Shit, at $900, just give them cell phones on a collar, FFS. Staple some blue tooth earpieces onto their ears and you're golden. I doubt the receivers they're using are any less likely to give them brain cancer.
This is like the 100th PIC-based web server. Do these guys never think to see if someone else has already done a PIC web server before writing their own? Hard to be sure since I can find mention of the dimensions, but this one looks to be about the same size. This one's been around for ages. And there plenty more. There's even this mini web server/tcp-ip stack for the PIC that compiles to a remarkable 30 bytes of PIC code.
As soon as you start coding for a specific GPU you're going to be treating PCs like consoles. I don't care to have to buy multiple graphics cards to play various games.
I got the impression that they're expecting C++ compilers for all the GPUs, eventually, so then they'd simply have rendering libraries for each GPU. I also got the impression that they'd be waiting until most gamers had one of the compatible GPUs. Let's face it, most gamers usually don't buy the cheapest graphics card and now the two major players, ATI and nVidia have GPUs that are easily accessible. It won't be too long until you can't buy a video card from them that doesn't support CUDA and whatever the ATI equivalent is.
I think it's a pretty safe gamble for video game developers, certainly the 1st Person 3D game developers.
As far as I can tell, once you already imaginated the lie, and start believe in it then it will be a recollection and indistinguishable from a real memory.
True, but creating a memory from a lie is one thing. Turning a memory into a non-memory, on the other hand, just isn't possible. "Did you shoot the clerk in the liquor store on June 14th, 2007?"
Before you even answer the question, the person performing the scan knows the answer. Unless you really don't remember for some reason, if you were there, it's going to come from memory. I don't care how much you lie to yourself to convince yourself you weren't there. If you were there, your brain remembers it and it's going to show up in an fMRI scan.
And all that person needs to know is how the machine works and construct their thoughts during the calibration in a manner that makes the machine read the data incorrectly.
Actually, you can't control which part of your brain you use quite that easily. For example, if the person asks, "Tell us about the time you had a fight with a bunch of smurfs," you can't force your brain to recall these events from memory. Your brain is forced to create a story from scratch.
In the same way, if they say, "Tell me about the last meeting you had at work," if you tell the truth, the story will come from your memory and won't be created from scratch. This latter story can be easily verified with co-workers to see if it's true.
It wouldn't be nearly as beatable as a lie detector simply because you can't control how your brain thinks. You can control what you think, but not what pathways are involved.
Strongly disagree! There is no way to reliably detect lies. Each person's brain is different... especially if they have a history of brain injury.
True, every person's brain is different, to some degree, but if you have a person perform certain tasks while scanning their brain, you can then create a map to use as a basis for fMRI studies which could then determine the truth. Granted, people with certain types of brain damage probably wouldn't qualify, but for most people, this is pretty doable.
A similar thing is frequently done in brain surgery where the person is awake. They're told to perform certain tasks while probes are used to induce action potentials in certain areas. By determining what effect the probes are having , they're able to map out the nuances of an individual's brain. The same idea is used during the initial scan, to determine which areas are active during certain activities (telling a true story vs. making up a story, for example).
For example, when recalling a story, the medial prefrontal cortex is more active, whereas when making up a story, sensory neurons are very active. These are very distinct and distant areas of the brain that everyone has. There are other regions that are affected by one situation or the other, as well. By assessing which areas are active and which aren't, you can get a pretty good notion of truth or lie.
Actually, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to distinguish a lie from the truth by EEG or fMRI. The pathways for recollection as opposed to creativity (lying), cause activity in different parts of the brain.
'Where were you last Tuesday at 3:00pm?' - If the person tells the truth, they're recalling the events. If they're lying, they're constructing a scenario in their head. The two would be very distinguishable.
That said, it's not without issues: First of all, if I pre-construct a scenario and run it through my head enough, it becomes a recollection and not a creation, I believe. Also, I'm not entirely sure that there's been enough actual studies of using fMRIs and/or EEGs for detecting lies vs. truth, nor how beatable the system is. Until these things have been studied and documented, they certainly shouldn't be used by courts.
