Thanks for the tip. Clearly you've not been into a European cell phone store recently...
If you're toting that thing around with you every and you don't do photography professionally that's just foolishness.
I hate to sound like a camera snob, but I really can see the difference between a 2 megapixel photo from a phone through a plastic-coated snap-on lens compared to my 8 megapixel canon SLR with an L-lens. Can't you? Trying to impress people has nothing to do with it.
I don't know where you are but in my local area I've never seen this. While I do understand and know of areas where photos are banned I've never heard of anyone getting harassed in these areas for using a cell phone.
Unfortunately, these areas are becoming prevalent in the UK. Fortunately, I'm not in the UK so much these days, but the EU is often not far behind the UK on things like this. I think you are lucky if you've not yet been harassed!;-)
The rest of your argument deals with general technophobia and has nothing to do with the camera aspect of a cell phone. Oh well...
No, you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not a technophobe. I'm not even going to go down that route of justifying my joke by listing my qualifications and what I do for a living, otherwise you'll then accuse me of trying to impress you;-) I was having a little rant at the expense of the idiots who make up the rules for our "security".
Really? Again, not knowing your situation... My cell service provider's plans have decrease since the introduction of the camera phone. I don't think the camera aspect has anything to do with it, they do charge 0.10 USD per picture sent over the cellphone without an inclusive package. They charge the exact same for text messages too.
The USA is known for offering much fairer prices for things like this! We were paying something like 50 cents a picture in Europe when I opened my contract, so I never sent one. But if you are happy with your camera phone, that's great. It's likely to change soon in Europe, because the prices charged by mobile phone network companies are now in the gunsights of the E.U. courts...
I HATE camera phones. What I'd like is a good, tiny phone, where the batteries last for ages. If I want to take a photo I get out my digital SLR and a 700 euro lens, I don't think "ah, now I've got my phone, I can leave my camera at home".
Here's the problem. The cellphone was supposed to make it easy for people to be reached on-the-move. For "security" reasons we are not allowed to use our phone everywhere, because the people who are taking photos of us and watching us on videos don't want us to take photos or videos of them (just count how many police brutality incidents on youtube also involve the rough handling of the guy capturing said incident on a camera). On european trains there are "quiet" zones where phones are banned, and if we use our phone on a plane then the phone will immediately detonate all of the explosive liquids stored in passenger's hand-luggage and cause sony lithium-ion batteries in apple G4 powerbooks to burst into flames.
Lastly, and even more importantly than plane death, upgrading the phone's camera just gives the mobile phone industry another excuse to charge you a higher subscription than the previous year.
This kind of problem is indeed quite easy to solve with a good algorithm. It's a hard(!) inverse problem, meaning that there are many possible model solutions (guessed number combinations) that match your data (pixels). The weakest link is knowing exactly the blurring algorithm that was used.
In the real world, data is imperfect and noisy, so the article is thus far correct. What is not correct is simply to pick the data with the nearest match, because it's a best match to the noise also. Maximum entropy is one algorithm which gives you a probabilistic answer, i.e. "the chances that this particular combination is the right one is [whatever] percent". You then pick the most likely one. Astronomers use this technique all the time for removing the blur and diffraction on their images. I personally use it regularly for nuclear spectroscopy, and it's absolutely solid if you use it carefully.
"98+% accuracy and virtually no false positive identifications"
That sounds like a mixed up quote of statistics from an inept marketing guru. Does that mean they call 2% "virtually no false positives" or does the program return an answer "I don't know what that is" for 2% of the time, and the false-positive data has been conveniently omitted? I'm going to err towards a worst-case scenario for the sake of argument.
Gracenote contains 69,462,367 songs in their database, and from those songs alone we could expect to see up to 1,389,247 songs incorrectly labelled. Multiply that by the number of distributed copies worldwide...
I came across something like this through work. I was helping to organise a physics conference in Berlin. We were using a town map website to mark the conference venue. I entered the address of the place, copied the url (with all the cgi after it), and made a link so that the visitors could navigate to the map website and immediately get a big red cross on it. Our legal experts told me to get rid of the link because we could face a law suit for improper use of linking to other people's material (even though the huge ad banner still shows viagra and goodness knows what else all around the map, and the visitors were therefore contributing to the ad revenue). It's all fucking bullshit if you ask me.
This won't really change a thing in favour of the citizens. It will be used to cover their backs when the police doing things right (which is most of the time), raise a bit of revenue when they sell it off for a britains-dumbest-criminals-type tv show, but don't forget the poor brazilian guy who was executed on the tube last year. The police "lost" the videos for that one, and the tube system is already wall-to-wall with cameras for our "security".
