Thankfully, government 'job creation' spending is neither wasteful, nor evil, no matter what the cost ends up being, even if extraordinarily larger than the salary(just ask the local chamber of commerce to haul out the multiplier effect and solve the little numerical problem), if you launder the funds through a corporation.
Direct payments are, depending on how you structure them, either wasteful big government bloat, or evil welfare; but obtaining them through 'public-private partnerships' or 'development incentives' is a fine and salubrious custom. Plus, it is equally acceptable to those who would rather not have the state turned into a feed-trough for assorted multinationals and those who would prefer that the competitive market not be distorted by substantial subsidies to some players but not others!
Just be glad that it actually produces something, unlike a shiny new stadium...
My enthusiasm for parsing legalese waned too quickly to look up all the details for all the involved parties; but it looks like Samsung is certainly not being sent away empty-handed...
The city of Austin's agreement is one part, and looks like some rather nice tax 'incentives' and procedural waivers(two decades worth of municipal tax breaks, a variety of free infrastructure upgrades). Apparently the county, state, and school district(?!?) also have their own packages.
I, for one, would like to thank the citizens of Texas for subsidizing my semiconductor purchases!
Let's crunch the numbers: It's the thick end of being 2012 now. Not quite; but a 6 year old computer would be a somewhere in 2005 piece of kit.
Depending on how much you spent at the time, that would mean an LGA775, 90nm, 'Prescott' P4 at between 2.8 and 3.8GHz(stock) or a socket 745 or 939 A64 somewhere between 1.8 and 2.6GHz(stock).
Either of those would(unless you bought a really crappy motherboard, in which case it probably wasn't a gaming PC anyway) almost certainly have had a 16x PCIe slot, so they would be fully compatible with almost any video card released in the last six years. If you bought in 2005, a GeForce 6800 or RADEON X800/X850 would have been available, if not necessarily inexpensive. Either of those would happily enough play F.E.A.R. or CoD2 at 1280x1024 at 30FPS, and those were considered comparatively intensive games for their time.
Actually kitting your 2005 system out with 4GB of RAM would probably have been too rich for most buyer's blood; with one or two being more likely; but most motherboards of the era(again, omitting cut-down junk that would never have been gaming, even at the time) should have 4 DDR2 slots, making an upgrade to an adequate-for-most-games 3 or 4GB quite cheap assuming your original configuration was 2x512 or 2x1GB.
Sounds totally doable to me, even if you aren't a retro-gaming enthusiast...
I suspect that when your core business depends on building massive caches of copyrighted materials(for what one would hope is a non-infringing purpose; but search engine databases aren't exactly a fully litigated area...), with some side businesses in youtube, Google Books, etc, etc. Team Content is able to make some interesting threats regarding decades of potentially catastrophic legislation...
Now, lest I be misunderstood, I think that the fact that what are commonly thought of as free venues for expression are, on the internet, sometimes governed by secret contracts between unaccountable corporations is rather sinister(it'd be like living in a city where all the sidewalks were privatized and the nearest business given the power to have their rentacops eject somebody from their patch of sidewalk for any reason); but also a more or less inevitable result of the fact that there are no 'natural commons' on the internet. Everything that is 'on' the internet is there because somebody's server is powered up, connected to the net, and responding to HTTP requests. Every last inch of 'the internet' correlates to a piece of private property crunching data somewhere. The only hope, really, is to make it easier(with things like bittorrent, or distributed caching mechanisms) for little people to easily and economically set up their own chunks of the internet...
As for the 'don't be evil' though, do you really think that Google wants to take anything down from youtube, or give anyone a cut of the ad revenue on something they spent money serving? Why would they do that? It would be foolish to expect Google to stand up for you any more than their bottom line dictates; and that may not be very much at all; but I'm not seeing the motivation to reduce the supply of youtube ad-fodder unless their hand is being forced in some way. If they wanted to make youtube smaller, they'd just delete stuff themselves, it'd be trivial.
It would be a delightful twist if that junk-mail rebate check happened to qualify under the "The Nine Criteria for a Negotiable Instrument.", which would allow you to cash it despite any verbiage to the contrary...
For simple ease of sorting, and avoidance of check-washers and the like, the checks that people actually use are fairly heavily standardized(either the slightly smaller human-use ones or the 1/3 of an 8.5x11 machine print ones, with MICR codes in all the right places, printed security features, etc.); but the set of things that could legally be checks is considerably larger than the set of things that are commonly used as checks...
