That was pretty much the point, there isn't any such thing: even if you accept the premise of the 'why are you so intolerant of my intolerance? Huh? Huh?' argument, the level of intolerance you'll find is incredibly tepid on the American left. It's mostly a footnote to the broader point, which is about the issues with the word 'tolerance'; but in the specific context of where you commonly hear the argument grandparent mentioned, it's worth noting that the 'intolerance' being complained about is generally incredibly feeble.
Religions do tend to be a bit touchy about market share; but there is nothing that forbids them from tolerating the fact that everybody else is wrong and going to hell. Indeed, as demonstrated by the relative passivity of most of the world's theists, they generally do. Honestly, that's one of the most interesting things about people who profess that our beliefs and actions have infinite positive or negative consequences: most of them act a great deal like everybody else, aside from a few hours a week of minimally demanding ceremonial behavior.
One would, naively, expect that the infinite valuation of salvation goods would lead to fanatical behavior on a scale that would leave the world knee deep in mangled corpses and televangelists. But it doesn't. It's odd.
You can actually generalize that a bit: 'tolerance' is really only a coherent concept with regard to certain classes of stimuli.
It is, at best, weird to speak of 'tolerance' of things you like. Nobody really talks about 'tolerating' things that they like. They don't not-tolerate them; but they don't tolerate them in any meaningful way.
It is downright incorrect to speak of 'tolerance' of things that are deemed to be beyond the pale. You don't 'tolerate' murderers or critical security flaws; not because you are 'intolerant'; but because such things are not accorded toleration.
It's only the intermediate class of things, things that are distasteful, unpleasant, etc; but are accorded some sort of right(or some sort of inevitability, in context, as with the squeaky vent that Facilities is never going to fix), that you can meaningfully 'tolerate', and the degree to which you do so determines how 'tolerant' or 'intolerant' you are(the medical usage semi-overlaps here, in that the less responsive to a given drug you are, the greater your tolerance to it is said to be, just as the less responsive to a given negative stimulus you are, the greater your tolerance is said to be).
The tricky thing is that, in practice, 'tolerance' is forced to carry two(quite distinct) meanings: The one is strictly a measure of how you endure the third class of negative-but-not-eradicable stimuli. The second is your system of classification for these three categories. That's a wholly different thing; but it has to coexist in the same word.
In the example you give(assuming the participants are actually sincere, that line frequently isn't), you really have an argument over whether or not homophobia is a class II or class III phenomenon: If it is class III, then failure to tolerate it is intolerance. If it is class II, failure to tolerate it is simple moral clarity. (There may also be a secondary argument over what exactly 'tolerance' means: There are definitely social circles that you will be frozen out of for socially retrograde attitudes; but the Leftist firebombing campaign against southern baptist churches just hasn't panned out... Exactly how polite you are required to be to count as 'tolerant' is a somewhat unsettled question).
Inconveniently, the case of the Blasphemy Police vs. freedom of expression is probably fairly similar. Nobody seems to be saying "Yup, I think that everyone deserves freedom of expression; but I Just Can't Stand It when I see a picture of Mohammed as a drag queen and I flip out, I'm intolerant, I guess." They are, rather, saying that blasphemy, at least against their favorites, is outside the set of phenomena to which tolerance applies. Inconveniently, while somebody's degree of 'tolerance' relative to a pre-supplied set assignment is measureable, and you can argue for or against given actions and policies based on how tolerant they are, the set assignment itself is basically in the same boat as the rest of moral philosophy: little more than handwaving and appeals to 'intuition' or emotion, or imaginary friends.
What do you think sectarian violence is all about? Shias and Sunnis are happily killing each over whether there was a 13th Imam or not, and both don't like the Sufis. Compare it to Mormons, Catholics, Protestants and their various flavors, and blasphemy laws have never lead to anything but general violence against people "we don't like".
My point was merely that, in application, I've never seen a blasphemy law that is applied across the board and thus suppresses basically all religious activity. In practice, the monopoly religion(or an oligopoly of doctrinally somewhat different; but-agree-to-politely-not-talk-about-that as part of a big-tent strategy religions) get to enforce the law against their opponents, and their opponents generally don't get to return the favor.