There are companies in the U.S. trying to get fMRIs used for precisely this purpose. One example is the company, No Lie MRI. If such systems can be proven reliable, then I'm all for using them in courts. Not so much to convict people, so much as to keep the innocent from being convicted, which happens plenty in the U.S.
I just want to know how they plan to dissipate all of the heat generated by this process. Assuming that the subsurface isn't hot, running sheets of metal into the ground and then using that as a heat sink, you could spread some of the heat out into the ground below. Obviously there's not much heat conduction in a vacuum, but the metal plates would certainly conduct away the heat and I assume the soil would then absorb it from the plates. Just an idea...
Of course, it's best if the plates are built on the moon 'cause carrying metal plating would be expensive.
If their lunar lander is anything like the apollo one, in terms of part of it remaining behind after the return to lunar orbit, then pieces from that could be used.
You wanna save the environment of earth? Move everyone off the earth to solar colonies and moon colonies, problem SOLVED once and for all! I think I'll choose the moon colony. I hear the people living on the solar colonies find it a little warm there.
Maybe I'm missing something. I certainly haven't researched this, but fission is used to create heat which is used to create steam which then drives a turbine to create electricity, correct?
If that's the case, I would think that it would be pretty easy to create steam on the moon without nuclear power, as long as there's sunlight. Not to mention the easy access to reduced pressure which will lower the boiling point. I'd think you could be boiling water all day with very little effort.
"Reducing energy consumption really represents an opportunity for IT to change their relationships with the rest of the business," Mines says. "Now, IT can pull their chair up to the table of strategy making for the firm, becoming an enabler at a strategic level for the company."
Does that come with a pay raise? I mean really, it's Information Technology, not energy management. What do they think? Hey, they know computers, so give them our electricity bill problem. This is stupid. And what, we can't pull our chair up to the table now? Why not?
This articles doesn't make sense to me. Okay, they mention saving energy by telecommuting and that definitely saves gas, but in terms of electricity, that's just shifting the energy usage to someone's home instead of the office. It might save the company money, but it's not necessarily helping the environment out, and you have to factor in some lost productivity in this. Also, this isn't really an IT issue, it's a management issue about whether or not they want to allow telecommuting. IT only comes into play in enabling it.
I don't know about others, but I'm a software developer. I want to write software. I don't want to be managing power consumption and coming up with plans to help people telecommute. People throw enough shit jobs at me that have nothing to do with programming and now they want to throw more shit at us? Sorry, I'll pass, even if it means I don't get to sit at the grown-ups table.
I've managed to reduce all 68 of these molecules to a single commonality: Carbon!
Curing diseases with this information is left as an exercise for the reader. Just send me the Nobel Prize. Thanks. Couldn't have done it without Slashdot.
There's truth in what you observe, but it's not a huge deal because that same change in living patterns means that we know what caused it and what to do about it. Life expectancy has gone up dramatically despite the introduction of new diseases.
True, but if prion diseases are starting to pop up out of nowhere then I'm a bit concerned, because the ones that have been around for a while, like CJD, have no cure.
It made me wonder, if it changes when it jumps species, maybe prion diseases are something new, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia. I didn't track down more stuff yet, but I plan on following up. I didn't realize this, but it appears that a lot of prion diseases are fairly recent developments. Scrapie showed up in 1732, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the 1800s, CJD showed up around 1920, Kuru in 1957, Chronic Wasting Disease in 1967, Feline Spongiform Enecephalopathy 1990.
And these are more than half of the diseases caused by prions, I believe. That's more than a bit disconcerting.
I apologize, if you clicked through to the site mentioned here, you'll see what they have in mind.
Please go through it. If you think they're missing something, let them know. That's what they want.
Yes, calcination releases CO2, but no, it absorbs 2 CO2 when dropped in the ocean. You already know the calcination process, which produces one molecule of CO2 along with a molecule of CaO. When added to water, CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2. Then, reacting with CO2 dissolved in the seawater, you get Ca(OH)2 + 2CO2 --> Ca(HCO3)2, Calcium Bicarb.
