I'm quite sure your comment is a dupe, too. I think I've seen the same before. Well actually it's more than just a dupe. A dupe of a dupe of a dupe of a... well you get the idea.
In Germany it's quite customary especially for business trips to drive your car to the nearest station, take the train to near where you have to be, and rent a car from there. You just can't beat the speed of the ICE. Same in France with the TGV.
TGV has a higher top speed but has the acceleration issue you mention. No problem as in France the cities are far apart. The ICE is developed for Germany which has their cities more scattered, and has faster acceleration but lower top speed. Both easily reach top speed and most of the trajectory will run at that speed. Seeing the landscape move by at some 300+ km/hr is just cool.
There are several issues that I can think of with this transfer.
First of all timing: you have to make sure the trains arrive at the exact same moment. Very exact, as otherwise you're wasting parallel track time in aligning the trains.
Secondly the transfer: you must make sure that no-one gets stuck halfway the trains, otherwise something nasty will happen when the trains separate again. The solution would be to have the doors closed by a certain point, and if not stop the combination (how to break synchronised is another issue). This takes a lot of track length.
Anyway you don't want to stop, want to keep a reasonable speed for the high-speed train, so then you're easily talking about 80 km/hr (normal street-car speed of 30-50 km/hr; normal high-speed train speed would be >200 km/hr). Otherwise, why not just stop alltogether.
Transfer times will have to be at least a minute. One minute at 80 km/h is just over 1,300 m.
Stopping a train at 80 km/hr takes a long way, that can easily be 400m. So for the emergency stop you need already 400m of parallel track. That makes for a total parallel track length of about 2 km. That's a very, very long distance. The high-speed train may be passing through that city; the tram will definitely have to loop around and go back to its normal routes.
It makes me think of a recent program about solutions to road traffic, where a similar idea was floated: put the cars on a continuous running train, well basically a huge conveyor belt. The driver doing the first and last mile themselves, and the long distance go automated. The animation showing how this would work also showed the transfer, where a car would be on a feeder conveyor and from there be transferred to the main conveyor. The parallel track was just long enough to make the transfer - no word on what happens if the mechanism doesn't work (then the car will be returned to the road the normal way), how the car gets on the feeder, or what happens if the transfer is not completed. It looked scary and all but fail safe to me. There was really no room for error.
Normally when you make a train/train transfer you step out of one train, walk to the other platform, get on the next. Fail safe. You fail to get off your train? Try again next station. Fail to clear the doors? They will open; train won't move until all doors are closed. Failed to get on the connecting train? Wait for the next.
Then you go ahead and get that fancy machine that does 100 fps, but if 60 fps is good enough for most, then that 's what most people buy. You go ahead get that CD, most other people will settle for the mp3 because they find the sound good enough and find it more convenient. You know there is choice. And about thanksgiving turkeys I never had any, probably never will have, and wouldn't know what it's meant to be for nor do I really care. Knowing the existence of that fest is good enough for me.
Because, as I said, for most people and with normal quality audio equipment there is no audible difference between mp3 and CD. So mp3 is good enough, CD doesn't sound better, just costs more and is less convenient in storage and so. So indeed those people taking mp3 over CD may consider it better: sounds the same; more convenience.
Good enough is good enough. Anything better is only costing more for no extra benefit, as it's good enough already.
the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
You really need pretty decent equipment to be able to hear the difference between MP3 and CD, and listen concentrated, without doing something else while the music is playing nor having any background noises. In the vast majority of situations it fails on the first account already, most consumer grade electronics is just not good enough to tell the difference. Then people are usually doing something else while listening to music, and background noises are also commonplace.
Businesses are in it to make money, and they will do their best to make as much money as possible. So they will charge a price as high as possible. If you think that movie is too expensive, don't go watch it, and the movie maker doesn't get anything. If you think that concert ticket costs too much, don't go watch it, and the concert organiser doesn't get anything.
Well maybe someone else thinks it's worth it, and will pay for it. And the concert organiser and movie theatre will charge a price where there are enough someones other than you that think it's worth the price to fill up the seats.
