And also the world leader in installed wind & solar power. They even planted the most trees. China is the biggest in a lot of things, but at least they're not sitting on their arses blaming the US for some global climate conspiracy theory. They learned from experience where witch hunts get you.
If you genuinely want to know what to *do* about climate change, don't you think it would be helpful to better know exactly how it's going to happen, along with where, when, and of course how much? So we can predict in detail what will happen, and prepare appropriately for it. You do want to use your mitigation and adaption budget as effectively as possible, right?
Geothermal: 45.0 Advanced Gas CC: 57.2 Wind: 64.5 Hydroelectric: 67.8 Solar PV: 84.7 Advanced Gas CC with CCS: 84.8 Biomass: 96.1 Advanced Nuclear: 102.8 Advanced Coal with CCS: 139.5 Wind (Offshore): 158.1 Solar Thermal: 235.9
Total levelised cost values in 2015 dollars per MWh, not including tax credits.
What promises? Are you sure you haven't confused the artificial hype from the countless media stories with actual claims from Magic Leap themselves? They have never publicly announced a release date or a product, and have only ever dropped vague hints about their technology.
Even large companies like google, Qualcomm and Intel regularly invest in things that bomb.
How often do those companies invest hundreds of millions in relatively-unknown startups?
You forgot the 'IMHO'. HTC and Oculus have an entirely different product (VR not AR, and the usual single-focus-plane display that has the same accommodation/vergence conflict that all the others do, including Microsoft), so unless ML have to give up on their lightfield approach altogether, then they're really not comparable.
Time will tell, but until it does, it's far too early to write them off completely. They have enough backing to sustain a lot more research and engineering if required.
You're welcome to your own opinion, but my point is that the opinion of the far-better-informed investors is rather more credible. The number of years you've been hearing about it is not particularly relevant to the feasibility of the product.
the headset they actually have is the size of a helmet
Sure, that's a working prototype - the one that performs the lightfield projections that (AFAIK) no other company has demonstrated anything close to (NVIDIA have showed a low-res display-only system, and Microsoft's Hololens, while impressive in many ways, uses ordinary LCD displays rather than lightfields or holograms). The sunglasses are the production target, and they're still finding the best engineering process to get a reasonable display squeezed into that form. It's not some surprising revelation that they've hit the occasional roadbump along the way.
the demo they posted on youtube over a year ago... was actually made with film studio special effects
The one with the big Weta logo in the corner? What a shock:-) If you want a reliable picture of what it can currently do, look instead at the videos that actually claim to be shot through the Magic Leap equipment.
there wouldn't be any need for this level of wierd cloak and dagger secrecy
The secrecy was precisely to manage the expectations of the inevitable "hype machine". You may have noticed; the internet has this tendency to blow things out of proportion, both positive and negative.
Incidentally, while I believe they genuinely do have some interesting technology, and am looking forward to what they (eventually) come out with, I'm not expecting magic, nor anything shipped in the next couple of years. For a well-informed and balanced (yet somewhat critical) look at what we know of Magic Leap's technology, the best I've is on Karl Guttag's blog.
Except they have more than hot air; they have genuinely interesting technology. I say this with some confidence because of *who* invested, and how much. You don't get the likes of Google, Qualcomm and Intel to toss you hundreds of millions with nothing more than a video with a Weta logo on it.
Granted they do not have a shippable product, and may still be some distance from one. This is not unusual. But magically leaping to the conclusion that he will *never* have one is certainly premature.
I've found it fascinating to see how readily the masses will seize upon any hint of criticism no matter how thin, and crow about how they knew it all along, any idiot could see it, and all those investors who had direct access to the engineers and early prototypes are obvious dupes with a fraction the sense of random commentors on the internet. Why are people so much more willing to believe a clickbait headline these days? Is it deep-seated anger about their own situation that drives them to believe the worst they hear about others?
It always amazes me how some are so astoundingly oblivious that they can post "just find another job!", as if it might never have even occurred to the person to consider something different. It invariably never seems to occur to them that, shitty as that person's job is, if they're still doing it then all the other options must be even worse.
New services don't have to pay off directly or immediately. The only value they need to offer Google is to encourage customers to also use their other services, many of which *are* monetised, or they may figure out a way to get more direct value from it later. If neither turns out to be the case, they eventually discontinue it.
Nobody is required to use this, but I'm having difficulty seeing what new privacy-destroying features it adds. Any company that syncs your contact list already has your friend network, and if that company also offers location services (or even just sees your IP) then they already know where you are.
