A) Caching B) Wifi C) Encryption D) Who cares? You've got everything you're likely to need stored on your device already.
Don't think of it as "my stuff lives in the cloud", think of it as "my stuff is synced with the cloud". With some local storage for caching, you only need a net connection occasionally for syncing & updating. That way, you only connect to the net when & how you want to (wifi, tethered 3G, whatever).
Some people are fine with cheap, thin clients needing more frequent net access, but all it takes to reduce that dependency is a few more local GBs and a decent syncing algorithm. I can still access my contacts, web albums etc on my phone even when I don't have any service. All the convenience of universal cloud access, and you can still carry most of it with you anywhere.
Right, the yet-unpublished O'Donnell paper - but still no more than the abstract so it's hard to comment, especially on a summary so obviously biased.
Doesn't seem like it changes the overall picture though. Some parts of Antarctica are warming, some are cooling, not much surprise there (happens everywhere) - but I noted there was apparently no challenge to the GRACE results showing significant and accelerating overall ice loss. That's something that will have a direct and increasing effect on the world's oceans.
Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:
McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.
If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerouspossiblereasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.
1) Is the climate warming or cooling? 2) Are humans responsible?
Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group I.
3) What's going to happen that's so bad we have to "do something about" now? 4) When is that going to happen?
Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group II.
WGI establishes the physical basis of anthropogenic climate change. AFAIK this is has not been convincingly challenged. WGII attempts to quantify the results, which is of course harder to pin down (and included a notorious inaccuracy or two). This new study will doubtless help refine the WGII predictions further.
That's a pretty different system - expensive, smaller-screen professional system, not at all suited to consumer use (for a start it requires 100 different viewpoints rather than 2). Though it'd look nice in person I imagine.
Don't expect this to come to your local cinema any time soon.
To project a movie with 2K horizontal resolution per eye on a 15m screen you'd need ripples to be no more than 15mm wide. You'd have to focus each pixel somewhere along a quarter section of that, 3.75mm. Assume 20 people seated every 1m, with each persons' eyes separated by about 65mm, that means to bounce a pixel off the ripple at a specific eye you'd need to divide that 3.75mm into 308 subdivisions of about 12 microns each.
This is over 2000 ppi resolution, projected across a 15m screen by a projector over 30m away. If the imaging device were to do that directly it'd have to have a resolution of 1.25M pixels horizontally, but you'd probably have a parallax barrier to direct the light. If you had something capable of head-tracking each person on each row and adjusting views individually, each of the parallax barrier sets (you'd need one set per viewer, along with individual optics to go with it) would need to be capable of nanometre-precise positioning. It might be possible to use a single, extra-fine set of tens of thousands of individually-mobile, variable-width parallax barriers, but we'd probably start hitting quantum effects at this point:-)
Alternatively, if people held their heads very still, you could use a nano-scaled lenticular prism with variable-length ripples on your screen and precalculated, radial, fixed seating positions, but I suspect they'd just opt for the glasses instead.
Important point: It's not an infrastructure loss, it's an infrastructure upgrade, and no copper will be ripped up until all the fibre is in place.
Leaving in the copper for duplication was certainly considered, but the significant advantages caused by a relatively fast national switchover to high-speed fibre won the day (100% uptake = lower prices for all + much wider market for high-speed data services like IPTV, electronic health record transmission, next-gen internet applications etc).
Turnbull does have a few clues about this (that's why he has shares in Melbourne IT; he can see where this is going), and I don't think for a minute that he personally believes Abbott's plan of a little wireless bandaid around the edges is anything more than a stopgap response (it's hardly futureproof in any sense). However, since Abbott booted him from the top spot (shame that) he doesn't have much say in the matter anymore, and now has to toe the party line and just do his assigned job of "demolishing" the Government wherever he can.
Oh, and fibre on the poles? It's going alongside the copper, through Telstra's conduits, ducts, poles; wherever the copper goes - that was one of the main points of the deal with Telstra after all.
How is this different to an ordinary USB webcam? Could slip an inline spy box on one of those much more easily, and they're far more common.
But then, who needs a box? A hidden malware driver could do exactly the same thing, and be far easier to install remotely - any online computer is a far easier target than a proprietary game console. Are you using a laptop with a built-in webcam and mic to post on Slashdot? Do you have a smartphone in your pocket? How do you know you're not already being spied upon?
Manufacturing costs are only part of it. You'll also need to add testing costs, packaging, shipping/insurance, the retailer's margin, and of course the amortised cost of development. If Kinect costs $150 to build, then MS are certainly taking a decent loss on each sale, and would be understandably unhappy if a buyer was unlikely to buy any games to go with it.