That you think it's overpriced doesn't mean it is overpriced, nor that they should lower prices.
If you don't want to share your contacts in the cloud, Android indeed doesn't provide an easy way to sync them.
Or you could, you know, use Exchange which you already suggested if you don't trust Google. I sync my contacts with Exchange, but they don't end up in my Google account.
I just don't have an Exchange server, and no experience with Windows server so that's going to be rough on me.
Maybe because you're one of 5 people that run their own personal LDAP directory server and want to sync it with their phone. There are a lot of industry standards that Google doesn't support because not enough people want them. That's what Apps are for - if you find something missing on your phone, write an app for it (or pay someone else to)
Not personal. Company LDAP server. This time my own company and own server but over 15 years ago I already was syncing contacts against LDAP servers of various companies I worked for. I'm not sure whether Exchange existed then already.
So there may be an app that does exactly what you want but you're not interested in even trying it?
I didn't say that. Just that I looked at it, it may do what I need, but the urge is not great enough to start hacking with it. Yet. I've too many other things to do at the moment. Just not high enough on the priority list.
Almost everything in the Android marketplace seems to want internet access for no discernible reason,
They usually need it for advertising. A valid reason, imho. For that same reason many apps also ask for location information nowadays (that one I don't like). The problem of course is that if the permission is there for advertising, it can be used for many other things as well.
And the problem is that you can't just "deny" a single permission, it's all or nothing. I'm fine with Internet access for ads (the "price" to pay for a free app, and usually I have no connection anyway), not so much for location details.
All arguments aside, Google's primary business is information.
True, but they do not sell personal information, they sell advertising.
As a company you can buy and sell advertising space on/for Google (through AdWords/AdSense). Google will not give you any personal information: instead Google will put your ads out towards the people they think are most likely to be interested in your product, attempting to make your advertisement more efficient. As such Google can charge higher prices for that ad space, and can use their own ad space more efficiently - two ways to increase value for them. And if you sell ad space on your own web site to Google, they will only provide the ads to display to you. No customer information is sold. Again Google will try to maximise efficiency by providing your web site with relevant ads, which is interesting for you as web site owner as you get more clicks and more income.
That's their business model. Sell advertising, not personal information. If you have any unambiguous example of Google selling actual costumer information (non-anonymous - I know they do provide certain anonymised, aggregated statistics), please do let me know.
OK no experience but how hard can it be to run your own Windows server? About as hard as running your own Linux server maybe?
Considering the submitter wants to share contacts with his own computer directly I may assume he has some kind of server for that already, or at least has the competence to set it up. Whether that's OpenLDAP or Exchange or whatever is not the point here. Or maybe he's just looking to sync with his company's directory server - and in that case there will be a very good reason not to copy all those contacts into the cloud too.
If you don't want to share your contacts in the cloud, Android indeed doesn't provide an easy way to sync them. I am running my own LDAP server for contacts; but searching on how to share them with my Android phone I found out that first I have to upload all of it to Google, and then I can sync my phone to Google again. But I don't want to put my contacts on Google, I have my own server already and that one works fine, thank you very much. And there is no need for Google to have all my contacts, really.
If it comes to companies that respect privacy I trust Google as being one of the best, yet my first choice is to not share those contacts at all. Sharing with Google is second choice already.
Now why Google doesn't provide support for a very standard directory service like LDAP is beyond me. I expected something like that to just work. It was a great disappointment and surprise when I found that out. There are some apps available that allow you to sync to an LDAP server, I haven't tried them out yet. They look very much like a rough hack to me.
Most of the security bashing is related to drive-by installs and related security holes, where software gets installed without user interaction. And the ease of which installed software can escalate its own permissions, and the hardness of running Windows as non-privileged user.
These nuclear reactors are not built to withstand a magnitude 10+ quake, for example. Nor can they withstand the impact of a major asteroid, or an attack with a nuclear bomb or super heavy conventional ordnance. These events are simply too rare, and also the destruction caused by the event likely dwarfs the destruction caused by the nuclear reactor's problems. The latter argument can also easily be applied to the Fukushima plant.
