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Comment: Physics. (Score 3, Interesting) 185

by jellomizer (#43804599) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked?

Most of the time when a picture or video has been faked or photoshopped, you can probably tell if you look at it carefully. Their usually isn't something quite right, about it, that most people will miss.

For example odd lighting. If you superimpose an image chances are you do not have the lighting just right.

Picture Fragments. Sometimes if you look at photoshopped pics (Even professional ones) you might find extra or removed limbs or fingers. Or some impossible feat of a part of the body that somehow is in front of something that couldn't possible be.

Extra Sharp or Blurry: Sometimes thing of interest that is added in later is taken with better skills than the background so you will see a blurry picture with a sharp object. Or they will cover up the whole picture by making everything blurry. If the image seems like it was taken from an iPhone but it was super blurry more than what the device does you can probably expect it has been altered somehow.

Dithering/Anti-Alias methods: Most digital cameras on full resolution tend to have some dithering to the colors (Those sparkly bits that don't seem to exist in real life) Then some equipment scales it down a bit and adds some Anti-Aliasing to make the colors more smooth and natural looking. If you add a fake element chances are those methods will be different. Say a smooth well anti-aliased pipe, with a dithered person.

Comment: Re:Good to see intelligence rewarded for once. (Score 4, Insightful) 189

by jellomizer (#43804471) Attached to: Curiosity Rewarded: Florida Teen Heading to Space Camp, Not Jail

Fear is our biggest problem right now.

Why aren't we going to the Gym to get in shape? Fear of going into a gym out of shape and being judged by others. (I will go to the Gym after I lose 20 lbs)
Why aren't we starting our own businesses but dealing with the lower reward working for a company? Fear that our ideas will get sued by patent trools or other companies. Or if the case your product did fail in some way you are responsible for a problem that is much bigger than you.
Why are Religious Fundamentalists going nuts about evolution and gay rights? They are afraid these changes will cause our culture to reject religion and have society force them to be atheist.
Why are businesses not expanding? They are afraid that new regulations will make it impossible for them to work. ...
Our culture has been poisoned with fear. But there isn't anything really about the facts to be afraid of, but because off all the fear we are paralyzed into doing the best thing for ourselves and our culture.

Politically is isn't about right vs left. It is about most of our leaders are or were Lawyers, They think in terms of a Lawyers, our leaders are not made up of peers of different skills. Except for adding a new law, perhaps we can change a process. Instead of trying a way to prosecute people who do things that are negative culturally lets try ways that will change their behaviors proactively, as well rehabilitate post incident.

For example I got into a car accident. I rear ended a car, however I did help prevent the car behind me from rear ending me, and the car in front of me got very little damage, while my car got the brunt of it. I never got in such an accident before. However the police at the scene figure they had to give me a ticket because in my state I am legally responsible. Except for the fact that I am now without my favorite car and have to pay a good insurance deductible, they felt like to rub some salt into my wound by adding a $100 ticket. The system is setup to try to discourage people from committing the crimes, they figure if you get punished for it you will learn your lesson. Except for slightly modifying the roads so these things wouldn't happen, or just realizing the person is already in enough pain. But our leaders are lawyers, every law that is broken and caught needs a punishment. So people will live in fear of breaking the laws.

Open Source

Why the 'Star Trek Computer' Will Be Open Source and Apache Licensed 125

Posted by Soulskill
from the so-we-can-keep-an-eye-on-the-bynars dept.
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have a new blog post positing that there is a trend towards advanced projects in NLP, Information Retrieval, Big Data and the Semantic Web moving to the Apache Software Foundation. Considering that Apache UIMA is a key component of IBM Watson, is it wrong to believe that the organization behind Hadoop, OpenNLP, Jena, Stanbol, Mahout and Lucene will ultimately be the home of a real 'Star Trek Computer'? Quoting: 'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had “access to all the data in the known Universe”, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. Jena provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. ... In addition to supporting the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data - specifically textual data in an unstructured (or semi structured) format. An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article. OpenNLP combined with Jena and other technologies, allows “The computer” to “read” the Web, extracting meaningful data and saving valid assertions for later use.'" Speaking of the Star Trek computer, I'm continually disappointed that neither Siri nor Google Now can talk to me in Majel Barrett's voice.

Comment: Old Xwindows screen saver. (Score 4, Funny) 55

by jellomizer (#43796545) Attached to: Violent Galactic Clash May Solve Cosmic Mystery

I had wasted way too many hours mesmerized by that screen saver of galaxies colliding on xwindows.
I would try to make bets which galaxy would come out on top. The big one or the small one that is tightly bound. Or world they just merge together into a super galaxy, or will they both explode. Sigh my GPA would probably have been a few points higher if it wasn't for that screensaver.

Space

Violent Galactic Clash May Solve Cosmic Mystery 55

Posted by Soulskill
from the right-to-bear-galactic-arms dept.
astroengine writes "The mother of all cosmic collisions has been spotted between two galaxies containing a total of 400 billion stars, igniting the birth of 2,000 new stars per year! This incredible event was first spotted by the recently-retired Herschel infrared space observatory (abstract), a mission managed by the European Space Agency. This violent discovery isn't just awesome to look at, it could also help explain how massive, red elliptical galaxies evolved in the early universe."
Canada

The Canadian Government's War On Science 442

Posted by Soulskill
from the it's-not-real-science-if-it-doesn't-involve-hockey dept.
FuzzNugget writes "A contributor at ScienceBlogs.com has compiled and published a shockingly long list of systematic attacks on scientific research committed by the Canadian government since the conservatives came to power in 2006. This anti-scientific scourge includes muzzling scientists, shutting down research centers, industry deregulation and re-purposing the National Research Council to align with business interests instead of doing real science. It will be another two years before Canadians have the chance to go to the polls, but how much more damage will be done in the meantime?"

Comment: Re:Holy Mackerel (Score 2) 189

by jellomizer (#43795475) Attached to: Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads

Well back in the 1990's the common web page was text with a few hyper links, and if you were really fancy you had a picture.
The bottle neck was the speed of the line.

However html has transformed from a way to displaying documents, to more of an application platform.

Complain if you like about it, but it is here to stay, and modern heavy html has solved a lot of problems. Such as platform independent programs, universal access to a program, easy deployment, etc...

Yes we have sacrificed speed for convenience, but I think it is worth it.

Comment: Re:Wake up (Score 3, Informative) 515

Bugs happen even with the best developers.
Not factoring in the cost of fixing bugs into your project is your mistake not theirs.
Often these bugs are not true bugs but misinterpretation of the specs, and needs to be reworked.
Do you rehire good contractors or at least give them as recon adaptions? If so the idea that these contractors will write bugs intentionally just to make money, is rather silly, as they are risking their future jobs.
If you are so masterful yourself and you are also the boss, you should see what the bugs are, and if they make sense, to have happen or if they are just blatantly put in.

The bug starts here.

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