If they're spending money lobbying local politicians to write favorable housing policy, they should all be fired for incompetence, because none of it is working.
More often than not, companies lobby for public policy which is favorable to the company, not necessarily favorable to the employees, neighbors, and communities which they are present in.
I disagree. Games like Dota 2 and League of Legends are filling sports stadiums and giving out multi-million dollar prize pools these days. If anything, at least in the United States, they are on the rise.
Using feature detectors and descriptors is only half of the solution. If you really want robust image recognition you need to use something like the vocabulary tree developed by Nister[1][2].
One of the coolest approaches I've seen does some cool inference on fully connected Conditional Random Fields via high-dimensional filtering. Amazing results.
I believe the fundamental difference is that the time to get to null-sec in EVE (the actual interesting component of the game that generates strong narratives) takes a significant time investment from the player. Leveling up skills, purchasing ships, and developing knowledge of the game are fairly tedious.
In comparison, you can get thrown into interesting situations from the get-go in DayZ. Basic FPS skills and a little knowledge of the clunky interface are all you need to generate strong player narratives. Whereas you make need several weeks to months to motivate an interesting experience in EvE, DayZ only requires a time investment of a couple hours (maybe).
Sure! My lab focuses on SLAM and 3D reconstruction, especially for robotic applications. We've developed a BSD-licensed C++ (w/ MATLAB wrapper) library with specific applications towards 3D reconstruction problems such as SLAM and structure from motion. It's called GTSAM [1]
We actively maintain and release new features as they are published. While we don't provide a full out of the box pipeline (yet!), there are plenty of examples and documentation which walk you though the math, implementation, and other issues. If you want to read about the graphical models underlying GTSAM, see [2]
Utilizing OpenCV for feature detection and association is pretty much all you really need to add to a program in order to recreate Photosynth using gtsam. I'd also you recommend KAZE features from a former post-doc out of our lab, it's state of the art and recently added OpenCV wrappers[3]. However, it's also trivial to integrate other sensors such as IMUs, GPS, lasers, etc. for full navigation problems.
If you wish to know more about the actual subject, I definitely recommend Hartley and Zisserman's Multiview Geometery Book[4]
do you think it would be possible and/or worth it to reconstruct a automotive road course? this is something i've always wanted to do. there's a ton of video online (though usually shot from inside the car.)
the one i spend the most time at is pretty flat, though. i suspect the green hills are hard to get a match on? here is an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyZcERAlBeE
I often go on rides around mountainous areas on my motorbike with a video camera attached to my helmet (some videos here http://www.youtube.com/user/slashtomeu/videos ). Since I carry a GPS as well, I've always wondered if I could reconstruct a 3D model of the landscape I ride around in.
I believe that most UAV designs for extra-terrestrial missions are designed around the use of airships rather than more traditional airplane or quadrotor designs. An example of initial research in the area is the Titan Aerobot [1]
Much though I love the idea of extraterrestrial airships, wouldn't an airship be even less effective than heavier-than-air machines in an incredibly thin atmosphere like Mars'?
Airships would be harder to make work on Mars, but once you have it working you would almost certainly be in a better position.
Also, Wolfram Alpha peggs the air pressure at 39km on earth, the height Felix Baumgartner jumped from, as 330 Pa. It has the atmospheric pressure on Mars (presumably the average at the surface) as 650 Pa. So balloons that will float in that, at least at a low altitude, are not beyond our engineering grasp. (and unmanned balloons on earth have gone down to as few as 55 Pa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon).
You are very right - I forgot to mention those. They tend to be a lot more feasible than fixed-wing aircraft, and their ability to land and take samples makes them even more useful.