Sorry, I was in a pissy mood when I replied last time. Please, go to their site. They've really thought this through and it's a good idea. With the right help, it could actually happen.
one hint is how much heat is required to produce (and therefore fuel of some sort to produce the heat), let alone the energy requirements for digging up the raw materials and transporting to processing facilities, etc etc. It's definitely *not* carbon-neutral.
If you had bothered to read the link I published, you'd see how they propose to do it. By using limestone from energy rich areas: For example, near sources of natural gas or in deserts, where solar energy could be used to provide the energy and some of the heat. So, basically mine and convert in the same place, then dump in the ocean. Not too terribly expensive.
I'm kind of fond of the resurrection of the lime idea, in part because it addresses at least 2 problems at once, though I don't know what the economics of it are in comparison to this. In addition to reducing CO2 overall, it also makes the sea more alkaline, which is good for sea life, in particular, coral. A lot of coral has been wiped out because of increased acidity in the ocean (due to, surprise, increased CO2 absorption).
Saying that any DNA is "Junk DNA" is like saying that all dark matter in the universe (which we don't quite yet fully understand) is "Junk Matter."
You're absolutely right. Right now, the term "junk DNA" is just sort of a way of filing it as "unknown function", but the term "non-coding DNA" is probably the more accurate term to describe it.
It's been hypothesized for some time that some of this non-coding DNA is used for morphological guidance of development. That is, some of the coding specifies why we look like we do. Why we have 10 fingers, 10 toes, 2 arms, 2 legs, and no big horn sticking out of our foreheads.
While there are genes that describe how to create and maintain the cells that make up the stomach, for example, there are no genes that describe the shape of the stomach or how it connects to the intestines and esophegous or that control where it is in the body. It makes a great deal of sense that this information is in the non-coding regions.
You're right, we don't know everything, but we know a great deal and the rate at which we're learning has grown exponentially in the past 30 years. The Human Genome Project has completely revolutionized biology. I suspect it won't be too long before we map out the function of the non-coding regions.
From the site: Legitimate data recovery firms know this. They will not take the challenge. Neither will a national government agency.
Okay, well first of all, it wouldn't be in the interest of any government law enforcement to accept this challenge. Why would they? To show us what they can and can't do? I think it's in their best interest to keep that to themselves and keep us wondering.
I don't know if the overwriting thing is a myth or not. I don't know enough about the physics of it to even approach an answer. On the other hand, I've had conversations with people who build gadgets for spooks and they have stuff that a lot of people here would probably consider impossible. The government hires some of the brightest minds for this kind of stuff.
I've learned to forgo the word "impossible" when it comes to this kind of stuff. You just never know. On the other hand, I don't really care one way or the other. I don't keep anything on my hard drives that I'd worry about the government finding.
The skeletons were found back in 2001 and 2002 and they were carbon dated no later than 2004, probably before that, though.
They don't say, but I suspect they're talking about the Ox Bel Ha cave system (Ox is the Mayan word for "Three" and is pronounced "Osh"), which is the largest underwater cave system in the world and it's actually something that's probably worthy of a Slashdot post in itself, if it weren't also old news.
I lived in that area for 3 years and I'm friends with 2 of the divers that discovered and mapped the Ox Bel Ha system.
The Yucatan peninsula is studded with sink holes called "cenotes". They're filled with fresh water (though there are areas where the salt water comes in and creates a salt/fresh water interface called the halocline, which looks wicked cool. It's kind of like oil and water) and look like a bunch of very circular ponds, except they're often fairly deep and interconnected by caves. Skeletons are a pretty common find in them, but most are far more recent (from the Mayan period) and are largely believed to be sacrificial.
I can't find the stories now, but I recall some stories suggesting that some of the indigenous people of South America were believed to have been descendants of lost fisherman from South-East Asia. It seems plausible that there could have been groups that arrived in Mexico as well.
Actually, the fan on my 8500 GT which was less than year old just died. I wanted a 9800 GTX anyway, which I got, but now I'm concerned I may have wasted some $$$.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit, at $900, just give them cell phones on a collar, FFS. Staple some blue tooth earpieces onto their ears and you're golden. I doubt the receivers they're using are any less likely to give them brain cancer.