Oh, I don't really blame the jurors for being dubiously clueful about ghastly intricate patent law(and probably unenthusiastic about spending months poring over the case), especially when the patent office itself has gone through a few waves of "just like things we did on mainframes and minicomputers; but over the internet and therefore novel!" and "just like things we did on PCs over the internet but on mobile phones and therefore novel!" patent grants themselves, and they are supposed to know better.
I just don't feel very comfortable about letting major court cases be decided by people who(even from their voluntary public remarks) are clearly out to lunch on what they are supposed to be deciding...
I tend to suspect that the 'prophets' who know when to skip town are in it for the money, while the ones who end up getting themselves killed over it are either sincerely deluded or caught up on the power and the status. Smith did alright for himself for a while; but he ultimately failed to take the money and run when that would have been a great deal more sensible...
Respect = Tolerance. So, basically, that should be the only law.
"Respect" and "Tolerance" are basically orthogonal. Tolerating somebody does require that you respect their right to do whatever it is they are doing; but has no necessary connection with respecting whatever it is they are doing. Respect, by contrast, implies some degree of actual regard for somebody, rather than mere sufferance of them.
In fact, 'tolerate' actually sounds pretty weird if used outside a context where the stimulus is implicitly negative in some respect. You wouldn't ask "How can you tolerate getting a raise and a corner office?" You would as "How can you tolerate that squeaky noise that the vent in your office makes?"
Blasphemy isn't 'religious intolerance'; but banning blasphemy is fairly obviously contrary to 'freedom of expression and opinion'. There, that was easy.
Incidentally, since most religions contain significant incompatibilities(on occasion, you get organizational splits purely because of personality spats or disputes over who gets the earthly loot; but all the really good schisms are over doctrine), the practice of almost any religion is necessarily blasphemous(at least by implication, often quite overtly) toward almost all the others.
In practice, of course, anti-blasphemy laws are usually just an excuse to suppress the minorities and the dissidents; but it would be (morbidly) amusing to watch the epic pileup that would occur if one were actually applied rigorously... There would also be some fun around statements that are simultaneously likely to arouse ire and are confirmed by assorted holy texts, the denial of which would also cause ire(Anything concerning the fact that the god of the old testament is kind of a genocidal psycho, or that Mohammed fucked a nine year old, would qualify, as would, no doubt, an endless number of subtler doctrinal quibbles between more enthusiastic sects).
I loved his position that a piece of prior art could be dismissed because the implementation discussed ran on a different processor architecture. Judicial functionaries have a proud history of pulling distinctions out of their asses and calling them 'tests'(later given first names, if they catch on more broadly); but that one was classic.
I'm not sure how anyone could even offer 'tested' in the present legal climate. Aside from the fact that individual judges and juries are unpredictable, are there even enough paralegals with relevant knowledge of US patent law to throw at the problem of determining whether a given complex system is noninfringing or legitimately licensed against all currently valid patents? That's an epic task search and (somewhat)natural language processing problem.
Indemnification is at least possible; but if you are practically guaranteed to have a few trolls hit you for low to moderate millions in the rocket docket, and there is the possibility of a huge lawsuit or two, it isn't going to be inexpensive, since it'll basically amount to insurance...
Anything that will play nice with a kinect, or its older-and-less-sophisticated-but-much-more-mature-at-emulating-a-mouse sibling the IR webcam with illuminators and a retroreflective dot(because the commercial units have been touched by the dead hand of 'assistive technology' pricing they are damned expensive for what they are, DIY hacks are less likely to be polished; but can come in at a factor of ten less) could be useful to provide an extra 'hand' worth of control without occupying your good hand(if you are a flight simmer, you may well want one anyway: for immersion, nothing beats having your cockpit view actually change when you turn your real-world head...)
Other useful things: the switch discussed here(or its reasonably numerous clones) is basically a cheapy guitar stomp pedal that can be programmed to perform more or less any keystroke, or short keystroke sequence(and possibly a mouse click event, not sure) that a normal USB HID device could. I think that 4-pedal versions are also available. For relatively little money, a chunk of plywood or something, and a USB hub, you should be able to get your feet in on controlling a bunch of useful hotkeys and whatnot.
