That's the unfortunate side effect of having bullshit 'homeland security' slush money available to the tribal militias of failed, 3rd world, states. Hickistan's sheriffs have enough of a problem with grandiosity without the feds buying them fancy toys.
It's certainly possible that someone attempting a rapid expansion could butt up against the limits of the location; but the handy thing about fiber is that the cost per strand drops pretty dramatically as you run more of it to the same place. The actual fiber certainly isn't free; but the necessary rights of way, support/protection for the cable, labor for installation, etc. cost much the same until you get to some impractically gigantic bundle. It may be necessary to make upgrades; but if a location is already well served enough to start building a datacenter, it's a good bet that adding the necessary capacity there will be cheaper than dealing with more, smaller, links to more locations.
It's really a very old idea, just with cellphones and GPS for ever finer granularity. Historically the granularity was more or less limited to 'day laborer', or paid by the piece, since more accurate timekeeping and information processing weren't available; but the basic concept of having a pool of disposable peons waiting to be temporarily employed as you need them is not new. Or particularly pleasant.
I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the really wealthy generally spend less time whining about taxes and more time creatively structuring their assets so as to not pay them; and can also afford, if they want, to live under just about any tax structure worldwide, so their choice of residence and citizenship is based more on preference and perceived advantages than on economic necessity. They may still dislike paying whatever taxes they can't avoid; but not enough to put themselves to any great personal inconvenience or hardship about it.
The less wealthy, but wealthy enough to feel exploited by the tax system, whine more loudly because they have fewer options for lowering their effective tax rate(high-salary skilled workers, say, tend to resent getting taxed at income tax rates rather than capital gains rates); and because they are relatively poor enough that the marginal value of the assets they lose to taxation is higher(if you are really rich, taxes may offend you in some abstract sense; but they don't really change your ability to enjoy basically anything money can buy; if you are merely wealthy, taxes aren't putting you in the bread line; but they quite possibly are reducing the range of things you can afford.)
The somewhat less wealthy are also presumably less able to insulate themselves from their environment. A suitably large fortune will keep just about anything except the central government at bay(this is why so many Russian oligarchs hang out in London); but the smaller the fortune the lower the degree of cost-effective insulation you can manage. This makes Jamaica's relative poverty, very high crime, poor corruption ranking, and mediocre HDI somewhat less attractive.
That claim is particularly weird because the pitch is targeted at wealthy Americans.
Yeah, sure, there are plenty of places where you have uncomfortably good odds of 'racial crimes', or garden variety getting mugged and/or shot; but wealthy people generally don't live in them. That's one of the perks of having enough money to live in the nice part of town. The people you want just don't really have to worry(they might anyway, like the nuts ranting about how talk of 'inequality' is just a step away from sending anyone not on welfare to the death camps). Unless there is a supply of people who just really want to live a long way from anywhere(flights to Australia aren't exotic or anything; but they are very, very, tedious); they'd better have a more relevant set of issues.
There are occasional clusters of cuts that seem a little curious; but single undersea cables getting knocked out now and again is just a fact of life. My understanding is that the people who specialize in laying and repairing undersea cable are more or less constantly moving from job to job. The only real story is that the fiber went down before the microwave link had been repaired. Given that you can get 100km out of a wifi link(with distinctly non-stock antennas, and potentially some small-but-FCC-unapproved increase in transmission power), it sounds like they should consider some backups that they can bring back into service more quickly.
If a 3rd party wishes to use Apple as a payment processor, then I'd agree that Apple has reason to expect a cut: payment processing costs money from anyone; and Apple's large collection of people with payment information already keyed in and a willingness to click 'buy' is certainly valuable.
Where I suspect that Apple may run into trouble(and would not mind in the slightest if they did), is the fact that they currently both forbid an app to link to an outside payment page(you can allude in general terms to the fact that purchases are to be made on your website; but you aren't allowed to embed the pertinent part of the site in your app or link to it directly) and Apple takes the same 30% for things like app purchases, where they do the payment processing, the storage, the delivery, etc. and for subscriptions purchased in-app, where they do nothing but the payment processing.