Repressed or hidden memories are a physical impossibility based on the understanding we presently have of memory.
Yet many people tend to completely forget things, only to recall it later.
Recent example, of one of the US president hopefuls: "the government departments that I want to close are a, b, and euhm..." and a while later he remembered it again.
The memory was obviously still there, yet for a while couldn't be recovered. I have similar experiences myself, you surely have too. Like standing in front of an ATM and drawing a blank on your decade-old PIN code... try an hour later and it's back no problem. Why was that memory suddenly gone? How come later it's back again?
This sounds to me like "hidden memories" that need some kind of trigger to recover. And as you rightfully remark, impossible based on our current understanding of the workings of the brain. It's so mighty complex, our understanding of how it works is probably just the very beginning.
Memory is a field that can do with a lot more research, obviously.
There is also this controversial issue of recalling memories under hypnosis. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is possible to recall memories while hypnotised, but there is also the risk of implanting memories.
The Mythbusters tackled this issue some time ago, and in their test (which afaict was done pretty soundly - at least they always try to do this type of experiments in a scientifically sound manner and with the help of experts in the field) found that when hypnotised they could recall more from something they just learned. Yet rightfully they were skeptical about their result and ended it with "this is an interesting results, and definitely needs more research to call it". But the fact remains that their test results went up a lot when under hypnosis, and that in itself is interesting.
Then there is also this short term vs long term memory. People don't appear to remember anything from their early childhood, the first five years of age mainly. Yet in that time we learn many skills like language that stay with us for our whole life.
Also traumatic experiences during early childhood are known to affect the lives of those affected well into adulthood, or even their whole life. The details of the experience itself are completely forgotten, but the results are still there. A fairly common example are children that lost their parents (or were dumped by the parents) shortly after birth, ended up in an orphanage, and were adopted by the time they were 1 yo. Most if not all of them suffer for many years, sometimes for life, from separation anxiety. While all they can remember are their adopted parents, who generally are fully accepted by the child as if it were their biological parents. They have no conscious memories of life before being adopted.
I was thinking in the same lines. That shouldn't be too hard to do, image recognition software combined with ever increasing computing horsepower should make that easy.
The beauty of this design is of course that it's non-intrusive, no cameras dangling in front of your eyes blocking your view. And while the prototype cost $300, that includes all kinds of (in manufacturing) unnecessary components like an experiment board, and components bought retail instead of just what's necessary bought wholesale. Going for mass production will likely slash the cost to US$ 50-100. Create custom components and have enough production and it may go down even more.
It just makes me wonder: as you have two eyes, will you be able to "pinch to zoom" with your eye movements? Blink left for left click, blink right for right click? Double blink to activate something? Close one eye to grab something on the screen and then use the other eye to drag it around?
The possibilities are endless! How come Steve Jobs didn't think of that? Isn't there a forward-facing camera in the iPhone and iPad already? Use that to track the user's eye movements.
Isn't it amazing how much effort humans put into the purpose of destroying one another?
I started to realise this recently while visiting some pre-WWII military sites, mostly former anti-ship and anti-aircraft batteries. So much effort it must have take to build them. It goes to show how much effort other groups must have put in to try and destroy that again. Now if only all that effort would have been put to different, more peaceful uses...
Stuxnet and Duqu are no different. They must have taken a lot of resources to create (in research and software development). Resources lost for other uses. The same accounts for the Iranians of course: the effort they put into building up nuclear facilities and (allegedly) making nuclear bombs is lost on the effort they could put into making their country a better place to live.
If it were so easy to computise, why haven't you done it yet and taken the prize?
My guess it's not that easy. And that it also doesn't have to do with computing horsepower as such.
Then about the text recognition and analyses: don't forget that there are more languages than just English. As a matter of fact most people in this world use a language other than English in their daily life. I for one use four languages, of which three daily and the fourth at least weekly. And English is my second language. You can not just assume the document you try to piece back together is written in English, you can't even assume it's written in Latin script, or that it is text to begin with: it may be drawings or maps.
