The sad thing is that those have been on water heaters from Asia for many years, including one I had six years ago. Innovation is cool and all, but taking a plug from a water heater and putting it on a computer isn't beyond what someone "skilled in the field" would come up with. An Apple hardware engineer probably just visited Japan and came up with:
(1) MAGNETIC CONNECTOR FOR WATER HEATER (2) s/WATER HEATER/ELECTRONIC DEVICE/ (3) profit!
Someday I hope to see a patent system based on the expected time it would take an engineer to develop something (with the current time as an upper bound). That way some revolutionary Fusion powerplant that takes 30 years to develop can get a long 20-year patent, wheras putting 1+1 together for a magnetic plug for electronics can get a year or two (generous), and the one-click Amazon patent can get the 2-3 months it deserves. Instead, we have a system where if you meet a fairly low bar you get the same 20 years and true breakthroughs in the field.
Obama would get a big +1 from me if he pressures them to figure out how to make a 737 suffice instead of a 747, or even bigger 380. He could say something like "I will make due with my closest 20 advisors, rather than 50". The best part is, it'd mostly be the next president that would have to deal with it, so it's a win-win for him. If change and efficiency are real, let's start showing it.
You live too close to Hill AFB. The average layman dosen't know what POTUS means. You could have just said, "the president" which is only 4 syllables of smooth flow.
Sure, but then you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific, since after all, other nations have presidents too. Then someone from the US would point out this is primarily a US discussion site, so people should just assume the US when not specified. Then someone from another country would say that slashdot isn't under ".us", and is thus global, and is globally accessible at any rate, so it is wrong to assume an original TLD is US-centric, and ICANN is evil. Then someone from the US will point out that the internet was invented by the US. Then someone else will point out that most of the internet is now outside the US, so it shouldn't matter, it's not like people respect the steam engine being from the UK originally.
So, in comparison, POTUS generated a pretty minimal debate.
You've just shifted the problem to the anti-phishing module API. If that API ever needs to change, then things are broken just the same as with the anti-fishing service API. In both cases this simply boils down to: If you create the perfect API that never needs to be changed, you are set. The problem is that nobody is perfect, and getting an imperfect thing working well enough is often better than delaying things a lot longer to create a "perfect" design.
No, but suggesting that people should be allowed to make money from such transplants... What next can I get a transplant in advance, just be safe, and then make money off it?:)
Ok then, how do *you* propose encouraging people to donate? If this treatment really works[1], then we're at the early part of an exponential curve, and anything you can use to speed up the first part is huge down the line. Waiting for people to donate out of the goodness of their own hearts would add years or decades to the process, since only a few would choose to do so. The only other method of speedup would be forcing donation, which is hardly ethical. While I don't *like* the idea of selling transplants, a viable alternative would be needed that didn't involve great additional harm to the world population.
Offtopic: I think slashdot eat my sacrasm tags around the first line:)
It didn't eat it, you have to escape it. If it were otherwise, how would <quote> tags work? If you write network facing software, now would be a good time to go back and check it.
[1] Always take Slashdot stories about medical breakthroughs with a grain of salt, and doubly so if it's from Roland.
I can just see it now: "A METHOD OF LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATION AND POSTING ON A DISCUSSION FORUM APPARATUS TO ACHIEVE UPWARD PEER MODERATION"
Remember that pure methods aren't patentable as per the latest court ruling, but if you can bring in a "machine" somehow "process" something, then you will be ok.
Re:No, you don't have to run as root first.
on
T-Mobile G1 Rooted
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Just about everyone in the robotics community calls them humanoid robots anyway. "Android" and "droid" are pretty much confined to sci-fi, and by the time we have real androids, I'm pretty sure this phone OS will be a thing of the past. Sure, Ishiguro's current work in this area is pretty interesting, but even those robots are only mistaken for humans from a distance, and they aren't mobile.
These are very different things, at least if you are a C programmer.
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think that you are wrong about the AI community looking down on games as "lowly applications."
