Different debate. Most governments censor their citizens; that debate is only over how much.
The debate going on here in Australia is about how to implement that censorship. Currently it's done at a legal and retail level. Conroy wants to extend that to ISPs too, by means of a URL blacklist.
The problem is, any attempt to explain that it'll only block < 0.001% of the RC content on the net, or that it's trivially bypassed by altering the URL (e.g. adding a "?" to the end), or that it's far too open for errors/abuse, gets either ignored or re-framed as "against filter == pro child porn".
First up, thanks for this - would love to see more 3D astronomical visualisations like this.
If we do future projects, we will increase the formats as appropriate.
I believe the OP was not requesting more formats, but that you release material in a format that is more easily translatable to other formats. Side-by-side can be viewed directly by many people without requiring glasses, but more importantly it can be converted automatically and on-the-fly (by YouTube or the software he linked or something like this) to other formats, including red/cyan, green/magenta, crosseyed, mirrored, or page-flipped for those with shutter glasses.
This would greatly increase the viewing audience (many of whom have green/magenta glasses instead of red/cyan) as well as the quality of the result for those with better equipment.
Is it true that you actually cannot detect red light at all? So a red filter, and even a room lit only by a red light bulb, look black to you? That would imply that your "red" and "green" cones are not merely mixed up, they are both completely broken (there's a lot of overlap), and that your rods (along with your "blue" cones) are also completely unable to sense 564nm light.
Reading further, it seems that rods are largely inactive in well-lit circumstances, so perhaps they are simply insufficient to detect enough light to balance the blue cones in your other eye. Interesting.
Correction; the iPhone struggles to play a handful of Strong Bad flash files (using a much slower & more limited javascript client), hardly the whole site.
And you're mistaken if you think Adobe hasn't been trying to get Flash on iPhone. It's Apple that has been blocking them.
All fine reasons from Apple's point of view, no doubt.
None of them are good reasons from a user's point of view. "Poor user experience" is the only one that might hold any water, and that fails for the same reason that Jobs' "no 3G for you" position did back in 2007; so long as it's optional, the users have the choice and can enjoy the many Flash sites that are suitable for mobile viewing.
Floppies could be trivially copied to flash drives; Flash animations and games cannot easily be converted to HTML5. We still see GIFs everywhere, despite the superior PNG format. Existing back-content means Flash will be needed for many years yet.
You may not miss Flash, but we prefer to choose for ourselves, thank you very much. You keep stating your personal preferences as justification for taking everyone else's choice away.
Flash has never met everybody's needs, and nor does HTML5 (rather less than Flash, currently). That's hardly a reason to prevent the use of either of them immediately, as Apple has chosen to do.
The option of disabling Flash on mobile devices is just as irrelevant as the option of disabling images on mobile devices; both were and are occasionally-useful choices to sacrifice richness to improve responsiveness, and neither means something is dying.
I don't doubt Flash will die out eventually. I suspect that date will be years further off than you think, since HTML5/SVG/WebGL/whatever have a lot of catching up to do in terms of abilities, expertise and authoring tools, but so long as Flash-using sites still attract significant traffic, any attempt by platform owners to prematurely kill Flash will only raise suspicions as to their agenda.
Sorry, but you're wrong, and so is Apple. No users are directly "effected" unless they choose to be. By your same "logic", any baby that's not ideal for every possible use should be thrown out with the bathwater, and users should be prevented from having anything to do with those terrible things whether they want it or not.
Sure, Flash sucks for some videos - and it's fine for others. A lot of Flash games don't play well on a mobile device - but some do. Flash ads are annoying - but Flash animations like Homestar Runner are awesome, work great, and I can pick and choose when & what Flash I see. If HTML5 was a valid alternative right now, you might have a point, but it isn't, and won't ever be an alternative for all the existing flash sites out there.
The fact that this argument is still on-going shows that there is still much demand for Flash. Apple can choose to exclude those customers if it wants, you can buy into that if you want, but I for one am very very glad that Android is a viable alternative that gives me the choice of HTML5 and Flash.
Flash video on my Nexus One is hit-or-miss - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's barely watchable. Flash video on my wife's iPhone is always miss - she doesn't even know there's video there. If it's not YouTube, she's out of luck completely, whereas I can mostly get something usable.
It's all the non-video uses of Flash that make the real difference though. See how far you get on homestarrunner.com without it; they're not going to convert all that older content to HTML5 any time soon, so iOS users will never see it. When my kids (or myself) are bored, it's very handy having a Flash-capable mobile device around.
Choice >> no choice, regardless of some bloke's experiences with a handful of sites.
