Well it is convenient to look for this double peak signature:
"Atmospheric nuclear explosions produce a unique signature: a short and intense flash lasting around 1 millisecond, followed by a second much more prolonged and less intense emission of light taking a fraction of a second to several seconds to build up."
But why would you want to drag any scientist into this UFO mess to declare that any easily detected energy burst must have attracted aliens.
I would rather say that all this new technology which was used in WW2 together with the paranoia over an axis landing on US soil and the emerging threat posed by the sovjet union just caused some people to go over board. My guess is that the second world war + cold war put enough people in pilots seats to confront them with a rather unfamiliar view of earth and high stresses too. I would assume that their reports of unidentified objects (Project Blue Book) lent more credibility to some sensationalist stories by some nutcases and with that you had this UFO hysteria going.
What? You are trying to tell me that so many people can not go wrong? Just look at the internet bubble and how so many down to earth people misjudged the capabilities of some web startups.
I think Occams razor cuts my way, human fallibility is always something you can count on.
Somehow I think one should try to do a statistic on those sightings and see whether they would fit the sort of development any mass hysteria would take. (Not some correlation with silly nuke tests or Hitler speeches) This wouldn't rule out real UFOs obviously but prove my point for a change.
Wow you have some balls. First you provide us with some potentially good piece of statistics which the xls file by the Defense Manpower Data Center would be and then you just pile up the bullshit with that idiotic graph from the blog post. Anyway I thank you for that first piece of information which by the way shows that Bill Clinton lost 4 soldiers to hostile action during his term in office while George W. Bush lost 2600 so far for the same reason.
The statistic is odd in that it doesn't seem to count deaths due to terrorist action during Mr. Bushes term in office. Even if you count them as hostile action Mr. Clinton is still short by two orders of magnitude.
I also find the constantly high number of deaths through accident striking.
I bought a Samsung 32GB SSD for my Portege 3505. Oddly enough it is not able to find the SSD during booting. Also I had to grind off some part of the SSD case because it didn't fit into the laptop drive bay. This turned out to be a big nuissance since the SSD is somewhat pricey. This is a BIOS issue since Linux recognizes the disk flawlessly. I wondered about getting one of those Flash floppy drives from HP which allow booting from a fake floppy. I think I'll make a USB drive out of the SSD now.
Ultimately I settled for a 2.5'' IDE to CF adapter + 8GB flash running Ubuntu 7.10. This works well enough but it seems that the laptop gets short hangs occasionally. Those hangs were reduced by building my own kernel with preemption set for low latency desktop, and 1000 ticks per second. I don't know what those changes exactly do to my problem but they seemed worth a try.
The laptop is ultra quiet now until the fan starts, I guess my next project is undervolting it. So far I had no success with the phc patch however.
If nuclear engineering is like any other engineering then it probably is not good. To move straight to the latest technology means that you might still have to learn about the incremental steps you missed out on.
I view working on something new as a learning exercise. Having reduced investment into engineers keeping up with the latest and greatest will just defer the investment into the future.
It will also prevent passing on knowledge between generations of engineers which will increase costs again because knowledge has to be gained anew.
All that just because of a bunch of hysterical tree huggers, what a pain.
I find it odd that AC finally concludes that Mr Smith suffers from technophobia rather than fear of even mightier capitalists. Given that he writes for the Guardian it would be an obvious choice.
Once a company has a foothold on the moon it would have the potential to grow much faster and further than anyone could on earth.
What might limit its growth initially is the fact that the customers would still be on earth. However, once there is a sufficiently large population of customers in space, earths importance would wane I guess.
There you would have social issues which could easily dwarf any perceived social problems we have nowadays with globalization.
Any entrepeneur would have potential access to weapons of mass destruction (i.e. throwing rocks) and they would be politically safer too (no fallout).
Ultimately things probably wouldn't get that far since companies still need a societies cooperation to work at all, what will certainly happen is that the amount of energy one person can control, will increase and the ability to do so will be less evenly distributed than nowadays.
All that will let the earth become a world among many and its resources will be limited compared what is possible in space.
After all I think the future is bright. I imagine that the world could become united in the process, much as bickering old Europe has become in the twentieth century.