Can you be specific? I just rewatched the two videos on the Steam page, and apart from a number of minor graphical differences, there was nothing in there that I haven't seen in some form while playing the game. Caves, megafauna, alien monoliths, space battles over huge freighters, trading posts, walker robots, space stations - everything's in there.
Well, there were sub-second shots of a large beast pushing trees aside and what looked like a crashed freighter - not seen those, but they were only shown briefly as set decoration, not gameplay-related.
Leaving aside that the vast majority of the so-called "bullshit" in that video is purely subjective (e.g. "real" dinosaurs, "will you get bored") or trivial (e.g. a creature pushes aside trees), it's clear that nearly all the player grief stems from Murray's responses to questions about multiplayer - and the video shows those responses entirely out of all context.
I watched a lot of the original interviews at the time, and while Murray did on some occasions answer with tentative "yes" responses to questions like "can you play with your friends" and "can you grief other players ("kinda") - questions that could be ambiguously interpreted, but I agree he should certainly have answered differently - he also spent considerable time downplaying any suggestion of multiplayer, saying it's not that sort of game, it's not about playing with others, it's not designed for that, and anyway there'd be virtually zero chance of meeting other players anyway. You saw none of that in the video, which was obviously designed to pick over everything he said in hindsight and show it in the worst light.
I get that some people really wanted multiplayer in there, but that was never claimed on any marketing material, and Murray invariably tried to steer away from those questions if it came up in an interview. Personally I never thought for a moment that it was a multiplayer game in any sense, and was surprised by the backlash from people that wanted to think that it did. The reviews were certainly very clear that it was solo only.
To be accurate, coral bleaching is caused by environmental stress, as it said in my first link - and polluted water or heavy sedimentation are possible sources of stress. Even excessive freshwater can cause bleaching (which contributed in 2008 and 2011).
However, those are not the cause of this event, as my second link made quite clear.
Thank you Mr Coward. But while water quality does impact the health of the GBR in a few specific areas, it does not cause bleaching.
This is what AIMS has to say about recent bleaching events:
In 2016, record oceans temperatures have led to record widespread coral bleaching on Australian coral reefs. This bleaching is part of the ongoing third global bleaching event, declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2015.
Between February and May, the Great Barrier Reef experienced record warm sea surface temperatures. Extensive field surveys and aerial surveys found bleaching was the most widespread and severe in the Far Northern management area, between Cape York and Port Douglas. Here, bleaching intensity was ‘Severe’ (more than 60% community bleaching). Bleaching intensity decreased along a southerly gradient. While most reefs exhibited some degree of bleaching, this bleaching varied in intensity (from less than 10% to over 90% community bleaching) and was patchy throughout most of the management area.
The impact from this bleaching event, the most widespread and severe ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef, is still unfolding. Based on in-water monitoring surveys, overall coral mortality is (as of June 2016) at 22% for the entire Great Barrier Reef. Coral mortality is highest in the northern section. Post-bleaching reef monitoring surveys towards the end of the year will provide further clarity on the full extent of coral mortality.
And still no remedies could occur until after the damage had already been done. The pure Libertarian creed is no more effective in the real world than the pure Capitalist or pure Communist approaches; there's far too many exploitable corner cases.
So your solution to corporate pollution is rescind all the regulations that currently prevent them, disband the organisation that enforces those regulations, wait until after the newly-unrestrained corporations have inevitably polluted everything nearby - then hope some nearby affected citizen is willing & and able to fight them in the civil courts (hopefully with sufficient legal resources to match the corporate legal team), then winning convincingly enough to a) stop them polluting, b) force them to clean everything all up & fully compensate any affected parties (possibly for decades to come - assuming they don't go bankrupt beforehand), and c) recover all legal costs on top of all that. Then go through the whole process again the next time some random company decides it's cheaper to pollute.
Oh absolutely some people are fine with it, and I agree many can build good tolerance, with graduated regular exposure. I'm certainly not arguing that decoupled motion should never be offered even as an option. I've been playing FPS games since the late 80s and I've built some tolerance, but I've seen people manage both more motion and a lot less, when playing in VR. There's been a great deal of research into this over the last couple of year, and susceptibility can vary widely.
Comes down to the fact that if your FPS game uses the same instant accelerations & strafing that FPS games traditionally love to do then you're going to significantly limit your customer base in VR, unless you can also provide a scheme that lets them start playing comfortably and get used to more over time.