Well, at conferences such as AAAI, even robotics isn't treated as more than a "mere application". At least that's the treatment I felt going there and presenting work. Its ok I guess, because AI theory doesn't directly relate to where most work in applied AI happens (just like in applying machine learning -- most of the work is in the features, not the algorithms). However, I feel there is a real gap between what conferences such as AAAI are willing to embrace, and what happens at game development conferences or robotics conferences. Being someone who did RoboCup for many years, I really do know what it is like to span that gap -- some of the most important breakthroughs we made were not publishable in either type of conference. I really feel that the field lacks something like the AI equivalent of JGT (Journal of Graphics Tools) or Graphics Gems. If I were a more professorial type I might try to start something like that, but instead I just wait and hope someone else will, and then I could contribute to it.
I think that many posters here are confusing Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning. The later is a subset of the former, but is often difficult to apply to games. Accepting adaptation is typically equivalent to abandoning Game Theory.
Other than the fact that applying machine learning successfully is difficult in general, I don't know if I really agree with that statement. Game theory is a subset of AI just like machine learning. Game theory is very important for abstract games such as chess, but I'd argue that most "physical simulation" games need things more like potential fields, advanced motion planning, high quality hand coded policies, and geometric stuff of that ilk. Old stuff like rule base AIs really has a place in games too -- the work done on scaling up expert systems is really like "software engineering for AI", and sadly a lot of that work didn't get published either.
A simple form of learning we used in our robotics work was weighted experts given a set of hand-coded policies (~= "a set of AI strategies" for the non AI people out there). We used that to learn during 30-minute autonomous robotics games against robotic opponents, and it worked, even during a relatively short game. All you need is a way to define successful subgoals (Ex: scoring in a team game, kills in an FPS, or areas won in an RTS) and you can get convergence to the optimal strategy in a logarithmic number of rounds. In a turn-based game, if those experts each applied game theory, you could have game theory and learning combined in a pretty reasonable way. Yes I know that would not be optimal, since you normally would just pick the strongest AI, but humans rarely play optimally, nor is even fun to always play against the same strong strategy.
Certainly there are entire fields of A.I. that are entirely unrelated, but there are many fields of A.I. whos core development is exclusively related to games.
True. I guess I just haven't really seen the dots connected. Then again, I haven't been to any AI conferences in the last year or two, so maybe that has changed already. I hope so.
Most games do not implement any heavy A.I. techniques because it is too difficult to provide skill gradients: Easy, Normal, Hard, Godlike. These skill gradients are pretty simple to implement as an escalation of "cheating," but not so simple as a tweak to AlphaBeta and pretty much futile with Machine Learning.
Well, here's another place where I think the communities need to work more closely. Coming up with search strategies that are more human-like when measured statistically would be fascinating work. Limiting search depth and random mistakes works in some games, but we could do a lot better. I think some of the commercial chess games already do a pretty good job of various skill
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Education can help; A lot of college CS programs don't force the breadth that an "AI game developer" would need. In my undergrad degree, graphics, AI, game programming, and distributed systems were "applications" classes, and you only needed one or two. Usually the game programmers would have to take graphics, because even if your the sound or networking guy, they'd expect you to know graphics like they did. If more game programmers had taken systems classes (such as operating systems), I don't think they would have had as rough a road with multicore either.
However, even given the current narrow classes, you can at least try to bleed through enough of the wider topics into game-oriented classes to get people footed. In the game programming course I was a teaching assistant for, I gave a couple lectures on AI (I was an AI/Robotics grad student). Then we gave them an AI-only assignment. It was a multiplayer tank game where we pitted their AIs against some test opponents, and then against one another in a tournament. It didn't allow much cheating in the AIs (only global visibility, where a player can see every unit at all times, which is nearly universal in game AIs). The assignment really seemed to be a hit, and hopefully for those students that went on to the games industry, it gave them the basis to branch out and learn other deeper AI techniques.
