The real reason they're trying to supress this video is that it reveals too much about the inner workings of the Air Force's cyber defense. Apparently, when there is a cyber attack coming in, it appears on the screen as a red bullseye. A red "severe" indicator also appears. One of the Air Force's cyber interceptors then leaps into action, by putting his finger over the bullseye and moving it around the screen. This causes the bullseye to turn from red to yellow and then disappear, and success is indicated by a blue "guarded" indicator.
Hackers could use this information to create new cyber attacks that don't look like bullseyes at all. Imagine a cyber attack disguised to look like a blue "guarded" indicator - it would be impossible to detect!
I just took a look at Best Buy's website. As a sample, I looked at their 30-39" TVs. Of the 24 they had for sale, 23 had at least 720p resolution. Over time TVs get replaced, so more and more TVs in people's homes will be HD capable.
Sports are being broadcast more often in HD, over the air and via cable. Sports have the benefit of looking much better and more detailed in HD. It's a difference almost anyone will see. This will drive the sale of HD TVs and general HD awareness. Once people do have HD TVs, they're going to want the higher quality movies, just to show off their TVs if nothing else.
Within 2-3 years, the price of BR players is going to plummet. Prices are high currently because of the cost of manufacturing, and because the manufacturers want to take in the big bucks from enthusiasts before they allow prices to drop.
The Laser Disc comparison is interesting. Blu Ray has the advantage of not being giant and cumbersome, and not needing to be flipped over every 30-60 minutes. If Blu Ray has a similar flaw, it is in its copy protection. If there is a high incidence of discs that won't play and players that become worthless, it might kill the format, but that seems unlikely.
Blu Ray is easily rentable, from Netflix and Blockbuster. This will ease adoption, and is the main reason I'm personally planning to get a Blu Ray player.
Digital movie downloads are the future, but that's at least 10 years from becoming mainstream. In the meantime there will be a few billion Blu Ray discs sold.
I don't want to do space research in order to boost the economy. That's a great side benefit when it happens, but it's not the focus. I want to do space research because space is out there. What is more fulfilling as humans than to explore new domains, learn new things, and to gain new abilities and technologies that allow us to do what could never be done before? Space is the next big thing, and I can't wait for us to really begin to master it. We've barely dipped our toes in the water.
I think that perhaps our society has become too safe and comfortable to have the desire to make real progress. People seem more content just to have secure retirement funds and bigger TVs. Is that all you need to be satisfied? That's all we can really expect from safe, low budget research that gives us minor technological advances.
In the long term, forging ahead and being a leader in space will help our economy. Eventually, human presence in space is going to keep increasing, and there will be money to be made for those who have the capability. This is long term - it may not profit your 401K, but it will provide opportunities to your grandchildren.
The understudy of Aldus Manutius, a young editor named Herberg McParagy, came up with something better too: the sentence grouping. His invention is nowadays called a "paragraph" - a set of perhaps 3-4 logically connected sentences, set apart with the use of line breaks to prevent the reader from losing interest, or simply going mad and jamming a spoon in his eye.
The new missions that might want to use plutonium wouldn't be launching until 2015-2020. Therefore, if we jump started production now we should be able to produce the plutonium that we need. If NASA was in a position of power and if the government was serious about doing space science, they could make this happen. They could petition and lobby to get plutonium back in production.
Given the fact that NASA isn't well supported, they are in a tough spot. Rather than making it clear how underfunded they really are, they instead try to play it safe and not rock the boat. They just weakly accept the lack of plutonium and other resources, and they don't put up a fight. This will only make it easier for politicians to keep cutting their funding year after year.
NASA needs to be bold and controversial. They should be putting forth proposals that will really capture the imagination, even if those things will take ten times their current level of funding. They should make it clear how much potential there is yet to be explored if we would commit to it whole heartedly.
Well, it's more the fault of the government and the public's lack of interest than it is a fault of NASA. The result is that NASA is forced to make do, because they have no clout to push for big items such as getting plutonium production back online in the US.
When I open a URL, there is a transaction between my computer and the host. Very roughly, it's like this:
Me: Hey, I have this URL. Can I get any content from it? Them: Sure, here's a video for you!
So, the gym analogy would be more like this:
Me: Hey, I saw this gym here. Can I work out? Them: Sure, come on in!