So why should they build, test and support new roms for every different Android device out there? They've got enough on their plate developing the reference OS itself. You should be asking Verizon, or at least HTC.
With Ubuntu, a lot of people chipped in to write and make available many different device drivers so that a huge range of hardware could be supported. Phones too require different device drivers - but on phones, many of those drivers are still proprietary. Cyanogen (among others) is the best recourse we've got.
But for actual solutions - well, you could insist on buying only phones with minimal vendor changes from vanilla Android, thus reducing the amount of work needed for porting the latest OS. Vendors could devote more effort to supporting older hardware, since it's clear it's a big issue with customers. From Google's pov, they've said they're working on separating as much as possible from the base OS, so that the cooler stuff can be updated independently.
Only other "solution" I can think of is for Google to hold off releasing new versions until major vendors complete porting it to their older hardware. But all that would do is disadvantage Google's own customers to no purpose, just so that other vendors' customers don't know what they're missing, not to mention reducing the valuable feedback Google needs to work on the next version. Might as well go to an annual cycle and change their name to Apple 2.0.
There are many, many information-based technologies involved in reverse-engineering the human brain (MRI scanners, to pick one at random), and pretty much all of them are advancing exponentially, thanks to Moore's Law. Progress is slow right now (always the case in the early stages of an exponential curve), but it's steady. And Kurzweil never claimed 10 years; that was a third-hand error in TFA (since corrected in the original Wired article) - the real claim is closer to 20.
We may not need to replace neurons with transistors, any more than we need to replace a bird's wings to fly - we can however simulate a complex analogue process like a neuron with a great deal of precision, given sufficient computing power. It's not necessarily the most efficient way to do things though, as with flapping wings.
He's got a hypothesis ("I can extend my own lifespan by aggressively interceding with my body chemistry"), he's performing the experiment on himself, he's making careful observations on a weekly basis and he's taking meticulous notes. Results are probably some time off yet, but even if he turns out to be completely wrong, he's done the experiment in a way that can be reproduced, and it's still a genuine contribution to human knowledge.
Kurzweil didn't make that ridiculous claim in the first place, despite Myers' third-hand assumptions.
It was just an aside pointing out that the brain's overwhelming complexity all stems from a few million bytes worth of DNA, implying a significant level of replicated structure, andcertainly not a suggestion that we could derive a whole working brain from it.
That might be what the Gizmodo article implies, and it seems to be what set Myers' rant off - but nowhere does it quote Kurzweil as actually claiming that.
Ray has suggested in his books that we could simulate a brain, either functionally by reverse-engineering how the brain actually does things (not by studying the DNA), or if that fails by simulating all the various actual neurons sufficiently well and hoping that intelligence emerges (though that would take a few orders of magnitude more computing power). I don't see Myers addressing those claims.
All that might mean is that the rest of your phone is being relatively economical. Try playing videos for a few hours, and watch the Display % drop dramatically.
Voice dialling (and a few other voice commands like search) have been available on Android since 1.6, though they only added voice dialling through Bluetooth in 2.2.
This update adds a number of extra voice commands beyond that.
Couldn't vouch for accuracy of course, but it's useful in any case for flagging higher-drain apps or components.
It is a percentage of course, so the relative proportion used by the screen will drop dramatically if you do something even more power-intensive on it, like make lots of calls, or play videos or games. On my Nexus One, the display is regularly 50-60% of power usage, which is not unexpected given that I read web pages and ebooks on it more than I make phone calls.
B&W is a design choice, used to stylistically highlight the desired emotion of the scene. So are contrast, saturation, blur, framerate, depth of field, framing, sound effects, CGI, frame aspect, lens flares, 65mm negs etc etc - and so is stereo 3D. They're all simply different adjectives to a cinematographer. And just like all the others, 3D requires careful thought in its usage, and can be used, overused or abused.
Nobody wants stereo 3D slapped on to films carelessly, any more than we want blur or lens flares or colourisation plastered willy-nilly just for the sake of a trend. Unfortunately we'll get a fair amount of that, but as filmmakers learn how to use it and the 3D industry matures, I see no reason it won't become just another tool in a director's toolbox, to be used when and only when it would support the story's impact.
It's not just technical, action directors like James Cameron that think so, either, but respected, story-oriented directors like Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott, who are both exploring what stereo 3D can add to their next films. I'd like to think that one day, we could even see a decent story, stereo 3D and black & white, all together in a very interesting film.
Though I don't think TFA (apart from the photographer himself) was claiming any form of proof of anything, or even that it was billed as "science journalism". It's certainly not a controlled study, as you say, just an interesting anecdote in the context of prior arguments about Himalayan glacier loss.