And now you can get an Eneloop Pro AA in 2500 mAh capacities, with far lower leakage & more lifetime cycles than anything from those days. And D-cells go up to 11,000 mAh.
It really isn't. While some people are fine with any decoupled motion, moving the camera sideways or backwards in VR is the easily fastest way to make a lot of people immediately queasy. Restricting it to forward & occasional rotational movement (with an "instant spin 180" button) is significantly more tolerable, particularly if you ensure all accelerations are low, but many will still find that uncomfortable before long. Putting a static frame around the view helps a lot (like a cockpit, or Google Earth VR's "tunnel vision" approach), but a few can't even handle that much. A teleport mechanic is the only way I know to get more or less universal acceptability.
It's interesting to note that Doom 3 BFG was originally promised as a bundled game with the Oculus Rift DK1, but that deal fell through. No word if that was due to the movement issue or the current Zenimax lawsuit, however.
And every article there's at least one comment grumbling that they don't have it now.
You already have batteries that are triple the capacity of the 1050mAh Li-Ions used in old Nokia phones, and dramatically better than the 30-minute talk-times of the original DynaTAC bricks. "Breakthroughs" in the lab can take many years to reach consumer products; silicon nanowire anodes were developed in 2007, but are only now reaching factories - and will take a couple more years before they scale capacity enough to be usable by major phone vendors.
There's an excellent discussion here about the legal meaning of Highsmith's Instrument of Gift.
There's a number of contradictory clauses in it, maybe three possible interpretations of what she intended, but one of them is indeed "full public domain" as apparently the court decided.
Look how much effort China puts into censoring the internet. Are they willing to go to those lengths? And 'subversive' information still gets through pretty easily, for anyone that wants it enough.
That said, basic restrictions can discourage casual browsers, average people that aren't invested enough to try to circumvent the blocks. Then again, that's almost never the group that caused the problem they're trying to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
He had to be restrained from using his own Twitter account. That sounds much more like 'moron' than 'con man' to me.
From careful scanning of TFS, about 6 MW each, though it would also convert a bit of the wind's speed to heat. Does that help?
And also the world leader in installed wind & solar power. They even planted the most trees. China is the biggest in a lot of things, but at least they're not sitting on their arses blaming the US for some global climate conspiracy theory. They learned from experience where witch hunts get you.
If you genuinely want to know what to *do* about climate change, don't you think it would be helpful to better know exactly how it's going to happen, along with where, when, and of course how much? So we can predict in detail what will happen, and prepare appropriately for it. You do want to use your mitigation and adaption budget as effectively as possible, right?
Please cite facts on solar energy vs. coal vs. CCNG vs. Wind
Sure. See Table 1b in this EIA report. To summarise:
Geothermal: 45.0
Advanced Gas CC: 57.2
Wind: 64.5
Hydroelectric: 67.8
Solar PV: 84.7
Advanced Gas CC with CCS: 84.8
Biomass: 96.1
Advanced Nuclear: 102.8
Advanced Coal with CCS: 139.5
Wind (Offshore): 158.1
Solar Thermal: 235.9
Total levelised cost values in 2015 dollars per MWh, not including tax credits.
Magic leap has been promised for years now
What promises? Are you sure you haven't confused the artificial hype from the countless media stories with actual claims from Magic Leap themselves? They have never publicly announced a release date or a product, and have only ever dropped vague hints about their technology.
Even large companies like google, Qualcomm and Intel regularly invest in things that bomb.
How often do those companies invest hundreds of millions in relatively-unknown startups?
You forgot the 'IMHO'. HTC and Oculus have an entirely different product (VR not AR, and the usual single-focus-plane display that has the same accommodation/vergence conflict that all the others do, including Microsoft), so unless ML have to give up on their lightfield approach altogether, then they're really not comparable.
Time will tell, but until it does, it's far too early to write them off completely. They have enough backing to sustain a lot more research and engineering if required.