Since this is the involved industry's own 'self regulation' body acting, it is generally safe to assume that the issue is seen as quite serious, and that the risk of actual legislation has been pushed back by at least half a decade...
Unless one wishes to cling to the trivially false illusion that humans are rational actors, who weigh all data inputs objectively, it seems fairly obvious that a gigantic picture asserting that Product X will make your face look like you've been born with perfect genes and then worked over by a talented retouch guy is a lie, even if accompanied by a 2pt flyspeck disclaimer that 'results not typical, you ugly hag, buy our product anyway or die scorned and alone'.
Of course, on that basis, it's hard to imagine much of the advertising industry being left(Note, this does not represent criticism of this basis, no not at all). So much of advertising consists of more or less blatantly false images and video, followed by a tiny text disclaimer.
As for the concerns mentioned at the end of TFS, I'm not sure I see the problem: this is arguably even more divorced from reality than cosmetics advertising, and the battle over pre-renders being pimped as "in engine"(recorded at 1FPS, with known-unusably-bugggy effects enabled with command line switches, on $10,000 workstation, played back at 30FPS, or just created by importing our highest resolution art assets into 3DSMAX...) in gameplay advertising has gone on for ages. As for 'photographer's own work', unless you assert that you, as a photographer, take 'pictures that objectively represent reality' rather than 'aesthetically pleasing pictures', why would photoshop be any worse than using a good lens or a low-noise sensor? In photojournalism, photochopping can be a serious problem; but in photography as art, you aren't making a truth claim, so it's pretty hard to lie...
As voluntary standards by a private industry body, this seems like an unimpeachable step. The issue would get a bit more dicey were the state to step in, you'd have to adjudicate the line between expressive free speech and commercial fraud through deception; but if the marketweasels want to clean up a small part of their slime trail, all the better...
Interestingly, despite its allegedly anti-commercial nature, GPL and similar licenses seem to have a dual effect, at least for the high profile projects:
On the one hand, they mean that small contributors can, and sometimes do, advance the project; but they also serve as essentially an 'informal, but legally toothed, consortium' for the larger contributors. Linux, say, does have a fair number of small contributors to various parts of it(probably wasn't IBM that hacked N64 controller support into the kernel...); but it also functions as a de-facto "baseline unixlike OS consortium" where the assorted hardware vendors who wish to sell servers or server parts to customers who will spend as much on hardware and as little on software as possible, and the vendors of software that needs an OS to run on can share development costs with one another. It's my suspicion that this is part of why Linux(which would seem less attractive, at first glance) has done comparatively well among the suits, while BSD(which would seem to be more attractive, given that you can take it proprietary at any time) has surprisingly limited penetration(and in somewhat different places: some companies with a long history of appliance manufacture, like NetApp, have a hugely custom in-house BSD and don't touch linux as often; but vendors of more generic appliance gear, with all the special sauce in userspace, or of commodity server stuff, seem to be very, very, heavily linux based.)
I can't say that I'm exactly optimistic about WebOS' future, given that it is in HP's hands, is up against android and a bunch of other linux-with-a-curious-skin projects, and probably under some pressure to make the purchase price of Palm seem sensible at some point before the sun swallows the earth; but it isn't insane per-se to expect that a bunch of different vendors would be interested in having a (frankly quite nice) linux UI developed along similar lines as the kernel.
Aside from the issue of "Will HP fuck it up?" the main question seems, to me, to be whether 3rd parties would rather have Apache-licensed access to Android at some delay, after Google's official Special Bestest Launch Buddy has been shipping it for some time, or whether they would rather have open-development access to a more restrictively licensed WebOS more or less immediately:
If you don't really care that you are implementing last year's no-longer-new-and-shiny, Android is basically free for the taking and doing whatever you want that doesn't violate the Linux kernel licenses. However, if you want the good stuff, when it is still fresh, you have to go have a chat with Mountain View. If HP is deluded enough to think that people will accept WebOS on those terms, they are heading for irrelevance; but it might well be the case that some vendors(especially those who don't really have a shot at a period of Android exclusivity) would happily accept timely access in exchange for the relative inability to keep changes(aside from their own userspace applications, of course) in-house...
From a backseat engineering perspective, having some degree of local failsafe to back up the GPS would have been a good plan...
The fact that GPS can be spoofed is not exactly a new discovery. "GPS Simulators" that provide a spoof GPS signal(for convenient testing of GPS gear in RF-enclosed environments only, of course...) are commercially available test equipment. Not inexpensive; but totally off-the-shelf. And, given how many commercial and military applications rely on GPS tracking or timekeeping it isn't as though there aren't plenty of people who would be able to make money or gain advantage by mucking with the signal. Detecting stealth aircraft is something of a specialty problem, fooling GPS units is one that would actually have fairly broad applications.
