Yeah, I don't know why cyclists and horse riders wear such ridiculous helmets and think they're good protection.
If they want a helmet that provided protection they'd be wearing something that looks more like a full face motorcycle helmet.
Won't be exactly the same of course. Cyclists probably need better airflow for breathing (and cooling), so design a better helmet then, I'm sure they can have airflow and protection.
Anyway it's just a matter of time till prosthetic memories become possible.
1) We already have PDAs and phones with "reminder" apps, cameras, microphones etc. 2) Already people can control devices by just "thought" alone. 3) The blind can see in low res via eye implants, or they can see via other means - mesh on tongue (while that's not so practical, it proves that alternate channels can be used for seeing).
When the technology provides this, there would be other issues as well - e.g. DRM.
The **AA might want to prevent/charge people for using their augmented memories and sensors. Whether just to replay or to "telepathically" (wireless) communicate with others.
They'd probably want a lot more than a penny for "your" thoughts.
Control: putting your sensitive and important information (and applications) in some "cloud" under the control of some other company is a bad idea.
Latency: The speed of light is still only about 300000 kilometres a second, and the actual latencies of remote servers in practice add up to even more (especially when encryption is involved).
1) If I could recover data from a zeroed drive, I'd charge a lot more than USD500 to do it. Why? Because there will be people who would pay. 2) I'd charge a LOT more to show you how to do it with NDA etc. 3) I'd charge even more to publicly disclose to everyone how to do it.
Secondly this from the website is even funnier: "Yes, if your company is an established, professional data recovery company (see below). Send a self-addressed, postage-paid box with packaging material to the address listed below and we will mail the drive to you."
Go look at Pwn2Own as an example of a competition that gets some serious entrants. The last I checked, USD10000 plus a Macbook is worth more than USD500.
I'd say hacking OSX is easier than recovering zeroed drive - especially since involves using far more expensive hardware.
You want a better dependency ratio? Just stop those stupid "wars" against smoking and obesity while taxing tobacco and unhealthy stuff high enough to pay for the differences.
A large proportion of nonsmokers eventually die of expensive diseases too (and this is way after their most productive years), and if they recover it just means they get another chance at another expensive disease.
So far all the stats I see that say smokers cost more (despite all the extra taxes they pay) appear to be rigged - they either assume that nonsmokers don't ever die, or other stupid stuff like taking the smoker's income and then multiply by X years of lifespan less and say that's the loss.
Don't ban smoking in restaurants and pubs. Just put higher taxes on establishments that want to allow smoking in their premises. You then don't lose a revenue source.
FWIW, I'm a nonsmoker, and I believe people shouldn't smoke - the disadvantages outweigh the benefits (to them personally). But if they insist, it can be good for the economy. Give their families a posthumous "Black Lung" award in recognition of their sacrifice (and maybe a free carton of cigs;) ).
Many specialists don't bother blogging. You may still need someone (journalist or PR person) to summarize a scientific publication.
I find the stuff here OK: http://www.eurekalert.org/
However many newspapers cater for the 95% of the population. 95% of the population don't really care about science and tech.
The thing is, they might not even care about "news". Compared with 50-100 years ago, there might be 10000x more things for the 95% to get interested in.
I usually don't bother with sites that want me to jump through hoops to read their content. If they went bust I wouldn't care. There are usually easier alternatives.
And here's their problem - buying a $300 reader with DRM and lock-in is yet more hoop jumping. Installing all that script/plugin crap is hoop jumping too.
Is the WSJ really worth it? Evidence? e.g. show me (or provide a summary) one article from them in the past 6 months that's a "must read".
If they went bust I probably wouldn't miss them.
In contrast I might miss the Economist (sure they've their biases, but they do provide some insight and even decent tech and science articles from time to time).
Lastly, I don't see why newspapers should cost so much in the USA. Over here they're sold for about USD0.34 at the newstands, contain a fair number of sheets and articles. And at least one of them is making money.
I want a _practical_ wearable computer - long operating life between charges/refuels. Compact, light. High res display that doesn't look too silly and doesn't cause eye-strain. Support for WiFi and cellphone, and other stuff (audio, usb, bluetooth).
