1. If nothing else, you (or a friend) can create a new account every year.
2. If your app is so good that all your friends are using it month after month, why not submit it to the store? There's 150,000 apps on there; Apple rejects only a small fraction (and mostly for justifiable reasons). Hell, you might even make a few bucks. Otherwise, signing an app three times a year is no huge burden.
3. It's $99 divided by the number of devices. If this had existed back in the day, local user groups would have been signing up for shared accounts right and left and splitting the cost. $99 a year divided by up to 100 devices is damn cheap.
Maybe it's because I remember the days when people built computers in their garages, but it's hard to believe that in 30 years we've gone from hobbyists investing thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to make home computing possible, to geeks spending their time whining about the end of computers as a hobby because one company wants a few bucks to develop on a few handheld devices. What a difference a generation makes.
Or you could, you know, pay a whole $99 for the iPhone dev program, which lets you and your friends run non-Apple-approved code on up to 100 devices running the iPhone OS.
So basically you're all bemoaning the loss of all your civil liberties because it costs 99 cents to run programs you've written on a device that has a tiny share of the computing market and no one is forcing you to buy in the first place.
IMHO "uncanny valley" just means "robotics engineers don't understand people". Whether we feel comfortable interacting with something has little to do with whether it visually approximates Homo Sapiens: Humans relate to other species all the time. Animated movies and TV shows are full of characters that don't resemble humans at all. A long scene in the movie A.I. of an android grotesquerie that should epitomize the "uncanny valley" elicits sympathy, not fear. Why are these characters so easy to relate to? We empathize with them.
A fundamental ability of the brain is to relate to the minds of others. We call it "Theory of Mind", "empathy", or even "anthropomorphizing", though it's not a trait limited to humans. Social animals use it to maintain relationships. Predators and prey learn to predict each others' actions. On some level, our brain takes everything it percieves and tries to create a model to map its behavior to our own. The easier a thing's behavior is to understand, the more comfortable we feel. The harder a thing's behavior is to understand and predict, the more uneasy we become. Animators, storytellers, playwrights, and cartoonists learned long ago that the best way to make an audience comfortable with a character is not to create a convincing human but to create convincingly human mannerisms. They focus on the things humans look at in other humans: The shape of a mouth, the position of an eyebrow, a squint, the speed of a movement, the direction a gaze, a particular choice of words, an instinctive reaction; in other words, all the little things we subconsciously do to tell other humans what we are thinking. By replicating (and exaggerating) the mannerisms and behaviors of a human, you can portray a convincingly "human" character with a trash compactor and a pair of binoculars.
Unfortunately, the field of robotics hasn't caught up. Humans don't relate to today's androids, because they just don't have mannerisms we can relate to. Current "androids" are at best vaguely aware of the world, and uncoordinated in their interaction with it. If they are able to interact with humans at all they do so in a very limited manner, responding with incoherent, irrelevant, or parroted information, and their attempts at "emotion" or "human behavior" are artificial and hollow. We're unable to subconsciously translate their behaviors into our equivalents, as they are generated by algorithms that are structured very differently from our brains. Being with an android is more like being with an individual suffering some form of profound dementia.
Of course, there's no easy way to make robots interact fluently with us. Our abilities are too limited at the moment; we probably won't have "comfortable" androids until AI has taken a few huge leaps ahead. But all the uncanny valley really comes down to is that you can't simply make a robot that looks human without the mannerisms to go with it. In fact, the more organic a machine appears the harder it becomes to think of it as just a piece of equipment, so natural behavior becomes all the more critical.
Get a passport. If you're bright and have valuable skills, you'll be wanted somewhere.
On a related note, a country as industrialized as the United States won't simply collapse. It has enough manufacturing capability and natural resources that should the dollar collapse, it could still provide for itself in much the same way that China does now. In addition, a falling dollar could not only trigger dramatic cost-cutting from the federal government* but would most certainly cause a huge wave of "in-sourcing" as companies around the world take advantage of cheaper highly skilled labor. And most of the United States' debts are in the form of dollars, so if the dollar loses value, the debts become smaller in absolute terms.
Unregulated free markets tend to weather most any storm, as long as the people holding the big chips don't keep making stupid decisions. Properly managed and regulated markets smooth out the rough spots, but mismanaged markets tend to collapse violently. The "Great Depression" and most national economic collapses have been caused and prolonged primarily by political and financial leaders' ignorance of basic economic principles.