From their perspective it's worth paying a little extra on security 'features' to lock in more buyers. I'm sure they've not forgotten the:CueCat. But of course, the extra challenge only gets more hackers interested...
I ran WM5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 for years before switching to Android, browsing with pIE, Opera, Iris, Torch, Skyfire and a couple of others. Opera & Iris were the best, and were usable but always somewhat sluggish and awkward, and I often reverted to my iPod Touch despite the lower-res screen. Then I switched to a Nexus One, and holy crap the mobile web is fun again:-) Chrome on 2.2 is easily faster than Safari on my wife's 3GS, and is far beyond compare to any WM6.5 browsing. Trying FF4b2 now, and while not up to Chrome yet, even at its worst it's still a lot nicer to browse with than anything on WM6.5.
Seriously, switch today, you'll kick yourself for waiting this long when you do.
It's a lithium-polymer battery dubbed "Hummingbird", and it's already in-use in warehouse forklifts. There's more info at dbm-energy.com and lekker-mobil.com (both in German). Still pretty light on details though.
I'd post the link to the FAQ directly, but Slashdot still won't let me paste the URL (yep, Chrome user), and it's way too long to type by hand.
The parallax is (potentially) identical to that experienced in real life, or at least it is if the viewer's head is in the optimal position, and is focused on the same point that the camera is (and the scene has been created correctly for the viewer's screen size and position). Of course, if (inevitably) the viewer looks elsewhere in the scene or isn't optimally centered, issues do arise which are less tolerable by some of the population, and hence some still get a better experience than others. And of course bad scene construction can easily make this a lot worse.
The only unavoidable disparity is where the eye lens' focal length (to the screen) differs from the focal point of the parallax (in the scene), and this is minimised when the screen is around 12-15m+ distant (i.e. theatre viewing, not so much for home viewing).
So yeah, you do in fact see doubled images on near/far objects, both in real life and on 3D screens, when the object's apparent depth is sufficiently different from the eyes' parallax point. This is something I have to deal with in the software I write.
In AU, a high-end name-brand 55" LCD TV generally costs $4K+, and all the latest models are either 3D-compatible or at least 3D-ready, so there's little to compare them against other than previous models (which are largely identical except for the 3D features).
Anyway, my point was that if there's a premium for 3D here in AU, it's rather less than the price drop seen in 18 months. I suspect you'll find that in another 12 month's time the price of a 3D TV will be significantly lower - any premium will be significantly reduced, and many 120/240Hz TVs will simply build in the capability anyway as a standard feature, due to the relatively low added manufacturing costs.
That's a pretty black-and-white, for-us-or-against-us point of view. I would have said,
3. Accidentally killing an unknown number of civilians and military personnel while attempting to embarrass group 2 into reining in military excesses and reducing civilian deaths
where "unknown number" is likely significantly smaller than "thousands", especially after redaction.
I don't believe Wikileaks has any stated goals of the "failure" of any group, only the release of potentially embarrassing information, and the leaked records are highly unlikely to directly hinder the war effort, only to place political pressure on how it is conducted (in other words, accountability).
In any case, the DoD report released today confirms Wikileaks "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods" and "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak", so it seems the number of civilians or military affected is pretty minimal.
You can feel pretty damn immersed in a black & white movie too, or a simple book; that's not really the issue.
But stereo 3D certainly adds information, especially to games. Parallax adds a powerful depth cue to the existing perspective foreshortening etc. Playing shooters, I sometimes throw grenades too short or too long, because I don't always have enough information to accurately judge the distance, and parallax would help that. Driving games in particular would benefit (me) if I could better judge the distance (depth) to the turn, and the speed (change of depth) I'm approaching it at.
I genuinely don't get people's objections. If you don't like it (and many don't), then stick to 2D and don't buy TVs that cost more. You do have a choice, nobody's forcing anything on you, so why are you hoping for the choice of others to be removed?
Eventually all mid- to high-end TVs will support 3D, whether you use it or not (as with colour, stereo, etc) but by then the novelty premium will be gone, and any minor incremental costs will long since have been hidden by price drops. It still won't be adding anything significant to your costs, and you can still ignore it. I'm not seeing the downside you appear to be worried about.
This must be a US thing. Here in AU, a friend of mine bought a 55" Samsung LCD 18 months ago, and a second friend bought a very similar 55" Samsung 1 month ago. The newer TV supported 3D (included a pair of glasses), but cost about $600 less than the non-3D TV.