A compass and some accelerometers(or even a view of the sun and an RTC) are a lousy substitute for the accuracy of GPS; but they do provide a sanity check that could keep you going in approximately the right direction, at least enough to hard-land somewhere nominally friendly, if GPS cannot be trusted...
Implement a basic URL-shortner/social-media-linking-crap mechanism.
When somebody clicks on a 56Kb.it shortened link, it redirects them to a fairly standard framed-web-proxy-page arrangement; but with an (HTML5, of course) audio widget that plays the dialup noise, and deliberate bandwidth throttling of the framed page to a bitrate chosen randomly from the historically plausible performance of a '56k' dialup line.
It's pointless, wasteful, adds an extra point of failure, and is really a pretty stupid gimmick. Should be all over the social networks within hours.
Frankly, imposing almost-certainly-negative externalities on unconsenting bystanders' persons and property during the course of your business makes you the ethical equivalent of a serial mugger. It is a pity that it doesn't make you the legal equivalent of one.
That's what I've never understood about the notion that these sorts of environmental regulations are 'anti-freedom' or 'anti-free-market'... Effectively, emitting pollutants that leave your property(as they almost always have a nasty tendency to do...) is some combination of assault and destruction of property, depending on exactly how much damage to other people's health and damage to other people's property you cause. That would seem to bring you trivially under the police power of the state to protect its citizens from violence against them by others.
Failure to protect the people from pollution involuntarily forced on them seems different only in degree from failing to prosecute poisoners or fly-tippers. Also arguably, environmental regulations that allow some harmful levels of pollution are actually more statist; because they assert the state's right to submit everyone to damage to the benefit of specific parties(almost exactly the same thing as the almost universally reviled Kelo v. City of New London decision: The state asserting its right to involuntarily transfer part of the property of everybody to the polluter for 'economic development' purposes). The only real areas of economic regulation that would seem to be purely 'environmentalist' in motivation, as opposed to a downright libertarian exercise of the state's right and duty to protect its citizens from violence, force, and fraud, would be those that govern pollution affecting only the polluter and those who have given informed consent to the pollution(employees accepting high risk for higher pay, say, with knowledge of that risk) and those that protect species and wetlands and things in themselves even when they are fully encompassed within a single chunk of property.
Politically, it isn't exactly a surprise that "libertarian" and "environmentalist" usually don't get along all that well; but ideologically, I've always been fascinated by how immediate, direct, property crimes for profit have no friends at all, and we can't seem to hang the perps high enough for anybody's satisfaction; but covert, indirect, property crimes for profit are eminently respectable, and have friends in all the most desirable places...
(As for the case of the 'secret sauce' product, it seems like it would depend on exactly why the sauce is secret: if, as is common at the experimental edges of medicine, nobody knows exactly what the sauce will do, it would seem to be the right of a competent adult to take risk upon themselves. If the sauce is secret because I'm just not telling you what it is, it becomes much harder to argue that we have actually achieved a genuine consent in the contractual sense, since I'm deliberately keeping you in a state shy of 'informed consent' for my own convenience.)
I suspect that the big limitation would be the resolution of the electrode array. My, admittedly layman's, understanding is that you basically need an electrode for every 'pixel'(and that's the relatively simple case where you are just brute forcing it, not doing really subtle stuff like trying to map color inputs to the nerves that used to take input from the now defunct cones, and greyscale luma values to those formerly served by rods, and such).
Fabricating really teeny structures is quite mature in silicon MEMS processes; but I don't know whether the same is true in biocompatible, possibly flexible, stuff you can safely implant into somebody's retina without just getting a bunch of scar tissue...
Given people's tolerance for black and white movies and crap TV reception, remarkably few shades of grey and some lousy, smeary, color are impressively useful for working out what is going on; but only having a 16x16 matrix of that to work with might be a problem... It would be interesting to know exactly how many electrodes you'd need to have in place and functioning to provide various levels of vision reproduction.
The real killer is probably seek, more than anything: both the xbox360 and PS3 only have 512 MB of RAM(well, technically the xbox has another 10 MB of eDRAM for the GPU, and the PS3 has a weird split down the middle, not quite as absolute as a separation between 'system ram' and 'ram on the video card'; but there are some penalties if you use more than the first 256MB as general purpose system RAM) and don't(to the best of my knowledge) use an HDD swap file for virtual memory. Some games may have game-specific 'install' support; but there isn't a generic caching mechanism.