If they don't want me to come in, they just have to say no. If MobiTv couldn't be bothered to say no or check IDs at the door, they have effectively allowed me in.
"C is much too slow, to get good performance you must use assembly."
"Scripted languages are much too slow, to get good performance you must use compiled languages."
As computers get faster, there is always a move from technologies that are easier for the computer to technologies that are easier for the developer. Since ray tracing involves less hacks and is a more direct model of the effects developers want to create, it seems inevitable.
NASA states that for their next mission they will only consider missions without a nuclear power source. This is a sad thing to hear, because it shows just how short-sighted and unambitious they have become. I've had enough with sending tiny robots to various places to look for traces of water. Some of those missions have been awesome, but we're now reaching the point that they're not going to teach us much more or help us to move forward.
The greatest promise for truly advancing space exploration is nuclear power. We're not even willing to produce plutonium for providing a little power to deep space missions. We're nowhere near actively considering the use of nuclear reactors for propulsion. Nuclear has the potential to increase by one or two orders of magnitude the size and weight we can send into space, which would radically change what we can do in space. However, it would require a huge investment in R&D as well as a big change of mindset, and the United States is not willing. Here's hoping another country will pick up the slack.
It seems to me the trouble is with your hiring process. You're looking for someone who has used your exact setup, when you should be searching for someone who excels at programming and web development.
Within the first 6 months, a quality developer who has to learn your platform from scratch is going to be more productive than a mediocre developer who happens to have experience on that specific platform. Hiring someone with a greater variety of experiences will probably also lead to new ideas and improvements to your way of doing things.
I have frequent insomnia, and I've been wondering lately about the effects of TV on my sleep habits. I wonder if there's something about viewing an electronic display that stimulates parts of the brain and tends to keep it awake. I'm considering an experiment of my own, in which I will not use TV or computers for two hours before the time that I want to go to sleep.
I think you've missed the point of the Extinction Timeline. If you take it as a serious attempt to accurately predict when things will go extinct, it is total garbage. If you take it as a creative exercise to imagine where the future might take us, it is quite interesting. I wonder what things that we assume will be around forever will end up only in history museums.
Say what you want about American Dad but when a series casts Patrick Stewart as a hooker-murdering CIA director and it's still not funny, something went terribly wrong.
A more likely scenario is that once XYZCom buys Slashdot, the site becomes blazingly fast for their customers. Meanwhile Kuro5hin and other competitors become really slow loading, and occasionally they won't load at all. XYZCom then begins to throw more ads onto Slashdot. They monitor all of your web traffic and use it to customize the ads you are shown. They use some DNS tricks to make it harder for AdBlock to remove ads from the page. Eventually, any request which doesn't include some bit of profit for XYZCom is slowed down.
Of course, either scenario is bad news for the customers.
A green gaming PC... so you can feel good as you sit inside by yourself, the blinds drawn to keep out the sunlight, avoiding the world and doing nothing for it, wasting time playing games.
What difference does it really make if the number is 1 in 5 or 1 in 50? The point of quoting the statistic is to say that the internet is not Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, and parents need to take responsibility to protect and monitor their children.
The fact that the statistic is inaccurate just means that it's no different from most other statistics that get thrown around.
That's a lot of information for a web page, but not very much at all for a moon mission. Since they don't even have their act together to get registered, I wonder if they have already given up.
It's not people like the parent poster who "are the reason why America is locked into a two party system." The two party system is the natural and only possible result of the way our government and our voting system is designed. It's not going to change because a small percentage of people decide to vote for a third party, and the idea that it will is simply wishful thinking.
I'm no fan of the two party system, and I would love to see it changed. But to do so would require a major overhaul of our voting system. A system such as Ranked Pairs or Range Voting would allow other parties to become more relevant. (See Wikipedia for nice descriptions of these systems.) Unfortunately, I don't know of any realistic way to push for such a change.
In the meantime, we're stuck with our two parties. Since you say you're a geek, you should approach this logically, and place your vote where it has the best possible outcome. Your comments about all politicians being the same and moving to China are just emotional tripe. The fact that both choices are flawed doesn't mean that one can't be significantly better than the other. Until you can manage to change the system, sometimes you just have to work within it.