IMHO
You're welcome to your own opinion, but my point is that the opinion of the far-better-informed investors is rather more credible. The number of years you've been hearing about it is not particularly relevant to the feasibility of the product.
the headset they actually have is the size of a helmet
Sure, that's a working prototype - the one that performs the lightfield projections that (AFAIK) no other company has demonstrated anything close to (NVIDIA have showed a low-res display-only system, and Microsoft's Hololens, while impressive in many ways, uses ordinary LCD displays rather than lightfields or holograms). The sunglasses are the production target, and they're still finding the best engineering process to get a reasonable display squeezed into that form. It's not some surprising revelation that they've hit the occasional roadbump along the way.
the demo they posted on youtube over a year ago ... was actually made with film studio special effects
The one with the big Weta logo in the corner? What a shock :-) If you want a reliable picture of what it can currently do, look instead at the videos that actually claim to be shot through the Magic Leap equipment.
there wouldn't be any need for this level of wierd cloak and dagger secrecy
The secrecy was precisely to manage the expectations of the inevitable "hype machine". You may have noticed; the internet has this tendency to blow things out of proportion, both positive and negative.
Incidentally, while I believe they genuinely do have some interesting technology, and am looking forward to what they (eventually) come out with, I'm not expecting magic, nor anything shipped in the next couple of years. For a well-informed and balanced (yet somewhat critical) look at what we know of Magic Leap's technology, the best I've is on Karl Guttag's blog.
Except they have more than hot air; they have genuinely interesting technology. I say this with some confidence because of *who* invested, and how much. You don't get the likes of Google, Qualcomm and Intel to toss you hundreds of millions with nothing more than a video with a Weta logo on it.
Granted they do not have a shippable product, and may still be some distance from one. This is not unusual. But magically leaping to the conclusion that he will *never* have one is certainly premature.
I've found it fascinating to see how readily the masses will seize upon any hint of criticism no matter how thin, and crow about how they knew it all along, any idiot could see it, and all those investors who had direct access to the engineers and early prototypes are obvious dupes with a fraction the sense of random commentors on the internet. Why are people so much more willing to believe a clickbait headline these days? Is it deep-seated anger about their own situation that drives them to believe the worst they hear about others?
The whoosh is strong with this one.
It always amazes me how some are so astoundingly oblivious that they can post "just find another job!", as if it might never have even occurred to the person to consider something different. It invariably never seems to occur to them that, shitty as that person's job is, if they're still doing it then all the other options must be even worse.
New services don't have to pay off directly or immediately. The only value they need to offer Google is to encourage customers to also use their other services, many of which *are* monetised, or they may figure out a way to get more direct value from it later. If neither turns out to be the case, they eventually discontinue it.
Nobody is required to use this, but I'm having difficulty seeing what new privacy-destroying features it adds. Any company that syncs your contact list already has your friend network, and if that company also offers location services (or even just sees your IP) then they already know where you are.
It's also worth noting that butyric acid is the main source of the smell of human vomit.
Can you be specific? I just rewatched the two videos on the Steam page, and apart from a number of minor graphical differences, there was nothing in there that I haven't seen in some form while playing the game. Caves, megafauna, alien monoliths, space battles over huge freighters, trading posts, walker robots, space stations - everything's in there.
Well, there were sub-second shots of a large beast pushing trees aside and what looked like a crashed freighter - not seen those, but they were only shown briefly as set decoration, not gameplay-related.
Leaving aside that the vast majority of the so-called "bullshit" in that video is purely subjective (e.g. "real" dinosaurs, "will you get bored") or trivial (e.g. a creature pushes aside trees), it's clear that nearly all the player grief stems from Murray's responses to questions about multiplayer - and the video shows those responses entirely out of all context.
I watched a lot of the original interviews at the time, and while Murray did on some occasions answer with tentative "yes" responses to questions like "can you play with your friends" and "can you grief other players ("kinda") - questions that could be ambiguously interpreted, but I agree he should certainly have answered differently - he also spent considerable time downplaying any suggestion of multiplayer, saying it's not that sort of game, it's not about playing with others, it's not designed for that, and anyway there'd be virtually zero chance of meeting other players anyway. You saw none of that in the video, which was obviously designed to pick over everything he said in hindsight and show it in the worst light.
I get that some people really wanted multiplayer in there, but that was never claimed on any marketing material, and Murray invariably tried to steer away from those questions if it came up in an interview. Personally I never thought for a moment that it was a multiplayer game in any sense, and was surprised by the backlash from people that wanted to think that it did. The reviews were certainly very clear that it was solo only.
To be accurate, coral bleaching is caused by environmental stress, as it said in my first link - and polluted water or heavy sedimentation are possible sources of stress. Even excessive freshwater can cause bleaching (which contributed in 2008 and 2011).
However, those are not the cause of this event, as my second link made quite clear.
