A kinect-style sensor would be a start; but to really make best use of this, rather pricey, display you'd really want to have some inertial sensors in the helmet and gaze tracking.
Plain-old stereoscopic "3D" is ok, and is a comparatively simple step to take(in terms of production and data storage) from a simple single-screen 2D image; but the fact that turning your head or moving your eyes doesn't change your perspective really tweaks your suspension of disbelief if you aren't careful about it. Given that movies rely so heavily on directorial control of camera angle and perspective(and often don't have the budget to fill out the rest of the "world" that should exist around every little soundstage set...) it makes less difference there; but in a 3D game, having the player's perspective change naturally when they turn their head or glance out of the corner of their eye would markedly improve realism...
It would also be useful for increasing the "useful" resolution of the screen for non-game applications: Consider, if you have, say, a triple monitor setup, you can really only focus on one screen at a time, the others will be peripheral vision at best. If you had motion/gaze tracking, your computer could provide a fairly large number of screens in software(say a 3x3 array), each one the same resolution as the monitor goggles, and switch which one is visible to you as you adjust where you are looking. It wouldn't be 100% equivalent to 9 actual displays; but it'd get you much of the benefit in a rather more compact unit...
Depends on how much they end up generating... Nitric acid isn't especially stable at even modest temperatures, and exposure to sunlight doesn't help its stability any, so you could get away with generating modest quantities; but it doesn't take all that much pH depression before exterior stonework and/or trees start whining.
Probably easier and cheaper to scrub the clouds upwind of where you don't want the rain, rather than try to re-evaporate individual raindrops over the area...
As long as you aren't doing it in any flight paths, you are probably not going to cause any immediate damage...
The real giggles, with the eventual success of any of these cloud-seeding projects, will be political(probably with a side of Aral-sea style ecological fuck-uppery in places where people don't care very much):
As with rivers that flow across political boundaries(a source of endless contention over water rights, complaints by team downstream that team upstream is taking too much water out and/or dumping too much shit in, etc.), air currents carrying enough water vapor to be even theoretically 'seed-able' are a finite resource. Rain that falls in one location won't be available to fall in another one. Historically, there hasn't been all that much fighting(either the legal flavor, or the literal flavor) about it, because rainfall was pretty much just a function of geography, climate, and luck.
Should it become possible to 'pump' a cloud with some comparatively inexpensive apparatus(whether it be this laser widget or some other thing), reliable air currents flowing from regions of evaporation will become a new flavor of 'river', suddenly subject to rivalrous use, and the rivalries that stem from it. Happy times!
Given that Apple's suppliers are the same set of OEMs as everybody else, I very strongly doubt that production pollution controls differ significantly. However, because most of the others have weaker brand identities, I couldn't think of appropriate analogs to 'iCancer' for them...
They should be ashamed of rejecting Apple's gifts. iCancer is a truly aspirational lifestyle disease. The revolutionary unibody tumor construction, with the most advanced custom-vascularization in the industry(PC detractors might argue that these are just made of your own commodity cells these days; but it's the unique integration and superb resistance to apoptosis that really makes them special), and Apple's trademark 'It Just Hurts' UX design truly make this the disease to have.
Their "5000 jobs" claim seems to belong in the same pile as the "Give us $100 million to build a stadium, and we promise to hire 6 hotdog vendors and a janitorial team!" arguments that get trotted out every time a pro sports team shakes down a municipality to build their business infrastructure for them... These sorts of things are so openly cynical and insultingly paltry that I'm honestly not sure why anybody even bothers pretending...
Hey! We totally pinkie-swear that if we are given nigh-unlimited power to bleed the nation's wireless users dry, we promise to build a couple of towers in rural nofuckingwhereistan and call it "Universal Access"! C'mon, it's a totally reasonable trade!
In the rather unixy context in which GNU software tends to operate(historically, yes, there is the strong lisp-derived strain; most prominently holding out in Emacs; but today's incarnations generally show up as the userland tools of a unix or unixlike system) the niche for extension languages is arguably even a bit narrower:
They have to address problems of interest to people technical enough to write them; but not technical or interested enough to modify the program(as you note); but they also have to address problems in programs that are sufficiently monolithic that you would use the program's internal extension language, rather than hacking together a bash script that stitches together a bunch of common utility programs. In a context where command line users are largely an afterthought, or a workflow situation that makes heavy use of big, monolithic, programs with minimally useful command line invocations, extension languages are the 'glue logic' you get(observe your local Office guru's bludgeoning about of VBscript, or some photo-pro's slightly alarming Photoshop batch processing abilities); but the unix 'flavor' has historically been that the shell, rather than the program extension language, has been the tool of choice for bodging jobs too big to tackle manually but to small to be worth delving into the guts of the programs themselves.