Let me finally remind you of president Reagan wishing for an alien invasion http://youtube.com/watch?v=KhUmCthFK0k Our best bet to get there is to be those aliens.
it probably is dorky to reply to a cosmic fart joke but why not.
You would be rather looking for H2S for the stink. I wonder if only Io has Sulfur in abundance or whether any of the saturnian moons is similarly afflicted. Oh, I just found that Titan also has some sulfur in its atmosphere. I'm sure the stink would crinkle your nose on Titan, right before it freezes off.
Maybe visiting some geyser in Iceland during winter could give you a similar experience.
Not that it would be entirely on topic but you just remembered me of this guy who took high resolution pictures of the ISS, the Space shuttle, some spy satellite, and Mercury. He took multiple frames of the object of interest and selected the best for combining well here it is what he exactly did:
"Images of Mercury were obtained at 8 bits of resolution using exposure times of 16.7 ms at a rate of 60 frames per second and recorded on broadcast-quality videotape for subsequent data reduction. The images were sorted and selected based on maximum gradient of the planet's bright limb, co-aligned, and added in 16 bit space."
This method is used to reduce seeing which is random and capable of reducing that Mt. Wilson telescope aperture from 1.5m to some seeing limited aperture of maybe 10 to 20cm (my guess).
The pixelation problem is not that similar to seeing. I would think since each new larger pixel is the average of the same region in the original image it is somehow low pass filtered spatially. Recovering a part of the image would somehow make it necessary that the image information is stored in the time domain since you can't get it from that 2d single frame space. That high level view makes it again look like the seeing problem but with the seeing one gets some images which cover a large spatial bandwidth but have low dynamic range, while with the pixelation the spatial bandwidth is constantly low but the dynamic range in the image is constantly high.
Searching google gives me something about de-identification and how the simple methods here discussed are easily thwarted by face recognition software. I.e. the bad guy crosses the US border is photographed, later produces de-identified compromising images of himself. Then the blurred/pixelated image is fed into the face recognition program and compared to the border database - success should easily follow, because the facial features are still recognizable to the software.
I'm really pathetic, I found some catchy headlines in the contents part i.e. "21 - Preparation of Picric Acid From Aspirin". Yet I can't just go and look for fear that somebody might misunderstand this. Damn, it reads like a headline from the "Nosy Inquirer".
I got the FM21-76 at Barnes and Noble right from the shelf but I've never seen this one there. Would make a fine addition though;).
Well not now but during the game. It puts you into the role of a serial killer who is encouraged to photograph his victims on occasion. This interpretation goes slightly beyond the game authors intentions I suppose, but probably is not too far off. Replayability has gone out the window for me. I'll stick to Lost Coast it is short and fits into this much more positive Half Life 2 setting.
Oops now that I've read the article I notice that he also wrote about Bioshock - no surprise really.
The fact that you are more physically engaged in a game, you are at least pushing the keys and moving the mouse, and that the game responds to your actions certainly makes it more immersive than some horror flick. It is not even possible that you can loose track as might happen when watching a movie. You are always in sync with what is happening, thereby allowing optimal use of your input bandwidth. Bioshock really reaches a good trade off between forcing you into a role and letting you control the flow of the action. This is a fairly new quality compared to some horror movies where you can be scared if you like but you don't take part so to speak.
One might argue that one should be able separate between the imaginary world of a game and real life, but when all effort is made to draw you into it you can still be disgusted about it I suppose. Or view it from a different perspective, if a game can reach as far as to make you feel uncomfortable about a role you are playing it certainly is the better game than one which doesn't allow you to make that connection to the real world but still racks up the body count.
I actually had to look up 'ls -h'. It supposedly prints out file sizes in a human readable format (man ls says "1K 234M 2G"). I thought that mere humans aren't granted access to UNIX machines.
I wonder what the crack did to ls. It probably printed smilies instead of 'K', 'M' or 'G', i.e. big smilies for G and a scowl for no extra letter because of the low efficiency or what not.
Another option could have been ls output in rosy warm colors - eek...
"The US Constitution gives inventors "... the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." If they do win at trial, destruction of every infringing device is within their rights."