Were Apple to allow people to integrate their own payment mechanisms for subscription(even at the level of just using a webview of the appropriate page in their app), the situation would be of much less concern. They could probably still justify a price on the high end of the range for payment processors, thanks to their convenient integration and large customer base; but they currently forbid any level of integration from anyone who isn't them. When they place everyone else at this considerable and partially artificial disadvantage and offer competing services in certain areas, that seems like a problem.
It doesn't seem surprising that the FTC would be nosing around. Apple got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, pretty damn seriously, in their 'negotiations' with book publishers(apparently Steve doesn't know not to commit illegal conspiracy over email...); and now they have an arrangement where they specifically forbid any of their competitors from doing anything in-app that would circumvent Apple's 30% cut(apps that can only be signed up for online are OK; but such apps are forbidden to link to the signup page in-app; either no sign-up information, or Apple-provided payment mechanism only); which more or less assures that they'll be able to undercut their competitors on iOS, unless some miracle has made the labels 30% or more more generous in their dealings with that competitor.
The barring a successful claim that iOS doesn't actually have market power; which seems unlikely, I'm not sure why this would pass scrutiny now that Apple has a direct competitor in the water.
Unless you are a pure legallist about it, surely you can take the circumstances of the article and the differing public interest values into account?
The News Corp hacks, for the most part, were voicemail intercepts on celebrities, crime victims, and their families, used to provide a front-row seat on assorted emotionally moving(and big selling), but effectively mere gossip, stories. The Guardian is taking advantage of the availability of somebody else's hack(that, unlike News Corp, they didn't pay somebody to do) to write an informational piece about a vendor of surveillance technology with a troubling and controversial human rights record. The substance of their story is both a glimpse into how the ugly side of security research works; and specific investigative journalism concerning the discrepancies between what Hacking Team has claimed about their export practices; and what their actual export practices are.
Again, if you adhere to a purely legalist position, and all hacks are illegal and therefore wrong; then there really isn't much to talk about, that's the end of the line. If, however, you concede that there is, at times, a compelling argument in favor of bringing to light things that certain people would rather keep hidden; you can't really expect that such sunshine efforts are going to have the luxury of just interviewing their subjects and receiving a straight answer. Most of the world's decent malfeasance is clandestine, for obvious reasons, so whenever it comes to light that isn't going to be because the people committing it wanted it to.
So, if we can get this to the right scale; we can have a 'sustainable bomber' capable of all steps from enrichment to warhead delivery! It's like a seat on the security council in one convenient package.
So, do we suspect mere incompetence, or is the OCP one of those 'open' projects where the lead is all gung-ho about industry collaboration and openness and such; so long as they are losing to somebody else, and then more or less immediately drops all but the barest vestiges of 'open' once they have the improvements they came for?
I certainly can't rule out the former, especially since a bunch of preening software narcissists who "move fast and break things" and are proud of it don't seem like naturals for either project management or hardware engineering; but I'd also be unsurprised if this was Facebook's 'shit, Google is hammering us on hardware and operations costs per ad served, we need to beat some fear into our vendors...' project, and now that it has succeeded in doing that, there really isn't any advantage for them in bothering to improve, maintain, or prevent from being watered down into meaninglessness, the 'spec;. Any guesses?
"I get it; some asshole said he was open; but he was only open for business."
I don't know if it's a good idea or not(probably depends on who you are, and I'm sure that there will be some people who chose incorrectly); but is it really a surprise that OCP would be doing their testing on the cheap 'n cheerful side of things?
It was my understanding that their premise, from the beginning, was that existing hardware vendors were excessively focused on adding costly, thermally demanding, and often proprietary, features at the hardware level that were unnecessary if you were willing to compensate for their absence in your software design.