No matter how good the stream rate is, you are going to be in a world of pain, where even users of 5,200RPM laptop drives from a few years ago mock your suffering, if you hit a random-access situation.
I'm afraid that the results are back and it is retinitis pigmentosa. Your only hope of avoiding permanent blindness is retinal implants.
Unfortunately, your insurance coverage will only pay for 'retinal implants with special offers'. Not to worry, though, these implants will display offers from our trusted content partners, tailored to your interests as a consumer, only when they detect that your eyes are closed, or otherwise unused.
Are BD-ROMs absolutely slower than DVDs, slower in terms of 'time to read out entire capacity of disk', or did PS3 developers just do a lousy job when handed 50GB and told to go nuts?
As best I understand from some cursory googling(coming from PC-land, where we haven't really worried about optical media speeds since the difference between a 2x and an 8x DVD writer was some pretty serious stuff, man) "1x" in Blu-ray land is 4.5 MB/s while "1x" in DVD land is 1.4 MB/s. This would suggest that a first-generation blu-ray drive, pitted against some cheap and mature 24x DVD drive, will be feeling the pain; but that blu-ray's far higher data density would give it a superior speed ceiling(since the rate at which you can spin a cheap, questionably balanced, polycarbonate disk on a cheap, questionably balanced, spindle is fairly limited and should be roughly similar for the two disk types) and that at ~8x, BD-ROM should be absolutely faster than DVD.
Regardless of absolute best case stream speeds, though, optical media are always going to have random access times that make HDDs look positively snappy, and HDD seek times are pretty damned miserable compared to flash, which is similarly un
Lasers start out as nice and coherent; but they are by no means immune to divergence lenses. Indeed, over sufficiently long distances(looking at you, lunar-ranging laser experiment...) divergence is more or less impossible to avoid. In this case, I'm assuming that divergence is desired; because shining a dot on a single retina in a mob isn't going to have much effect...
This seems like a terribly ill-thought-out scheme(except in that it might succeed in separating some police departments from rather a lot of the public's money, in exchange for a slightly more rugged version of a standard green laser, in a butch sci-fi plastic rifle case...)
Unless the laser is a tightly focused dot(in which case it won't be much use against a crowd) its intensity will vary rapidly with distance. In order to not be a complete toy at operationally useful ranges, it will very likely be downright dangerous at closer ones. Luckily, cops are technical experts and models of restraint, so that won't prove to be a problem.
In a similar vein, since lasers are a reasonably common occupational/hobby hazard these days, laser-protective eyewear, designed for strong attenuation of the common laser type of your choice, with minimal impact on general vision, is cheap and readily available. In order to have any effect on somebody wearing such, you'd likely need alarmingly higher power levels than you would need to have the same effect on an unshielded subject. So, either ~$20 eyewear gains you immunity to this fancy tech toy, or this fancy tech toy is powerful enough to stun protected users and fry retinas on everybody else. Brilliant.
Permanent blinding is against the Geneva convention. Temporary blinding ('dazzling' seems to be the polite term) is just ducky. As is accidental blinding that occurs as a side effect of lasers used for some other purpose.
In any case, though, riot cops aren't bound by the convention, so it ends up being largely a matter of what they can get away with vs. what lawsuits make too expensive...
Please, be fair: The Grinch's nuclear program is purely deterrent in nature; and is both a necessary and perfectly proportionate response when facing the threat of Santa, an absolutist God-King known for his massive industrial bunker complexes, extensive use of slave labor, incredibly extensive worldwide espionage apparatus(notorious for spying on children and compiling enemies lists, as well as its facility for bribery and corruption), and the ability to deliver an arbitrary payload to every target on earth in under 24 hours...
I know that North Korea is fashionably behind the times, juche and all; but seriously, this is a bit much.
The idea that Christmas trees are a symbol of Christianity, rather than some freaky pagan stuff, stolen for a while by Christians, and now firmly entrenched as a coniferous altar of Mammon for youth of all ages and faiths, is patently absurd.
Now, it is unlikely that pro-consumerist psychological warfare will be any more popular with our fabulously haired friend; but he needn't worry about the spread of any but the worldliest of indulgences...
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully, government 'job creation' spending is neither wasteful, nor evil, no matter what the cost ends up being, even if extraordinarily larger than the salary(just ask the local chamber of commerce to haul out the multiplier effect and solve the little numerical problem), if you launder the funds through a corporation.
