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Australia

Submission + - Julian Assange Runs For Office in Australia (theage.com.au)

Submitted by
mpawlo
mpawlo writes: "Mr Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame, has, according to The Age, confirmed his intention to run for the Australian Senate in 2013. He will also form a Wikileaks political party. I had to check, but yes, Mr Assange is still in political asylum at the embassy of Ecuador in London. I also had to the check the date, but it's not April Fools' Day, or perhaps it is according to the new Mayan Calendar..."
Graphics

Submission + - Vector vengeance: British claim they can kill the pixel within five years (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British are to be believed, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with vectors. If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on. At the moment, bitmaps are used almost exclusively in the realm of digital media — but that isn't to say they don't have their flaws. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps don’t scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business. Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors."
Space

Submission + - Earth Avoids Collisions with Pair of Asteroids

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Science Recorder reports that according to NASA a pair of asteroids — one just over three mile wide — passed Earth Tuesday and early Wednesday avoiding a potentially cataclysmic impact with our home planet. 2012 XE5, estimated at between 50-165 feet across, was discovered just days earlier, missing our planet by only 139,500 miles or slightly more than half the distance to the moon. 4179 Toutatis, just over three miles wide, put on an amazing show for astronomers early Wednesday missing Earth by 18 lunar lengths, while allowing scientists to observe the massive asteroid in detail. Asteroid Toutatis is well known to astronomers. It passes by Earth’s orbit every four years and astronomers say its unique orbit means it is unlikely to impact Earth for at least 600 years. It is one of the largest known potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), and its orbit is inclined less than half-a-degree from Earth’s. “We already know that Toutatis will not hit Earth for hundreds of years,” says Lance Benner of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program. “These new observations will allow us to predict the asteroid’s trajectory even farther into the future.” Toutatis would inflict devastating damage if it slammed into Earth, perhaps extinguishing human civilization. The asteroid thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was about 6 miles wide, researchers say.The fact that 2012 XE5 was discovered only a few days before the encounter prompted Minnesota Public Radio to poll its listeners with the following question: If an asteroid were to strike Earth within an hour, would you want to know?"

Comment Re:If we're going to survive long term (Score 1) 352

by Master Moose (#42247263) Attached to: I'd like us to explore with greatest emphasis ...

Agreed.

Knowledge and Intelligence are two separate but related things. Just because you are smart, doesn't mean you know Jack and Just because you know about Jack, doesn't make you smart.

As a kid, I would always get frustrated when watching some sitcom or cartoon and then the episode would occur when one of the characters would get hit on the head/walk into the lab at the wrong time... and invariably end up with greater intelligence. This in itself was not the annoying piece - It was how they would demonstrate this new found intelligence by having the character speak with a posh accent and use verbose technical jargon whilst spouting off facts off the top of their heads. . . All of this without ever having the opportunity to learn these new words or facts.

They were intelligent now because they magically knew things, not because of their ability to learn and apply knowledge

Comment Re:Damn... (Score 1) 602

by Master Moose (#42171969) Attached to: No More "Asperger's Syndrome"

Ahhh to go back and have the full Amiga superiority complex again (actually, do we ever rid ourselves of it - I know I haven't)

Laughing at the EGA and VGA screens of the IBM compatibles in the computer stores when we knew our machines were at home displaying 4096 colors (not that we ever mentioned the fringing)

Oh and not to mention HAM8 with the AGA processor. Just as those IBM users (we did not start calling them P.Cs for some time) were catching up gave us something else to boast about.

And then Commodore went and stuffed it up. The idiots went broke on us. This was the biggest ego blow of all

Comment Re:Why would it matter? (Score 1) 604

by Master Moose (#42108691) Attached to: How Do We Program Moral Machines?

Agreed. Basic rules to save driving:

If you cannot safely stop in the visible distance between you and any obstacle, you are going to fast.

This includes being able to stop if that vehicle in-front of you suddenly stops.
This includes being able to stop should there be a boulder in the middle of the road just just over that rise, or around that corner.

So long as safe distances and speeds were observed, many incidents could be avoided. If all vehicles are "aware" of all other vehicles in their area and possibly connected by some "hive" mind there should be less.

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