It would also help if the AI community wouldn't look down on things such as games as "lowly applications". In some sense I think game programmers would be best off talking to robotics people or even web machine learning people (spam filtering, web search ranking, etc). Those people are already doing applied AI, and particularly for robotics folks, working on many of the same problems that good game AIs would face.
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This to me is a huge downfall of modern games - instead of making AI opponents "smarter", devs simply tweak the rules to give the AI more of an advantage.
Indeed. Cheating AIs make me cringe. I'd really rather see a dumber AI that doesn't know where every unit on the level is, than play a more "skilled" one that's just using the fact that it's not playing the same game to gain its advantage.
That being said, it is incredibly hard to define an AI that doesn't have "unrealistic" skills when the players' skills are advancing in the same fashion. For example, your skill in Halo is to a large extent determined by how accurate you are, which is easily mimicked by AI. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone accused of using an "aimbot" because their skill (or luck) in an FPS seemed "too good" or "unrealistic". The same goes for RTS games - the top human players in the world are to a large degree measured by how many commands, or actions, they can perform in a minute - which is again easily transferred to an AI opponent.
It's hard to define, but not necessarily hard to measure. Record a bunch of humans playing, look at plots of where they aim based on location, distance, velocity, etc, and build a statistical model. Or, if you've got something more algorithm based, measure it the same way and make sure its distribution on plots looks fairly human. Of course, game companies will have to be willing to hire statistics/AI type people (or train their devs in those areas), and devote the money to gather player data and time to make it happen. So far few companies have gone that route, but I think more will in the future.
Several years ago I went to an AI conference (AAAI), and they had a quake bot that was coded by some rule-based AI experts (SOAR bot). I was into quake quite a bit at the time, and I'd have to say that was the most fun human-like AI I've played in a game where the player and AI had equal footing (same unit(s) and capabilities). I don't think the game companies have been willing to hire those kind of people yet, but as I said before, hopefully that will change, especially once customers realize that screenshots don't always mean good gameplay.
P.S. I did AI/Robotics for my degrees, and work on machine learning for a living. Haven't worked in the game industry, but I've worked with a bunch of people in school who have gone into that.
Caution, this guy's UID has the following prime factors:
2 2 2 419 That means he's a scammer that's in to computers... be careful around him. He could easily not be "Just Some Guy" but actually be "Zero Cool" in disguise.
The distinction seems to be feeding; swifts can feed while they continue flying, whereas these birds are waders and can't feed until they stop. It's like the furthest airplane flight record distinction of refueling or not.
Last I checked, although you can customize your yahoo page, you can't remove the F***ING HOROSCOPE! That actively pisses me off every time I set eyes on the page.
You're just saying that because you are an Aquarius -- so eccentric and passionately unwilling to fit in with everyone else.
My commute is 66 miles roundtrip, 67 if I need to get gas. So if my plug-in hybrid dies on the 202 some 12 miles from home, I:
...shouldn't try to go to work and back on a completely empty gas tank?
This is not an electric-only vehicle; It's electric + gas. So if you have a tank with gas in it, and a full charge from overnight, with a Volt you would use electricity for the first 40 miles, and gas for the last 26 (@ 50 MPG; that's 0.52 G of gas). So, your normal-car equivalent MPG when using a Volt for your commute would be 66/0.52 = 127MPG. Now you can see why many people are looking forward to this tech.
A 1% success rate is good enough to effectively "break" a captchca, but not good enough to really advance the state of machine vision by itself. In the end though, some good OCR work could come of these efforts, but not in comparison to the money and time everyone else loses from spam; We could have just funded the research. Sending spam, and unfortunately writing advanced spam tools, pays better than a university position.
The new cell produces enough electricity that if you covered a football field with them, it would be enough power to run an Olympic swimming pool full of hard drives. The additional electricity these cell provide compared to the previous record holder would allow you to copy several libraries-of-congress per second faster to your pool full of drives.
Had I discussed the Soyuz, you'd have a fucking point.
Ah, so you didn't say "while singing hosannas to Soyuz..." after all?
But I didn't, did I?