Thank you Mr Coward. But while water quality does impact the health of the GBR in a few specific areas, it does not cause bleaching.
This is what AIMS has to say about recent bleaching events:
In 2016, record oceans temperatures have led to record widespread coral bleaching on Australian coral reefs. This bleaching is part of the ongoing third global bleaching event, declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2015.
Between February and May, the Great Barrier Reef experienced record warm sea surface temperatures. Extensive field surveys and aerial surveys found bleaching was the most widespread and severe in the Far Northern management area, between Cape York and Port Douglas. Here, bleaching intensity was ‘Severe’ (more than 60% community bleaching). Bleaching intensity decreased along a southerly gradient. While most reefs exhibited some degree of bleaching, this bleaching varied in intensity (from less than 10% to over 90% community bleaching) and was patchy throughout most of the management area.
The impact from this bleaching event, the most widespread and severe ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef, is still unfolding. Based on in-water monitoring surveys, overall coral mortality is (as of June 2016) at 22% for the entire Great Barrier Reef. Coral mortality is highest in the northern section. Post-bleaching reef monitoring surveys towards the end of the year will provide further clarity on the full extent of coral mortality.
And still no remedies could occur until after the damage had already been done. The pure Libertarian creed is no more effective in the real world than the pure Capitalist or pure Communist approaches; there's far too many exploitable corner cases.
So your solution to corporate pollution is rescind all the regulations that currently prevent them, disband the organisation that enforces those regulations, wait until after the newly-unrestrained corporations have inevitably polluted everything nearby - then hope some nearby affected citizen is willing & and able to fight them in the civil courts (hopefully with sufficient legal resources to match the corporate legal team), then winning convincingly enough to a) stop them polluting, b) force them to clean everything all up & fully compensate any affected parties (possibly for decades to come - assuming they don't go bankrupt beforehand), and c) recover all legal costs on top of all that. Then go through the whole process again the next time some random company decides it's cheaper to pollute.
Oh absolutely some people are fine with it, and I agree many can build good tolerance, with graduated regular exposure. I'm certainly not arguing that decoupled motion should never be offered even as an option. I've been playing FPS games since the late 80s and I've built some tolerance, but I've seen people manage both more motion and a lot less, when playing in VR. There's been a great deal of research into this over the last couple of year, and susceptibility can vary widely.
Comes down to the fact that if your FPS game uses the same instant accelerations & strafing that FPS games traditionally love to do then you're going to significantly limit your customer base in VR, unless you can also provide a scheme that lets them start playing comfortably and get used to more over time.
And now you can get an Eneloop Pro AA in 2500 mAh capacities, with far lower leakage & more lifetime cycles than anything from those days. And D-cells go up to 11,000 mAh.
It really isn't. While some people are fine with any decoupled motion, moving the camera sideways or backwards in VR is the easily fastest way to make a lot of people immediately queasy. Restricting it to forward & occasional rotational movement (with an "instant spin 180" button) is significantly more tolerable, particularly if you ensure all accelerations are low, but many will still find that uncomfortable before long. Putting a static frame around the view helps a lot (like a cockpit, or Google Earth VR's "tunnel vision" approach), but a few can't even handle that much. A teleport mechanic is the only way I know to get more or less universal acceptability.
It's interesting to note that Doom 3 BFG was originally promised as a bundled game with the Oculus Rift DK1, but that deal fell through. No word if that was due to the movement issue or the current Zenimax lawsuit, however.
And every article there's at least one comment grumbling that they don't have it now.
You already have batteries that are triple the capacity of the 1050mAh Li-Ions used in old Nokia phones, and dramatically better than the 30-minute talk-times of the original DynaTAC bricks. "Breakthroughs" in the lab can take many years to reach consumer products; silicon nanowire anodes were developed in 2007, but are only now reaching factories - and will take a couple more years before they scale capacity enough to be usable by major phone vendors.
There's an excellent discussion here about the legal meaning of Highsmith's Instrument of Gift.
There's a number of contradictory clauses in it, maybe three possible interpretations of what she intended, but one of them is indeed "full public domain" as apparently the court decided.
Look how much effort China puts into censoring the internet. Are they willing to go to those lengths? And 'subversive' information still gets through pretty easily, for anyone that wants it enough.
That said, basic restrictions can discourage casual browsers, average people that aren't invested enough to try to circumvent the blocks. Then again, that's almost never the group that caused the problem they're trying to fix.
Sure it will. Note the Live/Typical traffic box at the bottom.