For more thoroughly custom work, the teensy is extremely convenient. It is essentially arduino compatible, so basic development is dead simple; but it also includes a USB HID bootloader out of the box and enough I/O pins to tack on a reasonable number of switches that can then be tied to keycodes sent to the host(I could imagine, for instance, that if you don't have the finger control for WASD, you might still be able to handle a joystick/grip type arrangement with 4 contact switches mapped to those allowing you to control standard left-hand functions with only gross motor control of the arm/shoulder and possibly one or two of the footswitches for crouch/reload/whatever.
Also good to know about for custom ergonomics work: Polycaprolactone. At room temperature, it is a plastic with bulk properties pretty similar to nylon. However, it becomes soft enough to be moldable at only 60 degrees C or so. This makes it only slightly uncomfortable to hand-mould grips and things that precisely fit you. It can also be tool worked when hardened with a minimum of trouble.
What Microsoft really appears to fear is the fact that MS Office versions N-1,N-2, and often even N-3 also take care of everything most people need to do.
They aren't simply adding a subscription option, they are nontrivially bumping the price of the perpetual license options...
Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.
The writer of this bullshit piece is the CEO of an advertising/tracking firm "33Across"
"Over 600,000 publishers and more than 375 Fortune 1000 marketers use 33Across’s Brand Graph technology, tools, and real-time predictive systems to connect their content and products into the social graph. Clients rely on their Brand Graph to leverage how individuals and the networks around them react to what is read, purchased, shared, and recommended in real-time. Reaching over a billion users, 33Across processes tens of thousands anonymous social engagement, influence, and interest actions that surround marketer and publisher brands each second."
Surely you aren't suggesting that the government should just allow consumers to speak ill of advertisers and other members of the better sort?
Clearly the horrors of 'do not track' are so great that we must have a law to forbid people from even expressing such a destructive preference.(Now, um, never you mind that I said that targeted advertising was awesome, and thus would theoretically be popular and simply outcompete DNT, that was, um, different for some reason! Targeted advertising is exciting and ought to be mandatory!)
Aside from the fact that just sticking a skimmer onto real Coca-Cola kiosks would be cheaper? Nothing at all. Same basic reason that ATM card skimmers are more common than full fake ATMs.
They also have a mac client, if I recall. If you need A/V for the Windows boxes anyway, plus something on the mail server to snip some of the crap out on the way in, it becomes a fairly easy sell for the vendor to shove a few mac or linux licenses out the door if some of their customers have a paranoic 'zOMG all computers must have antivirus to protect our megahertz!!!" policy. If you have to implement that, it's easier to at least implement it all in one place, with one console, and maybe a volume discount...
The trouble, in this case, is that it detects its own signature update componenets as viruses...
Not only should this have been caught in testing(Since it would have cropped up more or less the moment the new signatures were loaded onto a live system with Sophos installed; but they hit files about which sophos presumably has intimate knowledge, this isn't some 'obscure packing/compression scheme used by legacy CAD program that seemed like a good idea in the 80's looks like a suspicious obfuscated payload' kind of thing.
I am not impressed, though thankfully it only took me a little over half a day to fix it here...
I'd be totally unsurprised if a cheap-ass transistor amp sounds better than a cheap-ass pre-transistor or early transistor amp. I would mostly be worried about the fairly relentless downward pressure on the size of the speakers and headphones in use.
Even a modestly competent cheapy bookshelf speaker of no particular distinction doesn't sound nearly as tinny as even the speakers on a $3k laptop; because it doesn't have to fit in a few cubic centimeters of available chassis space. Similarly, while there are good earbuds that, when correctly fitted, can take advantage of near-direct coupling with the eardrum and achieve good sound reproduction and even bass, despite having a teeny driver, in the cheaper seats physics seems to give a significant boost to larger over-the-ear-and-too-goofy-for-the-train designs.
Even in home theatre settings, where you would think that bigger would still rule, I've seen far too many of those 'teeny-tiny-little-Bose-cubes-on-sticks' setups where a late-60s through '80s would have had actual speakers with driver diameters that allow them to hit low frequencies. Thanks to head related transfer functions and DSPs and other fancy stuff I don't really understand all that well, we do seem to be able to make brutally volume(in the spatial, not the intensity, sense)-constrained equipment sound better than one would expect; but we seem to have shied away from a willingness to throw volume at the problem.
