer Briefs: As aesthically pleasing as boxers, while providing the support of briefs! (Hanes make them). See? There is a third way...
I can't find a link, but a team from Louvain in Belgium developed software that would take a video feed, work out depth cues (moving around helped), create a mesh and overlay the texture from the video feed. (not in real time though) If you wanted a complete object you had to walk around it of course, but it worked well for pan shots too. You ended up with something like the 3D views of the Mars Pathfinder project. They had another system for stills - you would take one regular photo of e.g. someone's face and then another while shining a grid pattern onto their face using an overhead projector. Not as well defined as using a laser to measure distances or anything, but pretty good for knockabout use.
So, even if its not technically illegal to claim a piece of the Moon or Mars as your real estate in the US, the claim has no force outside the jurisdiction of the US, and the US is forbidden from extending it's sovereign territory into space. So it's pretty worthless having a claim on the Sea of Tranquility if your claim isn't actually valid there...