leonardward - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Good luck (Score 1) 1730

by leonardward on Thursday February 07, 2008 @11:39PM (#22344616) Attached to: Muslim Groups Attempt to Censor Wikipedia

Thank you for a concise, cogent posting that's utterly correct. That's "right" for you gray-world believers, who are thus "wrong." Since anything which could offend Christians is posted and published and promoted ad nauseum, we in the West shouldn't also be afraid to publish innocent pictures of Mohammed alongside so-called offensive ones (like the Danish cartoons). ...better to stop now before the rant begins. -I indeed own a bunghole, so I own an opinion.

Researchers Reference Flocking Birds to Improve Swarmbots 62

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @07:26PM from the shine-your-shoes-while-composing-a-song dept.

inghamb87 writes "Scientists have studied flocks of starlings and cracked the mystery behind the birds' ability to fly in large formations, and regroup quickly after attacks, without getting confused and ramming into each other. While the information is cool, some scientists seem to think that the best use of this knowledge is not to aid our appreciation of nature, but to make more effective robot swarms. We've talked about swarming robots many times before, but usually researchers look to insects for inspiration."

Lawyer Puts $10k Bounty on Blogger's Identity 286

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 28, 2008 @07:11PM from the turn-yourself-in-for-ten-grand dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Raymond Niro of Niro Scavone Haller & Niro is fighting back against criticism from the Patent Troll Tracker blog by offering a $10,000 bounty for the identity of the person behind it. He thinks the blogger might work for Microsoft, Intel, or has connections to a 'serial infringer' and that could 'color' what they say."

Stanford's New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D 156

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 28, 2008 @05:46PM from the please-be-kind-to-their-servers dept.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Stanford has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new 3-d modeling system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own photos. The system can take a 2-d still image and estimate a detailed 3-d structure which you can navigate. "For each small homogeneous patch in the image, we use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to infer a set of "plane parameters" that capture both the 3-d location and 3-d orientation of the patch. The MRF, trained via supervised learning, models both image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene; this enables the algorithm to capture much more detailed 3-d structure than does prior art (such as Saxena et al., 2005, Delage et al., 2005, and Hoiem et el., 2005), and also give a much richer experience in the 3-d flythroughs created using image-based rendering, even for scenes with significant non-vertical structure."

Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight 69

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 28, 2008 @05:15PM from the not-time-to-duck-and-cover-just-yet dept.

jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."

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