It seems to me that you have to be in the chain which leads to a criminal offense. I think that if somebody does something criminal with a tool you provided in some way and you are involved in the preparation of this offense then you are guilty.
I guess somebody still has to prove that you knew about a particular criminal offense to get you into trouble.
I'm not a lawyer though, so we will see what the future holds.
This would be a drastic measure, but it might make a point. Somehow I would guess though that the judge would rule that people have to pay a fine instead of going to prison.
The link to the law StGB shows only the old version without the new paragraph 202. Besides,in it you can find the following line:
Ausfertigungsdatum: 15.05.1871
Which must mean something like issue date 15.05.1871, now that is incremental change!
(1) Wer eine Straftat nach 202a oder 202b vorbereitet, indem er
1. Passworte oder sonstige Sicherungscodes, die den Zugang zu Daten ( 202a Abs. 2) ermöglichen, oder
2. Computerprogramme, deren Zweck die Begehung einer solchen Tat ist,
herstellt, sich oder einem anderen verschafft, verkauft, einem anderen überlässt, ver- breitet oder sonst zugänglich macht, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu einem Jahr oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.
In English that means that if you prepare a criminal offense according 202a/b through
1.) providing passwords 2.) providing software to achieve the above mentioned criminal offence
you will go to prison for a year or pay a fine.
The article mentioned above explains that security companies should still be able to write tools to test their systems since the criminal offense wasn't planned even though it was on peoples minds that the tool might be used for that.
Damn this sounds bad, I agree with the CCC now that this is a gray area. This would require some mind reading capabilities I guess.
The other two paragraphs address gathering and collection of data which is not meant for you or protected from you in some way.
See my reply to the guy who wanted to remove one of my testicles. I must admit he has a point, not about my testicles but about the propper spelling of Mac.
I'm ashamed, I've neglected my Mac lately and dealt with too much network stuff.
"Warning! - Many subjects outlined within this site are extremely dangerous and are provided here for information only. Please don`t experiment with high voltages or chemicals unless you are fully conversant with safe laboratory practices. No liability will be accepted for death, injury or damage arising from experimentation using any information or materials supplied."
Sounds like fun, but please be kind to animals and dead bodies of criminals, and don't kill yourself or others.
For some reason I mostly meet serious engineers and family people but it once happened that I went to a conference in California with some of my colleagues. There we were sitting in a hotel lounge fuzzing around with our laptops trying to get WLAN to work. Some girl sat nearby and said out of the blue that she didn't have any problems with her MAC to get trough their 'firewall' and that only pc people like us usually have problems with it.
I was taken aback, speechless, well I probably mumbled something. I have a MAC myself and was maybe a MAC fanboy as long as they used PowerPCs as CPUs, yet I didn't say anything.
There she was: 1. female 2. geeky 3. audacious 4. MAC fangirl (maybe convertible to a PowerPC fangirl?)
She might have been the last crazy woman out there for me and I didn't say anything.
Slashdot Mirror
EE Guy #3: Oh, they are still whining. Lets just give them VHDL, works for our parallel stuff.
I can't see anything devious in your plans.
Well it is convenient to look for this double peak signature:
"Atmospheric nuclear explosions produce a unique signature: a short and intense flash lasting around 1 millisecond, followed by a second much more prolonged and less intense emission of light taking a fraction of a second to several seconds to build up."
From here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Nuclear_Detonation_Detection_System
But why would you want to drag any scientist into this UFO mess to declare that any easily detected energy burst must have attracted aliens.
I would rather say that all this new technology which was used in WW2 together with the paranoia over an axis landing on US soil and the emerging threat posed by the sovjet union just caused some people to go over board. My guess is that the second world war + cold war put enough people in pilots seats to confront them with a rather unfamiliar view of earth and high stresses too. I would assume that their reports of unidentified objects (Project Blue Book) lent more credibility to some sensationalist stories by some nutcases and with that you had this UFO hysteria going.
What? You are trying to tell me that so many people can not go wrong? Just look at the internet bubble and how so many down to earth people misjudged the capabilities of some web startups.
I think Occams razor cuts my way, human fallibility is always something you can count on.