The idea is that you'll only be using gas for a part of your trip, with the rest powered by air. Say you travel 400 miles on air power, with an extra 100 miles powered by 5 gallons gas. By their logic, you just averaged 100 miles per gallon. They are discounting the energy required to compress the air, which inflates their numbers. If you make the whole trip on just air power, you get infinite MPG!
Hopefully the process to compress the air will be more efficient and cleaner than the process of burning gasoline, which is what would make this beneficial.
This article gives a surprisingly nuanced and fair overview of the issues at hand. We've been over these things a million times on Slashdot, of course. Still, it's encouraging to see the greater public getting their heads around what really is a complex issue.
The one point I don't think gets mentioned nearly enough is the potential value of free copying to society. We hear plenty about the supposed cost. But in a world with liberal sharing of creative works, those works will get into the hands of many more people, including people of limited means. People will be exposed to amazing works they might have otherwise missed. Works will have to compete for attention based more purely on their content, rather than on the marketing muscle behind them. New works will be created that are inspired by, and in some cases built from, the numerous creative sources made available through sharing.
Best of all, free copying creates a worldwide decentralized backup system for these works. Many works will be saved which might have been otherwise lost because they were copyrighted for far longer than they were profitable.
We are witnessing the beginning of a new era, where creativity spews forth from all corners and mixes in many unexpected ways. Much of it will be crap, but some of it will be mind-blowingly fantastic. An environment of sharing with few restrictions will make this possible, and it will preserve the best of what is produced for generations to come.
I hear this argument sometimes, and I honestly can't understand it. I have a tiny living room and a 52" screen, and it's the perfect size. A large screen fills more of my field of vision. I feel that a movie should be a grand experience and take over the space in which it's being shown. Seeing a movie on a 32" screen in comparison feels like sitting far away and watching the movie through a window. It's just not as engaging.
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason they're trying to supress this video is that it reveals too much about the inner workings of the Air Force's cyber defense. Apparently, when there is a cyber attack coming in, it appears on the screen as a red bullseye. A red "severe" indicator also appears. One of the Air Force's cyber interceptors then leaps into action, by putting his finger over the bullseye and moving it around the screen. This causes the bullseye to turn from red to yellow and then disappear, and success is indicated by a blue "guarded" indicator.
Hackers could use this information to create new cyber attacks that don't look like bullseyes at all. Imagine a cyber attack disguised to look like a blue "guarded" indicator - it would be impossible to detect!
I just took a look at Best Buy's website. As a sample, I looked at their 30-39" TVs. Of the 24 they had for sale, 23 had at least 720p resolution. Over time TVs get replaced, so more and more TVs in people's homes will be HD capable.
Sports are being broadcast more often in HD, over the air and via cable. Sports have the benefit of looking much better and more detailed in HD. It's a difference almost anyone will see. This will drive the sale of HD TVs and general HD awareness. Once people do have HD TVs, they're going to want the higher quality movies, just to show off their TVs if nothing else.
Within 2-3 years, the price of BR players is going to plummet. Prices are high currently because of the cost of manufacturing, and because the manufacturers want to take in the big bucks from enthusiasts before they allow prices to drop.
The Laser Disc comparison is interesting. Blu Ray has the advantage of not being giant and cumbersome, and not needing to be flipped over every 30-60 minutes. If Blu Ray has a similar flaw, it is in its copy protection. If there is a high incidence of discs that won't play and players that become worthless, it might kill the format, but that seems unlikely.
Blu Ray is easily rentable, from Netflix and Blockbuster. This will ease adoption, and is the main reason I'm personally planning to get a Blu Ray player.
Digital movie downloads are the future, but that's at least 10 years from becoming mainstream. In the meantime there will be a few billion Blu Ray discs sold.
I don't want to do space research in order to boost the economy. That's a great side benefit when it happens, but it's not the focus. I want to do space research because space is out there. What is more fulfilling as humans than to explore new domains, learn new things, and to gain new abilities and technologies that allow us to do what could never be done before? Space is the next big thing, and I can't wait for us to really begin to master it. We've barely dipped our toes in the water.
I think that perhaps our society has become too safe and comfortable to have the desire to make real progress. People seem more content just to have secure retirement funds and bigger TVs. Is that all you need to be satisfied? That's all we can really expect from safe, low budget research that gives us minor technological advances.
