When you're talking about overwhelming an under 50W signal from a satellite in orbit using the body of your car (an inch or two from the GPS receiver's antenna), it shouldn't take much power. Thus, there is a small possibility that you could obtain an experimental license (maybe part 74) from the FCC for transmission on a lower frequency, build a homebrew transmitter with harmonics in that band, and make it leak beyond the legally allowed spurious emissions limit. I'm not sure if that would pass legal muster or not. And you might even be able to do it with leakage that falls within the legal limits, but my guess is probably not.
Of course, the cynic in me would point out that A. the transmitter would be in a moving vehicle, making detection and fines/confiscation pretty unlikely, and B. if you're using it to cover up a serious crime, a $10,000 fine and a year in jail is peanuts, so it might still be worth it. Either way, I'm not in any way recommending that people do this; I'm merely pointing out that in theory, it can be done.
For a device that is easily found, you start with a Faraday cage. Bear in mind that GPS receivers go out of satellite range periodically, so losing signal would not be flagged as an unusual condition. Once it is inside the Faraday cage and is not receiving a signal from the actual satellites, you merely generate the bogus signal and inject it into the cage. using a properly shielded cable whose shield is electrically connected to the faraday cage chassis. Then, you can spoof the signal in absurd ways.
Granted, I'm not aware of a way to spoof the encrypted stream, but at least in theory I'd expect a receiver to fail over to the unencrypted stream in the absence of the encrypted stream. And more to the point, if you aren't being tracked by the U.S. military, it's unlikely that their receivers will be able to decode the encrypted stream anyway, so as long as you spoof an encrypted stream, regardless of the key used, that should theoretically be good enough to fool even a fairly sophisticated consumer-grade receiver....
If you mean jamming one that you can't find, that's also not too hard. You simply transmit a signal on the same frequency that pushes the noise margins beyond the detection threshold of the device. You power it off a separate switch so that you can turn it on and off at will. When you're away from home, you first pull into a location that is known to block the signal, e.g. a parking garage. Turn on the transmitter, go do your business, go back to the parking lot, and turn it off. Then, go home. Be sure you randomly choose parking garages. Sure, the signal loss is easily detected if there are logs of signal loss, but they still can't feasibly prove that you did something illegal, short of physically tailing you.
What happens if you find such a device on your car?
I don't know about you, but I'd probably pull it off and attach it to the nearest semi going across the country. Or maybe a squirrel.
And then install a jammer just in case they try it again with a bug that's harder to spot. Maybe even generate a fake GPS stream showing that the vehicle was at 30,000 feet, traveling at Mach 7, over the northern coast of Ecuador.
You know, when I read the headline, I expected ninth circuit. I mean, I'd be shocked if this decision had come out of the 4th or 5th, but even the D.C. circuit coming to that conclusion is a bit surprising, IMHO. It's not exactly a bastion of liberalism or civil liberties.
What's particularly baffling is that the ninth actually went the other way. So it's almost certainly a sufficiently contentious issue to get certiorari. I'll be interested to see the appeal, too. It seems clear that warrantless GPS tracking could be easily abused, and that the relatively low cost and effort involved makes it a fairly significant escalation of police surveillance. On the flip side, one could legitimately argue that anything you do in a vehicle is done in a public place and that you have no expectation of privacy. So it's definitely not clear cut either way.
I would tend to err on the side of requiring a warrant, particularly given that it is a relatively low bar and given that there is minimal chance of the decision to plant a GPS device being so time critical that a warrant could not be reasonably obtained. And if we see warrantless GPS tracking used in a sufficiently widespread way, there is substantial risk that people will employ countermeasures to jam GPS signals in and around their vehicles. The resulting mess would endanger public safety. So it is important that GPS tracking be very limited. Requiring a warrant does this. Without requiring a warrant, the temptation is too great to use GPS as a crutch in place of proper surveillance, which in the long run would be seriously detrimental to society.
Ooh. I've got it. We'll call it the Library of Congress crypto scheme. We could use it for encrypting other stuff, too. Any arbitrary word could be encoded as an LOC identifier, a page number,and an offset in bytes or words. Man, wouldn't that suck to decrypt?