*(If the US Federal Government decided to only have a military twice as powerful as anyone else, raise the retirement age a few years, add a couple tariffs, and dump the current medicare/private industry system in favor of a cheaper universal health plan like every other first world country, the US would be rolling in cash. It may be political suicide today, but if Americans start to see financial disaster looming, a little belt-tightening will become a lot more acceptable.)
I think Apple just wants to prevent iControlPad or some other company patenting the idea first, as it would leave Apple with a bag of hurt if they wanted to create their own device later. If there is to be a controller accessory for the iPhone/iPod, it should be (from a pragmatic point of view) developed in-house and standardized, as you don't want every game to require a different accessory or have to support a dozen controller profiles.
IMO, it would be bad for everyone if the iControlPad did catch on, as it's simply a poor controller: The "new design" more than doubles the width of the iPhone/iPod, you have to reposition your hands to touch the screen, and it doesn't seem to give your other eight fingers anything to do. Considering the problems they mentioned getting it to work with various versions of the iPhone and iPod, I'm also not convinced it will work with the next OS or hardware version. It's nice to see an attempt, especially from hobbyists, but I wouldn't want it to become the standard game controller for Apple handhelds.
The iPad is not the iPod... the iPad doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It will fade into obscurity with all of the other ebook readers just like Palm PDAs did.
I agree. No Flash, and it holds less than most netbooks. As Apple inventions go, it's pretty lame.
As long as they aren't permanently logging vast amounts of unique information under the new system, I don't see a problem with it. It's not really any different from stationing a few police or FBI officers at an airport to watch for known criminals. And it's a hell of an improvement over government-mandated racial discrimination.
If they want to do random checks, and the airline/airport approves, well, they can do random checks. I don't see why people expect fourth-amendment protection when they're on someone else's private property. If I owned a plane and an airstrip, and I made the rule that no one could use my equipment without a strip search (your dirty mind!), you couldn't claim constitutional protection. After all, I'm not forcing you to reveal anything—you can turn right around and leave.
Yesiree, gimme them good ol' days when the TSA just screened all the brown folks, and the police just arrested all the blacks. We don't need no gub'mint peerin' into our lives, us upstandin' citizens!
This isn't "Clippy 2.0". This is applied AI research that's more than ten years from making it into any real product, and it's a field a lot of companies are researching. From what I've read so far it's really far too vague and generic for anyone to deserve a patent on it, but the patent will probably expire before Microsoft has the opportunity to sue anyone over it.
While this is of course theoretical, if you put all the "zero" bits on one server and the "one" bits on another, you could also achieve fantastic compression ratios.
Come to think of it, this gives me a great idea for a defragmentation program...
Google definitely doesn't run servers in catacombs deep beneath the Vatican. The rumors are completely false that they could have a distributed storage system hidden in the endless mists of Angel Falls. And it would be utterly absurd to think they maintain a datacenter at the L2 point 1.1 million kilometers beyond the Moon.
Yeah, it's weird. I'm not entriely clear as to what the shadows represent (except, maybe, for a helpful reminder as to what is "next" to you.)
I think that's the idea. It's hard to tell from the short video, but the blocky nature of the world implies to me that the game limits you to arbitrary "jumps" in each dimension. Just like the world could be divided into fixed-width planes in the X, Y, and Z dimensions, it looks like the W dimension is composed of distinct layers. Which would explain the shadows; they represent what would appear if you jumped to the next adjacent "slice" of 4d-space.
Today's XKCD might help a bit. It's a world that has four spatial dimensions, like a hypercube.
We haven't been able to find any evidence of "real" higher spatial dimensions (though theories abound), but thinking in an extra dimension is an interesting mental exercise nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you could try the first image result for "Dilbert ham radio"...
And while we're on a roll...
1. If nothing else, you (or a friend) can create a new account every year.
2. If your app is so good that all your friends are using it month after month, why not submit it to the store? There's 150,000 apps on there; Apple rejects only a small fraction (and mostly for justifiable reasons). Hell, you might even make a few bucks. Otherwise, signing an app three times a year is no huge burden.
3. It's $99 divided by the number of devices. If this had existed back in the day, local user groups would have been signing up for shared accounts right and left and splitting the cost. $99 a year divided by up to 100 devices is damn cheap.