You did. So, I guess he has a point.
Learn to read you fucking moron.
Right after you learn to write. Sure, I know you meant to say "Proton", but it seems you are not willing to discuss anything without going totally apeshit.
Applying a little logic to the other poster's Proton example, I would expect he was referring to the difference between development and later production. Both NASA and the Soviet space programs had plenty of failures when they were developing new stuff from the ground up; Later rockets reused many things developer on earlier ones. They also had $30B-$40B budgets during the height of the space race. Let's see how SpaceX can go from here now that they've worked the bugs out of their base system.
No, I would not be willing to jump on a SpaceX rocket just yet, but I'm willing to wait and see if they can bring their idea of a ground-up redesign for cost efficiency up to the reliability they envision. I hope they succeed, because it would help the whole industry move forward.
And yes, inferring long term failure rates from a sample size of four is pretty stupid thing to do, especially when its the first four off the line. Clearly you have a brain smaller than a pea (using your comparison and a sample size of two).
I'm not sure the Orlando Sentinel will be very unbiased in its assessment of SpaceX, an upstart that threatens the established contractors, with many of their employees living and working in central Florida. That's like reading the LA Times for its opinion on copyright legislation, or the Detroit Free Press for their opinions on the success of import car companies.
The welfare you speak of is paying for launches at the going rate (which is well below development costs), and funding development of a manned rocket (dragon) that won a contract that NASA actively and openly solicited entries for. While not really "free", competition for best design for the lowest bid is hardly "welfare" either.
The existing aerospace contractors had become far too set in their ways and were hardly competing with one another on efficiency or cost. SpaceX seems like it could really change the game. Note that the old guard doesn't have to go away, it just has to adapt, and a new competitor will give them the urgency they seem to have lost.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing is that those have been on water heaters from Asia for many years, including one I had six years ago. Innovation is cool and all, but taking a plug from a water heater and putting it on a computer isn't beyond what someone "skilled in the field" would come up with. An Apple hardware engineer probably just visited Japan and came up with:
(1) MAGNETIC CONNECTOR FOR WATER HEATER
(2) s/WATER HEATER/ELECTRONIC DEVICE/
(3) profit!
Someday I hope to see a patent system based on the expected time it would take an engineer to develop something (with the current time as an upper bound). That way some revolutionary Fusion powerplant that takes 30 years to develop can get a long 20-year patent, wheras putting 1+1 together for a magnetic plug for electronics can get a year or two (generous), and the one-click Amazon patent can get the 2-3 months it deserves. Instead, we have a system where if you meet a fairly low bar you get the same 20 years and true breakthroughs in the field.
Obama would get a big +1 from me if he pressures them to figure out how to make a 737 suffice instead of a 747, or even bigger 380. He could say something like "I will make due with my closest 20 advisors, rather than 50". The best part is, it'd mostly be the next president that would have to deal with it, so it's a win-win for him. If change and efficiency are real, let's start showing it.
You live too close to Hill AFB. The average layman dosen't know what POTUS means. You could have just said, "the president" which is only 4 syllables of smooth flow.
Sure, but then you'd have someone from Europe talking about how ignorant Americans/USians are for just saying "the president" and not being specific, since after all, other nations have presidents too. Then someone from the US would point out this is primarily a US discussion site, so people should just assume the US when not specified. Then someone from another country would say that slashdot isn't under ".us", and is thus global, and is globally accessible at any rate, so it is wrong to assume an original TLD is US-centric, and ICANN is evil. Then someone from the US will point out that the internet was invented by the US. Then someone else will point out that most of the internet is now outside the US, so it shouldn't matter, it's not like people respect the steam engine being from the UK originally.
So, in comparison, POTUS generated a pretty minimal debate.
Anything that generates more traffic to spiders than users has no point in existing.