Prices do drop, and nobody's being forced to pay more right now for something they don't want. 3D TVs don't inherently cost much more than equivalent high-end TVs (a cheap IR emitter, new firmware, and some optional glasses is the only difference). Once the novelty passes, all decent TVs will support 3D (like they supported colour, stereo, comb filters, LED backlighting, YouTube playback etc), and any minor extra costs will have been hidden by price drops.
Once the premium evaporates, more people have supporting TVs and there's more content, I expect rather more take-up, but I still don't expect anyone to bother with the 3D and the glasses except on occasions where the extra hassle might be worthwhile.
Obviously not that simple, but if I was the girl, and those were the only two choices, I'd vote for the rape. Lesser of two evils and all that.
IRL, there's usually a lot of other choices involved; delaying tactics, trust building, overall harm minimisation by limited co-operation, etc. The Pentagon may or may not have considered any, but I'm guessing they refused to negotiate in any way, on policy. From Wikileaks' point of view, there's no harm in asking for help pointing out anything they may have missed, despite the expected answer - it's a life & death matter, after all.
In any case, Wikileaks clearly did make a bona fide attempt to protect the innocent. And they're not the ones actually out there killing people, either. If you're assigning blame, you could spread it a lot wider.
You're wrong in that you can't lie down and get a stereo effect, regardless of the method used. This is because the left & right viewpoints are created assuming the eyes are horizontally aligned. You'd have to shoot (or render) with over/under camera lenses to get footage suitable for sideways viewing (and then it wouldn't work for sitting up).
Your method summary is about right, except that I'd say that in my experience, Polarization often gives a blurrier image (more ghosting) than e.g. Shutter glasses, and that all methods equally can make people sick, when misused. Oh, and Lenticular doesn't work with tracking, though Parallax potentially can, and neither of the two tend to scale up well.
A) Caching
B) Wifi
C) Encryption
D) Who cares? You've got everything you're likely to need stored on your device already.
Don't think of it as "my stuff lives in the cloud", think of it as "my stuff is synced with the cloud". With some local storage for caching, you only need a net connection occasionally for syncing & updating. That way, you only connect to the net when & how you want to (wifi, tethered 3G, whatever).
Some people are fine with cheap, thin clients needing more frequent net access, but all it takes to reduce that dependency is a few more local GBs and a decent syncing algorithm. I can still access my contacts, web albums etc on my phone even when I don't have any service. All the convenience of universal cloud access, and you can still carry most of it with you anywhere.
Right, the yet-unpublished O'Donnell paper - but still no more than the abstract so it's hard to comment, especially on a summary so obviously biased.
Doesn't seem like it changes the overall picture though. Some parts of Antarctica are warming, some are cooling, not much surprise there (happens everywhere) - but I noted there was apparently no challenge to the GRACE results showing significant and accelerating overall ice loss. That's something that will have a direct and increasing effect on the world's oceans.
Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:
McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.
If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerous possible reasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.
Simple enough.
In the short term, more warming == more moisture in the air == more snowfall when that air travels north in the Gulf Stream to England.
In the long term, even more warming == temperatures in England no longer drop below freezing == rainfall instead of snow.
No such thing was "determined", in either case - only questions raised about the solidity of the evidence.
In fact, the 1996 claim is now more solid than ever, and the 2010 claims are far from disproved at this time, only questioned.
Naturally your own creditbility suffers no such doubt.
1) Is the climate warming or cooling?
2) Are humans responsible?
Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group I.
3) What's going to happen that's so bad we have to "do something about" now?
4) When is that going to happen?
Addressed by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group II.
WGI establishes the physical basis of anthropogenic climate change. AFAIK this is has not been convincingly challenged. WGII attempts to quantify the results, which is of course harder to pin down (and included a notorious inaccuracy or two). This new study will doubtless help refine the WGII predictions further.
That's a pretty different system - expensive, smaller-screen professional system, not at all suited to consumer use (for a start it requires 100 different viewpoints rather than 2). Though it'd look nice in person I imagine.
Don't expect this to come to your local cinema any time soon.
To project a movie with 2K horizontal resolution per eye on a 15m screen you'd need ripples to be no more than 15mm wide. You'd have to focus each pixel somewhere along a quarter section of that, 3.75mm. Assume 20 people seated every 1m, with each persons' eyes separated by about 65mm, that means to bounce a pixel off the ripple at a specific eye you'd need to divide that 3.75mm into 308 subdivisions of about 12 microns each.