There is obviously some level of reliability below which no compensation at the software level is possible(if you can't run the algorithm for detecting errors because it keeps glitching out, it's probably not going to work); but the impression they always conveyed was that many of the more sophisticated reliability mechanisms are really features aimed at people who are substantially less able to cope with failure; and are therefore willing to pay substantially more for hardware that can invisibly paper over a variety of moderately serious failures and allow the software on top to run without incident; rather than buying lots of cheap hardware that has a risk of going down in a screaming heap.
So long as nobody gets any stupid optimistic ideas, I don't really see the issue. Sure, if Facebook were about sending men to mars, they should seriously consider having three CPUs running in lockstep and voting on all operations and so on; but this project is about delivering as many ad impressions per dollar as possible; no reason to get worked up over the occasional glitch.
It is entirely true that people's faith-based hype money isn't 'value'; but there is an unpleasant tendency for people to have structured things such that activities of real value are tied, more and less indirectly, to the need to maintain a given valuation; so value tends to take it on the chin even if the bubble that is popping was full of nothing but hot air to begin with.
Lenovo, unfortunately, has their own non-Thinkpad laptop lines. These are where the bad ideas that have occasionally spilled over and corrupted the Thinkpads are given full freedom to breed and mutate into ever weirder and less likeable consumer crap.
So you are saying Greece lied, therefore the fault isn't with Greece, it's with the other EU countries? You're making my head hurt.
There's a difference, and an important one, between 'fault' in the moral, blame-attached-for-wrongdoing sense and 'fault' in the 'error, mistake, deviation from correct operation' sense.
You know the saying "If I owe you $1000, I have a problem. If I owe you $1,000,000, you have a problem."? It's not that Greece's government is somehow the morally blameless party; but it's the eurozone who is revealed, by Greece's failure, as having been...'optimistic'...about its due diligence in the past; and apparently without a coherent plan for what to do if that comes back to bite them.
It's not entirely unlike the US mortgage fuckup: sure, you can scold the irresponsible borrowers, taking out those loans they can't afford; but it's the lenders who have a giant pile of bad loans on their books, a strong suspicion of insufficient scrutiny in their past dealings; and no terribly coherent plan to do anything about it. Greece is unlikely to enjoy the experience; but countries defaulting is a thing that happens from time to time. For the euro, though, this is new territory; and potentially not the last country they'll have to do some variant of this to. So far, they aren't showing all that much promise.
Surely there would already be a long list of people who have died while watching TV, playing videogames, or putzing around on the phone while sitting on the couch; at least if such incidents weren't(while individually tragic), so boring that nobody has bothered to compile a list?
This is not to say that highly immersive simulations are riskless; I'd personally want to be either sitting down, or in a decent sized room with no sharp-edge furniture and ideally a cushy carpet if I were going to play some VR horror sim that is likely to cause me to jump wildly and potentially fall over; but that's basically the same precaution I would apply to playing some Wii kiddie game that involves flailing around wildly so the accelerometers pick up my input.
Given that you are, effectively, blindfolded; and being fed spurious(relative to the room you are actually in) visual stimuli; VR gaming is going to require more caution than flat screen gaming, especially if standing up and moving around are involved; but "VR: It's So Scary You'll Die in Real Life!!!" doesn't seem like a major issue.
I can't comment on operator demographics; but it's worth noting that even the fairly small drones(if the propellors are unshrouded or improperly shrouded) can fuck you up surprisingly well.
I imagine that one or two of us here may have had the misfortune of accidentally sticking a finger into an active case/CPU fan at some point. The zestier 80mm, and most of the 120s, will draw blood and possibly take a nail off without much trouble(though they might throw a blade doing so, and then tear their bearings apart, which can be fun to watch). Observe that those sorts of fans are too feeble to lift off. The same is not true of drone propellors. They can, and will, give you a pretty decent slashing.
Barring substantial bad luck, it'll mostly be surface soft tissue damage, lots of blood and maybe a little scarring but no serious long-term effects; but still not what you want to have happen.