Ow, that hurts me right in my personal webpage. Google is my biggest fan :)
You've just shifted the problem to the anti-phishing module API. If that API ever needs to change, then things are broken just the same as with the anti-fishing service API. In both cases this simply boils down to: If you create the perfect API that never needs to be changed, you are set. The problem is that nobody is perfect, and getting an imperfect thing working well enough is often better than delaying things a lot longer to create a "perfect" design.
You must be new here.
No, but suggesting that people should be allowed to make money from such transplants... What next can I get a transplant in advance, just be safe, and then make money off it? :)
Ok then, how do *you* propose encouraging people to donate? If this treatment really works[1], then we're at the early part of an exponential curve, and anything you can use to speed up the first part is huge down the line. Waiting for people to donate out of the goodness of their own hearts would add years or decades to the process, since only a few would choose to do so. The only other method of speedup would be forcing donation, which is hardly ethical. While I don't *like* the idea of selling transplants, a viable alternative would be needed that didn't involve great additional harm to the world population.
Offtopic: I think slashdot eat my sacrasm tags around the first line :)
It didn't eat it, you have to escape it. If it were otherwise, how would <quote> tags work? If you write network facing software, now would be a good time to go back and check it.
[1] Always take Slashdot stories about medical breakthroughs with a grain of salt, and doubly so if it's from Roland.
I can just see it now:
"A METHOD OF LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATION AND POSTING ON A DISCUSSION FORUM APPARATUS TO ACHIEVE UPWARD PEER MODERATION"
Remember that pure methods aren't patentable as per the latest court ruling, but if you can bring in a "machine" somehow "process" something, then you will be ok.
Just about everyone in the robotics community calls them humanoid robots anyway. "Android" and "droid" are pretty much confined to sci-fi, and by the time we have real androids, I'm pretty sure this phone OS will be a thing of the past. Sure, Ishiguro's current work in this area is pretty interesting, but even those robots are only mistaken for humans from a distance, and they aren't mobile.
Null and void
These are very different things, at least if you are a C programmer.
I think that you are wrong about the AI community looking down on games as "lowly applications."
Well, at conferences such as AAAI, even robotics isn't treated as more than a "mere application". At least that's the treatment I felt going there and presenting work. Its ok I guess, because AI theory doesn't directly relate to where most work in applied AI happens (just like in applying machine learning -- most of the work is in the features, not the algorithms). However, I feel there is a real gap between what conferences such as AAAI are willing to embrace, and what happens at game development conferences or robotics conferences. Being someone who did RoboCup for many years, I really do know what it is like to span that gap -- some of the most important breakthroughs we made were not publishable in either type of conference. I really feel that the field lacks something like the AI equivalent of JGT (Journal of Graphics Tools) or Graphics Gems. If I were a more professorial type I might try to start something like that, but instead I just wait and hope someone else will, and then I could contribute to it.
I think that many posters here are confusing Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning. The later is a subset of the former, but is often difficult to apply to games. Accepting adaptation is typically equivalent to abandoning Game Theory.
Other than the fact that applying machine learning successfully is difficult in general, I don't know if I really agree with that statement. Game theory is a subset of AI just like machine learning. Game theory is very important for abstract games such as chess, but I'd argue that most "physical simulation" games need things more like potential fields, advanced motion planning, high quality hand coded policies, and geometric stuff of that ilk. Old stuff like rule base AIs really has a place in games too -- the work done on scaling up expert systems is really like "software engineering for AI", and sadly a lot of that work didn't get published either.
A simple form of learning we used in our robotics work was weighted experts given a set of hand-coded policies (~= "a set of AI strategies" for the non AI people out there). We used that to learn during 30-minute autonomous robotics games against robotic opponents, and it worked, even during a relatively short game. All you need is a way to define successful subgoals (Ex: scoring in a team game, kills in an FPS, or areas won in an RTS) and you can get convergence to the optimal strategy in a logarithmic number of rounds. In a turn-based game, if those experts each applied game theory, you could have game theory and learning combined in a pretty reasonable way. Yes I know that would not be optimal, since you normally would just pick the strongest AI, but humans rarely play optimally, nor is even fun to always play against the same strong strategy.