Then I can read the newspaper or other stuff in hi-res and not have to lug around something huge.
Maybe once they get the neural interface thing worked out we'd be able to have multiple hi-res video+audio channels in to our brains (and some output channels).
In the meantime a tiny hi-res screen that just looks big from the user's perspective is fine with me.
I think the tech is already available or nearly there.
Doh, how do Governments force people to do stuff? Just jail the people at the top of MS in the relevant countries. If they refuse to go to jail, send people authorized to inflict force and violence to drag them off to jail.
That's well within the authority of any country which MS operates in.
You don't even have to fine at all. Once you start jailing top executives, they'll start taking things really seriously.
After all, if you're a CEO, the fines don't really come out of your pocket[1].
But time in prison comes out of your lifespan.
[1] They might in theory affect your bonus etc, but in practice just look at the AIGs of the world.
At higher and higher resolutions, though artifacts aren't eliminated, they get harder to see.
If I want AA, all I need to do is just remove my glasses or smear oil on them;). I actually don't like the resulting fuzziness/blurriness. Same goes for cleartype - I have it turned on for my admin account to remind me that I'm using an admin account. It just looks blurrier to me.
To me it's better to see the "ugly" pixels, than to see stuff smeared. Especially for games - since often a single pixel = your target/enemy far away, or sticking out a bit behind something.
It is better to have at least two types of cards. One for official ID - which should rarely leave my sight.
And one for payment, which I could pass to someone else for a short time.
So if something happens to the payment card or cert (damaged or lost), I can apply for another payment card.
While waiting for a new payment card to be issued, I can still prove I am me, with my ID card.
Putting that all on one card makes that hard.
Currently, I take out my ID card from my wallet far more rarely than I take out my credit cards. So it's the credit cards that are more likely to get lost or damaged.
A combined ID+payment card would mean the card gets used more often and thus more likely to get lost, damaged or revoked.
Y'know, actually I think a lot of gamers don't care. Well maybe they care before they buy the game. But after they start playing it, they'd care more about other stuff. Like the UI.
For instance, say you are playing a really massively multiplayer game with hundreds (thousands?) of orcs, humans, elves,etc running about in some area.
And you are a healer in a massive realm vs realm battle. You'd be less concerned about how realistic the graphics are, and more concerned about:
1) How do you _quickly_ figure out who on your side has low health (or is in need of a res, or has other problems needing your attention), WITHIN your spell range. 2) How can you consistently select and reselect that person (they're all moving about). 3) How do you quickly figure out where your team/warband/party members are - does the game highlight the player when you click on his/her name on the team sidebar or in the chat/event log?
My cousin was playing Warhammer Online, and to me the UI fails item 3. Maybe it's realistic to not know where your teammates are when you select their names, but to me it detracts from the game.
For 2) in a massive battle, you might have lots of people on your side but not directly in your team (who typically show up in a party/team sidebar). So perhaps right click on that ally should add them to a "quick select ally bar" (and selects them, another shortcut key removes them from the bar while selected - for the cases where you click on the wrong person). And the names should dim or there should be some indication when they go out of your range - (different indications for out of spell range, and out of map range).
After a certain graphic quality level it starts to hit extremely diminishing returns. For instance while Crysis in DX10 is supposedly still better than in DX9 (with the hack on), it's really hard to tell the difference, and the quality in some cases is subjective - you might not like the extra shadows that DX10 provides - the shadows from the artist's created/rendered textures are good enough for you.
Which gets me to another point. For games you are unlikely to need zillions of polygons - great textures cover a multitude of "sins". So you don't need to do fancy realtime ray tracing or whatever they think of next. If the textures look good, it looks good to most people.
Uh, but what you're saying only indicates the low and mid end market for stuff is going away as they end up going "onboard".
Nothing you're saying shows that the high end is going away.
There are still high end sound cards (with multiple recording channels, low latency, low noise etc), high end network cards, and high end serial cards. And they cost a lot of $$$.
In fact the cheap motherboards nowadays often have onboard sound, network AND video. These are targeting the low end of the market - cookie cutter office PCs.
It's the expensive motherboards that skip the onboard video:). They are for the higher end of the market.