Idiots like these guys sell this crap because there are rich idiots somewhere who buy it, and other idiots elsewhere who read about it, and other idiots who write... hang on...
Step 1: Jump on a big headline
Step 2: Use the word nano an awful lot
Step 3: Come up with an outrageous bill and say you need political support
"The necessary research must be completed, four to five years, at (a cost of) five to six million dollars per annum here at UB," Sarjeant said.
Check out the USA's flagship neutron scattering facility, which will churn out hundreds of scientific papers per year and put the USA at the front of materials science, on real science at the atomic scale (not inches, Sarjeant) and consider that 30 million dollars would kit them out with a whole suite of instruments for the entire scientific community to use (based on the quality of the proposals, of course).
Sarjeant, you're a complete... no, I can't even be bothered to say it...
Compare microsoft's map with that of google, centred on the Brandenburg gate, and you see that Microsoft are lagging slightly behind google in resolution. As I remember, the google launch had full resolution on Berlin from the start.
Do what you like! Hey, I really do feel that way, and whilst such a statement would probably result in a thumbs-up from me, I'm afraid someone has beaten you to it.
Aw, come on, I live in Berlin, and I've visited the nazi camps myself. Plus, you can easily flip this around. Think what happened to any scientist who spoke up against the idea that the earth was at the centre of the universe? That was 'evil' in its time, scientists were shunned or executed for speaking out against the norm. Prevent freedom of speech and ideas, and good things are also restricted along with the bad things.
Quoting one bad incident isn't sufficient to change my opinion that people should be allowed to say what they want, and I still maintain that having the chance to talk with racist people is the better course than to leave them smoldering in the underground. Education and freedom of information is the key to a good society, once you start telling people what they can and cannot say (or think) then you are in trouble.:-)
P.S. Just incase you get the wrong idea, my best friend is half-jewish and a girl I almost married was half indian half irish. And I _still_ think it's a good idea to let people speak up!;-)
I totally agree with this comment. I'd rather listen to/read a different perspective, albeit completely orthogonal to my own views, than see a suppression of the freedom of expression (especially in the f***ing internet).
OK Folks, I see a lot of comments about this, and I'd like to make a few points based on my own experience.
I grew up in the UK, where taxes are relatively low. I was unemployed for a few months after finishing a PhD in physics. Unemployment sucks, but it especially sucks when you have to grease up to some retard and fill out a hundred forms just so they give you enough money to buy half a loaf of bread. It took me a few months to find work, and now I am working as a physicist in Berlin. Here, taxes are pretty much 50% all in, and if you end up unemployed here then you find that you get something like 60% of your last salary for a while. Indeed - as one person put it - this seems to result in 20yo punks sitting in the park and smoking weed. I tend to notice the naked women sunbathing more than the punks, but never mind;-)
However, I'd take that social-security and high-tax life any day over the s**t consumer-driven life I had in the UK. I have not seen one violent crime in Berlin in the last 2 years I've been here. When I lived in Leeds, during one year gangs tried to steal my bicycle on THREE separate occasions WHILST I WAS RIDING HOME ON IT; a dealer was gunned down at the bottom of my ex-girlfriends street whilst he was buying a pizza; and the local cinema was robbed at gun point four times. I read a statistic the other day that claimed you are 6 times more likely to be robbed in London than in New York.
In summary: high taxes are OK and Britain sucks donkey balls.
It's not the responsibility of the lecturer, university, or anyone else to pass the exam, but the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the students. If a student wants to stay in bed all day listening to podcasts, but works hard enough to pass the exam, what's wrong with that? Let the students take responsibility for their own actions and provide them with as much material as you can.
I too would like a quantum computer for accurate simulation studies of quantum spin ladders and molecular magnets, but my point is that I smell a rat here and I don't fancy their chances. Hats off, however, if I'm wrong and they actually build it instead of simply disappearing with the profits, after selling the company shares in a couple of months:)
"The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need."
cooling to helium temperature does require vacuum pumps (usually more than one kind) and - if you want it to be reliable - a liquid nitrogen jacket too. I filled cryostats for years. There's nothing exotic about cryogenics, we've been doing this for decades. Just another example of the bull in this whole thing...
Hey all,
I think it's a great idea in theory, but there are a few pitfalls to avoid, as a few people in this thread have identified.