This is like the 100th PIC-based web server. Do these guys never think to see if someone else has already done a PIC web server before writing their own? Hard to be sure since I can find mention of the dimensions, but this one looks to be about the same size. This one's been around for ages. And there plenty more. There's even this mini web server/tcp-ip stack for the PIC that compiles to a remarkable 30 bytes of PIC code.
Nothing to see here. Move along...
As soon as you start coding for a specific GPU you're going to be treating PCs like consoles. I don't care to have to buy multiple graphics cards to play various games.
I got the impression that they're expecting C++ compilers for all the GPUs, eventually, so then they'd simply have rendering libraries for each GPU. I also got the impression that they'd be waiting until most gamers had one of the compatible GPUs. Let's face it, most gamers usually don't buy the cheapest graphics card and now the two major players, ATI and nVidia have GPUs that are easily accessible. It won't be too long until you can't buy a video card from them that doesn't support CUDA and whatever the ATI equivalent is.
I think it's a pretty safe gamble for video game developers, certainly the 1st Person 3D game developers.
As far as I can tell, once you already imaginated the lie, and start believe in it then it will be a recollection and indistinguishable from a real memory.
True, but creating a memory from a lie is one thing. Turning a memory into a non-memory, on the other hand, just isn't possible. "Did you shoot the clerk in the liquor store on June 14th, 2007?"
Before you even answer the question, the person performing the scan knows the answer. Unless you really don't remember for some reason, if you were there, it's going to come from memory. I don't care how much you lie to yourself to convince yourself you weren't there. If you were there, your brain remembers it and it's going to show up in an fMRI scan.
And all that person needs to know is how the machine works and construct their thoughts during the calibration in a manner that makes the machine read the data incorrectly.
Actually, you can't control which part of your brain you use quite that easily. For example, if the person asks, "Tell us about the time you had a fight with a bunch of smurfs," you can't force your brain to recall these events from memory. Your brain is forced to create a story from scratch.
In the same way, if they say, "Tell me about the last meeting you had at work," if you tell the truth, the story will come from your memory and won't be created from scratch. This latter story can be easily verified with co-workers to see if it's true.
It wouldn't be nearly as beatable as a lie detector simply because you can't control how your brain thinks. You can control what you think, but not what pathways are involved.
Did I leave my keys out in space again? I keep doing that. Sorry.
Strongly disagree! There is no way to reliably detect lies. Each person's brain is different ... especially if they have a history of brain injury.
True, every person's brain is different, to some degree, but if you have a person perform certain tasks while scanning their brain, you can then create a map to use as a basis for fMRI studies which could then determine the truth. Granted, people with certain types of brain damage probably wouldn't qualify, but for most people, this is pretty doable.
A similar thing is frequently done in brain surgery where the person is awake. They're told to perform certain tasks while probes are used to induce action potentials in certain areas. By determining what effect the probes are having , they're able to map out the nuances of an individual's brain. The same idea is used during the initial scan, to determine which areas are active during certain activities (telling a true story vs. making up a story, for example).
For example, when recalling a story, the medial prefrontal cortex is more active, whereas when making up a story, sensory neurons are very active. These are very distinct and distant areas of the brain that everyone has. There are other regions that are affected by one situation or the other, as well. By assessing which areas are active and which aren't, you can get a pretty good notion of truth or lie.
Actually, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to distinguish a lie from the truth by EEG or fMRI. The pathways for recollection as opposed to creativity (lying), cause activity in different parts of the brain.
'Where were you last Tuesday at 3:00pm?' - If the person tells the truth, they're recalling the events. If they're lying, they're constructing a scenario in their head. The two would be very distinguishable.
That said, it's not without issues: First of all, if I pre-construct a scenario and run it through my head enough, it becomes a recollection and not a creation, I believe. Also, I'm not entirely sure that there's been enough actual studies of using fMRIs and/or EEGs for detecting lies vs. truth, nor how beatable the system is. Until these things have been studied and documented, they certainly shouldn't be used by courts.
There are companies in the U.S. trying to get fMRIs used for precisely this purpose. One example is the company, No Lie MRI.