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Different debate. Most governments censor their citizens; that debate is only over how much.
The debate going on here in Australia is about how to implement that censorship. Currently it's done at a legal and retail level. Conroy wants to extend that to ISPs too, by means of a URL blacklist.
The problem is, any attempt to explain that it'll only block < 0.001% of the RC content on the net, or that it's trivially bypassed by altering the URL (e.g. adding a "?" to the end), or that it's far too open for errors/abuse, gets either ignored or re-framed as "against filter == pro child porn".
First up, thanks for this - would love to see more 3D astronomical visualisations like this.
If we do future projects, we will increase the formats as appropriate.
I believe the OP was not requesting more formats, but that you release material in a format that is more easily translatable to other formats. Side-by-side can be viewed directly by many people without requiring glasses, but more importantly it can be converted automatically and on-the-fly (by YouTube or the software he linked or something like this) to other formats, including red/cyan, green/magenta, crosseyed, mirrored, or page-flipped for those with shutter glasses.
This would greatly increase the viewing audience (many of whom have green/magenta glasses instead of red/cyan) as well as the quality of the result for those with better equipment.
Is it true that you actually cannot detect red light at all? So a red filter, and even a room lit only by a red light bulb, look black to you? That would imply that your "red" and "green" cones are not merely mixed up, they are both completely broken (there's a lot of overlap), and that your rods (along with your "blue" cones) are also completely unable to sense 564nm light.
Reading further, it seems that rods are largely inactive in well-lit circumstances, so perhaps they are simply insufficient to detect enough light to balance the blue cones in your other eye. Interesting.
Correction; the iPhone struggles to play a handful of Strong Bad flash files (using a much slower & more limited javascript client), hardly the whole site.
And you're mistaken if you think Adobe hasn't been trying to get Flash on iPhone. It's Apple that has been blocking them.
All fine reasons from Apple's point of view, no doubt.
None of them are good reasons from a user's point of view. "Poor user experience" is the only one that might hold any water, and that fails for the same reason that Jobs' "no 3G for you" position did back in 2007; so long as it's optional, the users have the choice and can enjoy the many Flash sites that are suitable for mobile viewing.
A few points:
I don't doubt Flash will die out eventually. I suspect that date will be years further off than you think, since HTML5/SVG/WebGL/whatever have a lot of catching up to do in terms of abilities, expertise and authoring tools, but so long as Flash-using sites still attract significant traffic, any attempt by platform owners to prematurely kill Flash will only raise suspicions as to their agenda.
Sorry, but you're wrong, and so is Apple. No users are directly "effected" unless they choose to be. By your same "logic", any baby that's not ideal for every possible use should be thrown out with the bathwater, and users should be prevented from having anything to do with those terrible things whether they want it or not.
Sure, Flash sucks for some videos - and it's fine for others. A lot of Flash games don't play well on a mobile device - but some do. Flash ads are annoying - but Flash animations like Homestar Runner are awesome, work great, and I can pick and choose when & what Flash I see. If HTML5 was a valid alternative right now, you might have a point, but it isn't, and won't ever be an alternative for all the existing flash sites out there.
The fact that this argument is still on-going shows that there is still much demand for Flash. Apple can choose to exclude those customers if it wants, you can buy into that if you want, but I for one am very very glad that Android is a viable alternative that gives me the choice of HTML5 and Flash.
Flash video on my Nexus One is hit-or-miss - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's barely watchable. Flash video on my wife's iPhone is always miss - she doesn't even know there's video there. If it's not YouTube, she's out of luck completely, whereas I can mostly get something usable.
It's all the non-video uses of Flash that make the real difference though. See how far you get on homestarrunner.com without it; they're not going to convert all that older content to HTML5 any time soon, so iOS users will never see it. When my kids (or myself) are bored, it's very handy having a Flash-capable mobile device around.
Choice >> no choice, regardless of some bloke's experiences with a handful of sites.
When it is, I'd expect it to appear here.
So why should they build, test and support new roms for every different Android device out there? They've got enough on their plate developing the reference OS itself. You should be asking Verizon, or at least HTC.
With Ubuntu, a lot of people chipped in to write and make available many different device drivers so that a huge range of hardware could be supported. Phones too require different device drivers - but on phones, many of those drivers are still proprietary. Cyanogen (among others) is the best recourse we've got.
But for actual solutions - well, you could insist on buying only phones with minimal vendor changes from vanilla Android, thus reducing the amount of work needed for porting the latest OS. Vendors could devote more effort to supporting older hardware, since it's clear it's a big issue with customers. From Google's pov, they've said they're working on separating as much as possible from the base OS, so that the cooler stuff can be updated independently.