This is over 2000 ppi resolution, projected across a 15m screen by a projector over 30m away. If the imaging device were to do that directly it'd have to have a resolution of 1.25M pixels horizontally, but you'd probably have a parallax barrier to direct the light. If you had something capable of head-tracking each person on each row and adjusting views individually, each of the parallax barrier sets (you'd need one set per viewer, along with individual optics to go with it) would need to be capable of nanometre-precise positioning. It might be possible to use a single, extra-fine set of tens of thousands of individually-mobile, variable-width parallax barriers, but we'd probably start hitting quantum effects at this point :-)
Alternatively, if people held their heads very still, you could use a nano-scaled lenticular prism with variable-length ripples on your screen and precalculated, radial, fixed seating positions, but I suspect they'd just opt for the glasses instead.
Important point: It's not an infrastructure loss, it's an infrastructure upgrade, and no copper will be ripped up until all the fibre is in place.
Leaving in the copper for duplication was certainly considered, but the significant advantages caused by a relatively fast national switchover to high-speed fibre won the day (100% uptake = lower prices for all + much wider market for high-speed data services like IPTV, electronic health record transmission, next-gen internet applications etc).
Turnbull does have a few clues about this (that's why he has shares in Melbourne IT; he can see where this is going), and I don't think for a minute that he personally believes Abbott's plan of a little wireless bandaid around the edges is anything more than a stopgap response (it's hardly futureproof in any sense). However, since Abbott booted him from the top spot (shame that) he doesn't have much say in the matter anymore, and now has to toe the party line and just do his assigned job of "demolishing" the Government wherever he can.
Oh, and fibre on the poles? It's going alongside the copper, through Telstra's conduits, ducts, poles; wherever the copper goes - that was one of the main points of the deal with Telstra after all.
How is this different to an ordinary USB webcam? Could slip an inline spy box on one of those much more easily, and they're far more common.
But then, who needs a box? A hidden malware driver could do exactly the same thing, and be far easier to install remotely - any online computer is a far easier target than a proprietary game console. Are you using a laptop with a built-in webcam and mic to post on Slashdot? Do you have a smartphone in your pocket? How do you know you're not already being spied upon?
Manufacturing costs are only part of it. You'll also need to add testing costs, packaging, shipping/insurance, the retailer's margin, and of course the amortised cost of development. If Kinect costs $150 to build, then MS are certainly taking a decent loss on each sale, and would be understandably unhappy if a buyer was unlikely to buy any games to go with it.
From their perspective it's worth paying a little extra on security 'features' to lock in more buyers. I'm sure they've not forgotten the :CueCat. But of course, the extra challenge only gets more hackers interested...
I ran WM5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 for years before switching to Android, browsing with pIE, Opera, Iris, Torch, Skyfire and a couple of others. Opera & Iris were the best, and were usable but always somewhat sluggish and awkward, and I often reverted to my iPod Touch despite the lower-res screen. Then I switched to a Nexus One, and holy crap the mobile web is fun again :-) Chrome on 2.2 is easily faster than Safari on my wife's 3GS, and is far beyond compare to any WM6.5 browsing. Trying FF4b2 now, and while not up to Chrome yet, even at its worst it's still a lot nicer to browse with than anything on WM6.5.
Seriously, switch today, you'll kick yourself for waiting this long when you do.
Incorrect popup image scaling? How is that related to clipboard paste failure? Did you mistype that URL by hand?
As it turns out though, paste is now working fine for me, so all is well again.
It's a lithium-polymer battery dubbed "Hummingbird", and it's already in-use in warehouse forklifts. There's more info at dbm-energy.com and lekker-mobil.com (both in German). Still pretty light on details though.
I'd post the link to the FAQ directly, but Slashdot still won't let me paste the URL (yep, Chrome user), and it's way too long to type by hand.
Android has an All/Some/None setting to turn off UI animations, in Settings/Display/Animation, so once again it gives people the choice.
It's been there since 1.6 at least.
The parallax is (potentially) identical to that experienced in real life, or at least it is if the viewer's head is in the optimal position, and is focused on the same point that the camera is (and the scene has been created correctly for the viewer's screen size and position). Of course, if (inevitably) the viewer looks elsewhere in the scene or isn't optimally centered, issues do arise which are less tolerable by some of the population, and hence some still get a better experience than others. And of course bad scene construction can easily make this a lot worse.
The only unavoidable disparity is where the eye lens' focal length (to the screen) differs from the focal point of the parallax (in the scene), and this is minimised when the screen is around 12-15m+ distant (i.e. theatre viewing, not so much for home viewing).