Are you implying that ""The spirituality and soul of music is truly found when the sound engulfs you and that is just what 2012 will bring. It is a physical thing, a relief that you feel when you finally hear music the way artists and producers did when they created it in the studio. The sound engulfs you and your senses open up allowing you to truly feel the deep emotion in the music of some of our finest artists. From Frank Sinatra to the Black Keys, the feeling is there. This is what recording companies were born to give you and in 2012 they will deliver."" is mushy bullshit? How could you!!!
Perhaps more importantly, even if we concede the point that FLAC-ed audio right from the studio masters sounds better than 128kb/s mp3s ripped from a CD brutally optimized to sound good on a $30 boombox, the question becomes 'Better on what speakers or headphones?'. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, and software is cheap(once written); and all of these things are widely available in quantity; but the quality of the audio gear that most people are actually listening through has hardly been a beneficiary of Moore's law...
Based on TFA's (somewhat fragmentary) description, this 'Pono' nonsense appears to be some dreadful 'ecosystem' that includes high quality recordings in some format; but also "Pono's cloud-based libraries" and quite probably some sort of 'social' crap.
Also, given that TFA has some stuff from Young about how CDs ruined everything, the plan presumably also includes using a lossless, or less-lossy, format on the same sources from which CDs are generated, rather than to sling CD audio around.
FLAC would certainly be capable of being the compression system for such a scheme(and, let's face it, all lossless compression systems are going to sound the same, even wholly unoptimized ones like 'well, just gzip the.wav file...', so the only real question is whether somebody's patented magic sauce math will save you enough bandwidth to be worth the licensing fees, or whether using FLAC(possibly with some ghastly proprietary data fields or DRM wrapper) is easier and cheaper).
"Popcorn lung" makes it sound funny; but that one is actually a pretty ugly story(at least for the production workers and some of the QA guys at the plants, this guy must have really been a big fan to inhale that much). Let's just say that "constrictive bronchiolitis obliterans" is almost as much fun as it sounds like it would be. A much rarer disease; but the macro-scale symptoms are pretty similar to emphysema.
The matter first came to broader attention when NIOSH looked into a cluster of occurrences of this(usually quite uncommon) condition at a microwave popcorn plant. As it turns out, diacetyl, the usual artificial butter flavoring component, causes a delightful progressive, irreversible, destruction of lung capacity(pretty much what 'bronchiolitis obliterans' sounds like it does, it does.) The most severe cases require permanent supplemental oxygen or lung transplants to survive. Less severe cases experience ongoing shortness of breath and respiratory difficulties(whether only under exertion, or even when idle depends on the severity of the case).
As usual with these cases, the story of the discovery is littered with OSHA dragging its feet, popcorn producers skipping cheap protective measures like extractor fans to keep exposure down(25k to install fans, or slow death for the workers in the mixing room... Hmm, which is better for shareholder value?), and similar depressing anecdotes. Since consumer exposure is much, much lower than flavor-mixing exposure, the FDA has twiddled its thumbs about any questions of reconsidering the present regulatory status of 'safe' give to diacetyl as a food ingredient; but some are a bit concerned...
The more worrisome thing is probably that NFC is built in in the hope that swiping it all over the place against untrusted devices will become a normal behavior(sort of the way that attacks against the USB charge/data port are wildly impractical, until random charging kiosks start popping up in airports and all over the place, at which point behavioral protection goes out the window, and a bunch of systems intended only to connect to your home PC start getting shoved into god-knows-what...). Sure, as an attack to execute against the phone in your pocket, it is only marginally more practical than making a stab for the USB port; but if the happy-magic-future-of-even-more-middlemen-and-fees comes to pass, you'll see anywhere between several and dozens of readers a day getting a chance to try whatever they want when you shove your phone onto the pad(plus, if ATMs and mag stripe skimming are any indication, it will be about 20 minutes before somebody comes out with a nice little stick-on thin-circuit-in-rugged-sticker NFC 'skimmer' that can be planted on top of legitimate NFC pads and will do its best to MitM legitimate conversations or attack devices while they converse with the genuine NFC pad and log the results).