I don't know if there are other sources or not. The concept of non-crystalline metal alloys is not itself patented; but the problem with them has historically been that they can only be fabricated by cooling the metal at truly heroic rates(achievable with hair-thin samples that are just large enough to poke at in the lab; but anything of actually useful size would partially or wholly crystalize during cooling). The 'Liquid Metal' guys originate from some Caltech research that identified alloys that remain amorphous during processing that is actually practical for parts of moderate size.
They certainly hold all the patents that they can surrounding that; but if somebody else has a sufficiently distinct alloy that also doesn't crystalize during cooling, they just need to avoid stepping on any trademarks.
This product doesn't appear to be outside of the realm of the possible; bulk metallic glasses are a real thing (and apparently not excessively expensive for consumer electronics, a number of Sandisk's adequate-but-cheap-and-wholly-unexciting MP3 players used them as chassis materials); and the rest of the specs are on the high side; but available.
However, there appears to be almost nothing about this 'Turing Robotic Industries' except a couple of sites with the same 3d renders and vague puffery. Is 'cryptic' just what all the cool kids are doing these days, or is this the ever delightful scent of vaporware?
Yeah, you put it way more concisely than I managed to.
I suppose you could also swap out an entire crew at a time; but I suspect that that plan wouldn't work as well in practice. You will need some alternative to just having the crew assembled for the duration of the operation; and then resting or replacing it when you return to port; whatever seems best.
It's certainly true that the impact of playing a field game vs. playing a computer game is likely to be different for the player(whether it will actually be healthier depends on how brutally the field sport chews up the human resources vs. how badly inactivity and carpal tunnel syndrome get you); but from the perspective of the audience there isn't much difference.
It's not as though watching intense phsyical exertion gives you exercise by osmosis; so while I'd tend to agree that gamers are not 'athletes', I have little time for the people who are sitting on the couch with a beer and a bowl of chips, decrying the physical passivity of the gamer geeks.
Aren't "analytics", at least at a fairly rudimentary level, something that was already present in most RTSes, long before it became a buzzword among online advertisers?
I'm not even terribly serious, and I remember most multiplayer or skirmish matches having an end-of-match display of CPM, units built/lost, structures built/lost, resources gathered/spent, graphs of all these variables over time, and so on.
Nobody even bothers to call that 'analytics'; it's just a summary of the salient aspects of the game. If you happen to have a second, 3rd, or nth screen available I don't see why you wouldn't want to be able to see those variables in real time; but the idea that 'analytics' is somehow novel or revolutionary is just nonsense.
I didn't mean to imply that the crew were expendable; but to respond to the grandparent post's note that technology that enables very long deployments isn't going to stop the people from burning out after a while.
My intended point was that, while people do react increasingly poorly to very long deployments, that is a comparatively predictable problem, which can be combated by a moving people in and out of active duty to control the length of active service; which is something that militaries have done for quite some time. If some fancy ultra-long-endurance technology allows you to send a ship out for X years, determining how you'll rotate crew in and out to keep each sailor within acceptable limits is going to be more complex than it is in lower endurance ships were the endurance of the crew is equal to or greater than that of the ship, so everyone leaves and comes back at the same time; but steadily rotating part of the manpower of a relatively large ship, base, etc. in order to compromise between cohesion and length of active service isn't a fundamentally novel problem.
On the plus side, unless WWIII is breaking out(in which case the personnel getting burned out is likely to be a trickier problem; but also one you'd encounter regardless of spare parts), you can probably swap out crew more easily than you can parts(especially the larger ones, or the more sensitive ones that you can't just put in checked baggage); unless the ship is in the midst of active hostility, in which case the crew would be pretty dumb to sabotage equipment that increases their odds of making it home alive.
With humans, you have some uncertainty(accidents, unusual medical issues, the occasional psych freakout or disciplinary problem); but the approximate rate at which you need to rotate people to keep them from burning out is comparatively predictable. With spare parts, there are some you know you'll need; but an impractically bulky number of ones you might need; but can't say for sure about. Much easier to ferry out a fresh batch of crew every X months than it is to guess, sufficiently far in advance, what parts to put on the next supply boat.