I didn't intend to say US has good contracts, just that you can not get a phone without a very big contract that includes heaps of data.
Secondly when it comes to maps, on my Android phone I carry an off-line copy of Google Maps and OpenCycleMap, using a great free app called Locus. That covers my mapping needs. Another issue is that for data you almost have to go 3G, and for calls that just eats extra battery for no improvement whatsoever. I used to be on 3G, returned to 2G. And as soon as you leave your own country, data roaming costs are going to kill you. In Sweden that's maybe not an issue, in a tiny city state like Hong Kong it is.
There is a lot more info they have about you, that you didn't give them voluntarily.
Facebook cookies track your movements on third-party web sites. Until recently logging off from Facebook did not help (reported extensively on/. over the last months).
Facebook tries to recognise and automatically tag people in other people's photos: you're in your friend's photo, are tagged automatically or by that friend, and another bit of information about you becomes available to Facebook and it's out of your control.
You may be mentioned (tagged) in a friend's comment. Again you didn't volunteer that information about you to Facebook, someone else does, and you don't have control about it.
You can not delete comments or photos. Many people think they can as there is a "delete" function, but all it does is hide this information from you and other users. It's not gone as in deleted, it's merely hidden, and is still there.
You can not close and delete your account. You can't even close it afaik.
All this info on Facebook is there forever, out of your control. And the last part is maybe the most damning of all. There is no control over your own data on Facebook. They pretend to give you some (by allowing "delete") but in reality they don't (it's not deleted). They collect info about you that is not given by you, instead it's collected automatically and is info that is about things you do outside of Facebook. Those things should worry people. It is not about the info you put in your profile, it's not about what you write yourself in your comments or the photos you post yourself, not even about the external links in friend's messages that you click. It's the rest of the information that's gathered in the background, unknown to you, out of your control.
The current wireless networks also have been built up from scratch.
And that was in a time that electronics were far less common, when the use was less defined, when most people didn't have a mobile phone nor felt the need for it, yet they did it and succeeded to build out to cover complete nations. Including vast, almost unpopulated areas. Nowadays there aren't many places in the world that do not have any mobile phone network available.
If Apple or any other company were to do something like that today, they would have to start the same way. Build up in the major cities first, then cover the motorways between them, move on to the secondary cities and small towns, and finally cover the countryside.
Apple may be able to do this: they have a large customer base that they could migrate to their network, guaranteeing customers (and income) from the get-go.
A company like Google may be able to do this, too: they already own data networks all over the world, and have the cash for it.
But sure it's not easy, and it's going to require a major investment. And the existing carriers will do whatever they can to frustrate such an effort of course.
And without any indication on how the video is used. Who stores the video, and how? How long is it stored? Watched on random basis or in case of reported problems only? So many unknowns here, hard to give an opinion on it.
But well who needs to know the answer to those basic questions anyway.
Yet when I call a friend, only my friend received my voice, and he receives it as audio. The phone company doesn't store this (unless they've been requested to wiretap your line - not very common outside of the US luckily - and even then it's normally stored as audio only), they're not even allowed to listen in to it when it happens, they just have to transmit the audio signal from my phone to my friend's phone.
In this case the audio goes to the vendor of your phone, which then attempts to actively listen in to it and make out what you're trying to say, and as such can store this in a machine processable format. That's the big difference.
It also means that to have Siri work you have to pay for a data account (preferably an unlimited account - this will eat a lot of data if used frequently), as otherwise it will simply not work.
This may be a non-issue for markets like the US where you can only get a phone in conjunction with a heavily overpriced contract that by default includes data, it is an issue for other markets where plans and phones are separated.
I don't have a mobile data plan with my smart phone, don't see the need for it really, WiFi does the job just fine. I don't feel the need for e-mail on the go. I don't feel the need for watching streaming video on such a small screen. I'm not Facebook addicted either. And Angry Birds plays better offline: no ads. And that one moment a month or less that I think "now I really need some data" is not enough to pay for a subscription, and open WiFi networks are usually easy enough to find.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite sure your comment is a dupe, too. I think I've seen the same before. Well actually it's more than just a dupe. A dupe of a dupe of a dupe of a... well you get the idea.