Slashdot Mirror
That was pretty much the point, there isn't any such thing: even if you accept the premise of the 'why are you so intolerant of my intolerance? Huh? Huh?' argument, the level of intolerance you'll find is incredibly tepid on the American left. It's mostly a footnote to the broader point, which is about the issues with the word 'tolerance'; but in the specific context of where you commonly hear the argument grandparent mentioned, it's worth noting that the 'intolerance' being complained about is generally incredibly feeble.
Religions do tend to be a bit touchy about market share; but there is nothing that forbids them from tolerating the fact that everybody else is wrong and going to hell. Indeed, as demonstrated by the relative passivity of most of the world's theists, they generally do. Honestly, that's one of the most interesting things about people who profess that our beliefs and actions have infinite positive or negative consequences: most of them act a great deal like everybody else, aside from a few hours a week of minimally demanding ceremonial behavior.
One would, naively, expect that the infinite valuation of salvation goods would lead to fanatical behavior on a scale that would leave the world knee deep in mangled corpses and televangelists. But it doesn't. It's odd.
You can actually generalize that a bit: 'tolerance' is really only a coherent concept with regard to certain classes of stimuli.
It is, at best, weird to speak of 'tolerance' of things you like. Nobody really talks about 'tolerating' things that they like. They don't not-tolerate them; but they don't tolerate them in any meaningful way.
It is downright incorrect to speak of 'tolerance' of things that are deemed to be beyond the pale. You don't 'tolerate' murderers or critical security flaws; not because you are 'intolerant'; but because such things are not accorded toleration.
It's only the intermediate class of things, things that are distasteful, unpleasant, etc; but are accorded some sort of right(or some sort of inevitability, in context, as with the squeaky vent that Facilities is never going to fix), that you can meaningfully 'tolerate', and the degree to which you do so determines how 'tolerant' or 'intolerant' you are(the medical usage semi-overlaps here, in that the less responsive to a given drug you are, the greater your tolerance to it is said to be, just as the less responsive to a given negative stimulus you are, the greater your tolerance is said to be).
The tricky thing is that, in practice, 'tolerance' is forced to carry two(quite distinct) meanings: The one is strictly a measure of how you endure the third class of negative-but-not-eradicable stimuli. The second is your system of classification for these three categories. That's a wholly different thing; but it has to coexist in the same word.
In the example you give(assuming the participants are actually sincere, that line frequently isn't), you really have an argument over whether or not homophobia is a class II or class III phenomenon: If it is class III, then failure to tolerate it is intolerance. If it is class II, failure to tolerate it is simple moral clarity. (There may also be a secondary argument over what exactly 'tolerance' means: There are definitely social circles that you will be frozen out of for socially retrograde attitudes; but the Leftist firebombing campaign against southern baptist churches just hasn't panned out... Exactly how polite you are required to be to count as 'tolerant' is a somewhat unsettled question).
Inconveniently, the case of the Blasphemy Police vs. freedom of expression is probably fairly similar. Nobody seems to be saying "Yup, I think that everyone deserves freedom of expression; but I Just Can't Stand It when I see a picture of Mohammed as a drag queen and I flip out, I'm intolerant, I guess." They are, rather, saying that blasphemy, at least against their favorites, is outside the set of phenomena to which tolerance applies. Inconveniently, while somebody's degree of 'tolerance' relative to a pre-supplied set assignment is measureable, and you can argue for or against given actions and policies based on how tolerant they are, the set assignment itself is basically in the same boat as the rest of moral philosophy: little more than handwaving and appeals to 'intuition' or emotion, or imaginary friends.
What do you think sectarian violence is all about? Shias and Sunnis are happily killing each over whether there was a 13th Imam or not, and both don't like the Sufis. Compare it to Mormons, Catholics, Protestants and their various flavors, and blasphemy laws have never lead to anything but general violence against people "we don't like".
My point was merely that, in application, I've never seen a blasphemy law that is applied across the board and thus suppresses basically all religious activity. In practice, the monopoly religion(or an oligopoly of doctrinally somewhat different; but-agree-to-politely-not-talk-about-that as part of a big-tent strategy religions) get to enforce the law against their opponents, and their opponents generally don't get to return the favor.