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That's the unfortunate side effect of having bullshit 'homeland security' slush money available to the tribal militias of failed, 3rd world, states. Hickistan's sheriffs have enough of a problem with grandiosity without the feds buying them fancy toys.
It's certainly possible that someone attempting a rapid expansion could butt up against the limits of the location; but the handy thing about fiber is that the cost per strand drops pretty dramatically as you run more of it to the same place. The actual fiber certainly isn't free; but the necessary rights of way, support/protection for the cable, labor for installation, etc. cost much the same until you get to some impractically gigantic bundle. It may be necessary to make upgrades; but if a location is already well served enough to start building a datacenter, it's a good bet that adding the necessary capacity there will be cheaper than dealing with more, smaller, links to more locations.
It's really a very old idea, just with cellphones and GPS for ever finer granularity. Historically the granularity was more or less limited to 'day laborer', or paid by the piece, since more accurate timekeeping and information processing weren't available; but the basic concept of having a pool of disposable peons waiting to be temporarily employed as you need them is not new. Or particularly pleasant.
I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the really wealthy generally spend less time whining about taxes and more time creatively structuring their assets so as to not pay them; and can also afford, if they want, to live under just about any tax structure worldwide, so their choice of residence and citizenship is based more on preference and perceived advantages than on economic necessity. They may still dislike paying whatever taxes they can't avoid; but not enough to put themselves to any great personal inconvenience or hardship about it.
The less wealthy, but wealthy enough to feel exploited by the tax system, whine more loudly because they have fewer options for lowering their effective tax rate(high-salary skilled workers, say, tend to resent getting taxed at income tax rates rather than capital gains rates); and because they are relatively poor enough that the marginal value of the assets they lose to taxation is higher(if you are really rich, taxes may offend you in some abstract sense; but they don't really change your ability to enjoy basically anything money can buy; if you are merely wealthy, taxes aren't putting you in the bread line; but they quite possibly are reducing the range of things you can afford.)
The somewhat less wealthy are also presumably less able to insulate themselves from their environment. A suitably large fortune will keep just about anything except the central government at bay(this is why so many Russian oligarchs hang out in London); but the smaller the fortune the lower the degree of cost-effective insulation you can manage. This makes Jamaica's relative poverty, very high crime, poor corruption ranking, and mediocre HDI somewhat less attractive.
That claim is particularly weird because the pitch is targeted at wealthy Americans.
Yeah, sure, there are plenty of places where you have uncomfortably good odds of 'racial crimes', or garden variety getting mugged and/or shot; but wealthy people generally don't live in them. That's one of the perks of having enough money to live in the nice part of town. The people you want just don't really have to worry(they might anyway, like the nuts ranting about how talk of 'inequality' is just a step away from sending anyone not on welfare to the death camps). Unless there is a supply of people who just really want to live a long way from anywhere(flights to Australia aren't exotic or anything; but they are very, very, tedious); they'd better have a more relevant set of issues.
There are occasional clusters of cuts that seem a little curious; but single undersea cables getting knocked out now and again is just a fact of life. My understanding is that the people who specialize in laying and repairing undersea cable are more or less constantly moving from job to job. The only real story is that the fiber went down before the microwave link had been repaired. Given that you can get 100km out of a wifi link(with distinctly non-stock antennas, and potentially some small-but-FCC-unapproved increase in transmission power), it sounds like they should consider some backups that they can bring back into service more quickly.
If a 3rd party wishes to use Apple as a payment processor, then I'd agree that Apple has reason to expect a cut: payment processing costs money from anyone; and Apple's large collection of people with payment information already keyed in and a willingness to click 'buy' is certainly valuable.
Where I suspect that Apple may run into trouble(and would not mind in the slightest if they did), is the fact that they currently both forbid an app to link to an outside payment page(you can allude in general terms to the fact that purchases are to be made on your website; but you aren't allowed to embed the pertinent part of the site in your app or link to it directly) and Apple takes the same 30% for things like app purchases, where they do the payment processing, the storage, the delivery, etc. and for subscriptions purchased in-app, where they do nothing but the payment processing.