That's not true. Getting an ISBN isn't hard and self publishing companies will generally assign you one as part of the deal.
Depends on the size of the publishing house and the expected sales volume. If you're selling through a major bookstore chain, yeah, you're going to have an ISBN. For an independent author selling a few hundred copies of a book on the history of Three Way in a local bookstore, you probably won't have an ISBN---particularly if the book printing and binding was done at the Kinko's in Jackson. The single ISBN would cost as much as you'd make on the whole book.
ISBN numbers are very much geared towards large volume commercial publishing. The system grudgingly handles smaller publishing to a point, but beyond that point, a lot of stuff falls through the cracks.
I'll tell you what happens when resource acquisition and trade is no longer a societal imperative: we get fat.
Well, at least these hypothetical fat aliens will be too lazy to invade Earth. Probably too lazy to visit, either, but you really have to focus on the positive side.
It's hard to take that view legitimately. I mean sure, if you only exterminate the humans in, say, Canada, that might be a plausible comparison. Exterminating all the humans on Earth would mean that the entire human species would no longer exist. Even if you consider humans to be vermin, eradicating all of them is not remotely in the same league as eradicating all of them in a single spot.
Unless, of course, the planet seeding theories are correct, and humans exist on many, many planets, in which case, yeah, the continued existence of the human race does pretty much preclude the existence of significantly more advanced nonhuman intelligent alien life unless they have such drastically different thermal, light, or gravity requirements that terraforming Earth in their planet's image is not feasible or useful. Or unless they just haven't bothered encroaching on us yet because they have plenty of uninhabited worlds that are equally suitable.
In short, there are too many variables to draw a useful conclusion.
If you're going to quote Adams, at least quote the right bit:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't though of that" and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
---Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
To be fair, that statement was barely true because it deliberately used percentages to mask the magnitude of a statistic.
A country with a small enough GDP automatically spends a much greater percentage because the baseline cost of having a military is substantial. The alternative is not having a military at all. As a country's GDP grows, the military spending as a percentage of GDP typically falls off fairly rapidly. By the same standard, an independently owned burger joint with a manager and two employees has a much worse manager-to-employee ratio than most Fortune 500 companies. Does that mean that a large company can imply that its 1:2.1 manager-to-employee ratio is great because it ranks 20,000th in businesses across the U.S.? Of course not. See how absurd that is?
Comparing it to Middle Eastern nations is similarly useless because they have bombings on a regular basis, continuous military skirmishes between neighboring states, etc.---problems that the U.S. simply doesn't face. Even if you don't discount the MIddle East, saying "The U.S. is sixth or seventh in the world among countries with GDPs over $50 million behind only Middle Eastern Nations" still paints a far different and far more accurate picture than saying "The U.S. is 22nd in the world".
The only truly valid comparison that can be drawn, however, is between the U.S. and countries with a similarly large GDP that are not actively at war with their neighbors. But it would not support her position very well if she had said that we have the largest military spending of any country in the world by total dollars, and the largest spending as a percentage of GDP except for Middle Eastern countries and countries with GDPs smaller than Nebraska.
Or, put another way, it attempts to ascribe importance to a relatively unimportant partial statistic in a deliberate attempt to confuse people by diminishing the perceived importance of more complete statistics that paint a very different picture. For example, if I said that a country killed 5% fewer people in a war this year than last, that sounds pretty good. Things are improving. If I said that same country killed 95 million people in a war this year compared with 100 million last year, you'd be horrified. It might be improving, but the numbers are so shocking that the percentage doesn't do it justice.
And as such, this was inevitable. Did anyone honestly think that our government could have any technology without eventually using it to its maximum potential? First, they say that it doesn't really look like they're seeing you nude. Then upon proof that they're lying, they say that it can't store the pictures. Now that there's proof that this isn't true, either, they'll say that the images are only being stored for diagnostic and training purposes.
Then, when the "Girls Gone Wild JFK Airport Style" video comes out, they'll say that all those people signed release forms. Then, when someone sues because she didn't, they'll pay her off to sweep it under the rug.