That's because your trains US are slow.
In Germany it's quite customary especially for business trips to drive your car to the nearest station, take the train to near where you have to be, and rent a car from there. You just can't beat the speed of the ICE. Same in France with the TGV.
TGV has a higher top speed but has the acceleration issue you mention. No problem as in France the cities are far apart. The ICE is developed for Germany which has their cities more scattered, and has faster acceleration but lower top speed. Both easily reach top speed and most of the trajectory will run at that speed. Seeing the landscape move by at some 300+ km/hr is just cool.
There are several issues that I can think of with this transfer.
First of all timing: you have to make sure the trains arrive at the exact same moment. Very exact, as otherwise you're wasting parallel track time in aligning the trains.
Secondly the transfer: you must make sure that no-one gets stuck halfway the trains, otherwise something nasty will happen when the trains separate again. The solution would be to have the doors closed by a certain point, and if not stop the combination (how to break synchronised is another issue). This takes a lot of track length.
Anyway you don't want to stop, want to keep a reasonable speed for the high-speed train, so then you're easily talking about 80 km/hr (normal street-car speed of 30-50 km/hr; normal high-speed train speed would be >200 km/hr). Otherwise, why not just stop alltogether.
Transfer times will have to be at least a minute. One minute at 80 km/h is just over 1,300 m.
Stopping a train at 80 km/hr takes a long way, that can easily be 400m. So for the emergency stop you need already 400m of parallel track. That makes for a total parallel track length of about 2 km. That's a very, very long distance. The high-speed train may be passing through that city; the tram will definitely have to loop around and go back to its normal routes.
It makes me think of a recent program about solutions to road traffic, where a similar idea was floated: put the cars on a continuous running train, well basically a huge conveyor belt. The driver doing the first and last mile themselves, and the long distance go automated. The animation showing how this would work also showed the transfer, where a car would be on a feeder conveyor and from there be transferred to the main conveyor. The parallel track was just long enough to make the transfer - no word on what happens if the mechanism doesn't work (then the car will be returned to the road the normal way), how the car gets on the feeder, or what happens if the transfer is not completed. It looked scary and all but fail safe to me. There was really no room for error.
Normally when you make a train/train transfer you step out of one train, walk to the other platform, get on the next. Fail safe. You fail to get off your train? Try again next station. Fail to clear the doors? They will open; train won't move until all doors are closed. Failed to get on the connecting train? Wait for the next.
Then you go ahead and get that fancy machine that does 100 fps, but if 60 fps is good enough for most, then that 's what most people buy. You go ahead get that CD, most other people will settle for the mp3 because they find the sound good enough and find it more convenient. You know there is choice. And about thanksgiving turkeys I never had any, probably never will have, and wouldn't know what it's meant to be for nor do I really care. Knowing the existence of that fest is good enough for me.
Because, as I said, for most people and with normal quality audio equipment there is no audible difference between mp3 and CD. So mp3 is good enough, CD doesn't sound better, just costs more and is less convenient in storage and so. So indeed those people taking mp3 over CD may consider it better: sounds the same; more convenience.
Good enough is good enough. Anything better is only costing more for no extra benefit, as it's good enough already.
the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
You really need pretty decent equipment to be able to hear the difference between MP3 and CD, and listen concentrated, without doing something else while the music is playing nor having any background noises. In the vast majority of situations it fails on the first account already, most consumer grade electronics is just not good enough to tell the difference. Then people are usually doing something else while listening to music, and background noises are also commonplace.
Businesses are in it to make money, and they will do their best to make as much money as possible. So they will charge a price as high as possible. If you think that movie is too expensive, don't go watch it, and the movie maker doesn't get anything. If you think that concert ticket costs too much, don't go watch it, and the concert organiser doesn't get anything.
Well maybe someone else thinks it's worth it, and will pay for it. And the concert organiser and movie theatre will charge a price where there are enough someones other than you that think it's worth the price to fill up the seats.