Direct payments are, depending on how you structure them, either wasteful big government bloat, or evil welfare; but obtaining them through 'public-private partnerships' or 'development incentives' is a fine and salubrious custom. Plus, it is equally acceptable to those who would rather not have the state turned into a feed-trough for assorted multinationals and those who would prefer that the competitive market not be distorted by substantial subsidies to some players but not others!
Just be glad that it actually produces something, unlike a shiny new stadium...
My enthusiasm for parsing legalese waned too quickly to look up all the details for all the involved parties; but it looks like Samsung is certainly not being sent away empty-handed...
The city of Austin's agreement is one part, and looks like some rather nice tax 'incentives' and procedural waivers(two decades worth of municipal tax breaks, a variety of free infrastructure upgrades). Apparently the county, state, and school district(?!?) also have their own packages.
I, for one, would like to thank the citizens of Texas for subsidizing my semiconductor purchases!
Let's crunch the numbers: It's the thick end of being 2012 now. Not quite; but a 6 year old computer would be a somewhere in 2005 piece of kit.
Depending on how much you spent at the time, that would mean an LGA775, 90nm, 'Prescott' P4 at between 2.8 and 3.8GHz(stock) or a socket 745 or 939 A64 somewhere between 1.8 and 2.6GHz(stock).
Either of those would(unless you bought a really crappy motherboard, in which case it probably wasn't a gaming PC anyway) almost certainly have had a 16x PCIe slot, so they would be fully compatible with almost any video card released in the last six years. If you bought in 2005, a GeForce 6800 or RADEON X800/X850 would have been available, if not necessarily inexpensive. Either of those would happily enough play F.E.A.R. or CoD2 at 1280x1024 at 30FPS, and those were considered comparatively intensive games for their time.
Actually kitting your 2005 system out with 4GB of RAM would probably have been too rich for most buyer's blood; with one or two being more likely; but most motherboards of the era(again, omitting cut-down junk that would never have been gaming, even at the time) should have 4 DDR2 slots, making an upgrade to an adequate-for-most-games 3 or 4GB quite cheap assuming your original configuration was 2x512 or 2x1GB.
Sounds totally doable to me, even if you aren't a retro-gaming enthusiast...
I suspect that when your core business depends on building massive caches of copyrighted materials(for what one would hope is a non-infringing purpose; but search engine databases aren't exactly a fully litigated area...), with some side businesses in youtube, Google Books, etc, etc. Team Content is able to make some interesting threats regarding decades of potentially catastrophic legislation...
Now, lest I be misunderstood, I think that the fact that what are commonly thought of as free venues for expression are, on the internet, sometimes governed by secret contracts between unaccountable corporations is rather sinister(it'd be like living in a city where all the sidewalks were privatized and the nearest business given the power to have their rentacops eject somebody from their patch of sidewalk for any reason); but also a more or less inevitable result of the fact that there are no 'natural commons' on the internet. Everything that is 'on' the internet is there because somebody's server is powered up, connected to the net, and responding to HTTP requests. Every last inch of 'the internet' correlates to a piece of private property crunching data somewhere. The only hope, really, is to make it easier(with things like bittorrent, or distributed caching mechanisms) for little people to easily and economically set up their own chunks of the internet...
As for the 'don't be evil' though, do you really think that Google wants to take anything down from youtube, or give anyone a cut of the ad revenue on something they spent money serving? Why would they do that? It would be foolish to expect Google to stand up for you any more than their bottom line dictates; and that may not be very much at all; but I'm not seeing the motivation to reduce the supply of youtube ad-fodder unless their hand is being forced in some way. If they wanted to make youtube smaller, they'd just delete stuff themselves, it'd be trivial.
It would be a delightful twist if that junk-mail rebate check happened to qualify under the "The Nine Criteria for a Negotiable Instrument.", which would allow you to cash it despite any verbiage to the contrary...
For simple ease of sorting, and avoidance of check-washers and the like, the checks that people actually use are fairly heavily standardized(either the slightly smaller human-use ones or the 1/3 of an 8.5x11 machine print ones, with MICR codes in all the right places, printed security features, etc.); but the set of things that could legally be checks is considerably larger than the set of things that are commonly used as checks...
Your UV exposure matters a fair bit as well(as does the genetics fairy; but you can't do much about that at present...).
Shockingly, a pattern of frequent mild radiation burns doesn't really do one's skin much good.
Since this is the involved industry's own 'self regulation' body acting, it is generally safe to assume that the issue is seen as quite serious, and that the risk of actual legislation has been pushed back by at least half a decade...