This is one of those cases where the slippery slope is almost inevitable. You have a technology that invades the privacy of people so completely that its abuse is almost unavoidable. Abuse was practically designed into the system. Trying to keep such a system from being abused is like trying to teach a jaguar to be a house cat. Doubly so when that system is in the hands of government agencies that are rarely held accountable by the general public. Triply so when even a cell phone camera is sufficient to abuse the system to horrifying ends. Quadruply so when you're talking about nudie pics.
I would think that this is where the DSP comes in.... You have a series of chemical signals coming in from specific nerves, and you turn each of these signals into a separate data stream. You ask the person, "Okay, try lifting your arm straight up." You then record what happens. Repeat for other actions to build up a rough map of what neuron does what. Then, you have the person try to use the limb, starting from various positions, and tell the person to do specific things, progressively tuning the amount of response for particular motions iteratively until the motion of the prosthetic limb feels natural. Easy? No. Quick? Also no. Possible? I don't see why not.
If an electrical connection can control an arm, how much longer until you can control a whole body?
I think we're likely to be able to repair spinal cord damage long before we learn how to patch around it with electronics. We're gettingclosereveryday.
I am not a neurosurgeon, but it seems to me that implanting probes in the motor cortex is probably not the best solution anyway. You already presumably have peripheral motor nerves coming off the spine and across your back to where the arm used to be (ignoring people who can't use limbs due to spinal damage for the moment). And peripheral motor nerves, unlike spinal nerves, don't suddenly stop controlling your arm and start controlling your leg or start controlling a different muscle in your arm, generally speaking.
To use a computer analogy, controlling implants with probes in the brain is like staying in a hotel in NYC and controlling the lights in your house in California by installing a box that introspect the packets that flow through a core router on a major Internet backbone in Cleveland. Ten hours later, you drive to D.C., and the packets that went to your house get routed through Detroit instead, so your house isn't controllable. As you get closer to your house, you encounter fewer possible paths that actually go to your house. Thus, the closer you are to the endpoint, the greater the likelihood that the packets are going to pass through your tap. By the time the packets get to your house, you can be pretty sure that they're intended for your house, or at worst, for somebody in your general neighborhood.
So by tapping the peripheral motor nerves, you'd reduce the number of problems you have to deal with down to one: the nerves near the implant site dying. And even in that case, repairs would be less dangerous; you would shorten the nerve in the person's shoulder area instead cutting into his/her skull. Also, the mechanisms that attack implants in the brain aren't present in the rest of the body, AFAIK, so you might have a whole different set of problems or you might have fewer problems, but it seems unlikely that you'd have the same problems.
Man, that would be awesome. Wouldn't be very practical in a theater, of course.
Then again, theaters aren't very practical to begin with. You're driving halfway across town, paying half again more (per person) than the DVD will cost to buy two years from now, and spending fifteen bucks on a tub of popcorn and a coke, all for the pleasure of sitting there in a chair that looks like some homeless guy peed in it, with a sticky floor, squeezed between two morbidly obese people while their kids sit behind you and throw popcorn at your head, all the while having trouble watching the movie for all the laser pointers and screaming children....
Yeah, I watch movies at home anyway unless I'm on a date, and ideally, even then....
Close. The primary cause of the headaches is that the parallax angle doesn't match with the optical focus.
Your body is wired to have your eyes focus close up when your eyes are crossed substantially (pointed at something close) and focus far away when they are not. With 3D movies, anything that doesn't appear to be roughly in the same plane as the screen is going to cause headaches because your eyes are converging on something closer or farther away, but focusing at that distance. As long as your primary action occurs mainly at the screen depth and there is minimal activity in front of it to cause you to converge your eyes unnaturally closer than the screen, you shouldn't get headaches (assuming the glasses aren't too tight).
I'm assuming that we're talking about passive 3D here (polarization-based). The active systems (alternating fields) cause even more headaches because of how much more they depend on persistence of vision.
