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MIT Grad To Make Digital "SixthSense" Open Source
yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."
You may be disappointed to discover that the technology is more like multitouch gestures in the middle of the air with a projector. This has precious little to do with brain-computer interfaces of any kind.
The writer assumes this single example totally undermines the argument that "Open Source and Innovation are incompatible".
First, its a strawman argument. Nobody has said that innovation is incompatible with open source, at least no one has made a compelling case.
Second its a presumption of importance way beyond the merits of the case. It is neither the first nor the most important open-sourcing of a potentially lucrative idea.
This is Slashdot. You have to expect a certain amount of grandiosity in the story excerpts.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"put paid to" : ended, rendered obsolete, finished off, destroyed, etc.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/293200.html
"canard": groundless rumour or belief. http://cheetah.eb.com/dictionary/canard
True innovation takes effort. Effort costs money. Giving away your stuff isn't usually a good way to make money.
"Open source" efforts are generally quite effective at delivering answers to problems that are already well-understood and answered. Witness the whole Open-source UNIX phenomenon - UNIX was an long-standing operating system in the 1980s when it really started to gain steam, and it's downright ancient today. The problems of running a POSIX-style system are well understood.
The BASH shell and environment of today would be quite recognizable by any UNIX developer circa 1978.
Truly new ideas, however, are usually "held back" and kept proprietary for a while during which time the inventor/developer of the idea profits. After a while, the patent expires, and since the patent itself is public information, when it expires, that information is then added to the pool of general knowledge kept by society.
In its basic inception, patents are a good thing!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"put paid" -- to finish something off
"canard" -- a false or unfounded report or story
True. I showed my mother the video on the TED website and she (a physical therapist) immediately spotted it. She said it should be called the eigth sense. after accelleration, proprioception, and orientation. That last one is the wrong word because I forgot what it was called but I meant the sense of where you are relative to yourself (upside down, horizontal, etc)
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
"Put paid to" :To deal with effectively; to finish something off.
Meaning
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/293200.html
"Canard"
Meaning: a false or unfounded report or story
My backup chemistry thesis stored on Data Storing Bacteria mutated; granting me a degree in forensic anthropology. v4sw7
I'm personally more concerned that someone who went to MIT thinks that a technology that interacts with a person is a sense. For something to be a sense, in the accepted meaning of the word, it's going to have to convey information to a person's brain. And for it to be new, it's going to have to not use sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell.
If you follow it back to the original presentation (the "Demoed" link, you can see there is nothing even vaguely akin to a sense, although the head of the lab does use that term.
It is more like Microsoft Surface in a wearable form, sans the surface.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.