Unless one wishes to cling to the trivially false illusion that humans are rational actors, who weigh all data inputs objectively, it seems fairly obvious that a gigantic picture asserting that Product X will make your face look like you've been born with perfect genes and then worked over by a talented retouch guy is a lie, even if accompanied by a 2pt flyspeck disclaimer that 'results not typical, you ugly hag, buy our product anyway or die scorned and alone'.
Of course, on that basis, it's hard to imagine much of the advertising industry being left(Note, this does not represent criticism of this basis, no not at all). So much of advertising consists of more or less blatantly false images and video, followed by a tiny text disclaimer.
As for the concerns mentioned at the end of TFS, I'm not sure I see the problem: this is arguably even more divorced from reality than cosmetics advertising, and the battle over pre-renders being pimped as "in engine"(recorded at 1FPS, with known-unusably-bugggy effects enabled with command line switches, on $10,000 workstation, played back at 30FPS, or just created by importing our highest resolution art assets into 3DSMAX...) in gameplay advertising has gone on for ages. As for 'photographer's own work', unless you assert that you, as a photographer, take 'pictures that objectively represent reality' rather than 'aesthetically pleasing pictures', why would photoshop be any worse than using a good lens or a low-noise sensor? In photojournalism, photochopping can be a serious problem; but in photography as art, you aren't making a truth claim, so it's pretty hard to lie...
As voluntary standards by a private industry body, this seems like an unimpeachable step. The issue would get a bit more dicey were the state to step in, you'd have to adjudicate the line between expressive free speech and commercial fraud through deception; but if the marketweasels want to clean up a small part of their slime trail, all the better...
Interestingly, despite its allegedly anti-commercial nature, GPL and similar licenses seem to have a dual effect, at least for the high profile projects:
On the one hand, they mean that small contributors can, and sometimes do, advance the project; but they also serve as essentially an 'informal, but legally toothed, consortium' for the larger contributors. Linux, say, does have a fair number of small contributors to various parts of it(probably wasn't IBM that hacked N64 controller support into the kernel...); but it also functions as a de-facto "baseline unixlike OS consortium" where the assorted hardware vendors who wish to sell servers or server parts to customers who will spend as much on hardware and as little on software as possible, and the vendors of software that needs an OS to run on can share development costs with one another. It's my suspicion that this is part of why Linux(which would seem less attractive, at first glance) has done comparatively well among the suits, while BSD(which would seem to be more attractive, given that you can take it proprietary at any time) has surprisingly limited penetration(and in somewhat different places: some companies with a long history of appliance manufacture, like NetApp, have a hugely custom in-house BSD and don't touch linux as often; but vendors of more generic appliance gear, with all the special sauce in userspace, or of commodity server stuff, seem to be very, very, heavily linux based.)
I can't say that I'm exactly optimistic about WebOS' future, given that it is in HP's hands, is up against android and a bunch of other linux-with-a-curious-skin projects, and probably under some pressure to make the purchase price of Palm seem sensible at some point before the sun swallows the earth; but it isn't insane per-se to expect that a bunch of different vendors would be interested in having a (frankly quite nice) linux UI developed along similar lines as the kernel.
Aside from the issue of "Will HP fuck it up?" the main question seems, to me, to be whether 3rd parties would rather have Apache-licensed access to Android at some delay, after Google's official Special Bestest Launch Buddy has been shipping it for some time, or whether they would rather have open-development access to a more restrictively licensed WebOS more or less immediately:
If you don't really care that you are implementing last year's no-longer-new-and-shiny, Android is basically free for the taking and doing whatever you want that doesn't violate the Linux kernel licenses. However, if you want the good stuff, when it is still fresh, you have to go have a chat with Mountain View. If HP is deluded enough to think that people will accept WebOS on those terms, they are heading for irrelevance; but it might well be the case that some vendors(especially those who don't really have a shot at a period of Android exclusivity) would happily accept timely access in exchange for the relative inability to keep changes(aside from their own userspace applications, of course) in-house...
It also has delicious cadmium!
From a backseat engineering perspective, having some degree of local failsafe to back up the GPS would have been a good plan...
The fact that GPS can be spoofed is not exactly a new discovery. "GPS Simulators" that provide a spoof GPS signal(for convenient testing of GPS gear in RF-enclosed environments only, of course...) are commercially available test equipment. Not inexpensive; but totally off-the-shelf. And, given how many commercial and military applications rely on GPS tracking or timekeeping it isn't as though there aren't plenty of people who would be able to make money or gain advantage by mucking with the signal. Detecting stealth aircraft is something of a specialty problem, fooling GPS units is one that would actually have fairly broad applications.