Only other "solution" I can think of is for Google to hold off releasing new versions until major vendors complete porting it to their older hardware. But all that would do is disadvantage Google's own customers to no purpose, just so that other vendors' customers don't know what they're missing, not to mention reducing the valuable feedback Google needs to work on the next version. Might as well go to an annual cycle and change their name to Apple 2.0.
No, there's no restriction about where the accounts are, only that they all use the same master credit card.
So yeah, you & your friends can be a "family", so long as you're comfortable with giving them the ability to purchase snazzy avatar hats on your dime.
Seems like the Family Pack coming in November is still US$99 for 4 people.
There are many, many information-based technologies involved in reverse-engineering the human brain (MRI scanners, to pick one at random), and pretty much all of them are advancing exponentially, thanks to Moore's Law. Progress is slow right now (always the case in the early stages of an exponential curve), but it's steady. And Kurzweil never claimed 10 years; that was a third-hand error in TFA (since corrected in the original Wired article) - the real claim is closer to 20.
We may not need to replace neurons with transistors, any more than we need to replace a bird's wings to fly - we can however simulate a complex analogue process like a neuron with a great deal of precision, given sufficient computing power. It's not necessarily the most efficient way to do things though, as with flapping wings.
He's got a hypothesis ("I can extend my own lifespan by aggressively interceding with my body chemistry"), he's performing the experiment on himself, he's making careful observations on a weekly basis and he's taking meticulous notes. Results are probably some time off yet, but even if he turns out to be completely wrong, he's done the experiment in a way that can be reproduced, and it's still a genuine contribution to human knowledge.
How is that not "science"?
Kurzweil didn't make that ridiculous claim in the first place, despite Myers' third-hand assumptions.
It was just an aside pointing out that the brain's overwhelming complexity all stems from a few million bytes worth of DNA, implying a significant level of replicated structure, andcertainly not a suggestion that we could derive a whole working brain from it.
That might be what the Gizmodo article implies, and it seems to be what set Myers' rant off - but nowhere does it quote Kurzweil as actually claiming that.
Ray has suggested in his books that we could simulate a brain, either functionally by reverse-engineering how the brain actually does things (not by studying the DNA), or if that fails by simulating all the various actual neurons sufficiently well and hoping that intelligence emerges (though that would take a few orders of magnitude more computing power). I don't see Myers addressing those claims.
All that might mean is that the rest of your phone is being relatively economical. Try playing videos for a few hours, and watch the Display % drop dramatically.
Voice dialling (and a few other voice commands like search) have been available on Android since 1.6, though they only added voice dialling through Bluetooth in 2.2.
This update adds a number of extra voice commands beyond that.
Couldn't vouch for accuracy of course, but it's useful in any case for flagging higher-drain apps or components.
It is a percentage of course, so the relative proportion used by the screen will drop dramatically if you do something even more power-intensive on it, like make lots of calls, or play videos or games. On my Nexus One, the display is regularly 50-60% of power usage, which is not unexpected given that I read web pages and ebooks on it more than I make phone calls.
The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
Go to Settings / About phone / Battery use, and it'll show you exactly what's chewing up all your battery life.
One of Android's best features.
Rooting an N1 is fully sanctioned by Google, and they even provide instructions, though it does void the warranty.
The OP may have meant e.g. customising the phone's UI by, say, adding widgets to the homescreen.
B&W is a design choice, used to stylistically highlight the desired emotion of the scene. So are contrast, saturation, blur, framerate, depth of field, framing, sound effects, CGI, frame aspect, lens flares, 65mm negs etc etc - and so is stereo 3D. They're all simply different adjectives to a cinematographer. And just like all the others, 3D requires careful thought in its usage, and can be used, overused or abused.
Nobody wants stereo 3D slapped on to films carelessly, any more than we want blur or lens flares or colourisation plastered willy-nilly just for the sake of a trend. Unfortunately we'll get a fair amount of that, but as filmmakers learn how to use it and the 3D industry matures, I see no reason it won't become just another tool in a director's toolbox, to be used when and only when it would support the story's impact.
It's not just technical, action directors like James Cameron that think so, either, but respected, story-oriented directors like Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott, who are both exploring what stereo 3D can add to their next films. I'd like to think that one day, we could even see a decent story, stereo 3D and black & white, all together in a very interesting film.
Or so Ars reports.
But games? Is anyone still doing games in OpenGL these days, apart from the rare port to Mac or Linux?
Though I don't think TFA (apart from the photographer himself) was claiming any form of proof of anything, or even that it was billed as "science journalism". It's certainly not a controlled study, as you say, just an interesting anecdote in the context of prior arguments about Himalayan glacier loss.