That you think it's overpriced doesn't mean it is overpriced, nor that they should lower prices.
If you don't want to share your contacts in the cloud, Android indeed doesn't provide an easy way to sync them.
Or you could, you know, use Exchange which you already suggested if you don't trust Google. I sync my contacts with Exchange, but they don't end up in my Google account.
I just don't have an Exchange server, and no experience with Windows server so that's going to be rough on me.
Maybe because you're one of 5 people that run their own personal LDAP directory server and want to sync it with their phone. There are a lot of industry standards that Google doesn't support because not enough people want them. That's what Apps are for - if you find something missing on your phone, write an app for it (or pay someone else to)
Not personal. Company LDAP server. This time my own company and own server but over 15 years ago I already was syncing contacts against LDAP servers of various companies I worked for. I'm not sure whether Exchange existed then already.
So there may be an app that does exactly what you want but you're not interested in even trying it?
I didn't say that. Just that I looked at it, it may do what I need, but the urge is not great enough to start hacking with it. Yet. I've too many other things to do at the moment. Just not high enough on the priority list.
Almost everything in the Android marketplace seems to want internet access for no discernible reason,
They usually need it for advertising. A valid reason, imho. For that same reason many apps also ask for location information nowadays (that one I don't like). The problem of course is that if the permission is there for advertising, it can be used for many other things as well.
And the problem is that you can't just "deny" a single permission, it's all or nothing. I'm fine with Internet access for ads (the "price" to pay for a free app, and usually I have no connection anyway), not so much for location details.
All arguments aside, Google's primary business is information.
True, but they do not sell personal information, they sell advertising.
As a company you can buy and sell advertising space on/for Google (through AdWords/AdSense). Google will not give you any personal information: instead Google will put your ads out towards the people they think are most likely to be interested in your product, attempting to make your advertisement more efficient. As such Google can charge higher prices for that ad space, and can use their own ad space more efficiently - two ways to increase value for them. And if you sell ad space on your own web site to Google, they will only provide the ads to display to you. No customer information is sold. Again Google will try to maximise efficiency by providing your web site with relevant ads, which is interesting for you as web site owner as you get more clicks and more income.
That's their business model. Sell advertising, not personal information. If you have any unambiguous example of Google selling actual costumer information (non-anonymous - I know they do provide certain anonymised, aggregated statistics), please do let me know.
I think you should have added the word "not" twice in there.
OK no experience but how hard can it be to run your own Windows server? About as hard as running your own Linux server maybe?
Considering the submitter wants to share contacts with his own computer directly I may assume he has some kind of server for that already, or at least has the competence to set it up. Whether that's OpenLDAP or Exchange or whatever is not the point here. Or maybe he's just looking to sync with his company's directory server - and in that case there will be a very good reason not to copy all those contacts into the cloud too.
If you don't want to share your contacts in the cloud, Android indeed doesn't provide an easy way to sync them. I am running my own LDAP server for contacts; but searching on how to share them with my Android phone I found out that first I have to upload all of it to Google, and then I can sync my phone to Google again. But I don't want to put my contacts on Google, I have my own server already and that one works fine, thank you very much. And there is no need for Google to have all my contacts, really.
If it comes to companies that respect privacy I trust Google as being one of the best, yet my first choice is to not share those contacts at all. Sharing with Google is second choice already.
Now why Google doesn't provide support for a very standard directory service like LDAP is beyond me. I expected something like that to just work. It was a great disappointment and surprise when I found that out. There are some apps available that allow you to sync to an LDAP server, I haven't tried them out yet. They look very much like a rough hack to me.
Most of the security bashing is related to drive-by installs and related security holes, where software gets installed without user interaction. And the ease of which installed software can escalate its own permissions, and the hardness of running Windows as non-privileged user.
There is a limit to what you should plan for.
These nuclear reactors are not built to withstand a magnitude 10+ quake, for example. Nor can they withstand the impact of a major asteroid, or an attack with a nuclear bomb or super heavy conventional ordnance. These events are simply too rare, and also the destruction caused by the event likely dwarfs the destruction caused by the nuclear reactor's problems. The latter argument can also easily be applied to the Fukushima plant.