A compass and some accelerometers(or even a view of the sun and an RTC) are a lousy substitute for the accuracy of GPS; but they do provide a sanity check that could keep you going in approximately the right direction, at least enough to hard-land somewhere nominally friendly, if GPS cannot be trusted...
Oon Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison...
They definitely seem to have been cruelly ignored by the riot police of America...
Should be simple enough. Here's the plan:
Register domain 56Kb.it.
Implement a basic URL-shortner/social-media-linking-crap mechanism.
When somebody clicks on a 56Kb.it shortened link, it redirects them to a fairly standard framed-web-proxy-page arrangement; but with an (HTML5, of course) audio widget that plays the dialup noise, and deliberate bandwidth throttling of the framed page to a bitrate chosen randomly from the historically plausible performance of a '56k' dialup line.
It's pointless, wasteful, adds an extra point of failure, and is really a pretty stupid gimmick. Should be all over the social networks within hours.
Frankly, imposing almost-certainly-negative externalities on unconsenting bystanders' persons and property during the course of your business makes you the ethical equivalent of a serial mugger. It is a pity that it doesn't make you the legal equivalent of one.
That's what I've never understood about the notion that these sorts of environmental regulations are 'anti-freedom' or 'anti-free-market'... Effectively, emitting pollutants that leave your property(as they almost always have a nasty tendency to do...) is some combination of assault and destruction of property, depending on exactly how much damage to other people's health and damage to other people's property you cause. That would seem to bring you trivially under the police power of the state to protect its citizens from violence against them by others.
Failure to protect the people from pollution involuntarily forced on them seems different only in degree from failing to prosecute poisoners or fly-tippers. Also arguably, environmental regulations that allow some harmful levels of pollution are actually more statist; because they assert the state's right to submit everyone to damage to the benefit of specific parties(almost exactly the same thing as the almost universally reviled Kelo v. City of New London decision: The state asserting its right to involuntarily transfer part of the property of everybody to the polluter for 'economic development' purposes). The only real areas of economic regulation that would seem to be purely 'environmentalist' in motivation, as opposed to a downright libertarian exercise of the state's right and duty to protect its citizens from violence, force, and fraud, would be those that govern pollution affecting only the polluter and those who have given informed consent to the pollution(employees accepting high risk for higher pay, say, with knowledge of that risk) and those that protect species and wetlands and things in themselves even when they are fully encompassed within a single chunk of property.
Politically, it isn't exactly a surprise that "libertarian" and "environmentalist" usually don't get along all that well; but ideologically, I've always been fascinated by how immediate, direct, property crimes for profit have no friends at all, and we can't seem to hang the perps high enough for anybody's satisfaction; but covert, indirect, property crimes for profit are eminently respectable, and have friends in all the most desirable places... (As for the case of the 'secret sauce' product, it seems like it would depend on exactly why the sauce is secret: if, as is common at the experimental edges of medicine, nobody knows exactly what the sauce will do, it would seem to be the right of a competent adult to take risk upon themselves. If the sauce is secret because I'm just not telling you what it is, it becomes much harder to argue that we have actually achieved a genuine consent in the contractual sense, since I'm deliberately keeping you in a state shy of 'informed consent' for my own convenience.)
I suspect that the big limitation would be the resolution of the electrode array. My, admittedly layman's, understanding is that you basically need an electrode for every 'pixel'(and that's the relatively simple case where you are just brute forcing it, not doing really subtle stuff like trying to map color inputs to the nerves that used to take input from the now defunct cones, and greyscale luma values to those formerly served by rods, and such).
Fabricating really teeny structures is quite mature in silicon MEMS processes; but I don't know whether the same is true in biocompatible, possibly flexible, stuff you can safely implant into somebody's retina without just getting a bunch of scar tissue...
Given people's tolerance for black and white movies and crap TV reception, remarkably few shades of grey and some lousy, smeary, color are impressively useful for working out what is going on; but only having a 16x16 matrix of that to work with might be a problem... It would be interesting to know exactly how many electrodes you'd need to have in place and functioning to provide various levels of vision reproduction.
The real killer is probably seek, more than anything: both the xbox360 and PS3 only have 512 MB of RAM(well, technically the xbox has another 10 MB of eDRAM for the GPU, and the PS3 has a weird split down the middle, not quite as absolute as a separation between 'system ram' and 'ram on the video card'; but there are some penalties if you use more than the first 256MB as general purpose system RAM) and don't(to the best of my knowledge) use an HDD swap file for virtual memory. Some games may have game-specific 'install' support; but there isn't a generic caching mechanism.