Minor nit: you should probably write out Iodine the first time you use it instead of abbreviating it. The d**n sans-serif fonts used on many websites including this one makes a capital i indistinguishable from a lowercase L, so when I read your post, I was completely and utterly baffled for about two minutes before it hit me that it was a capital i. *smashes head into desk*.
On a lighter note, if I could go back in time and prevent one person from being born, it would be the inventor of the first sans serif typeface.
Another handy thing is that most of the basic NS types (e.g. NSString) have equivalents down in Core Foundation (e.g. CFStringRef), and the objects are transparently bridged; if you create an NSString, you can pass it down to Core Foundation, use it as a CFStringRef, pass it back, and use it as an NSString again, and vice versa.
As a result, it is fairly straightforward to mix the toll-free-bridged data types between pure C code and Objective-C code.
Anyway, would love to see how it's done for a non-trivial app that isn't an opengl game.
Well, your view is going to be in Objective-C. I mean you could technically use objc_msg_send in C code, but unless you enjoy self-flagellation, you probably won't enjoy that much, either.
Beyond the view code, though, there's nothing stopping you from writing the rest of your code in C or C++. For example, you might take an app like OpenOffice and write a new GUI that uses most of the exiting core code under the hood, calling back into Objective-C code for updating the screen and so on. You just make normal C function calls out of the Objective-C code, passing Objective-C objects as void *. When those functions need to call back the other direction, you create a C source file with normal C functions (e.g. update_view(void *cocoaView)), but you compile it with the Objective-C compiler. You cast the void * back to an appropriate class object, and send the appropriate message as you would from any other Objective-C code.
It is almost impossible to determine how a company will treat you up front, sure there are some signs you can find on your own but determining details can be hard in a job search..
Agreed. It varies not just from company to company, but also team to team within most larger companies. How well you are treated financially depends not just on the company, but on your luck in bosses, how much the company values your position, how well you sell yourself (don't be a prima donna, but do make your contributions obvious), and myriad other things that cannot necessarily be judged ahead of time.
One good starting point is to ask to meet some of your future coworkers, then ask how many years they have been working there. If the answers are mostly or exclusively low single digits, you should probably look elsewhere. That said, even this isn't always sufficient.
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When you're talking about overwhelming an under 50W signal from a satellite in orbit using the body of your car (an inch or two from the GPS receiver's antenna), it shouldn't take much power. Thus, there is a small possibility that you could obtain an experimental license (maybe part 74) from the FCC for transmission on a lower frequency, build a homebrew transmitter with harmonics in that band, and make it leak beyond the legally allowed spurious emissions limit. I'm not sure if that would pass legal muster or not. And you might even be able to do it with leakage that falls within the legal limits, but my guess is probably not.
Of course, the cynic in me would point out that A. the transmitter would be in a moving vehicle, making detection and fines/confiscation pretty unlikely, and B. if you're using it to cover up a serious crime, a $10,000 fine and a year in jail is peanuts, so it might still be worth it. Either way, I'm not in any way recommending that people do this; I'm merely pointing out that in theory, it can be done.
It's actually pretty easy.
For a device that is easily found, you start with a Faraday cage. Bear in mind that GPS receivers go out of satellite range periodically, so losing signal would not be flagged as an unusual condition. Once it is inside the Faraday cage and is not receiving a signal from the actual satellites, you merely generate the bogus signal and inject it into the cage. using a properly shielded cable whose shield is electrically connected to the faraday cage chassis. Then, you can spoof the signal in absurd ways.
Granted, I'm not aware of a way to spoof the encrypted stream, but at least in theory I'd expect a receiver to fail over to the unencrypted stream in the absence of the encrypted stream. And more to the point, if you aren't being tracked by the U.S. military, it's unlikely that their receivers will be able to decode the encrypted stream anyway, so as long as you spoof an encrypted stream, regardless of the key used, that should theoretically be good enough to fool even a fairly sophisticated consumer-grade receiver....