Repressed or hidden memories are a physical impossibility based on the understanding we presently have of memory.
Yet many people tend to completely forget things, only to recall it later.
Recent example, of one of the US president hopefuls: "the government departments that I want to close are a, b, and euhm..." and a while later he remembered it again.
The memory was obviously still there, yet for a while couldn't be recovered. I have similar experiences myself, you surely have too. Like standing in front of an ATM and drawing a blank on your decade-old PIN code... try an hour later and it's back no problem. Why was that memory suddenly gone? How come later it's back again?
This sounds to me like "hidden memories" that need some kind of trigger to recover. And as you rightfully remark, impossible based on our current understanding of the workings of the brain. It's so mighty complex, our understanding of how it works is probably just the very beginning.
Memory is a field that can do with a lot more research, obviously.
There is also this controversial issue of recalling memories under hypnosis. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is possible to recall memories while hypnotised, but there is also the risk of implanting memories.
The Mythbusters tackled this issue some time ago, and in their test (which afaict was done pretty soundly - at least they always try to do this type of experiments in a scientifically sound manner and with the help of experts in the field) found that when hypnotised they could recall more from something they just learned. Yet rightfully they were skeptical about their result and ended it with "this is an interesting results, and definitely needs more research to call it". But the fact remains that their test results went up a lot when under hypnosis, and that in itself is interesting.
Then there is also this short term vs long term memory. People don't appear to remember anything from their early childhood, the first five years of age mainly. Yet in that time we learn many skills like language that stay with us for our whole life.
Also traumatic experiences during early childhood are known to affect the lives of those affected well into adulthood, or even their whole life. The details of the experience itself are completely forgotten, but the results are still there. A fairly common example are children that lost their parents (or were dumped by the parents) shortly after birth, ended up in an orphanage, and were adopted by the time they were 1 yo. Most if not all of them suffer for many years, sometimes for life, from separation anxiety. While all they can remember are their adopted parents, who generally are fully accepted by the child as if it were their biological parents. They have no conscious memories of life before being adopted.
I was thinking in the same lines. That shouldn't be too hard to do, image recognition software combined with ever increasing computing horsepower should make that easy.
The beauty of this design is of course that it's non-intrusive, no cameras dangling in front of your eyes blocking your view. And while the prototype cost $300, that includes all kinds of (in manufacturing) unnecessary components like an experiment board, and components bought retail instead of just what's necessary bought wholesale. Going for mass production will likely slash the cost to US$ 50-100. Create custom components and have enough production and it may go down even more.
It just makes me wonder: as you have two eyes, will you be able to "pinch to zoom" with your eye movements? Blink left for left click, blink right for right click? Double blink to activate something? Close one eye to grab something on the screen and then use the other eye to drag it around?
The possibilities are endless! How come Steve Jobs didn't think of that? Isn't there a forward-facing camera in the iPhone and iPad already? Use that to track the user's eye movements.
Isn't it amazing how much effort humans put into the purpose of destroying one another?
I started to realise this recently while visiting some pre-WWII military sites, mostly former anti-ship and anti-aircraft batteries. So much effort it must have take to build them. It goes to show how much effort other groups must have put in to try and destroy that again. Now if only all that effort would have been put to different, more peaceful uses...
Stuxnet and Duqu are no different. They must have taken a lot of resources to create (in research and software development). Resources lost for other uses. The same accounts for the Iranians of course: the effort they put into building up nuclear facilities and (allegedly) making nuclear bombs is lost on the effort they could put into making their country a better place to live.
If it were so easy to computise, why haven't you done it yet and taken the prize?
My guess it's not that easy. And that it also doesn't have to do with computing horsepower as such.
Then about the text recognition and analyses: don't forget that there are more languages than just English. As a matter of fact most people in this world use a language other than English in their daily life. I for one use four languages, of which three daily and the fourth at least weekly. And English is my second language. You can not just assume the document you try to piece back together is written in English, you can't even assume it's written in Latin script, or that it is text to begin with: it may be drawings or maps.
