Posts by falsedan

BBC: Monster cargo ship delivers '863 million tins of baked beans'

earth to moon is a bit further that reported ...

closest around 350,000km, not 350km

Max Headroom style fake celebrity avatar plan seeks Kickfunding

Re: Without solving the human-level AI problem?

Facial puppetry already exists, in real-time too.

http://machin-x.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/facial-puppetry-face-tracking-and.html

http://www.hao-li.com/publications/movies/siggraph2011video.mov

BTW I recommend browsing through the SIGGRAPH videos every August.

Hong Kong visitors get all-in-one guidebook and phone

Re: Calls to mobiles

"Called party pays" is pretty unusual. Probably the restriction on free calls reflects which carriers have agreed to colo their VoIP digiboxs, and the peering arrangements their sales guys have wrangled.

Re: Calls to mobiles

The US was the first country to use cell phones, so there were no best practices for them to follow (like not calling them 'cell' phones…). One of the common best practices that the US didn't follow is with numbering: when you signed a cell phone contract, you were assigned a geographical number e.g. if you signed the contract in Houston, your cell number was in the 713 area code.

The advantage was you could get a home and cell number that were very similar (i.e. xxx1 for home, xxx2 for cell). The disadvantage was that callers could not tell if a given number was a cell or not, and thus would be outraged if what they thought was a local call ended up costing them tens of dollars.

The telcos avoided this situation by pushing the increased cost onto the cell phone contract, so that callers would always be charged the same rate for geo-like numbers, and cell phone subscribers would pay to accept calls.

US Navy in new electromagnetic railgun milestone

Speed kills.

Smart projectiles; also battleships have enormous inertia and tend not to significantly bob.

US rocketeer thunders to 121,000ft

3 main problems to overcome

1. control surfaces and flight control software are non-trivial

2. need a highly insensate, low weight, high energy payload (this will probably be toxic, difficult to manufacture, or supply is tightly controlled)

3. budget would have been in excess of USD$100k; a Tomahawk costs USD$570k ( which is within the same order of magnitude and has already solved problem 1 & 2 )

Call routing scam costs telcos $150m a year

ah, grey routes

Glad someone mentioned carousels.