Somehow I think one should try to do a statistic on those sightings and see whether they would fit the sort of development any mass hysteria would take. (Not some correlation with silly nuke tests or Hitler speeches) This wouldn't rule out real UFOs obviously
but prove my point for a change.
Wow you have some balls. First you provide us with some potentially good piece of statistics which the xls file by the Defense Manpower Data Center would be and then you just pile up the bullshit with that idiotic graph from the blog post. Anyway I thank you for that first piece of information which by the way shows that Bill Clinton lost 4 soldiers to hostile action during his term in office while George W. Bush lost 2600 so far for the same reason.
The statistic is odd in that it doesn't seem to count deaths due to terrorist action during Mr. Bushes term in office. Even if you count them as hostile action Mr. Clinton is still short by two orders of magnitude.
I also find the constantly high number of deaths through accident striking.
This whole thing seems to have been discussed before by the way. Thanks for spreading the idiocy to slashdot.
http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/004581.html
You could have convinced me that there might be a good reason to be in Iraq, but this is just disgusting.
The abreviated version. ...
...
...
Lieutenant Colonel Jack D. Ripper: I would love to come Lionel but the string in my leg has gone
Air Chief Marshal Lionel Mandrake: Come here Ripper, the Redcoats are comming!
There, fixed that little issue.
I never thought that cosmologists are that far out there.
I hope the author is not suggesting that if he gets funding he will do nothing about it.
I bought a Samsung 32GB SSD for my Portege 3505. Oddly enough it is not able to find the SSD during booting. Also I had to grind off some part of the SSD case because it didn't fit into the laptop drive bay.
This turned out to be a big nuissance since the SSD is somewhat pricey. This is a BIOS issue since Linux recognizes the disk flawlessly. I wondered about getting one of those Flash floppy drives from HP which allow booting from a fake floppy. I think I'll make a USB drive out of the SSD now.
Ultimately I settled for a 2.5'' IDE to CF adapter + 8GB flash running Ubuntu 7.10. This works well enough but it seems that the laptop gets short hangs occasionally. Those hangs were reduced by building my own kernel with preemption set for low latency desktop, and 1000 ticks per second. I don't know what those changes exactly do to my problem but they seemed worth a try.
The laptop is ultra quiet now until the fan starts, I guess my next project is undervolting it. So far I had no success with the phc patch however.
If nuclear engineering is like any other engineering then it probably is not good. To move straight to the latest technology means that you might still have to learn about the incremental steps you missed out on.
I view working on something new as a learning exercise. Having reduced investment into engineers keeping up with the latest and greatest will just defer the investment into the future.
It will also prevent passing on knowledge between generations of engineers which will increase costs again because knowledge has to be gained anew.
All that just because of a bunch of hysterical tree huggers, what a pain.
I find it odd that AC finally concludes that Mr Smith suffers from technophobia rather than fear of even mightier capitalists. Given that he writes for the Guardian it would be an obvious choice.
Once a company has a foothold on the moon it would have the potential to grow much faster and further than anyone could on earth.
What might limit its growth initially is the fact that the customers would still be on earth. However, once there is a sufficiently large population of customers in space, earths importance would wane I guess.
There you would have social issues which could easily dwarf any perceived social problems we have nowadays with globalization.
Any entrepeneur would have potential access to weapons of mass destruction (i.e. throwing rocks) and they would be politically safer too (no fallout).
Ultimately things probably wouldn't get that far since companies still need a societies cooperation to work at all, what will certainly happen is that the amount of energy one person can control, will increase and the ability to do so will be less evenly distributed than nowadays.
All that will let the earth become a world among many and its resources will be limited compared what is possible in space.
After all I think the future is bright. I imagine that the world could become united in the process, much as bickering old Europe has become in the twentieth century.
Let me finally remind you of president Reagan wishing for an alien invasion
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KhUmCthFK0k
Our best bet to get there is to be those aliens.
it probably is dorky to reply to a cosmic fart joke but why not.
You would be rather looking for H2S for the stink. I wonder if only Io has Sulfur in abundance or whether any of the saturnian moons is similarly afflicted. Oh, I just found that Titan also has some sulfur in its atmosphere. I'm sure the stink would crinkle your nose on Titan, right before it freezes off.