If you mean jamming one that you can't find, that's also not too hard. You simply transmit a signal on the same frequency that pushes the noise margins beyond the detection threshold of the device. You power it off a separate switch so that you can turn it on and off at will. When you're away from home, you first pull into a location that is known to block the signal, e.g. a parking garage. Turn on the transmitter, go do your business, go back to the parking lot, and turn it off. Then, go home. Be sure you randomly choose parking garages. Sure, the signal loss is easily detected if there are logs of signal loss, but they still can't feasibly prove that you did something illegal, short of physically tailing you.
I don't know about you, but I'd probably pull it off and attach it to the nearest semi going across the country. Or maybe a squirrel.
And then install a jammer just in case they try it again with a bug that's harder to spot. Maybe even generate a fake GPS stream showing that the vehicle was at 30,000 feet, traveling at Mach 7, over the northern coast of Ecuador.
You know, when I read the headline, I expected ninth circuit. I mean, I'd be shocked if this decision had come out of the 4th or 5th, but even the D.C. circuit coming to that conclusion is a bit surprising, IMHO. It's not exactly a bastion of liberalism or civil liberties.
What's particularly baffling is that the ninth actually went the other way. So it's almost certainly a sufficiently contentious issue to get certiorari. I'll be interested to see the appeal, too. It seems clear that warrantless GPS tracking could be easily abused, and that the relatively low cost and effort involved makes it a fairly significant escalation of police surveillance. On the flip side, one could legitimately argue that anything you do in a vehicle is done in a public place and that you have no expectation of privacy. So it's definitely not clear cut either way.
I would tend to err on the side of requiring a warrant, particularly given that it is a relatively low bar and given that there is minimal chance of the decision to plant a GPS device being so time critical that a warrant could not be reasonably obtained. And if we see warrantless GPS tracking used in a sufficiently widespread way, there is substantial risk that people will employ countermeasures to jam GPS signals in and around their vehicles. The resulting mess would endanger public safety. So it is important that GPS tracking be very limited. Requiring a warrant does this. Without requiring a warrant, the temptation is too great to use GPS as a crutch in place of proper surveillance, which in the long run would be seriously detrimental to society.
Ooh. I've got it. We'll call it the Library of Congress crypto scheme. We could use it for encrypting other stuff, too. Any arbitrary word could be encoded as an LOC identifier, a page number ,and an offset in bytes or words. Man, wouldn't that suck to decrypt?
Ring finger, presumably.
Depends on the size of the publishing house and the expected sales volume. If you're selling through a major bookstore chain, yeah, you're going to have an ISBN. For an independent author selling a few hundred copies of a book on the history of Three Way in a local bookstore, you probably won't have an ISBN---particularly if the book printing and binding was done at the Kinko's in Jackson. The single ISBN would cost as much as you'd make on the whole book.
ISBN numbers are very much geared towards large volume commercial publishing. The system grudgingly handles smaller publishing to a point, but beyond that point, a lot of stuff falls through the cracks.
You read the article?
Impostor! Burn the witch!
Well, at least these hypothetical fat aliens will be too lazy to invade Earth. Probably too lazy to visit, either, but you really have to focus on the positive side.
It's hard to take that view legitimately. I mean sure, if you only exterminate the humans in, say, Canada, that might be a plausible comparison. Exterminating all the humans on Earth would mean that the entire human species would no longer exist. Even if you consider humans to be vermin, eradicating all of them is not remotely in the same league as eradicating all of them in a single spot.
Unless, of course, the planet seeding theories are correct, and humans exist on many, many planets, in which case, yeah, the continued existence of the human race does pretty much preclude the existence of significantly more advanced nonhuman intelligent alien life unless they have such drastically different thermal, light, or gravity requirements that terraforming Earth in their planet's image is not feasible or useful. Or unless they just haven't bothered encroaching on us yet because they have plenty of uninhabited worlds that are equally suitable.
In short, there are too many variables to draw a useful conclusion.
If you're going to quote Adams, at least quote the right bit:
To be fair, that statement was barely true because it deliberately used percentages to mask the magnitude of a statistic.