Oh, I don't really blame the jurors for being dubiously clueful about ghastly intricate patent law(and probably unenthusiastic about spending months poring over the case), especially when the patent office itself has gone through a few waves of "just like things we did on mainframes and minicomputers; but over the internet and therefore novel!" and "just like things we did on PCs over the internet but on mobile phones and therefore novel!" patent grants themselves, and they are supposed to know better.
I just don't feel very comfortable about letting major court cases be decided by people who(even from their voluntary public remarks) are clearly out to lunch on what they are supposed to be deciding...
I tend to suspect that the 'prophets' who know when to skip town are in it for the money, while the ones who end up getting themselves killed over it are either sincerely deluded or caught up on the power and the status. Smith did alright for himself for a while; but he ultimately failed to take the money and run when that would have been a great deal more sensible...
Respect = Tolerance. So, basically, that should be the only law.
"Respect" and "Tolerance" are basically orthogonal. Tolerating somebody does require that you respect their right to do whatever it is they are doing; but has no necessary connection with respecting whatever it is they are doing. Respect, by contrast, implies some degree of actual regard for somebody, rather than mere sufferance of them.
In fact, 'tolerate' actually sounds pretty weird if used outside a context where the stimulus is implicitly negative in some respect. You wouldn't ask "How can you tolerate getting a raise and a corner office?" You would as "How can you tolerate that squeaky noise that the vent in your office makes?"
Blasphemy isn't 'religious intolerance'; but banning blasphemy is fairly obviously contrary to 'freedom of expression and opinion'. There, that was easy.
Incidentally, since most religions contain significant incompatibilities(on occasion, you get organizational splits purely because of personality spats or disputes over who gets the earthly loot; but all the really good schisms are over doctrine), the practice of almost any religion is necessarily blasphemous(at least by implication, often quite overtly) toward almost all the others.
In practice, of course, anti-blasphemy laws are usually just an excuse to suppress the minorities and the dissidents; but it would be (morbidly) amusing to watch the epic pileup that would occur if one were actually applied rigorously... There would also be some fun around statements that are simultaneously likely to arouse ire and are confirmed by assorted holy texts, the denial of which would also cause ire(Anything concerning the fact that the god of the old testament is kind of a genocidal psycho, or that Mohammed fucked a nine year old, would qualify, as would, no doubt, an endless number of subtler doctrinal quibbles between more enthusiastic sects).
I loved his position that a piece of prior art could be dismissed because the implementation discussed ran on a different processor architecture. Judicial functionaries have a proud history of pulling distinctions out of their asses and calling them 'tests'(later given first names, if they catch on more broadly); but that one was classic.
I'm not sure how anyone could even offer 'tested' in the present legal climate. Aside from the fact that individual judges and juries are unpredictable, are there even enough paralegals with relevant knowledge of US patent law to throw at the problem of determining whether a given complex system is noninfringing or legitimately licensed against all currently valid patents? That's an epic task search and (somewhat)natural language processing problem.
Indemnification is at least possible; but if you are practically guaranteed to have a few trolls hit you for low to moderate millions in the rocket docket, and there is the possibility of a huge lawsuit or two, it isn't going to be inexpensive, since it'll basically amount to insurance...
All limits are political.
And they say that postmodernism is dead...
Anything that will play nice with a kinect, or its older-and-less-sophisticated-but-much-more-mature-at-emulating-a-mouse sibling the IR webcam with illuminators and a retroreflective dot(because the commercial units have been touched by the dead hand of 'assistive technology' pricing they are damned expensive for what they are, DIY hacks are less likely to be polished; but can come in at a factor of ten less) could be useful to provide an extra 'hand' worth of control without occupying your good hand(if you are a flight simmer, you may well want one anyway: for immersion, nothing beats having your cockpit view actually change when you turn your real-world head...)
Other useful things: the switch discussed here(or its reasonably numerous clones) is basically a cheapy guitar stomp pedal that can be programmed to perform more or less any keystroke, or short keystroke sequence(and possibly a mouse click event, not sure) that a normal USB HID device could. I think that 4-pedal versions are also available. For relatively little money, a chunk of plywood or something, and a USB hub, you should be able to get your feet in on controlling a bunch of useful hotkeys and whatnot.