Maybe visiting some geyser in Iceland during winter could give you a similar experience.
Ha! Found it!
;).
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/393340.html
There is a paper I can go to bed with
Not that it would be entirely on topic but you just remembered me of this guy who took high resolution pictures of the ISS, the Space shuttle, some spy satellite, and Mercury. He took multiple frames of the object of interest and selected the best for combining well here it is what he exactly did:
;)
"Images of Mercury were obtained at 8 bits of resolution using exposure times of 16.7 ms at a rate of 60 frames per second and recorded on broadcast-quality videotape for subsequent data reduction. The images were sorted and selected based on maximum gradient of the planet's bright limb, co-aligned, and added in 16 bit space."
Here is a link:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJ/journal/issues/v119n5/990240/990240.html
let me store it here so I don't forget it
This method is used to reduce seeing which is random and capable of reducing that Mt. Wilson telescope aperture from 1.5m to some seeing limited aperture of maybe 10 to 20cm (my guess).
The pixelation problem is not that similar to seeing. I would think since each new larger pixel is the average of the same region in the original image it is somehow low pass filtered spatially. Recovering a part of the image would somehow make it necessary that the image information is stored in the time domain since you can't get it from that 2d single frame space. That high level view makes it again look like the seeing problem but with the seeing one gets some images which cover a large spatial bandwidth but have low dynamic range, while with the pixelation the spatial bandwidth is constantly low but the dynamic range in the image is constantly high.
Searching google gives me something about de-identification and how the simple methods here discussed are easily thwarted by face recognition software. I.e. the bad guy crosses the US border is photographed, later produces de-identified compromising images of himself. Then the blurred/pixelated image is fed into the face recognition program and compared to the border database - success should easily follow, because the facial features are still recognizable to the software.
Here is an example: http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2003/CMU-CS-03-119.pdf
I just can't find what you were talking about, and I'll come across who knows what if I try to find it myself:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf
I'm really pathetic, I found some catchy headlines in the contents part i.e. "21 - Preparation of Picric Acid From Aspirin". Yet I can't just go and look for fear that somebody might misunderstand this. Damn, it reads like a headline from the "Nosy Inquirer". I got the FM21-76 at Barnes and Noble right from the shelf but I've never seen this one there. Would make a fine addition though ;).
Don't try this at home kids:
...
http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/ymboa/ymboa.html
I badly would like to have this, too sad that I'll have to wait until March. Wait! Which year would that be?
Why can't I have this? I would even pay! This can't possibly be considered dangerous, it was printed in 1854 and mankind didn't kill itself off yet.
Oh well - can't have everything I guess
Well not now but during the game. It puts you into the role of a serial killer who is encouraged to photograph his victims on occasion. This interpretation goes slightly beyond the game authors intentions I suppose, but probably is not too far off. Replayability has gone out the window for me. I'll stick to Lost Coast it is short and fits into this much more positive Half Life 2 setting.
Oops now that I've read the article I notice that he also wrote about Bioshock - no surprise really.
The fact that you are more physically engaged in a game, you are at least pushing the keys and moving the mouse, and that the game responds to your actions certainly makes it more immersive than some horror flick. It is not even possible that you can loose track as might happen when watching a movie. You are always in sync with what is happening, thereby allowing optimal use of your input bandwidth. Bioshock really reaches a good trade off between forcing you into a role and letting you control the flow of the action. This is a fairly new quality compared to some horror movies where you can be scared if you like but you don't take part so to speak.
One might argue that one should be able separate between the imaginary world of a game and real life, but when all effort is made to draw you into it you can still be disgusted about it I suppose. Or view it from a different perspective, if a game can reach as far as to make you feel uncomfortable about a role you are playing it certainly is the better game than one which doesn't allow you to make that connection to the real world but still racks up the body count.
I actually had to look up 'ls -h'. It supposedly prints out file sizes in a human readable format (man ls says "1K 234M 2G"). I thought that mere humans aren't granted access to UNIX machines.
...
I wonder what the crack did to ls. It probably printed smilies instead of 'K', 'M' or 'G', i.e. big smilies for G and a scowl for no extra letter because of the low efficiency or what not.