No matter how good the stream rate is, you are going to be in a world of pain, where even users of 5,200RPM laptop drives from a few years ago mock your suffering, if you hit a random-access situation.
I'm afraid that the results are back and it is retinitis pigmentosa. Your only hope of avoiding permanent blindness is retinal implants.
Unfortunately, your insurance coverage will only pay for 'retinal implants with special offers'. Not to worry, though, these implants will display offers from our trusted content partners, tailored to your interests as a consumer, only when they detect that your eyes are closed, or otherwise unused.
Are BD-ROMs absolutely slower than DVDs, slower in terms of 'time to read out entire capacity of disk', or did PS3 developers just do a lousy job when handed 50GB and told to go nuts?
As best I understand from some cursory googling(coming from PC-land, where we haven't really worried about optical media speeds since the difference between a 2x and an 8x DVD writer was some pretty serious stuff, man) "1x" in Blu-ray land is 4.5 MB/s while "1x" in DVD land is 1.4 MB/s. This would suggest that a first-generation blu-ray drive, pitted against some cheap and mature 24x DVD drive, will be feeling the pain; but that blu-ray's far higher data density would give it a superior speed ceiling(since the rate at which you can spin a cheap, questionably balanced, polycarbonate disk on a cheap, questionably balanced, spindle is fairly limited and should be roughly similar for the two disk types) and that at ~8x, BD-ROM should be absolutely faster than DVD.
Regardless of absolute best case stream speeds, though, optical media are always going to have random access times that make HDDs look positively snappy, and HDD seek times are pretty damned miserable compared to flash, which is similarly un
Lasers start out as nice and coherent; but they are by no means immune to divergence lenses. Indeed, over sufficiently long distances(looking at you, lunar-ranging laser experiment...) divergence is more or less impossible to avoid. In this case, I'm assuming that divergence is desired; because shining a dot on a single retina in a mob isn't going to have much effect...
This seems like a terribly ill-thought-out scheme(except in that it might succeed in separating some police departments from rather a lot of the public's money, in exchange for a slightly more rugged version of a standard green laser, in a butch sci-fi plastic rifle case...)
Unless the laser is a tightly focused dot(in which case it won't be much use against a crowd) its intensity will vary rapidly with distance. In order to not be a complete toy at operationally useful ranges, it will very likely be downright dangerous at closer ones. Luckily, cops are technical experts and models of restraint, so that won't prove to be a problem.
In a similar vein, since lasers are a reasonably common occupational/hobby hazard these days, laser-protective eyewear, designed for strong attenuation of the common laser type of your choice, with minimal impact on general vision, is cheap and readily available. In order to have any effect on somebody wearing such, you'd likely need alarmingly higher power levels than you would need to have the same effect on an unshielded subject. So, either ~$20 eyewear gains you immunity to this fancy tech toy, or this fancy tech toy is powerful enough to stun protected users and fry retinas on everybody else. Brilliant.
Permanent blinding is against the Geneva convention. Temporary blinding ('dazzling' seems to be the polite term) is just ducky. As is accidental blinding that occurs as a side effect of lasers used for some other purpose.
In any case, though, riot cops aren't bound by the convention, so it ends up being largely a matter of what they can get away with vs. what lawsuits make too expensive...
Please, be fair: The Grinch's nuclear program is purely deterrent in nature; and is both a necessary and perfectly proportionate response when facing the threat of Santa, an absolutist God-King known for his massive industrial bunker complexes, extensive use of slave labor, incredibly extensive worldwide espionage apparatus(notorious for spying on children and compiling enemies lists, as well as its facility for bribery and corruption), and the ability to deliver an arbitrary payload to every target on earth in under 24 hours...
I know that North Korea is fashionably behind the times, juche and all; but seriously, this is a bit much.
The idea that Christmas trees are a symbol of Christianity, rather than some freaky pagan stuff, stolen for a while by Christians, and now firmly entrenched as a coniferous altar of Mammon for youth of all ages and faiths, is patently absurd.
Now, it is unlikely that pro-consumerist psychological warfare will be any more popular with our fabulously haired friend; but he needn't worry about the spread of any but the worldliest of indulgences...
The teenage fry-cook is a 'trader' in roughly the same sense that a Private E-1 is a 'military contractor'...
Not strictly false; but not terribly usefully true.