If such systems can be proven reliable, then I'm all for using them in courts. Not so much to convict people, so much as to keep the innocent from being convicted, which happens plenty in the U.S.
They're not going to ban Jedi training videos as well, are they? After all, they're part of the rebellion.
I just want to know how they plan to dissipate all of the heat generated by this process.
Assuming that the subsurface isn't hot, running sheets of metal into the ground and then using that as a heat sink, you could spread some of the heat out into the ground below. Obviously there's not much heat conduction in a vacuum, but the metal plates would certainly conduct away the heat and I assume the soil would then absorb it from the plates. Just an idea...
Of course, it's best if the plates are built on the moon 'cause carrying metal plating would be expensive.
If their lunar lander is anything like the apollo one, in terms of part of it remaining behind after the return to lunar orbit, then pieces from that could be used.
You wanna save the environment of earth? Move everyone off the earth to solar colonies and moon colonies, problem SOLVED once and for all!
I think I'll choose the moon colony. I hear the people living on the solar colonies find it a little warm there.
Maybe I'm missing something. I certainly haven't researched this, but fission is used to create heat which is used to create steam which then drives a turbine to create electricity, correct?
If that's the case, I would think that it would be pretty easy to create steam on the moon without nuclear power, as long as there's sunlight. Not to mention the easy access to reduced pressure which will lower the boiling point. I'd think you could be boiling water all day with very little effort.
I need to hurry up and finish work on my black-hole shelter...
"Reducing energy consumption really represents an opportunity for IT to change their relationships with the rest of the business," Mines says. "Now, IT can pull their chair up to the table of strategy making for the firm, becoming an enabler at a strategic level for the company."
Does that come with a pay raise? I mean really, it's Information Technology, not energy management. What do they think? Hey, they know computers, so give them our electricity bill problem. This is stupid. And what, we can't pull our chair up to the table now? Why not?
This articles doesn't make sense to me. Okay, they mention saving energy by telecommuting and that definitely saves gas, but in terms of electricity, that's just shifting the energy usage to someone's home instead of the office. It might save the company money, but it's not necessarily helping the environment out, and you have to factor in some lost productivity in this. Also, this isn't really an IT issue, it's a management issue about whether or not they want to allow telecommuting. IT only comes into play in enabling it.
I don't know about others, but I'm a software developer. I want to write software. I don't want to be managing power consumption and coming up with plans to help people telecommute. People throw enough shit jobs at me that have nothing to do with programming and now they want to throw more shit at us? Sorry, I'll pass, even if it means I don't get to sit at the grown-ups table.
I've managed to reduce all 68 of these molecules to a single commonality: Carbon!
Curing diseases with this information is left as an exercise for the reader. Just send me the Nobel Prize. Thanks. Couldn't have done it without Slashdot.
What will be very scary is when they began to spread through air contact, like a flu virus.
Fortunately, that will never happen. Prions are misfolded proteins. They're enormous compared to viruses and far too dense to be airborne spread.
There's truth in what you observe, but it's not a huge deal because that same change in living patterns means that we know what caused it and what to do about it. Life expectancy has gone up dramatically despite the introduction of new diseases.
True, but if prion diseases are starting to pop up out of nowhere then I'm a bit concerned, because the ones that have been around for a while, like CJD, have no cure.
It made me wonder, if it changes when it jumps species, maybe prion diseases are something new, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia. I didn't track down more stuff yet, but I plan on following up. I didn't realize this, but it appears that a lot of prion diseases are fairly recent developments. Scrapie showed up in 1732, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the 1800s, CJD showed up around 1920, Kuru in 1957, Chronic Wasting Disease in 1967, Feline Spongiform Enecephalopathy 1990.
And these are more than half of the diseases caused by prions, I believe. That's more than a bit disconcerting.
I apologize, if you clicked through to the site mentioned here, you'll see what they have in mind.
Please go through it. If you think they're missing something, let them know. That's what they want.
Yes, calcination releases CO2, but no, it absorbs 2 CO2 when dropped in the ocean. You already know the calcination process, which produces one molecule of CO2 along with a molecule of CaO. When added to water, CaO + H2O --> Ca(OH)2. Then, reacting with CO2 dissolved in the seawater, you get Ca(OH)2 + 2CO2 --> Ca(HCO3)2, Calcium Bicarb.