Yet another fMRI study finds that fluid movement in the brain changes based on activity. Doesn't show that area of the brain is doing any work.
Given that the "fluid movement" is typically the (substantial) blood supply required to satisfy the brain's exorbitant metabolic demands, it seems plausible to suspect that there is, in fact, a connection. More research is needed, probably involving lots of electrode probes and cute furry animals; but it is hardly an unreasonable hypothesis...
Under the(now broken) assumption that "not selling" means "the consumers just have to suck it up and wait", it can be a useful price discrimination tactic. If one market is willing to pay more, you release there first(so that if there is any uncontrolled intra-market flow, remember kids, free trade is only for corporations, not for you!, it is more expensive copies flowing to rabid fanboys in lower-price countries, rather than low-price-but-legitimate copies being imported into higher priced regions). NTSC/PAL differences and DVD region coding are also directed at stopping that; but those are mostly a dead letter at this point.
There are likely also delays that stem simply from the transaction costs and delays involved in the hellish morass that is international licensing contracts; but those aren't really the product of intention, just inertia.
Commonwealth countries are, presumably, hit particularly hard by this sort of thing because they are more likely to get english-language releases, which would be generally quite acceptable to customers in the US and UK, which are prime early-release markets. Markets with less common languages may see a delay for dubbing; but it is less likely that studios would be worried about those being imported, except by relatively small expat populations.
The trouble with vaccine 'efficacy' is that it really operates in two different ways, with both being required for full effect:
You get the direct reduction in vulnerability of vaccinated individuals, varying somewhat by vaccine and disease or disease strain, well above zero; but generally not perfect. You also get, if a sufficiently large percentage of the population is vaccinated, a crash in the disease's ability to spread, because it can't move to enough new hosts before running its course in existing ones. This demographic crash contributes the rest of the efficacy.
Unfortunately, it is trivial for free-riders to take advantage of the second form of vaccine efficacy, without actually contributing to it, right up to the point where that mechanism breaks down for everyone...
The MMR vaccine has not shown signs of causing neurological problems; but Measles, in the not-as-rare-as-one-might-like cases where it progresses to include Encephalitis, certainly has...
In addition to logic in the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail that you might get promoted for pounding" vein, I imagine that the FBI's counterintelligence office doesn't really want to court the potential moral hazard of providing assistance to people who might be moles in order to remove their incentive to sell out.
There is, one presumes, a very long list of people who would really like something in their life fixed up, and you don't really want to get into the business of having to fix things for them lest they go rogue on you...
'Contact' is one word for it. Using the phrase "His mother is a terrible human being and has caused me tremendous suffering. Not enough bad things can happen to her if you know what I mean." makes you sound like you do have a certain, er, mutually beneficial exchange of services, in mind...
Depends on the details of the start of the affair: "However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime."
If the agent merely posed as the sort of consular person who the suspect was looking for, it's just a sting, not entrapment. If, on the other hand, the agent engaged in a prolonged campaign of grooming and cajoling to get otherwise upright and/or feckless people stirred up enough to do something, there would be a serious argument that entrapment was going on...
It would be interesting to know if the feds just have undercover people swarming around likely defection loci, just hanging out and looking shady and approachable, or whether Akamai is considered cool enough to get investigations focused on its employees, or whether the fellow in question has something else that flagged him.
Given that nature is, in rough approximation, a large mass of meat eating itself(with enough solar meat to save the system from heat death), I'm inclined to doubt it.
It would certainly try; but the world is already quite full indeed of vicious little organisms who want nothing more than to break the world down into its simple sugars, and the equally cunning countermeasures deployed against them by their intended victims. It is unlikely(though not 100%) impossible, that somebody's pampered little high-yield laboratory specialist would make much of a mark on the mean, mean, microbial streets...
We at Vasco love the passive voice more than our own mothers. Also, all appearances to the contrary, we aren't colossal fuckups because, when we colossally fucked up, we "acted in accordance with all relevant rules and procedures"(this apparently didn't include mentioning that there had been an issue). Thankfully, we hire external auditors who operate well on our level of understanding, so they didn't reveal the embarrassing scope of our failure. After somebody else entirely did our job for us, we finally got around to cleaning up what of our mess was still within the realm of fixable(sorry, Iranian Gmail users, hope you weren't doing anything seditious..)