In the long term, forging ahead and being a leader in space will help our economy. Eventually, human presence in space is going to keep increasing, and there will be money to be made for those who have the capability. This is long term - it may not profit your 401K, but it will provide opportunities to your grandchildren.
- Passengers check in and are given anesthetics
- Their clothing is removed and burned
- Their naked bodies are xrayed and then wrapped in paper
- They are loaded on the plane
- After the flight, they are unloaded and dressed in hospital gowns
- Six to twelve hours later they wake up and are free to go
You can fit a LOT more passengers on a plane when they're in this state, so just think of the cost savings!The understudy of Aldus Manutius, a young editor named Herberg McParagy, came up with something better too: the sentence grouping. His invention is nowadays called a "paragraph" - a set of perhaps 3-4 logically connected sentences, set apart with the use of line breaks to prevent the reader from losing interest, or simply going mad and jamming a spoon in his eye.
A Møøse once bit my sister...
The new missions that might want to use plutonium wouldn't be launching until 2015-2020. Therefore, if we jump started production now we should be able to produce the plutonium that we need. If NASA was in a position of power and if the government was serious about doing space science, they could make this happen. They could petition and lobby to get plutonium back in production.
Given the fact that NASA isn't well supported, they are in a tough spot. Rather than making it clear how underfunded they really are, they instead try to play it safe and not rock the boat. They just weakly accept the lack of plutonium and other resources, and they don't put up a fight. This will only make it easier for politicians to keep cutting their funding year after year.
NASA needs to be bold and controversial. They should be putting forth proposals that will really capture the imagination, even if those things will take ten times their current level of funding. They should make it clear how much potential there is yet to be explored if we would commit to it whole heartedly.
Well, it's more the fault of the government and the public's lack of interest than it is a fault of NASA. The result is that NASA is forced to make do, because they have no clout to push for big items such as getting plutonium production back online in the US.
When I open a URL, there is a transaction between my computer and the host. Very roughly, it's like this:
Me: Hey, I have this URL. Can I get any content from it?
Them: Sure, here's a video for you!
So, the gym analogy would be more like this:
Me: Hey, I saw this gym here. Can I work out?
Them: Sure, come on in!
If they don't want me to come in, they just have to say no. If MobiTv couldn't be bothered to say no or check IDs at the door, they have effectively allowed me in.
"C is much too slow, to get good performance you must use assembly."
"Scripted languages are much too slow, to get good performance you must use compiled languages."
As computers get faster, there is always a move from technologies that are easier for the computer to technologies that are easier for the developer. Since ray tracing involves less hacks and is a more direct model of the effects developers want to create, it seems inevitable.
NASA states that for their next mission they will only consider missions without a nuclear power source. This is a sad thing to hear, because it shows just how short-sighted and unambitious they have become. I've had enough with sending tiny robots to various places to look for traces of water. Some of those missions have been awesome, but we're now reaching the point that they're not going to teach us much more or help us to move forward.
The greatest promise for truly advancing space exploration is nuclear power. We're not even willing to produce plutonium for providing a little power to deep space missions. We're nowhere near actively considering the use of nuclear reactors for propulsion. Nuclear has the potential to increase by one or two orders of magnitude the size and weight we can send into space, which would radically change what we can do in space. However, it would require a huge investment in R&D as well as a big change of mindset, and the United States is not willing. Here's hoping another country will pick up the slack.
It seems to me the trouble is with your hiring process. You're looking for someone who has used your exact setup, when you should be searching for someone who excels at programming and web development.
Within the first 6 months, a quality developer who has to learn your platform from scratch is going to be more productive than a mediocre developer who happens to have experience on that specific platform. Hiring someone with a greater variety of experiences will probably also lead to new ideas and improvements to your way of doing things.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fPgV6-gnQaE
I have frequent insomnia, and I've been wondering lately about the effects of TV on my sleep habits. I wonder if there's something about viewing an electronic display that stimulates parts of the brain and tends to keep it awake. I'm considering an experiment of my own, in which I will not use TV or computers for two hours before the time that I want to go to sleep.