Maybe it's because I remember the days when people built computers in their garages, but it's hard to believe that in 30 years we've gone from hobbyists investing thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to make home computing possible, to geeks spending their time whining about the end of computers as a hobby because one company wants a few bucks to develop on a few handheld devices. What a difference a generation makes.
Or you could, you know, pay a whole $99 for the iPhone dev program, which lets you and your friends run non-Apple-approved code on up to 100 devices running the iPhone OS.
So basically you're all bemoaning the loss of all your civil liberties because it costs 99 cents to run programs you've written on a device that has a tiny share of the computing market and no one is forcing you to buy in the first place.
IMHO "uncanny valley" just means "robotics engineers don't understand people". Whether we feel comfortable interacting with something has little to do with whether it visually approximates Homo Sapiens: Humans relate to other species all the time. Animated movies and TV shows are full of characters that don't resemble humans at all. A long scene in the movie A.I. of an android grotesquerie that should epitomize the "uncanny valley" elicits sympathy, not fear. Why are these characters so easy to relate to? We empathize with them.
A fundamental ability of the brain is to relate to the minds of others. We call it "Theory of Mind", "empathy", or even "anthropomorphizing", though it's not a trait limited to humans. Social animals use it to maintain relationships. Predators and prey learn to predict each others' actions. On some level, our brain takes everything it percieves and tries to create a model to map its behavior to our own. The easier a thing's behavior is to understand, the more comfortable we feel. The harder a thing's behavior is to understand and predict, the more uneasy we become. Animators, storytellers, playwrights, and cartoonists learned long ago that the best way to make an audience comfortable with a character is not to create a convincing human but to create convincingly human mannerisms. They focus on the things humans look at in other humans: The shape of a mouth, the position of an eyebrow, a squint, the speed of a movement, the direction a gaze, a particular choice of words, an instinctive reaction; in other words, all the little things we subconsciously do to tell other humans what we are thinking. By replicating (and exaggerating) the mannerisms and behaviors of a human, you can portray a convincingly "human" character with a trash compactor and a pair of binoculars.
Unfortunately, the field of robotics hasn't caught up. Humans don't relate to today's androids, because they just don't have mannerisms we can relate to. Current "androids" are at best vaguely aware of the world, and uncoordinated in their interaction with it. If they are able to interact with humans at all they do so in a very limited manner, responding with incoherent, irrelevant, or parroted information, and their attempts at "emotion" or "human behavior" are artificial and hollow. We're unable to subconsciously translate their behaviors into our equivalents, as they are generated by algorithms that are structured very differently from our brains. Being with an android is more like being with an individual suffering some form of profound dementia.
Of course, there's no easy way to make robots interact fluently with us. Our abilities are too limited at the moment; we probably won't have "comfortable" androids until AI has taken a few huge leaps ahead. But all the uncanny valley really comes down to is that you can't simply make a robot that looks human without the mannerisms to go with it. In fact, the more organic a machine appears the harder it becomes to think of it as just a piece of equipment, so natural behavior becomes all the more critical.
So true. Popularity is one of the worst ways to measure interest.
Get a passport. If you're bright and have valuable skills, you'll be wanted somewhere.
On a related note, a country as industrialized as the United States won't simply collapse. It has enough manufacturing capability and natural resources that should the dollar collapse, it could still provide for itself in much the same way that China does now. In addition, a falling dollar could not only trigger dramatic cost-cutting from the federal government* but would most certainly cause a huge wave of "in-sourcing" as companies around the world take advantage of cheaper highly skilled labor. And most of the United States' debts are in the form of dollars, so if the dollar loses value, the debts become smaller in absolute terms.
Unregulated free markets tend to weather most any storm, as long as the people holding the big chips don't keep making stupid decisions. Properly managed and regulated markets smooth out the rough spots, but mismanaged markets tend to collapse violently. The "Great Depression" and most national economic collapses have been caused and prolonged primarily by political and financial leaders' ignorance of basic economic principles.
*(If the US Federal Government decided to only have a military twice as powerful as anyone else, raise the retirement age a few years, add a couple tariffs, and dump the current medicare/private industry system in favor of a cheaper universal health plan like every other first world country, the US would be rolling in cash. It may be political suicide today, but if Americans start to see financial disaster looming, a little belt-tightening will become a lot more acceptable.)