Were Apple to allow people to integrate their own payment mechanisms for subscription(even at the level of just using a webview of the appropriate page in their app), the situation would be of much less concern. They could probably still justify a price on the high end of the range for payment processors, thanks to their convenient integration and large customer base; but they currently forbid any level of integration from anyone who isn't them. When they place everyone else at this considerable and partially artificial disadvantage and offer competing services in certain areas, that seems like a problem.
It doesn't seem surprising that the FTC would be nosing around. Apple got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, pretty damn seriously, in their 'negotiations' with book publishers(apparently Steve doesn't know not to commit illegal conspiracy over email...); and now they have an arrangement where they specifically forbid any of their competitors from doing anything in-app that would circumvent Apple's 30% cut(apps that can only be signed up for online are OK; but such apps are forbidden to link to the signup page in-app; either no sign-up information, or Apple-provided payment mechanism only); which more or less assures that they'll be able to undercut their competitors on iOS, unless some miracle has made the labels 30% or more more generous in their dealings with that competitor.
The barring a successful claim that iOS doesn't actually have market power; which seems unlikely, I'm not sure why this would pass scrutiny now that Apple has a direct competitor in the water.
Unless you are a pure legallist about it, surely you can take the circumstances of the article and the differing public interest values into account?
The News Corp hacks, for the most part, were voicemail intercepts on celebrities, crime victims, and their families, used to provide a front-row seat on assorted emotionally moving(and big selling), but effectively mere gossip, stories. The Guardian is taking advantage of the availability of somebody else's hack(that, unlike News Corp, they didn't pay somebody to do) to write an informational piece about a vendor of surveillance technology with a troubling and controversial human rights record. The substance of their story is both a glimpse into how the ugly side of security research works; and specific investigative journalism concerning the discrepancies between what Hacking Team has claimed about their export practices; and what their actual export practices are.
Again, if you adhere to a purely legalist position, and all hacks are illegal and therefore wrong; then there really isn't much to talk about, that's the end of the line. If, however, you concede that there is, at times, a compelling argument in favor of bringing to light things that certain people would rather keep hidden; you can't really expect that such sunshine efforts are going to have the luxury of just interviewing their subjects and receiving a straight answer. Most of the world's decent malfeasance is clandestine, for obvious reasons, so whenever it comes to light that isn't going to be because the people committing it wanted it to.
So, if we can get this to the right scale; we can have a 'sustainable bomber' capable of all steps from enrichment to warhead delivery! It's like a seat on the security council in one convenient package.
So, do we suspect mere incompetence, or is the OCP one of those 'open' projects where the lead is all gung-ho about industry collaboration and openness and such; so long as they are losing to somebody else, and then more or less immediately drops all but the barest vestiges of 'open' once they have the improvements they came for?
I certainly can't rule out the former, especially since a bunch of preening software narcissists who "move fast and break things" and are proud of it don't seem like naturals for either project management or hardware engineering; but I'd also be unsurprised if this was Facebook's 'shit, Google is hammering us on hardware and operations costs per ad served, we need to beat some fear into our vendors...' project, and now that it has succeeded in doing that, there really isn't any advantage for them in bothering to improve, maintain, or prevent from being watered down into meaninglessness, the 'spec;. Any guesses?
"I get it; some asshole said he was open; but he was only open for business."
I don't know if it's a good idea or not(probably depends on who you are, and I'm sure that there will be some people who chose incorrectly); but is it really a surprise that OCP would be doing their testing on the cheap 'n cheerful side of things?
It was my understanding that their premise, from the beginning, was that existing hardware vendors were excessively focused on adding costly, thermally demanding, and often proprietary, features at the hardware level that were unnecessary if you were willing to compensate for their absence in your software design.
There is obviously some level of reliability below which no compensation at the software level is possible(if you can't run the algorithm for detecting errors because it keeps glitching out, it's probably not going to work); but the impression they always conveyed was that many of the more sophisticated reliability mechanisms are really features aimed at people who are substantially less able to cope with failure; and are therefore willing to pay substantially more for hardware that can invisibly paper over a variety of moderately serious failures and allow the software on top to run without incident; rather than buying lots of cheap hardware that has a risk of going down in a screaming heap.
