Posted on 01/28/2009 10:29:13 AM PST by Domandred
Transportation officials in Texas are scrambling to prevent hackers from changing messages on digital road signs after one sign in Austin was altered to read, "Zombies Ahead."
Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation, confirmed that a portable traffic sign at Lamar Boulevard and West 15th Street, near the University of Texas at Austin, was hacked into during the early hours of Jan. 19.
"It was clever, kind of cute, but not what it was intended for," said Lippincott, who saw the sign during his morning commute. "Those signs are deployed for a reason — to improve traffic conditions, let folks know there's a road closure."
"It's sort of amusing, but not at all helpful," he told FOXNews.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Morning, all. Up and leaving for the airport soon. Not sure when I’ll be back; Sunday at the latest, in a probability. Take care of yourselves...
LOL
I always like to start the day with a cat. How are you?
Ovulating :O)
Well, get off the computer and ... you know ...
I have to go to Wal-mart.
I need to go to Walmart too...Wow did you see that Oprah is figuring out people actually shop and save at WALMART!!!!! Sheesh where has she been? LOL
We have huge over-the-road signs that the state of Illinois paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for. They just sit there, blank, 99% of the time.
Your tax dollars at work.
Have you ever used one?
The problem is that your inner ear and the ‘visual worlds’ orientation/motion don’t synch, you feel motion sick. Some people much worse then others.
Further, especially when using stereoscopic images, the fact that the eyes stay focused at a fixed distance while the parallax changes causes further discomfort.
Try one out and tell me it’s comfortable. Current models are much more expensive the my old one but the only improvements are in LCD quality and optics (both of which are really cheap on the old VFX1). Head tracking and frame rate were already ‘good enough’ (using a 1 gig CPU to run games designed for 200MHz).
Comfortable VR will require two improvements, one a breaktrough. Eye ball tracking, software focus object selection and zoom optics too keep the focal length appropriate is the less important, currently doable but uneconomic part. Tricking the inner ear is the part as yet impossible. I’m not all that comfortable with the prospect of putting current through my head to spoof motion, you first.
I practically live at Wal-mart. The cashiers ask me for advice about pregnancy and low-cost childrearing ;-).
I was at Wal-Mart this morning...
No one was there but me and the clerks and maybe two shoppers, so I read my list, got everything on it, and was out in 25 minutes....
I was all done with my errands before 9:00, and back home!!!
(I love it when it works this good!)
It was crowded at our Wal-mart at 1:00 pm. I saw several people I know from church. We’d also been to the bank.
Now I need to go sweep crumbs from the dining room floor, while Ash is out for a walk.
I do not understand this. You have a dog, but you still have crumbs on your dining room floor?
Your dog is deficient. Send it back for a warranty replacement.
She’s too big to get all the way under the dinner table and get all the debris from under the horizontal supports. Also, someone dropped a bunch of mechanical-pencil lead bits.
Stuff like dropping the spoon while stirring the chili, she’s great for. Slurp-slurp, and the floor’s clean. She even eats the chickpeas.
Thanks for your very thoughtful response. Of the two concerns you mentioned, I have perhaps lightly glossed over the matter of the visual delay problem, primarily because as a Myopic, it is something I've had to accommodate to periodically.
The way to minimize it might be to electronically generate the entire image, twice for each participant, and then select that portion of the image to feed each eye once the eye's focal point is determined. As you noted, eyeball tracking gear is extant, and not overly expensive. It is built into a number of cameras, allowing them to focus where the eye is looking in the scene.
An advantage for our application will be that by tracking the positions of two eyes, and comparing their angles, the focal distance can be derived quickly and accurately. This would allow the shifting of image distance you mentioned. As you said, doable.
In regard to the matter of fooling the inner ear, I agree that would be a challenge, and eventually game afficianados may wish to do such a dreadful thing.
For this application, I do not think it is necessary. We have our participant in a darkened booth, looking this way and that. This way, he sees other meeting guests. That way he sees the presenter. There should be no reason for his inner ear to disagree with his visual input.
For a "virtual reality" ski slope, it would indeed be a different matter.
My first approximation for such a mad concept would be a field of ultrasonic positioning pulses for microscopic, injectable, (and permanent), devices inside the vestibular canals. They would float freely, as our natural devices do, except when acted upon by gravity or acceleration. To overcome the natural, at rest feelings, the inner-ear devices would be maneuvered by the ultrasonic fields to give feelings of being turned this way and that.
It's possibly a workable scheme, at what expense I can't imagine, and I'm not sure whether the results would be useful enough to go forward with it.
About the only thing that speaks to its being useful is for training in flight scenarios deemed too risky for any other manner of gaining experience.
I would definitely not recommend using magnetic materials, unless they could be completely scavenged after the training, (and I would note in passing that magnetic materials would probably stand the best chance of being completely scavengable). That would make a simpler inner-ear "virtual acceleration" training mechanism.
The mechanical pencil lead-bits are harmless. They are only carbon and clay.
Actual pieces of the mechanical pencil would not be good for her.
Most toners in today’s copiers are eatable, well they are inert.
When we built our Fax Maxhine, we found out that the toner wasn't edible, it was carnivorous.
But she wouldn't eat them!
We have snow this morning. All the petz are annoyed. Anoreth's classes are cancelled. DP and I have been married 20 years today.
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