I think Apple just wants to prevent iControlPad or some other company patenting the idea first, as it would leave Apple with a bag of hurt if they wanted to create their own device later. If there is to be a controller accessory for the iPhone/iPod, it should be (from a pragmatic point of view) developed in-house and standardized, as you don't want every game to require a different accessory or have to support a dozen controller profiles.
IMO, it would be bad for everyone if the iControlPad did catch on, as it's simply a poor controller: The "new design" more than doubles the width of the iPhone/iPod, you have to reposition your hands to touch the screen, and it doesn't seem to give your other eight fingers anything to do. Considering the problems they mentioned getting it to work with various versions of the iPhone and iPod, I'm also not convinced it will work with the next OS or hardware version. It's nice to see an attempt, especially from hobbyists, but I wouldn't want it to become the standard game controller for Apple handhelds.
Tron.
The iPad is not the iPod... the iPad doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It will fade into obscurity with all of the other ebook readers just like Palm PDAs did.
I agree. No Flash, and it holds less than most netbooks. As Apple inventions go, it's pretty lame.
As long as they aren't permanently logging vast amounts of unique information under the new system, I don't see a problem with it. It's not really any different from stationing a few police or FBI officers at an airport to watch for known criminals. And it's a hell of an improvement over government-mandated racial discrimination.
If they want to do random checks, and the airline/airport approves, well, they can do random checks. I don't see why people expect fourth-amendment protection when they're on someone else's private property. If I owned a plane and an airstrip, and I made the rule that no one could use my equipment without a strip search (your dirty mind!), you couldn't claim constitutional protection. After all, I'm not forcing you to reveal anything—you can turn right around and leave.
Yesiree, gimme them good ol' days when the TSA just screened all the brown folks, and the police just arrested all the blacks. We don't need no gub'mint peerin' into our lives, us upstandin' citizens!
Basically, they're going to do what they've been depicted as doing in every movie and TV show for the last fifty years: ACTUAL DETECTIVE WORK. Crazy!
Heh, I just got it. Took me a while.
and "reddit", though that's in the released source.
(most taken from the xkcd forum thread)
of course, (sudo) make me a sandwich
uname
su
sudo shutdown
sudo reboot
logout
pwd
lpr
clear
rm -rf /
find kitten
buy stuff
echo
finger
goto
date
irc/wget/curl
wget/curl xkcd.com
ping
vi/vim/emacs/nano
apt-get (moo)
sudo apt-get (update/upgrade/dist-upgrade)
moo
hello (joshua)
man (help) (cat) (last) (next)
go (west) (east) (south) (north)
look
light (lamp)
xyzzy
whoami
i read the source code
asl
cheat
buy stuff
stop reading Slashdot for the day.
Ah, I remember when I could do that.
This isn't "Clippy 2.0". This is applied AI research that's more than ten years from making it into any real product, and it's a field a lot of companies are researching. From what I've read so far it's really far too vague and generic for anyone to deserve a patent on it, but the patent will probably expire before Microsoft has the opportunity to sue anyone over it.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HiRISE_face.jpg
My God! It looks nothing like any face I've ever seen! Obviously the beings who created it possess an intelligence entirely unlike our own!
Only half the bits are on one server vs. another
While this is of course theoretical, if you put all the "zero" bits on one server and the "one" bits on another, you could also achieve fantastic compression ratios.
Come to think of it, this gives me a great idea for a defragmentation program...
Google definitely doesn't run servers in catacombs deep beneath the Vatican. The rumors are completely false that they could have a distributed storage system hidden in the endless mists of Angel Falls. And it would be utterly absurd to think they maintain a datacenter at the L2 point 1.1 million kilometers beyond the Moon.
Already done.
Maybe Google even sent them a link.
Yeah, it's weird. I'm not entriely clear as to what the shadows represent (except, maybe, for a helpful reminder as to what is "next" to you.)
I think that's the idea. It's hard to tell from the short video, but the blocky nature of the world implies to me that the game limits you to arbitrary "jumps" in each dimension. Just like the world could be divided into fixed-width planes in the X, Y, and Z dimensions, it looks like the W dimension is composed of distinct layers. Which would explain the shadows; they represent what would appear if you jumped to the next adjacent "slice" of 4d-space.
Today's XKCD might help a bit. It's a world that has four spatial dimensions, like a hypercube.
We haven't been able to find any evidence of "real" higher spatial dimensions (though theories abound), but thinking in an extra dimension is an interesting mental exercise nonetheless.
s/think/su