So long as nobody gets any stupid optimistic ideas, I don't really see the issue. Sure, if Facebook were about sending men to mars, they should seriously consider having three CPUs running in lockstep and voting on all operations and so on; but this project is about delivering as many ad impressions per dollar as possible; no reason to get worked up over the occasional glitch.
It is entirely true that people's faith-based hype money isn't 'value'; but there is an unpleasant tendency for people to have structured things such that activities of real value are tied, more and less indirectly, to the need to maintain a given valuation; so value tends to take it on the chin even if the bubble that is popping was full of nothing but hot air to begin with.
It's a bit of an ugly process.
How do you say "Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." in Mandarin?
Lenovo, unfortunately, has their own non-Thinkpad laptop lines. These are where the bad ideas that have occasionally spilled over and corrupted the Thinkpads are given full freedom to breed and mutate into ever weirder and less likeable consumer crap.
So you are saying Greece lied, therefore the fault isn't with Greece, it's with the other EU countries? You're making my head hurt.
There's a difference, and an important one, between 'fault' in the moral, blame-attached-for-wrongdoing sense and 'fault' in the 'error, mistake, deviation from correct operation' sense.
You know the saying "If I owe you $1000, I have a problem. If I owe you $1,000,000, you have a problem."? It's not that Greece's government is somehow the morally blameless party; but it's the eurozone who is revealed, by Greece's failure, as having been...'optimistic'...about its due diligence in the past; and apparently without a coherent plan for what to do if that comes back to bite them.
It's not entirely unlike the US mortgage fuckup: sure, you can scold the irresponsible borrowers, taking out those loans they can't afford; but it's the lenders who have a giant pile of bad loans on their books, a strong suspicion of insufficient scrutiny in their past dealings; and no terribly coherent plan to do anything about it. Greece is unlikely to enjoy the experience; but countries defaulting is a thing that happens from time to time. For the euro, though, this is new territory; and potentially not the last country they'll have to do some variant of this to. So far, they aren't showing all that much promise.
Surely there would already be a long list of people who have died while watching TV, playing videogames, or putzing around on the phone while sitting on the couch; at least if such incidents weren't(while individually tragic), so boring that nobody has bothered to compile a list?
This is not to say that highly immersive simulations are riskless; I'd personally want to be either sitting down, or in a decent sized room with no sharp-edge furniture and ideally a cushy carpet if I were going to play some VR horror sim that is likely to cause me to jump wildly and potentially fall over; but that's basically the same precaution I would apply to playing some Wii kiddie game that involves flailing around wildly so the accelerometers pick up my input.
Given that you are, effectively, blindfolded; and being fed spurious(relative to the room you are actually in) visual stimuli; VR gaming is going to require more caution than flat screen gaming, especially if standing up and moving around are involved; but "VR: It's So Scary You'll Die in Real Life!!!" doesn't seem like a major issue.
I can't comment on operator demographics; but it's worth noting that even the fairly small drones(if the propellors are unshrouded or improperly shrouded) can fuck you up surprisingly well.
I imagine that one or two of us here may have had the misfortune of accidentally sticking a finger into an active case/CPU fan at some point. The zestier 80mm, and most of the 120s, will draw blood and possibly take a nail off without much trouble(though they might throw a blade doing so, and then tear their bearings apart, which can be fun to watch). Observe that those sorts of fans are too feeble to lift off. The same is not true of drone propellors. They can, and will, give you a pretty decent slashing.
Barring substantial bad luck, it'll mostly be surface soft tissue damage, lots of blood and maybe a little scarring but no serious long-term effects; but still not what you want to have happen.