There was a place in town, whilst i was at university. It did quite well. This seemed to be their plan of action:
(a) It was, at the core, a normal internet cafe with mid-to-top range PCs and a very fast LAN, _without_ partitions of any kind, such that you could socialise with your neighbours
(b) The gaming was organised at fixed times, and local _competitions_ were arranged which charged a small entry fee. The entry fee was good, because people were _invited_ to bring their own machines and compete for the prizes.
(c) It had a good colour laserjet printer (even cheaper now!) and clued-up staff to help punters with their mundane IT problems. As you have probably planned, this was their "day job".
The danger is that you have to put out more cash than a 'normal' cafe just to keep the PCs up to good gaming standard, so your costs are slightly higher.
My view is that, like everything else, it's all in the sale and the packaging. I don't think it would hurt to go on a road trip and see some places in other towns before you ask the bank for a loan!
Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the tip. Clearly you've not been into a European cell phone store recently...
If you're toting that thing around with you every and you don't do photography professionally that's just foolishness. I hate to sound like a camera snob, but I really can see the difference between a 2 megapixel photo from a phone through a plastic-coated snap-on lens compared to my 8 megapixel canon SLR with an L-lens. Can't you? Trying to impress people has nothing to do with it.
I don't know where you are but in my local area I've never seen this. While I do understand and know of areas where photos are banned I've never heard of anyone getting harassed in these areas for using a cell phone.
Unfortunately, these areas are becoming prevalent in the UK. Fortunately, I'm not in the UK so much these days, but the EU is often not far behind the UK on things like this. I think you are lucky if you've not yet been harassed! ;-)
The rest of your argument deals with general technophobia and has nothing to do with the camera aspect of a cell phone. Oh well...
No, you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'm not a technophobe. I'm not even going to go down that route of justifying my joke by listing my qualifications and what I do for a living, otherwise you'll then accuse me of trying to impress you ;-) I was having a little rant at the expense of the idiots who make up the rules for our "security".
Really? Again, not knowing your situation... My cell service provider's plans have decrease since the introduction of the camera phone. I don't think the camera aspect has anything to do with it, they do charge 0.10 USD per picture sent over the cellphone without an inclusive package. They charge the exact same for text messages too.
The USA is known for offering much fairer prices for things like this! We were paying something like 50 cents a picture in Europe when I opened my contract, so I never sent one. But if you are happy with your camera phone, that's great. It's likely to change soon in Europe, because the prices charged by mobile phone network companies are now in the gunsights of the E.U. courts...
Here's the problem. The cellphone was supposed to make it easy for people to be reached on-the-move. For "security" reasons we are not allowed to use our phone everywhere, because the people who are taking photos of us and watching us on videos don't want us to take photos or videos of them (just count how many police brutality incidents on youtube also involve the rough handling of the guy capturing said incident on a camera). On european trains there are "quiet" zones where phones are banned, and if we use our phone on a plane then the phone will immediately detonate all of the explosive liquids stored in passenger's hand-luggage and cause sony lithium-ion batteries in apple G4 powerbooks to burst into flames.
Lastly, and even more importantly than plane death, upgrading the phone's camera just gives the mobile phone industry another excuse to charge you a higher subscription than the previous year.
In the real world, data is imperfect and noisy, so the article is thus far correct. What is not correct is simply to pick the data with the nearest match, because it's a best match to the noise also. Maximum entropy is one algorithm which gives you a probabilistic answer, i.e. "the chances that this particular combination is the right one is [whatever] percent". You then pick the most likely one. Astronomers use this technique all the time for removing the blur and diffraction on their images. I personally use it regularly for nuclear spectroscopy, and it's absolutely solid if you use it carefully.
"98+% accuracy and virtually no false positive identifications"
That sounds like a mixed up quote of statistics from an inept marketing guru. Does that mean they call 2% "virtually no false positives" or does the program return an answer "I don't know what that is" for 2% of the time, and the false-positive data has been conveniently omitted? I'm going to err towards a worst-case scenario for the sake of argument.
Gracenote contains 69,462,367 songs in their database, and from those songs alone we could expect to see up to 1,389,247 songs incorrectly labelled. Multiply that by the number of distributed copies worldwide...
I came across something like this through work. I was helping to organise a physics conference in Berlin. We were using a town map website to mark the conference venue. I entered the address of the place, copied the url (with all the cgi after it), and made a link so that the visitors could navigate to the map website and immediately get a big red cross on it. Our legal experts told me to get rid of the link because we could face a law suit for improper use of linking to other people's material (even though the huge ad banner still shows viagra and goodness knows what else all around the map, and the visitors were therefore contributing to the ad revenue). It's all fucking bullshit if you ask me.