A country with a small enough GDP automatically spends a much greater percentage because the baseline cost of having a military is substantial. The alternative is not having a military at all. As a country's GDP grows, the military spending as a percentage of GDP typically falls off fairly rapidly. By the same standard, an independently owned burger joint with a manager and two employees has a much worse manager-to-employee ratio than most Fortune 500 companies. Does that mean that a large company can imply that its 1:2.1 manager-to-employee ratio is great because it ranks 20,000th in businesses across the U.S.? Of course not. See how absurd that is?
Comparing it to Middle Eastern nations is similarly useless because they have bombings on a regular basis, continuous military skirmishes between neighboring states, etc.---problems that the U.S. simply doesn't face. Even if you don't discount the MIddle East, saying "The U.S. is sixth or seventh in the world among countries with GDPs over $50 million behind only Middle Eastern Nations" still paints a far different and far more accurate picture than saying "The U.S. is 22nd in the world".
The only truly valid comparison that can be drawn, however, is between the U.S. and countries with a similarly large GDP that are not actively at war with their neighbors. But it would not support her position very well if she had said that we have the largest military spending of any country in the world by total dollars, and the largest spending as a percentage of GDP except for Middle Eastern countries and countries with GDPs smaller than Nebraska.
Or, put another way, it attempts to ascribe importance to a relatively unimportant partial statistic in a deliberate attempt to confuse people by diminishing the perceived importance of more complete statistics that paint a very different picture. For example, if I said that a country killed 5% fewer people in a war this year than last, that sounds pretty good. Things are improving. If I said that same country killed 95 million people in a war this year compared with 100 million last year, you'd be horrified. It might be improving, but the numbers are so shocking that the percentage doesn't do it justice.
It's the same way with our military budget.
Wait, you read the article?
Impostor! Get the noob!
Der TSA, der?
:-D
And as such, this was inevitable. Did anyone honestly think that our government could have any technology without eventually using it to its maximum potential? First, they say that it doesn't really look like they're seeing you nude. Then upon proof that they're lying, they say that it can't store the pictures. Now that there's proof that this isn't true, either, they'll say that the images are only being stored for diagnostic and training purposes.
Then, when the "Girls Gone Wild JFK Airport Style" video comes out, they'll say that all those people signed release forms. Then, when someone sues because she didn't, they'll pay her off to sweep it under the rug.
This is one of those cases where the slippery slope is almost inevitable. You have a technology that invades the privacy of people so completely that its abuse is almost unavoidable. Abuse was practically designed into the system. Trying to keep such a system from being abused is like trying to teach a jaguar to be a house cat. Doubly so when that system is in the hands of government agencies that are rarely held accountable by the general public. Triply so when even a cell phone camera is sufficient to abuse the system to horrifying ends. Quadruply so when you're talking about nudie pics.
Inevitable.
I would think that this is where the DSP comes in.... You have a series of chemical signals coming in from specific nerves, and you turn each of these signals into a separate data stream. You ask the person, "Okay, try lifting your arm straight up." You then record what happens. Repeat for other actions to build up a rough map of what neuron does what. Then, you have the person try to use the limb, starting from various positions, and tell the person to do specific things, progressively tuning the amount of response for particular motions iteratively until the motion of the prosthetic limb feels natural. Easy? No. Quick? Also no. Possible? I don't see why not.
I think we're likely to be able to repair spinal cord damage long before we learn how to patch around it with electronics. We're getting closer every day.
I am not a neurosurgeon, but it seems to me that implanting probes in the motor cortex is probably not the best solution anyway. You already presumably have peripheral motor nerves coming off the spine and across your back to where the arm used to be (ignoring people who can't use limbs due to spinal damage for the moment). And peripheral motor nerves, unlike spinal nerves, don't suddenly stop controlling your arm and start controlling your leg or start controlling a different muscle in your arm, generally speaking.
To use a computer analogy, controlling implants with probes in the brain is like staying in a hotel in NYC and controlling the lights in your house in California by installing a box that introspect the packets that flow through a core router on a major Internet backbone in Cleveland. Ten hours later, you drive to D.C., and the packets that went to your house get routed through Detroit instead, so your house isn't controllable. As you get closer to your house, you encounter fewer possible paths that actually go to your house. Thus, the closer you are to the endpoint, the greater the likelihood that the packets are going to pass through your tap. By the time the packets get to your house, you can be pretty sure that they're intended for your house, or at worst, for somebody in your general neighborhood.