So, is there any reason that this company shouldn't just be sold for scrap now? Their security clearly isn't good enough, their secretive attitude isn't exactly in line with being a 'trusted' certificate authority, and they can't even hire the right outside assistance to help them clean up their own messes. Hell, at this point, my very own FuzzyFuzzyFungus' SporeCert(tm) trust solutions would appear to be a better bet...
" it wouldn't be surprising if all software is made available as an ISO on a USB drive which can be read by tablet and PC alike."
What is the obsession with wrapping files in oddball formats that need to be 'mounted' when zip, or equivalents, are ubiquitous? The only reason to put up with ISO files is if you need to burn a CD, or need to placate some program whose DRM requires that it believe that a CD is present in order to run. What insanity would cause you to wrap your files in an ISO if you are just going to put them on a flash drive? If it needs to be a single file, just fucking zip it. If not, we have these cool things called "Directories" whose magic one can use to store multiple files without visual clutter.
Apple, for some inscrutable reason, has already gone down this road: I can understand the utility of having.dmg support built into the system for, y'know creating, modifying, and working with disk images; but for what absurd reason does an install package downloaded from the internet, often only containing a couple of files, have to be a "disk image", which then has to be mounted?
There is no specific regulation(aside from whatever body of generic business-practices regulation governs operations in that jurisdiction); but the major OS, browser, and email client companies effectively count as the regulators.
They can, and do, issue frequent updates(with fairly swift uptake across a good percentage of the userbase, these days) which can and sometimes do include changes to the trusted roots. If a CA gets removed, their customers' users start seeing scary, scary warning messages or just being blocked entirely. Game Over.
Historically, they've been pretty gutless about doing this punitively(presumably because of the risk that they will be blamed for being "broken" if a lot of sites suddenly stop working in their browser and not in the other guy's browser); but, architecturally, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are essentially in the position of being able to render any CA worthless in a month or less...
Strongarm antipiracy measures are not new. In the early 1990s, I knew a software company that was planning to bundle an IDE card that would function as a dongle with their product. If the dongle thought the software was hacked, it would dump a large amount of voltage via a cascade to fry the machine.
By "Planning" do you mean "pissed off geeks were fantasizing about it" or did this somehow make it as far as legal before being shot down?
Slashdot Mirror
A kinect-style sensor would be a start; but to really make best use of this, rather pricey, display you'd really want to have some inertial sensors in the helmet and gaze tracking.
Plain-old stereoscopic "3D" is ok, and is a comparatively simple step to take(in terms of production and data storage) from a simple single-screen 2D image; but the fact that turning your head or moving your eyes doesn't change your perspective really tweaks your suspension of disbelief if you aren't careful about it. Given that movies rely so heavily on directorial control of camera angle and perspective(and often don't have the budget to fill out the rest of the "world" that should exist around every little soundstage set...) it makes less difference there; but in a 3D game, having the player's perspective change naturally when they turn their head or glance out of the corner of their eye would markedly improve realism...
It would also be useful for increasing the "useful" resolution of the screen for non-game applications: Consider, if you have, say, a triple monitor setup, you can really only focus on one screen at a time, the others will be peripheral vision at best. If you had motion/gaze tracking, your computer could provide a fairly large number of screens in software(say a 3x3 array), each one the same resolution as the monitor goggles, and switch which one is visible to you as you adjust where you are looking. It wouldn't be 100% equivalent to 9 actual displays; but it'd get you much of the benefit in a rather more compact unit...
Depends on how much they end up generating... Nitric acid isn't especially stable at even modest temperatures, and exposure to sunlight doesn't help its stability any, so you could get away with generating modest quantities; but it doesn't take all that much pH depression before exterior stonework and/or trees start whining.
Probably easier and cheaper to scrub the clouds upwind of where you don't want the rain, rather than try to re-evaporate individual raindrops over the area...
But we'll need droids who can speak their binary language...
As long as you aren't doing it in any flight paths, you are probably not going to cause any immediate damage...
The real giggles, with the eventual success of any of these cloud-seeding projects, will be political(probably with a side of Aral-sea style ecological fuck-uppery in places where people don't care very much):
As with rivers that flow across political boundaries(a source of endless contention over water rights, complaints by team downstream that team upstream is taking too much water out and/or dumping too much shit in, etc.), air currents carrying enough water vapor to be even theoretically 'seed-able' are a finite resource. Rain that falls in one location won't be available to fall in another one. Historically, there hasn't been all that much fighting(either the legal flavor, or the literal flavor) about it, because rainfall was pretty much just a function of geography, climate, and luck.