This won't really change a thing in favour of the citizens. It will be used to cover their backs when the police doing things right (which is most of the time), raise a bit of revenue when they sell it off for a britains-dumbest-criminals-type tv show, but don't forget the poor brazilian guy who was executed on the tube last year. The police "lost" the videos for that one, and the tube system is already wall-to-wall with cameras for our "security".
Idiots like these guys sell this crap because there are rich idiots somewhere who buy it, and other idiots elsewhere who read about it, and other idiots who write... hang on...
Step 2: Use the word nano an awful lot
Step 3: Come up with an outrageous bill and say you need political support
"The necessary research must be completed, four to five years, at (a cost of) five to six million dollars per annum here at UB," Sarjeant said.
Check out the USA's flagship neutron scattering facility, which will churn out hundreds of scientific papers per year and put the USA at the front of materials science, on real science at the atomic scale (not inches, Sarjeant) and consider that 30 million dollars would kit them out with a whole suite of instruments for the entire scientific community to use (based on the quality of the proposals, of course). Sarjeant, you're a complete... no, I can't even be bothered to say it...
Compare microsoft's map with that of google, centred on the Brandenburg gate, and you see that Microsoft are lagging slightly behind google in resolution. As I remember, the google launch had full resolution on Berlin from the start.
P.S. Just incase you get the wrong idea, my best friend is half-jewish and a girl I almost married was half indian half irish. And I _still_ think it's a good idea to let people speak up! ;-)
I totally agree with this comment. I'd rather listen to/read a different perspective, albeit completely orthogonal to my own views, than see a suppression of the freedom of expression (especially in the f***ing internet).
OK Folks, I see a lot of comments about this, and I'd like to make a few points based on my own experience. I grew up in the UK, where taxes are relatively low. I was unemployed for a few months after finishing a PhD in physics. Unemployment sucks, but it especially sucks when you have to grease up to some retard and fill out a hundred forms just so they give you enough money to buy half a loaf of bread. It took me a few months to find work, and now I am working as a physicist in Berlin. Here, taxes are pretty much 50% all in, and if you end up unemployed here then you find that you get something like 60% of your last salary for a while. Indeed - as one person put it - this seems to result in 20yo punks sitting in the park and smoking weed. I tend to notice the naked women sunbathing more than the punks, but never mind ;-)
However, I'd take that social-security and high-tax life any day over the s**t consumer-driven life I had in the UK. I have not seen one violent crime in Berlin in the last 2 years I've been here. When I lived in Leeds, during one year gangs tried to steal my bicycle on THREE separate occasions WHILST I WAS RIDING HOME ON IT; a dealer was gunned down at the bottom of my ex-girlfriends street whilst he was buying a pizza; and the local cinema was robbed at gun point four times. I read a statistic the other day that claimed you are 6 times more likely to be robbed in London than in New York.
In summary: high taxes are OK and Britain sucks donkey balls.
It's not the responsibility of the lecturer, university, or anyone else to pass the exam, but the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the students. If a student wants to stay in bed all day listening to podcasts, but works hard enough to pass the exam, what's wrong with that? Let the students take responsibility for their own actions and provide them with as much material as you can.
I too would like a quantum computer for accurate simulation studies of quantum spin ladders and molecular magnets, but my point is that I smell a rat here and I don't fancy their chances. Hats off, however, if I'm wrong and they actually build it instead of simply disappearing with the profits, after selling the company shares in a couple of months :)
cooling to helium temperature does require vacuum pumps (usually more than one kind) and - if you want it to be reliable - a liquid nitrogen jacket too. I filled cryostats for years. There's nothing exotic about cryogenics, we've been doing this for decades. Just another example of the bull in this whole thing...
Hey all, I think it's a great idea in theory, but there are a few pitfalls to avoid, as a few people in this thread have identified. There was a place in town, whilst i was at university. It did quite well. This seemed to be their plan of action: (a) It was, at the core, a normal internet cafe with mid-to-top range PCs and a very fast LAN, _without_ partitions of any kind, such that you could socialise with your neighbours (b) The gaming was organised at fixed times, and local _competitions_ were arranged which charged a small entry fee. The entry fee was good, because people were _invited_ to bring their own machines and compete for the prizes. (c) It had a good colour laserjet printer (even cheaper now!) and clued-up staff to help punters with their mundane IT problems. As you have probably planned, this was their "day job". The danger is that you have to put out more cash than a 'normal' cafe just to keep the PCs up to good gaming standard, so your costs are slightly higher. My view is that, like everything else, it's all in the sale and the packaging. I don't think it would hurt to go on a road trip and see some places in other towns before you ask the bank for a loan! Good luck!