Certainly there are entire fields of A.I. that are entirely unrelated, but there are many fields of A.I. whos core development is exclusively related to games.
True. I guess I just haven't really seen the dots connected. Then again, I haven't been to any AI conferences in the last year or two, so maybe that has changed already. I hope so.
Most games do not implement any heavy A.I. techniques because it is too difficult to provide skill gradients: Easy, Normal, Hard, Godlike. These skill gradients are pretty simple to implement as an escalation of "cheating," but not so simple as a tweak to AlphaBeta and pretty much futile with Machine Learning.
Well, here's another place where I think the communities need to work more closely. Coming up with search strategies that are more human-like when measured statistically would be fascinating work. Limiting search depth and random mistakes works in some games, but we could do a lot better. I think some of the commercial chess games already do a pretty good job of various skill
Education can help; A lot of college CS programs don't force the breadth that an "AI game developer" would need. In my undergrad degree, graphics, AI, game programming, and distributed systems were "applications" classes, and you only needed one or two. Usually the game programmers would have to take graphics, because even if your the sound or networking guy, they'd expect you to know graphics like they did. If more game programmers had taken systems classes (such as operating systems), I don't think they would have had as rough a road with multicore either.
However, even given the current narrow classes, you can at least try to bleed through enough of the wider topics into game-oriented classes to get people footed. In the game programming course I was a teaching assistant for, I gave a couple lectures on AI (I was an AI/Robotics grad student). Then we gave them an AI-only assignment. It was a multiplayer tank game where we pitted their AIs against some test opponents, and then against one another in a tournament. It didn't allow much cheating in the AIs (only global visibility, where a player can see every unit at all times, which is nearly universal in game AIs). The assignment really seemed to be a hit, and hopefully for those students that went on to the games industry, it gave them the basis to branch out and learn other deeper AI techniques.
It would also help if the AI community wouldn't look down on things such as games as "lowly applications". In some sense I think game programmers would be best off talking to robotics people or even web machine learning people (spam filtering, web search ranking, etc). Those people are already doing applied AI, and particularly for robotics folks, working on many of the same problems that good game AIs would face.
This to me is a huge downfall of modern games - instead of making AI opponents "smarter", devs simply tweak the rules to give the AI more of an advantage.
Indeed. Cheating AIs make me cringe. I'd really rather see a dumber AI that doesn't know where every unit on the level is, than play a more "skilled" one that's just using the fact that it's not playing the same game to gain its advantage.
That being said, it is incredibly hard to define an AI that doesn't have "unrealistic" skills when the players' skills are advancing in the same fashion. For example, your skill in Halo is to a large extent determined by how accurate you are, which is easily mimicked by AI. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone accused of using an "aimbot" because their skill (or luck) in an FPS seemed "too good" or "unrealistic". The same goes for RTS games - the top human players in the world are to a large degree measured by how many commands, or actions, they can perform in a minute - which is again easily transferred to an AI opponent.
It's hard to define, but not necessarily hard to measure. Record a bunch of humans playing, look at plots of where they aim based on location, distance, velocity, etc, and build a statistical model. Or, if you've got something more algorithm based, measure it the same way and make sure its distribution on plots looks fairly human. Of course, game companies will have to be willing to hire statistics/AI type people (or train their devs in those areas), and devote the money to gather player data and time to make it happen. So far few companies have gone that route, but I think more will in the future.
Several years ago I went to an AI conference (AAAI), and they had a quake bot that was coded by some rule-based AI experts (SOAR bot). I was into quake quite a bit at the time, and I'd have to say that was the most fun human-like AI I've played in a game where the player and AI had equal footing (same unit(s) and capabilities). I don't think the game companies have been willing to hire those kind of people yet, but as I said before, hopefully that will change, especially once customers realize that screenshots don't always mean good gameplay.
P.S. I did AI/Robotics for my degrees, and work on machine learning for a living. Haven't worked in the game industry, but I've worked with a bunch of people in school who have gone into that.