Should it become possible to 'pump' a cloud with some comparatively inexpensive apparatus(whether it be this laser widget or some other thing), reliable air currents flowing from regions of evaporation will become a new flavor of 'river', suddenly subject to rivalrous use, and the rivalries that stem from it. Happy times!
Given that Apple's suppliers are the same set of OEMs as everybody else, I very strongly doubt that production pollution controls differ significantly. However, because most of the others have weaker brand identities, I couldn't think of appropriate analogs to 'iCancer' for them...
They should be ashamed of rejecting Apple's gifts. iCancer is a truly aspirational lifestyle disease. The revolutionary unibody tumor construction, with the most advanced custom-vascularization in the industry(PC detractors might argue that these are just made of your own commodity cells these days; but it's the unique integration and superb resistance to apoptosis that really makes them special), and Apple's trademark 'It Just Hurts' UX design truly make this the disease to have.
Their "5000 jobs" claim seems to belong in the same pile as the "Give us $100 million to build a stadium, and we promise to hire 6 hotdog vendors and a janitorial team!" arguments that get trotted out every time a pro sports team shakes down a municipality to build their business infrastructure for them... These sorts of things are so openly cynical and insultingly paltry that I'm honestly not sure why anybody even bothers pretending...
Does doublespeak count against my 'anytime' minutes; but at twice the normal rate, or do I need to upgrade my plan?
Hey! We totally pinkie-swear that if we are given nigh-unlimited power to bleed the nation's wireless users dry, we promise to build a couple of towers in rural nofuckingwhereistan and call it "Universal Access"! C'mon, it's a totally reasonable trade!
In the rather unixy context in which GNU software tends to operate(historically, yes, there is the strong lisp-derived strain; most prominently holding out in Emacs; but today's incarnations generally show up as the userland tools of a unix or unixlike system) the niche for extension languages is arguably even a bit narrower:
They have to address problems of interest to people technical enough to write them; but not technical or interested enough to modify the program(as you note); but they also have to address problems in programs that are sufficiently monolithic that you would use the program's internal extension language, rather than hacking together a bash script that stitches together a bunch of common utility programs. In a context where command line users are largely an afterthought, or a workflow situation that makes heavy use of big, monolithic, programs with minimally useful command line invocations, extension languages are the 'glue logic' you get(observe your local Office guru's bludgeoning about of VBscript, or some photo-pro's slightly alarming Photoshop batch processing abilities); but the unix 'flavor' has historically been that the shell, rather than the program extension language, has been the tool of choice for bodging jobs too big to tackle manually but to small to be worth delving into the guts of the programs themselves.
Yet another fMRI study finds that fluid movement in the brain changes based on activity. Doesn't show that area of the brain is doing any work.
Given that the "fluid movement" is typically the (substantial) blood supply required to satisfy the brain's exorbitant metabolic demands, it seems plausible to suspect that there is, in fact, a connection. More research is needed, probably involving lots of electrode probes and cute furry animals; but it is hardly an unreasonable hypothesis...
Under the(now broken) assumption that "not selling" means "the consumers just have to suck it up and wait", it can be a useful price discrimination tactic. If one market is willing to pay more, you release there first(so that if there is any uncontrolled intra-market flow, remember kids, free trade is only for corporations, not for you!, it is more expensive copies flowing to rabid fanboys in lower-price countries, rather than low-price-but-legitimate copies being imported into higher priced regions). NTSC/PAL differences and DVD region coding are also directed at stopping that; but those are mostly a dead letter at this point.
There are likely also delays that stem simply from the transaction costs and delays involved in the hellish morass that is international licensing contracts; but those aren't really the product of intention, just inertia.
Commonwealth countries are, presumably, hit particularly hard by this sort of thing because they are more likely to get english-language releases, which would be generally quite acceptable to customers in the US and UK, which are prime early-release markets. Markets with less common languages may see a delay for dubbing; but it is less likely that studios would be worried about those being imported, except by relatively small expat populations.
The trouble with vaccine 'efficacy' is that it really operates in two different ways, with both being required for full effect:
You get the direct reduction in vulnerability of vaccinated individuals, varying somewhat by vaccine and disease or disease strain, well above zero; but generally not perfect. You also get, if a sufficiently large percentage of the population is vaccinated, a crash in the disease's ability to spread, because it can't move to enough new hosts before running its course in existing ones. This demographic crash contributes the rest of the efficacy.
Unfortunately, it is trivial for free-riders to take advantage of the second form of vaccine efficacy, without actually contributing to it, right up to the point where that mechanism breaks down for everyone...
The MMR vaccine has not shown signs of causing neurological problems; but Measles, in the not-as-rare-as-one-might-like cases where it progresses to include Encephalitis, certainly has...