For more thoroughly custom work, the teensy is extremely convenient. It is essentially arduino compatible, so basic development is dead simple; but it also includes a USB HID bootloader out of the box and enough I/O pins to tack on a reasonable number of switches that can then be tied to keycodes sent to the host(I could imagine, for instance, that if you don't have the finger control for WASD, you might still be able to handle a joystick/grip type arrangement with 4 contact switches mapped to those allowing you to control standard left-hand functions with only gross motor control of the arm/shoulder and possibly one or two of the footswitches for crouch/reload/whatever.
Also good to know about for custom ergonomics work: Polycaprolactone. At room temperature, it is a plastic with bulk properties pretty similar to nylon. However, it becomes soft enough to be moldable at only 60 degrees C or so. This makes it only slightly uncomfortable to hand-mould grips and things that precisely fit you. It can also be tool worked when hardened with a minimum of trouble.
What Microsoft really appears to fear is the fact that MS Office versions N-1,N-2, and often even N-3 also take care of everything most people need to do.
They aren't simply adding a subscription option, they are nontrivially bumping the price of the perpetual license options...
The writer's bio on his current website mentions a past leadership gig with CNet...
Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.
The writer of this bullshit piece is the CEO of an advertising/tracking firm "33Across"
"Over 600,000 publishers and more than 375 Fortune 1000 marketers use 33Across’s Brand Graph technology, tools, and real-time predictive systems to connect their content and products into the social graph. Clients rely on their Brand Graph to leverage how individuals and the networks around them react to what is read, purchased, shared, and recommended in real-time. Reaching over a billion users, 33Across processes tens of thousands anonymous social engagement, influence, and interest actions that surround marketer and publisher brands each second."
Why do we even listen to these people?
Surely you aren't suggesting that the government should just allow consumers to speak ill of advertisers and other members of the better sort?
Clearly the horrors of 'do not track' are so great that we must have a law to forbid people from even expressing such a destructive preference.(Now, um, never you mind that I said that targeted advertising was awesome, and thus would theoretically be popular and simply outcompete DNT, that was, um, different for some reason! Targeted advertising is exciting and ought to be mandatory!)
Aside from the fact that just sticking a skimmer onto real Coca-Cola kiosks would be cheaper? Nothing at all. Same basic reason that ATM card skimmers are more common than full fake ATMs.
They also have a mac client, if I recall. If you need A/V for the Windows boxes anyway, plus something on the mail server to snip some of the crap out on the way in, it becomes a fairly easy sell for the vendor to shove a few mac or linux licenses out the door if some of their customers have a paranoic 'zOMG all computers must have antivirus to protect our megahertz!!!" policy. If you have to implement that, it's easier to at least implement it all in one place, with one console, and maybe a volume discount...
The trouble, in this case, is that it detects its own signature update componenets as viruses...
Not only should this have been caught in testing(Since it would have cropped up more or less the moment the new signatures were loaded onto a live system with Sophos installed; but they hit files about which sophos presumably has intimate knowledge, this isn't some 'obscure packing/compression scheme used by legacy CAD program that seemed like a good idea in the 80's looks like a suspicious obfuscated payload' kind of thing.
I am not impressed, though thankfully it only took me a little over half a day to fix it here...
I'd be totally unsurprised if a cheap-ass transistor amp sounds better than a cheap-ass pre-transistor or early transistor amp. I would mostly be worried about the fairly relentless downward pressure on the size of the speakers and headphones in use.
Even a modestly competent cheapy bookshelf speaker of no particular distinction doesn't sound nearly as tinny as even the speakers on a $3k laptop; because it doesn't have to fit in a few cubic centimeters of available chassis space. Similarly, while there are good earbuds that, when correctly fitted, can take advantage of near-direct coupling with the eardrum and achieve good sound reproduction and even bass, despite having a teeny driver, in the cheaper seats physics seems to give a significant boost to larger over-the-ear-and-too-goofy-for-the-train designs.
Even in home theatre settings, where you would think that bigger would still rule, I've seen far too many of those 'teeny-tiny-little-Bose-cubes-on-sticks' setups where a late-60s through '80s would have had actual speakers with driver diameters that allow them to hit low frequencies. Thanks to head related transfer functions and DSPs and other fancy stuff I don't really understand all that well, we do seem to be able to make brutally volume(in the spatial, not the intensity, sense)-constrained equipment sound better than one would expect; but we seem to have shied away from a willingness to throw volume at the problem.