And some have _relatively_ little money because they make _cheap_ stuff for the rich westerners.
When you are a factory worker in a Chinese factory making RC cars that are sold for USD4 per piece, you can't earn big bucks in US terms.
You might earn more in local terms. While 4 US dollars might not be much in the USA, it could buy 5 or 6 meals in China.
Meals might be subsidized/provided by the factory too.
Hard life perhaps, but seems a lot of people in China would rather do that than work in a farm (unless it's a farm on WoW:) ).
Yes many would prefer to be earning "big bucks" working for Starbucks in the USA, but I doubt the USA wants to let them in to do that.
Lastly while we in the "cheaper world" might not be producing anything particularly valuable, what's produced still does have some value - otherwise it wouldn't be selling in Walmart, newegg, Amazon, etc.
Pieces of paper tend to continue working even many disaster scenarios. I'm not sure if most hospital generators would power _everything_ required to keep the computerized crap up.
Yep skip the 100% digital bullshit. Use paper where it still works better. The computerized stuff is useful too but in most IT stuff you can't quickly read and scribble something on the record and rush off to the next patient. You can do that in paper (ok the minus is the scribble could be unreadable...).
Spending the millions on more staff, better training and protocols[1], MRI, dialysis machines and other things that would really help directly.
[1] For example the handover protocols could probably be improved in many hospitals. That could save a fair number of lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't know why cyclists and horse riders wear such ridiculous helmets and think they're good protection.
If they want a helmet that provided protection they'd be wearing something that looks more like a full face motorcycle helmet.
Won't be exactly the same of course. Cyclists probably need better airflow for breathing (and cooling), so design a better helmet then, I'm sure they can have airflow and protection.
> They may be too far apart, or they may have very different mate attraction strategies that are not interesting to the other group.
That definition might make Slashdotters a different species.
Depends on the state of the planet I guess.
Anyway it's just a matter of time till prosthetic memories become possible.
1) We already have PDAs and phones with "reminder" apps, cameras, microphones etc.
2) Already people can control devices by just "thought" alone.
3) The blind can see in low res via eye implants, or they can see via other means - mesh on tongue (while that's not so practical, it proves that alternate channels can be used for seeing).
When the technology provides this, there would be other issues as well - e.g. DRM.
The **AA might want to prevent/charge people for using their augmented memories and sensors. Whether just to replay or to "telepathically" (wireless) communicate with others.
They'd probably want a lot more than a penny for "your" thoughts.
Control: putting your sensitive and important information (and applications) in some "cloud" under the control of some other company is a bad idea.
Latency: The speed of light is still only about 300000 kilometres a second, and the actual latencies of remote servers in practice add up to even more (especially when encryption is involved).
Yep don't bring your phones, ipods in too...
I wonder:
What if you had photographic memory and were a good artist. Would they let you out?
What if you had memory issues with your brain and thus have a prosthetic memory installed to help you?
That challenge is a joke.
1) If I could recover data from a zeroed drive, I'd charge a lot more than USD500 to do it. Why? Because there will be people who would pay.
2) I'd charge a LOT more to show you how to do it with NDA etc.
3) I'd charge even more to publicly disclose to everyone how to do it.
Secondly this from the website is even funnier: "Yes, if your company is an established, professional data recovery company (see below). Send a self-addressed, postage-paid box with packaging material to the address listed below and we will mail the drive to you."
Go look at Pwn2Own as an example of a competition that gets some serious entrants. The last I checked, USD10000 plus a Macbook is worth more than USD500.
I'd say hacking OSX is easier than recovering zeroed drive - especially since involves using far more expensive hardware.
Stick with windows.
:)
That way you can continue to run many apps and viruses that are 10 years old or even older.
Anyone remember the regular stories that the newspapers are in trouble due to rising costs etc?
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
You forget a very important point: it's a lot harder to use your loaded weapon if the other person shoots you first.
Go point this at an armed cop (or even a soldier - since the idiot submitter mentioned warzone) and see what happens to you.
You'd be safer with something that looks like a camera than something that resembles a gun.
But does it free up that cache ram if other programs need ram? AFAIK it doesn't.
It's fine if firefox is the only program you want to run.