I think you've missed the point of the Extinction Timeline. If you take it as a serious attempt to accurately predict when things will go extinct, it is total garbage. If you take it as a creative exercise to imagine where the future might take us, it is quite interesting. I wonder what things that we assume will be around forever will end up only in history museums.
Say what you want about American Dad but when a series casts Patrick Stewart as a hooker-murdering CIA director and it's still not funny, something went terribly wrong.
A more likely scenario is that once XYZCom buys Slashdot, the site becomes blazingly fast for their customers. Meanwhile Kuro5hin and other competitors become really slow loading, and occasionally they won't load at all. XYZCom then begins to throw more ads onto Slashdot. They monitor all of your web traffic and use it to customize the ads you are shown. They use some DNS tricks to make it harder for AdBlock to remove ads from the page. Eventually, any request which doesn't include some bit of profit for XYZCom is slowed down.
Of course, either scenario is bad news for the customers.
A green gaming PC... so you can feel good as you sit inside by yourself, the blinds drawn to keep out the sunlight, avoiding the world and doing nothing for it, wasting time playing games.
Where do I order?
What difference does it really make if the number is 1 in 5 or 1 in 50? The point of quoting the statistic is to say that the internet is not Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, and parents need to take responsibility to protect and monitor their children.
The fact that the statistic is inaccurate just means that it's no different from most other statistics that get thrown around.
His team is called Team Cringely, so unless they changed the name they are not yet registered, Here's their wiki:
http://www.teamcringely.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
That's a lot of information for a web page, but not very much at all for a moon mission. Since they don't even have their act together to get registered, I wonder if they have already given up.
It's not people like the parent poster who "are the reason why America is locked into a two party system." The two party system is the natural and only possible result of the way our government and our voting system is designed. It's not going to change because a small percentage of people decide to vote for a third party, and the idea that it will is simply wishful thinking.
I'm no fan of the two party system, and I would love to see it changed. But to do so would require a major overhaul of our voting system. A system such as Ranked Pairs or Range Voting would allow other parties to become more relevant. (See Wikipedia for nice descriptions of these systems.) Unfortunately, I don't know of any realistic way to push for such a change.
In the meantime, we're stuck with our two parties. Since you say you're a geek, you should approach this logically, and place your vote where it has the best possible outcome. Your comments about all politicians being the same and moving to China are just emotional tripe. The fact that both choices are flawed doesn't mean that one can't be significantly better than the other. Until you can manage to change the system, sometimes you just have to work within it.
The idea is that you'll only be using gas for a part of your trip, with the rest powered by air. Say you travel 400 miles on air power, with an extra 100 miles powered by 5 gallons gas. By their logic, you just averaged 100 miles per gallon. They are discounting the energy required to compress the air, which inflates their numbers. If you make the whole trip on just air power, you get infinite MPG!
Hopefully the process to compress the air will be more efficient and cleaner than the process of burning gasoline, which is what would make this beneficial.
This article gives a surprisingly nuanced and fair overview of the issues at hand. We've been over these things a million times on Slashdot, of course. Still, it's encouraging to see the greater public getting their heads around what really is a complex issue.
The one point I don't think gets mentioned nearly enough is the potential value of free copying to society. We hear plenty about the supposed cost. But in a world with liberal sharing of creative works, those works will get into the hands of many more people, including people of limited means. People will be exposed to amazing works they might have otherwise missed. Works will have to compete for attention based more purely on their content, rather than on the marketing muscle behind them. New works will be created that are inspired by, and in some cases built from, the numerous creative sources made available through sharing.
Best of all, free copying creates a worldwide decentralized backup system for these works. Many works will be saved which might have been otherwise lost because they were copyrighted for far longer than they were profitable.
We are witnessing the beginning of a new era, where creativity spews forth from all corners and mixes in many unexpected ways. Much of it will be crap, but some of it will be mind-blowingly fantastic. An environment of sharing with few restrictions will make this possible, and it will preserve the best of what is produced for generations to come.
I hear this argument sometimes, and I honestly can't understand it. I have a tiny living room and a 52" screen, and it's the perfect size. A large screen fills more of my field of vision. I feel that a movie should be a grand experience and take over the space in which it's being shown. Seeing a movie on a 32" screen in comparison feels like sitting far away and watching the movie through a window. It's just not as engaging.