Are you implying that ""The spirituality and soul of music is truly found when the sound engulfs you and that is just what 2012 will bring. It is a physical thing, a relief that you feel when you finally hear music the way artists and producers did when they created it in the studio. The sound engulfs you and your senses open up allowing you to truly feel the deep emotion in the music of some of our finest artists. From Frank Sinatra to the Black Keys, the feeling is there. This is what recording companies were born to give you and in 2012 they will deliver."" is mushy bullshit? How could you!!!
Perhaps more importantly, even if we concede the point that FLAC-ed audio right from the studio masters sounds better than 128kb/s mp3s ripped from a CD brutally optimized to sound good on a $30 boombox, the question becomes 'Better on what speakers or headphones?'. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, and software is cheap(once written); and all of these things are widely available in quantity; but the quality of the audio gear that most people are actually listening through has hardly been a beneficiary of Moore's law...
Based on TFA's (somewhat fragmentary) description, this 'Pono' nonsense appears to be some dreadful 'ecosystem' that includes high quality recordings in some format; but also "Pono's cloud-based libraries" and quite probably some sort of 'social' crap.
Also, given that TFA has some stuff from Young about how CDs ruined everything, the plan presumably also includes using a lossless, or less-lossy, format on the same sources from which CDs are generated, rather than to sling CD audio around.
FLAC would certainly be capable of being the compression system for such a scheme(and, let's face it, all lossless compression systems are going to sound the same, even wholly unoptimized ones like 'well, just gzip the .wav file...', so the only real question is whether somebody's patented magic sauce math will save you enough bandwidth to be worth the licensing fees, or whether using FLAC(possibly with some ghastly proprietary data fields or DRM wrapper) is easier and cheaper).
Well, he can always start eating lots of microwave popcorn and try it that way. $7.2 million isn't bad, is it?
"Popcorn lung" makes it sound funny; but that one is actually a pretty ugly story(at least for the production workers and some of the QA guys at the plants, this guy must have really been a big fan to inhale that much). Let's just say that "constrictive bronchiolitis obliterans" is almost as much fun as it sounds like it would be. A much rarer disease; but the macro-scale symptoms are pretty similar to emphysema.
The matter first came to broader attention when NIOSH looked into a cluster of occurrences of this(usually quite uncommon) condition at a microwave popcorn plant. As it turns out, diacetyl, the usual artificial butter flavoring component, causes a delightful progressive, irreversible, destruction of lung capacity(pretty much what 'bronchiolitis obliterans' sounds like it does, it does.) The most severe cases require permanent supplemental oxygen or lung transplants to survive. Less severe cases experience ongoing shortness of breath and respiratory difficulties(whether only under exertion, or even when idle depends on the severity of the case).
As usual with these cases, the story of the discovery is littered with OSHA dragging its feet, popcorn producers skipping cheap protective measures like extractor fans to keep exposure down(25k to install fans, or slow death for the workers in the mixing room... Hmm, which is better for shareholder value?), and similar depressing anecdotes. Since consumer exposure is much, much lower than flavor-mixing exposure, the FDA has twiddled its thumbs about any questions of reconsidering the present regulatory status of 'safe' give to diacetyl as a food ingredient; but some are a bit concerned...
The more worrisome thing is probably that NFC is built in in the hope that swiping it all over the place against untrusted devices will become a normal behavior(sort of the way that attacks against the USB charge/data port are wildly impractical, until random charging kiosks start popping up in airports and all over the place, at which point behavioral protection goes out the window, and a bunch of systems intended only to connect to your home PC start getting shoved into god-knows-what...). Sure, as an attack to execute against the phone in your pocket, it is only marginally more practical than making a stab for the USB port; but if the happy-magic-future-of-even-more-middlemen-and-fees comes to pass, you'll see anywhere between several and dozens of readers a day getting a chance to try whatever they want when you shove your phone onto the pad(plus, if ATMs and mag stripe skimming are any indication, it will be about 20 minutes before somebody comes out with a nice little stick-on thin-circuit-in-rugged-sticker NFC 'skimmer' that can be planted on top of legitimate NFC pads and will do its best to MitM legitimate conversations or attack devices while they converse with the genuine NFC pad and log the results).