Comment Now this is the plan. (Score 1) 250
Get your ass to Mars!
Comment Re:Legos? (Score 2, Interesting) 241
What makes this different from Legos, pixelblocks, ASCII art, or even a JPEG image, is that the selection of pixels/pieces is predetermined, limited, and they must all be used to make the image. For all those other forms you're allowed to pick the closest color value for each pixel.
With this puzzle, supposing you did it manually, scanning row by row, and picking the best-fitting piece for each pixel. It'll look great at first, but soon you'll be running out of good matches and having to choose less and less optimal pieces; you can't say "give me a 45% with a sideways gradient" when you've used them all up. So the algorithm has to consider how to distribute all the pieces throughout the image for the optimum match.
Comment Re:love the name (Score 2, Interesting) 241
"Jigazo" means "self-portrait" in Japanese. Clever naming.
Submission + - "Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores in Japan (ameba.jp)
Riktov writes: I came across this at Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo.
This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 450
I regularly use a 133MHz, 48MB RAM laptop running an eight-year-old RedHat distribution, for programming for fun.
I've used it to work through Peter Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp" and SICP. Other than the compiler/interpreter setup, all I need is a bare-bones X window manager and Emacs.
Comment Re:Facebook has had an evil ToS for awhile (Score 1) 409
Yeah, yeah. You know what's another lazy form of protest? Stupid people who protest to show how much they disagree with the policy of their country's government. If they take such exception, they should stop being subject to the government by renouncing their citizenship and moving to another country. Sheesh.
Comment Re:Your modulo (Score 1) 1475
Two is, in fact, a somewhat magical number, and thus a legitimate condition for unions (of people or anything else). In a group of two, each member has one and only one partner.
What if an outside agency (such as the police) is in a situation of having to notify or otherwise grant some priviledge to a person's spouse in an emergency? If the person has multiple spouses, which should come first? If one can't be tracked down, how many more should be tried?
With just two people, one can't get jealous of the "other". Two or more can't conspire against others.
As every software tester should know, there are three classes of numbers: zero, one, and more than one. And a partnership by definition is one to one, not zero, no more than one.
Comment Re:Your modulo (Score 1) 1475
Why should marriage be tied to the issue of having children? The two acts are completely independent of each other, and an enlightened definition of marriage should thus pose no restrictions based on consanguinity. What if one or both are infertile?
Preventing inbred children is a legitimate concern, but that is, and should be, out the reach of marriage laws.
Comment Re:So, to solve the future of space travel (Score 1) 384
Yeah, after all everyone knows just how superior -- in terms of nutrition, environmental impact, and taste -- the typical Western diet (beef and processed everything) is, right?
We ought to be subsidizing McDonald's to provide meals in space.
Comment Re:America, for one, welcomes... (Score 1) 734
>> The other straws being waiting three hours in
>> security lines, having your baggage smashed by
>> pissed-off hispanic handlers,
I'm neither hispanic, nor a particular fan of airport baggage handlers, but as an American I say, by all means, take your ethnic stereotypes to other countries whose baggage handlers will most certainly appreciate them.
Comment Re:America, for one, welcomes... (Score 0) 734
Let's see, from your post I surmise that you are neither a EU citizen nor a US citizen.
So what is/was your citizenship? The Soviet Union? Some "non-aligned" African republic? (How many foreigners were able to enter The German Democratic Republic without a visa?!)
>They wont let me in the country, even if I
> have a visa, even if I answer all the
> intrusive questions they want to ask.
If you have a visa, doesn't that by definition mean they've agreed to let you in the country?
Comment Participating, yes. Watching, probably not. (Score 2, Insightful) 252
As the article says, the survey is about how many people participate in the sports and gaming. If you put it that way, probably more Americans play games than play basketball, more Japanese play games than play baseball. Not at all surprising.
But if someone says he's "in to football", chances are good that he's in to watching professional football, not playing it. Apparently only 3% of Swedes play hockey, but undoubtedly many many more watch it. I think even a lot of football fans would, if placed in front of a TV set, prefer to interact and be challenged by a game than passively watch a game. And either activity would be greatly preferred to actually going out and getting down in the dirt.
And nowhere does the article mention the amount of money spent on gaming vs. sports, and that's the conventional measure of how "big" something is. It's quite possible that gaming does take in more money, but probably not to the proportions reported here.
Photoshop Allows Us To Alter Our Memories 358
Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."
Nuclear Warhead Blueprints On Smugglers' Computers 637
imrehg links to a story at the Guardian which begins "Blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead have been found in the computers of the world's most notorious nuclear-smuggling racket, according to a leading US researcher. The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, but investigators fear they could have been extensively copied and sold to 'rogue' states via the nuclear black market." Reader this great guy links to the New York Times article on the discovery, and asks "Given that
Khan's revelations were made in early 2004, does that mean it took the IAEA
1-2 years to brute-force the encryption?"
Cassini 'Tastes' Organic Material at Enceladus 70
Riding with Robots writes "As previously reported, the robotic spacecraft Cassini recently flew through the mysterious geyser plumes at Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Today, NASA released the preliminary results of the flyby, including some intriguing findings, such as organic materials 20 times denser than expected and relatively high temperatures along the fissures where the geysers emanate. 'These spectacular new data will really help us understand what powers the geysers. The surprisingly high temperatures make it more likely that there's liquid water not far below the surface,' said one mission scientist."