Another option could have been ls output in rosy warm colors - eek
"The US Constitution gives inventors "... the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." If they do win at trial, destruction of every infringing device is within their rights."
Here is a new line for you guys.
Ok, but will it be on YouTube?
Indeed,
l eisure/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we. shtml
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/travel-
It is no laughing matter though.
"Mein Fuehrer, I can walk!"
There goes the wheelchair.
It seems to me that you have to be in the chain which leads to a criminal offense. I think that if somebody does something criminal with a tool you provided in some way and you are involved in the preparation of this offense then you are guilty.
I guess somebody still has to prove that you knew about a particular criminal offense to get you into trouble.
I'm not a lawyer though, so we will see what the future holds.
This would be a drastic measure, but it might make a point. Somehow I would guess though that the judge would rule that people have to pay a fine instead of going to prison.
e rkriminalit%E4t.pdf
;)
The link to the law StGB shows only the old version without the new paragraph 202.
Besides,in it you can find the following line:
Ausfertigungsdatum: 15.05.1871
Which must mean something like issue date 15.05.1871, now that is incremental change!
I just found the paragraph here: http://www.kes.info/archiv/online/06-6-006.htm
Seems like it took until May the 25th (since 2006) to get it signed.
Paragraph 202c says:
(1) Wer eine Straftat nach 202a oder 202b vorbereitet, indem er
1. Passworte oder sonstige Sicherungscodes, die den Zugang zu Daten ( 202a
Abs. 2) ermöglichen, oder
2. Computerprogramme, deren Zweck die Begehung einer solchen Tat ist,
herstellt, sich oder einem anderen verschafft, verkauft, einem anderen überlässt, ver-
breitet oder sonst zugänglich macht, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu einem Jahr oder mit
Geldstrafe bestraft.
In English that means that if you prepare a criminal offense according 202a/b through
1.) providing passwords
2.) providing software to achieve the above mentioned criminal offence
you will go to prison for a year or pay a fine.
The article mentioned above explains that security companies should still be able to write
tools to test their systems since the criminal offense wasn't planned even though it was on peoples minds that the tool might be used for that.
Damn this sounds bad, I agree with the CCC now that this is a gray area. This would require some mind reading capabilities I guess.
The other two paragraphs address gathering and collection of data which is not meant for you or protected from you in some way.
The pdf file for the change proposal can be found here:
http://www.bmj.bund.de/files/-/1317/RegE%20Comput
BTW, I'm not a lawyer. This might also explain my bad english, how could one possibly translate between German and English legalese anyway
Tom Paine is that you? Stop hiding behind the AC ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
See my reply to the guy who wanted to remove one of my testicles. I must admit he has a point, not about my testicles but about the propper spelling of Mac. I'm ashamed, I've neglected my Mac lately and dealt with too much network stuff.
Well, given that it comes from Macintosh and is never written all uppercase you have a point.
I'm probably not such a fanboy after all. Maybe I never deserved her anyway.
to this: http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/ymboa/ymboa.html my childhood was bland even though it was not so much spoiled by clueless journalists and other sissies.
It says on the page:
"Warning! - Many subjects outlined within this site are extremely dangerous and are provided here for information only. Please don`t experiment with high voltages or chemicals unless you are fully conversant with safe laboratory practices. No liability will be accepted for death, injury or damage arising from experimentation using any information or materials supplied."
Sounds like fun, but please be kind to animals and dead bodies of criminals, and don't kill yourself or others.
For some reason I mostly meet serious engineers and family people but it once happened that
I went to a conference in California with some of my colleagues. There we were sitting in a hotel lounge fuzzing around with our laptops trying to get WLAN to work. Some girl sat nearby and said out of the blue that she didn't have any problems with her MAC to get trough their 'firewall' and that only pc people like us usually have problems with it.
I was taken aback, speechless, well I probably mumbled something. I have a MAC myself and was maybe a MAC fanboy as long as they used PowerPCs as CPUs, yet I didn't say anything.
There she was:
1. female
2. geeky
3. audacious
4. MAC fangirl (maybe convertible to a PowerPC fangirl?)
She might have been the last crazy woman out there for me and I didn't say anything.
Damn!