Sorry, I was in a pissy mood when I replied last time. Please, go to their site. They've really thought this through and it's a good idea. With the right help, it could actually happen.
one hint is how much heat is required to produce (and therefore fuel of some sort to produce the heat), let alone the energy requirements for digging up the raw materials and transporting to processing facilities, etc etc. It's definitely *not* carbon-neutral.
If you had bothered to read the link I published, you'd see how they propose to do it. By using limestone from energy rich areas: For example, near sources of natural gas or in deserts, where solar energy could be used to provide the energy and some of the heat. So, basically mine and convert in the same place, then dump in the ocean. Not too terribly expensive.
I'm kind of fond of the resurrection of the lime idea, in part because it addresses at least 2 problems at once, though I don't know what the economics of it are in comparison to this. In addition to reducing CO2 overall, it also makes the sea more alkaline, which is good for sea life, in particular, coral. A lot of coral has been wiped out because of increased acidity in the ocean (due to, surprise, increased CO2 absorption).
Saying that any DNA is "Junk DNA" is like saying that all dark matter in the universe (which we don't quite yet fully understand) is "Junk Matter."
You're absolutely right. Right now, the term "junk DNA" is just sort of a way of filing it as "unknown function", but the term "non-coding DNA" is probably the more accurate term to describe it.
It's been hypothesized for some time that some of this non-coding DNA is used for morphological guidance of development. That is, some of the coding specifies why we look like we do. Why we have 10 fingers, 10 toes, 2 arms, 2 legs, and no big horn sticking out of our foreheads.
While there are genes that describe how to create and maintain the cells that make up the stomach, for example, there are no genes that describe the shape of the stomach or how it connects to the intestines and esophegous or that control where it is in the body. It makes a great deal of sense that this information is in the non-coding regions.
You're right, we don't know everything, but we know a great deal and the rate at which we're learning has grown exponentially in the past 30 years. The Human Genome Project has completely revolutionized biology. I suspect it won't be too long before we map out the function of the non-coding regions.
From the site: Legitimate data recovery firms know this. They will not take the challenge. Neither will a national government agency.
Okay, well first of all, it wouldn't be in the interest of any government law enforcement to accept this challenge. Why would they? To show us what they can and can't do? I think it's in their best interest to keep that to themselves and keep us wondering.
I don't know if the overwriting thing is a myth or not. I don't know enough about the physics of it to even approach an answer. On the other hand, I've had conversations with people who build gadgets for spooks and they have stuff that a lot of people here would probably consider impossible. The government hires some of the brightest minds for this kind of stuff.
I've learned to forgo the word "impossible" when it comes to this kind of stuff. You just never know. On the other hand, I don't really care one way or the other. I don't keep anything on my hard drives that I'd worry about the government finding.
The skeletons were found back in 2001 and 2002 and they were carbon dated no later than 2004, probably before that, though.
They don't say, but I suspect they're talking about the Ox Bel Ha cave system (Ox is the Mayan word for "Three" and is pronounced "Osh"), which is the largest underwater cave system in the world and it's actually something that's probably worthy of a Slashdot post in itself, if it weren't also old news.
I lived in that area for 3 years and I'm friends with 2 of the divers that discovered and mapped the Ox Bel Ha system.
The Yucatan peninsula is studded with sink holes called "cenotes". They're filled with fresh water (though there are areas where the salt water comes in and creates a salt/fresh water interface called the halocline, which looks wicked cool. It's kind of like oil and water) and look like a bunch of very circular ponds, except they're often fairly deep and interconnected by caves. Skeletons are a pretty common find in them, but most are far more recent (from the Mayan period) and are largely believed to be sacrificial.
I can't find the stories now, but I recall some stories suggesting that some of the indigenous people of South America were believed to have been descendants of lost fisherman from South-East Asia. It seems plausible that there could have been groups that arrived in Mexico as well.
Actually, the fan on my 8500 GT which was less than year old just died. I wanted a 9800 GTX anyway, which I got, but now I'm concerned I may have wasted some $$$.