So by tapping the peripheral motor nerves, you'd reduce the number of problems you have to deal with down to one: the nerves near the implant site dying. And even in that case, repairs would be less dangerous; you would shorten the nerve in the person's shoulder area instead cutting into his/her skull. Also, the mechanisms that attack implants in the brain aren't present in the rest of the body, AFAIK, so you might have a whole different set of problems or you might have fewer problems, but it seems unlikely that you'd have the same problems.
Man, that would be awesome. Wouldn't be very practical in a theater, of course.
Then again, theaters aren't very practical to begin with. You're driving halfway across town, paying half again more (per person) than the DVD will cost to buy two years from now, and spending fifteen bucks on a tub of popcorn and a coke, all for the pleasure of sitting there in a chair that looks like some homeless guy peed in it, with a sticky floor, squeezed between two morbidly obese people while their kids sit behind you and throw popcorn at your head, all the while having trouble watching the movie for all the laser pointers and screaming children....
Yeah, I watch movies at home anyway unless I'm on a date, and ideally, even then....
Close. The primary cause of the headaches is that the parallax angle doesn't match with the optical focus.
Your body is wired to have your eyes focus close up when your eyes are crossed substantially (pointed at something close) and focus far away when they are not. With 3D movies, anything that doesn't appear to be roughly in the same plane as the screen is going to cause headaches because your eyes are converging on something closer or farther away, but focusing at that distance. As long as your primary action occurs mainly at the screen depth and there is minimal activity in front of it to cause you to converge your eyes unnaturally closer than the screen, you shouldn't get headaches (assuming the glasses aren't too tight).
I'm assuming that we're talking about passive 3D here (polarization-based). The active systems (alternating fields) cause even more headaches because of how much more they depend on persistence of vision.
Minor nit: you should probably write out Iodine the first time you use it instead of abbreviating it. The d**n sans-serif fonts used on many websites including this one makes a capital i indistinguishable from a lowercase L, so when I read your post, I was completely and utterly baffled for about two minutes before it hit me that it was a capital i. *smashes head into desk*.
On a lighter note, if I could go back in time and prevent one person from being born, it would be the inventor of the first sans serif typeface.
Another handy thing is that most of the basic NS types (e.g. NSString) have equivalents down in Core Foundation (e.g. CFStringRef), and the objects are transparently bridged; if you create an NSString, you can pass it down to Core Foundation, use it as a CFStringRef, pass it back, and use it as an NSString again, and vice versa.
As a result, it is fairly straightforward to mix the toll-free-bridged data types between pure C code and Objective-C code.
Well, your view is going to be in Objective-C. I mean you could technically use objc_msg_send in C code, but unless you enjoy self-flagellation, you probably won't enjoy that much, either.
Beyond the view code, though, there's nothing stopping you from writing the rest of your code in C or C++. For example, you might take an app like OpenOffice and write a new GUI that uses most of the exiting core code under the hood, calling back into Objective-C code for updating the screen and so on. You just make normal C function calls out of the Objective-C code, passing Objective-C objects as void *. When those functions need to call back the other direction, you create a C source file with normal C functions (e.g. update_view(void *cocoaView)), but you compile it with the Objective-C compiler. You cast the void * back to an appropriate class object, and send the appropriate message as you would from any other Objective-C code.
You b***ard! I looked that up at work!
Agreed. It varies not just from company to company, but also team to team within most larger companies. How well you are treated financially depends not just on the company, but on your luck in bosses, how much the company values your position, how well you sell yourself (don't be a prima donna, but do make your contributions obvious), and myriad other things that cannot necessarily be judged ahead of time.
One good starting point is to ask to meet some of your future coworkers, then ask how many years they have been working there. If the answers are mostly or exclusively low single digits, you should probably look elsewhere. That said, even this isn't always sufficient.