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Comment "It's not a trillion frames per second" (Score 1) 197

Well assuming the laser pulses are completely uniform (which they are very close to being), then each wavefront of light is mathematically indistinguishable from the one before and after it, so in a very metaphysical sense, you could say that stitching together a video with frames of data taken from successive pulses is absolutely no different in the end than if they had collected all the data in a single shot. However they actually need to aggregate data from millions of frames into a single shot, because they get on average something like half a photon expected per frame without aggregation to increase the SNR -- see the longer presentation here (it's quite a remarkable presentation, I have seen about a third of it so far -- it talks a lot initially about their work to see around corners -- this is not a new thing to try to do, it has been done before with standard camera equipment and a projected pattern with some success, but doing it with laser pulses is new).

The cool thing about what they have done is that you can watch the actual wavefront move like an expanding contact lens through the scene. To my knowledge, nobody has ever seen this before. Sure, it's data from billions of expanding contact lenses, but it shows you in a very visual way that the universe works the way the mathematics say it does.

No, the camera is not a trillion frames per second, but it shows you events that happen over trillionth-of-a-second timescales, if it were possible to capture data that quickly (which it is not) and if it were possible to solve the SNR issues over that timescale (which it is not).

Comment Nothing more effective than an irate customer (Score 1) 517

There's nothing more effective than an irate customer. Get into as many accounts as you can, grab an email address and the first and last 4 digits of their credit card info (or some other disambiguating information), then send emails to the customers from an email anonymizer, sharing whatever disambiguating information you obtained from their account, and stating the fact that the company won't fix their security. Step back and watch the customers make the company fix the problem.

Comment It's the government (Score 1) 234

The only plausible explanation for Carrier IQ is a government mandate to the carriers to install wiretapping capabilities. Which makes it ironic that a class-action lawsuit is proceeding which will probably eventually bring in the FCC too, i.e. the very government that put Carrier IQ in place in the first place.

Comment New enterprise project = stodgy by default? (Score 1) 117

'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role.

Restated: Oracle started a new project from scratch, but still managed to make the code look like it had been maintained by a megacorporation for a decade, like other long-term Oracle and Sun projects?

Comment This has been known since the 80s (Score 2) 420

Reading via word shape has been tested since the 80s: See "The Psychology of Reading" by Taylor & Taylor (1989), or read this: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx Apparently one part of the brain looks at global word shape, and another starts reading letters from the beginning and end of the word at the same time, and they both collectively converge on a mutually-consistent hypothesis. But word shape reading is faster and often pre-empts the local feature (letter) reading process.

Comment That's not the same thing (Score 1) 133

Look at 0:53 and 1:50 in the video you posted -- this train is locked in position in *one orientation* at *one distance* from the track, and it happens when you cool the superconductor down. The video in the original post shows you can set the orientation and distance by applying greater than some threshold force, and then it is preserved. Orientation preservation is remarkable.

Comment Ocean noise pollution (Score 1) 363

Sound travels extremely well and fast in water, and is close to inescapable to ocean life. The noise pollution produced by boats is having adverse effects on at least whales and dolphins: http://news.discovery.com/animals/whales-scream-noise-pollution.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7003587/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/noise-pollution-disrupts-whale-communication/

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