In addition to logic in the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail that you might get promoted for pounding" vein, I imagine that the FBI's counterintelligence office doesn't really want to court the potential moral hazard of providing assistance to people who might be moles in order to remove their incentive to sell out.
There is, one presumes, a very long list of people who would really like something in their life fixed up, and you don't really want to get into the business of having to fix things for them lest they go rogue on you...
'Contact' is one word for it. Using the phrase "His mother is a terrible human being and has caused me tremendous suffering. Not enough bad things can happen to her if you know what I mean." makes you sound like you do have a certain, er, mutually beneficial exchange of services, in mind...
Depends on the details of the start of the affair: "However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime."
If the agent merely posed as the sort of consular person who the suspect was looking for, it's just a sting, not entrapment. If, on the other hand, the agent engaged in a prolonged campaign of grooming and cajoling to get otherwise upright and/or feckless people stirred up enough to do something, there would be a serious argument that entrapment was going on...
It would be interesting to know if the feds just have undercover people swarming around likely defection loci, just hanging out and looking shady and approachable, or whether Akamai is considered cool enough to get investigations focused on its employees, or whether the fellow in question has something else that flagged him.
I've got some bad news for you about certain improvements made to the speed and efficiency of the garbage collection algorithm...
Given that nature is, in rough approximation, a large mass of meat eating itself(with enough solar meat to save the system from heat death), I'm inclined to doubt it.
It would certainly try; but the world is already quite full indeed of vicious little organisms who want nothing more than to break the world down into its simple sugars, and the equally cunning countermeasures deployed against them by their intended victims. It is unlikely(though not 100%) impossible, that somebody's pampered little high-yield laboratory specialist would make much of a mark on the mean, mean, microbial streets...
Wow, that's gutsy.
We at Vasco love the passive voice more than our own mothers. Also, all appearances to the contrary, we aren't colossal fuckups because, when we colossally fucked up, we "acted in accordance with all relevant rules and procedures"(this apparently didn't include mentioning that there had been an issue). Thankfully, we hire external auditors who operate well on our level of understanding, so they didn't reveal the embarrassing scope of our failure. After somebody else entirely did our job for us, we finally got around to cleaning up what of our mess was still within the realm of fixable(sorry, Iranian Gmail users, hope you weren't doing anything seditious..)
So, is there any reason that this company shouldn't just be sold for scrap now? Their security clearly isn't good enough, their secretive attitude isn't exactly in line with being a 'trusted' certificate authority, and they can't even hire the right outside assistance to help them clean up their own messes. Hell, at this point, my very own FuzzyFuzzyFungus' SporeCert(tm) trust solutions would appear to be a better bet...
" it wouldn't be surprising if all software is made available as an ISO on a USB drive which can be read by tablet and PC alike."
.dmg support built into the system for, y'know creating, modifying, and working with disk images; but for what absurd reason does an install package downloaded from the internet, often only containing a couple of files, have to be a "disk image", which then has to be mounted?
What is the obsession with wrapping files in oddball formats that need to be 'mounted' when zip, or equivalents, are ubiquitous? The only reason to put up with ISO files is if you need to burn a CD, or need to placate some program whose DRM requires that it believe that a CD is present in order to run. What insanity would cause you to wrap your files in an ISO if you are just going to put them on a flash drive? If it needs to be a single file, just fucking zip it. If not, we have these cool things called "Directories" whose magic one can use to store multiple files without visual clutter.
Apple, for some inscrutable reason, has already gone down this road: I can understand the utility of having
There is no specific regulation(aside from whatever body of generic business-practices regulation governs operations in that jurisdiction); but the major OS, browser, and email client companies effectively count as the regulators.
They can, and do, issue frequent updates(with fairly swift uptake across a good percentage of the userbase, these days) which can and sometimes do include changes to the trusted roots. If a CA gets removed, their customers' users start seeing scary, scary warning messages or just being blocked entirely. Game Over.
Historically, they've been pretty gutless about doing this punitively(presumably because of the risk that they will be blamed for being "broken" if a lot of sites suddenly stop working in their browser and not in the other guy's browser); but, architecturally, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are essentially in the position of being able to render any CA worthless in a month or less...
Strongarm antipiracy measures are not new. In the early 1990s, I knew a software company that was planning to bundle an IDE card that would function as a dongle with their product. If the dongle thought the software was hacked, it would dump a large amount of voltage via a cascade to fry the machine.
By "Planning" do you mean "pissed off geeks were fantasizing about it" or did this somehow make it as far as legal before being shot down?