So yeah, you do in fact see doubled images on near/far objects, both in real life and on 3D screens, when the object's apparent depth is sufficiently different from the eyes' parallax point. This is something I have to deal with in the software I write.
In AU, a high-end name-brand 55" LCD TV generally costs $4K+, and all the latest models are either 3D-compatible or at least 3D-ready, so there's little to compare them against other than previous models (which are largely identical except for the 3D features).
Anyway, my point was that if there's a premium for 3D here in AU, it's rather less than the price drop seen in 18 months. I suspect you'll find that in another 12 month's time the price of a 3D TV will be significantly lower - any premium will be significantly reduced, and many 120/240Hz TVs will simply build in the capability anyway as a standard feature, due to the relatively low added manufacturing costs.
That's a pretty black-and-white, for-us-or-against-us point of view. I would have said,
3. Accidentally killing an unknown number of civilians and military personnel while attempting to embarrass group 2 into reining in military excesses and reducing civilian deaths
where "unknown number" is likely significantly smaller than "thousands", especially after redaction.
I don't believe Wikileaks has any stated goals of the "failure" of any group, only the release of potentially embarrassing information, and the leaked records are highly unlikely to directly hinder the war effort, only to place political pressure on how it is conducted (in other words, accountability).
In any case, the DoD report released today confirms Wikileaks "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods" and "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak", so it seems the number of civilians or military affected is pretty minimal.
You can feel pretty damn immersed in a black & white movie too, or a simple book; that's not really the issue.
But stereo 3D certainly adds information, especially to games. Parallax adds a powerful depth cue to the existing perspective foreshortening etc. Playing shooters, I sometimes throw grenades too short or too long, because I don't always have enough information to accurately judge the distance, and parallax would help that. Driving games in particular would benefit (me) if I could better judge the distance (depth) to the turn, and the speed (change of depth) I'm approaching it at.
I genuinely don't get people's objections. If you don't like it (and many don't), then stick to 2D and don't buy TVs that cost more. You do have a choice, nobody's forcing anything on you, so why are you hoping for the choice of others to be removed?
Eventually all mid- to high-end TVs will support 3D, whether you use it or not (as with colour, stereo, etc) but by then the novelty premium will be gone, and any minor incremental costs will long since have been hidden by price drops. It still won't be adding anything significant to your costs, and you can still ignore it. I'm not seeing the downside you appear to be worried about.
This must be a US thing. Here in AU, a friend of mine bought a 55" Samsung LCD 18 months ago, and a second friend bought a very similar 55" Samsung 1 month ago. The newer TV supported 3D (included a pair of glasses), but cost about $600 less than the non-3D TV.
Prices do drop, and nobody's being forced to pay more right now for something they don't want. 3D TVs don't inherently cost much more than equivalent high-end TVs (a cheap IR emitter, new firmware, and some optional glasses is the only difference). Once the novelty passes, all decent TVs will support 3D (like they supported colour, stereo, comb filters, LED backlighting, YouTube playback etc), and any minor extra costs will have been hidden by price drops.
Once the premium evaporates, more people have supporting TVs and there's more content, I expect rather more take-up, but I still don't expect anyone to bother with the 3D and the glasses except on occasions where the extra hassle might be worthwhile.
Obviously not that simple, but if I was the girl, and those were the only two choices, I'd vote for the rape. Lesser of two evils and all that.
IRL, there's usually a lot of other choices involved; delaying tactics, trust building, overall harm minimisation by limited co-operation, etc. The Pentagon may or may not have considered any, but I'm guessing they refused to negotiate in any way, on policy. From Wikileaks' point of view, there's no harm in asking for help pointing out anything they may have missed, despite the expected answer - it's a life & death matter, after all.
In any case, Wikileaks clearly did make a bona fide attempt to protect the innocent. And they're not the ones actually out there killing people, either. If you're assigning blame, you could spread it a lot wider.
You're wrong in that you can't lie down and get a stereo effect, regardless of the method used. This is because the left & right viewpoints are created assuming the eyes are horizontally aligned. You'd have to shoot (or render) with over/under camera lenses to get footage suitable for sideways viewing (and then it wouldn't work for sitting up).
Your method summary is about right, except that I'd say that in my experience, Polarization often gives a blurrier image (more ghosting) than e.g. Shutter glasses, and that all methods equally can make people sick, when misused. Oh, and Lenticular doesn't work with tracking, though Parallax potentially can, and neither of the two tend to scale up well.
Would disagree.
What, you mean Americans use "[zic]"?