I didn't intend to say US has good contracts, just that you can not get a phone without a very big contract that includes heaps of data.
Secondly when it comes to maps, on my Android phone I carry an off-line copy of Google Maps and OpenCycleMap, using a great free app called Locus. That covers my mapping needs. Another issue is that for data you almost have to go 3G, and for calls that just eats extra battery for no improvement whatsoever. I used to be on 3G, returned to 2G. And as soon as you leave your own country, data roaming costs are going to kill you. In Sweden that's maybe not an issue, in a tiny city state like Hong Kong it is.
There is a lot more info they have about you, that you didn't give them voluntarily.
Facebook cookies track your movements on third-party web sites. Until recently logging off from Facebook did not help (reported extensively on /. over the last months).
Facebook tries to recognise and automatically tag people in other people's photos: you're in your friend's photo, are tagged automatically or by that friend, and another bit of information about you becomes available to Facebook and it's out of your control.
You may be mentioned (tagged) in a friend's comment. Again you didn't volunteer that information about you to Facebook, someone else does, and you don't have control about it.
You can not delete comments or photos. Many people think they can as there is a "delete" function, but all it does is hide this information from you and other users. It's not gone as in deleted, it's merely hidden, and is still there.
You can not close and delete your account. You can't even close it afaik.
All this info on Facebook is there forever, out of your control. And the last part is maybe the most damning of all. There is no control over your own data on Facebook. They pretend to give you some (by allowing "delete") but in reality they don't (it's not deleted). They collect info about you that is not given by you, instead it's collected automatically and is info that is about things you do outside of Facebook. Those things should worry people. It is not about the info you put in your profile, it's not about what you write yourself in your comments or the photos you post yourself, not even about the external links in friend's messages that you click. It's the rest of the information that's gathered in the background, unknown to you, out of your control.
The current wireless networks also have been built up from scratch.
And that was in a time that electronics were far less common, when the use was less defined, when most people didn't have a mobile phone nor felt the need for it, yet they did it and succeeded to build out to cover complete nations. Including vast, almost unpopulated areas. Nowadays there aren't many places in the world that do not have any mobile phone network available.
If Apple or any other company were to do something like that today, they would have to start the same way. Build up in the major cities first, then cover the motorways between them, move on to the secondary cities and small towns, and finally cover the countryside.
Apple may be able to do this: they have a large customer base that they could migrate to their network, guaranteeing customers (and income) from the get-go.
A company like Google may be able to do this, too: they already own data networks all over the world, and have the cash for it.
But sure it's not easy, and it's going to require a major investment. And the existing carriers will do whatever they can to frustrate such an effort of course.
And without any indication on how the video is used. Who stores the video, and how? How long is it stored? Watched on random basis or in case of reported problems only? So many unknowns here, hard to give an opinion on it.
But well who needs to know the answer to those basic questions anyway.
Yet when I call a friend, only my friend received my voice, and he receives it as audio. The phone company doesn't store this (unless they've been requested to wiretap your line - not very common outside of the US luckily - and even then it's normally stored as audio only), they're not even allowed to listen in to it when it happens, they just have to transmit the audio signal from my phone to my friend's phone.
In this case the audio goes to the vendor of your phone, which then attempts to actively listen in to it and make out what you're trying to say, and as such can store this in a machine processable format. That's the big difference.
It also means that to have Siri work you have to pay for a data account (preferably an unlimited account - this will eat a lot of data if used frequently), as otherwise it will simply not work.
This may be a non-issue for markets like the US where you can only get a phone in conjunction with a heavily overpriced contract that by default includes data, it is an issue for other markets where plans and phones are separated.
I don't have a mobile data plan with my smart phone, don't see the need for it really, WiFi does the job just fine. I don't feel the need for e-mail on the go. I don't feel the need for watching streaming video on such a small screen. I'm not Facebook addicted either. And Angry Birds plays better offline: no ads. And that one moment a month or less that I think "now I really need some data" is not enough to pay for a subscription, and open WiFi networks are usually easy enough to find.