I don't know if there are other sources or not. The concept of non-crystalline metal alloys is not itself patented; but the problem with them has historically been that they can only be fabricated by cooling the metal at truly heroic rates(achievable with hair-thin samples that are just large enough to poke at in the lab; but anything of actually useful size would partially or wholly crystalize during cooling). The 'Liquid Metal' guys originate from some Caltech research that identified alloys that remain amorphous during processing that is actually practical for parts of moderate size.
They certainly hold all the patents that they can surrounding that; but if somebody else has a sufficiently distinct alloy that also doesn't crystalize during cooling, they just need to avoid stepping on any trademarks.
This product doesn't appear to be outside of the realm of the possible; bulk metallic glasses are a real thing (and apparently not excessively expensive for consumer electronics, a number of Sandisk's adequate-but-cheap-and-wholly-unexciting MP3 players used them as chassis materials); and the rest of the specs are on the high side; but available.
However, there appears to be almost nothing about this 'Turing Robotic Industries' except a couple of sites with the same 3d renders and vague puffery. Is 'cryptic' just what all the cool kids are doing these days, or is this the ever delightful scent of vaporware?
Yeah, you put it way more concisely than I managed to.
I suppose you could also swap out an entire crew at a time; but I suspect that that plan wouldn't work as well in practice. You will need some alternative to just having the crew assembled for the duration of the operation; and then resting or replacing it when you return to port; whatever seems best.
Aren't all sports classified as 'games'?
It's certainly true that the impact of playing a field game vs. playing a computer game is likely to be different for the player(whether it will actually be healthier depends on how brutally the field sport chews up the human resources vs. how badly inactivity and carpal tunnel syndrome get you); but from the perspective of the audience there isn't much difference.
It's not as though watching intense phsyical exertion gives you exercise by osmosis; so while I'd tend to agree that gamers are not 'athletes', I have little time for the people who are sitting on the couch with a beer and a bowl of chips, decrying the physical passivity of the gamer geeks.
Aren't "analytics", at least at a fairly rudimentary level, something that was already present in most RTSes, long before it became a buzzword among online advertisers?
I'm not even terribly serious, and I remember most multiplayer or skirmish matches having an end-of-match display of CPM, units built/lost, structures built/lost, resources gathered/spent, graphs of all these variables over time, and so on.
Nobody even bothers to call that 'analytics'; it's just a summary of the salient aspects of the game. If you happen to have a second, 3rd, or nth screen available I don't see why you wouldn't want to be able to see those variables in real time; but the idea that 'analytics' is somehow novel or revolutionary is just nonsense.
I didn't mean to imply that the crew were expendable; but to respond to the grandparent post's note that technology that enables very long deployments isn't going to stop the people from burning out after a while.
My intended point was that, while people do react increasingly poorly to very long deployments, that is a comparatively predictable problem, which can be combated by a moving people in and out of active duty to control the length of active service; which is something that militaries have done for quite some time. If some fancy ultra-long-endurance technology allows you to send a ship out for X years, determining how you'll rotate crew in and out to keep each sailor within acceptable limits is going to be more complex than it is in lower endurance ships were the endurance of the crew is equal to or greater than that of the ship, so everyone leaves and comes back at the same time; but steadily rotating part of the manpower of a relatively large ship, base, etc. in order to compromise between cohesion and length of active service isn't a fundamentally novel problem.
On the plus side, unless WWIII is breaking out(in which case the personnel getting burned out is likely to be a trickier problem; but also one you'd encounter regardless of spare parts), you can probably swap out crew more easily than you can parts(especially the larger ones, or the more sensitive ones that you can't just put in checked baggage); unless the ship is in the midst of active hostility, in which case the crew would be pretty dumb to sabotage equipment that increases their odds of making it home alive.
With humans, you have some uncertainty(accidents, unusual medical issues, the occasional psych freakout or disciplinary problem); but the approximate rate at which you need to rotate people to keep them from burning out is comparatively predictable. With spare parts, there are some you know you'll need; but an impractically bulky number of ones you might need; but can't say for sure about. Much easier to ferry out a fresh batch of crew every X months than it is to guess, sufficiently far in advance, what parts to put on the next supply boat.