Caution, this guy's UID has the following prime factors:
2 2 2 419
That means he's a scammer that's in to computers... be careful around him. He could easily not be "Just Some Guy" but actually be "Zero Cool" in disguise.
You can trust what I say, my UID is prime.
The distinction seems to be feeding; swifts can feed while they continue flying, whereas these birds are waders and can't feed until they stop. It's like the furthest airplane flight record distinction of refueling or not.
Get back to work Kyle, you broke the build again!!!
Last I checked, although you can customize your yahoo page, you can't remove the F***ING HOROSCOPE! That actively pisses me off every time I set eyes on the page.
You're just saying that because you are an Aquarius -- so eccentric and passionately unwilling to fit in with everyone else.
Did you miss the "million" in there?
My commute is 66 miles roundtrip, 67 if I need to get gas. So if my plug-in hybrid dies on the 202 some 12 miles from home, I:
...shouldn't try to go to work and back on a completely empty gas tank?
This is not an electric-only vehicle; It's electric + gas. So if you have a tank with gas in it, and a full charge from overnight, with a Volt you would use electricity for the first 40 miles, and gas for the last 26 (@ 50 MPG; that's 0.52 G of gas). So, your normal-car equivalent MPG when using a Volt for your commute would be 66/0.52 = 127MPG. Now you can see why many people are looking forward to this tech.
A 1% success rate is good enough to effectively "break" a captchca, but not good enough to really advance the state of machine vision by itself. In the end though, some good OCR work could come of these efforts, but not in comparison to the money and time everyone else loses from spam; We could have just funded the research. Sending spam, and unfortunately writing advanced spam tools, pays better than a university position.
The new cell produces enough electricity that if you covered a football field with them, it would be enough power to run an Olympic swimming pool full of hard drives. The additional electricity these cell provide compared to the previous record holder would allow you to copy several libraries-of-congress per second faster to your pool full of drives.
Hope this helps.
Alternatively, you can use a Fresnel lens instead of a mirror.
Had I discussed the Soyuz, you'd have a fucking point.
Ah, so you didn't say "while singing hosannas to Soyuz..." after all?
But I didn't, did I?
You did. So, I guess he has a point.
Learn to read you fucking moron.
Right after you learn to write. Sure, I know you meant to say "Proton", but it seems you are not willing to discuss anything without going totally apeshit.
Applying a little logic to the other poster's Proton example, I would expect he was referring to the difference between development and later production. Both NASA and the Soviet space programs had plenty of failures when they were developing new stuff from the ground up; Later rockets reused many things developer on earlier ones. They also had $30B-$40B budgets during the height of the space race. Let's see how SpaceX can go from here now that they've worked the bugs out of their base system.
No, I would not be willing to jump on a SpaceX rocket just yet, but I'm willing to wait and see if they can bring their idea of a ground-up redesign for cost efficiency up to the reliability they envision. I hope they succeed, because it would help the whole industry move forward.
And yes, inferring long term failure rates from a sample size of four is pretty stupid thing to do, especially when its the first four off the line. Clearly you have a brain smaller than a pea (using your comparison and a sample size of two).
I'm not sure the Orlando Sentinel will be very unbiased in its assessment of SpaceX, an upstart that threatens the established contractors, with many of their employees living and working in central Florida. That's like reading the LA Times for its opinion on copyright legislation, or the Detroit Free Press for their opinions on the success of import car companies.
The welfare you speak of is paying for launches at the going rate (which is well below development costs), and funding development of a manned rocket (dragon) that won a contract that NASA actively and openly solicited entries for. While not really "free", competition for best design for the lowest bid is hardly "welfare" either.
The existing aerospace contractors had become far too set in their ways and were hardly competing with one another on efficiency or cost. SpaceX seems like it could really change the game. Note that the old guard doesn't have to go away, it just has to adapt, and a new competitor will give them the urgency they seem to have lost.
I'm going to freak if somebody says "whoosh" on Slashdot one more time
Whoosh.
Now get your freak on...