You want a better dependency ratio? Just stop those stupid "wars" against smoking and obesity while taxing tobacco and unhealthy stuff high enough to pay for the differences.
;) ).
A large proportion of nonsmokers eventually die of expensive diseases too (and this is way after their most productive years), and if they recover it just means they get another chance at another expensive disease.
So far all the stats I see that say smokers cost more (despite all the extra taxes they pay) appear to be rigged - they either assume that nonsmokers don't ever die, or other stupid stuff like taking the smoker's income and then multiply by X years of lifespan less and say that's the loss.
Don't ban smoking in restaurants and pubs. Just put higher taxes on establishments that want to allow smoking in their premises. You then don't lose a revenue source.
FWIW, I'm a nonsmoker, and I believe people shouldn't smoke - the disadvantages outweigh the benefits (to them personally). But if they insist, it can be good for the economy. Give their families a posthumous "Black Lung" award in recognition of their sacrifice (and maybe a free carton of cigs
Many specialists don't bother blogging. You may still need someone (journalist or PR person) to summarize a scientific publication.
I find the stuff here OK: http://www.eurekalert.org/
However many newspapers cater for the 95% of the population. 95% of the population don't really care about science and tech.
The thing is, they might not even care about "news". Compared with 50-100 years ago, there might be 10000x more things for the 95% to get interested in.
I usually don't bother with sites that want me to jump through hoops to read their content. If they went bust I wouldn't care. There are usually easier alternatives.
And here's their problem - buying a $300 reader with DRM and lock-in is yet more hoop jumping. Installing all that script/plugin crap is hoop jumping too.
Is the WSJ really worth it? Evidence? e.g. show me (or provide a summary) one article from them in the past 6 months that's a "must read".
If they went bust I probably wouldn't miss them.
In contrast I might miss the Economist (sure they've their biases, but they do provide some insight and even decent tech and science articles from time to time).
Lastly, I don't see why newspapers should cost so much in the USA. Over here they're sold for about USD0.34 at the newstands, contain a fair number of sheets and articles. And at least one of them is making money.
Well I don't want a larger reader.
I want a _practical_ wearable computer - long operating life between charges/refuels. Compact, light. High res display that doesn't look too silly and doesn't cause eye-strain. Support for WiFi and cellphone, and other stuff (audio, usb, bluetooth).
Then I can read the newspaper or other stuff in hi-res and not have to lug around something huge.
Maybe once they get the neural interface thing worked out we'd be able to have multiple hi-res video+audio channels in to our brains (and some output channels).
In the meantime a tiny hi-res screen that just looks big from the user's perspective is fine with me.
I think the tech is already available or nearly there.
> But how do they "force" MS to do anything
Doh, how do Governments force people to do stuff? Just jail the people at the top of MS in the relevant countries. If they refuse to go to jail, send people authorized to inflict force and violence to drag them off to jail.
That's well within the authority of any country which MS operates in.
You don't even have to fine at all. Once you start jailing top executives, they'll start taking things really seriously.
After all, if you're a CEO, the fines don't really come out of your pocket[1].
But time in prison comes out of your lifespan.
[1] They might in theory affect your bonus etc, but in practice just look at the AIGs of the world.
Not really relevant in the case I was talking about - the malware written in perl intentionally runs stuff it downloads from the internet.
At higher and higher resolutions, though artifacts aren't eliminated, they get harder to see.
;). I actually don't like the resulting fuzziness/blurriness. Same goes for cleartype - I have it turned on for my admin account to remind me that I'm using an admin account. It just looks blurrier to me.
If I want AA, all I need to do is just remove my glasses or smear oil on them
To me it's better to see the "ugly" pixels, than to see stuff smeared. Especially for games - since often a single pixel = your target/enemy far away, or sticking out a bit behind something.
It's Russian, and Slashdot doesn't support the russian alphabet well?
It is bad "hygiene" to combine ID with payment.
It is better to have at least two types of cards. One for official ID - which should rarely leave my sight.
And one for payment, which I could pass to someone else for a short time.
So if something happens to the payment card or cert (damaged or lost), I can apply for another payment card.
While waiting for a new payment card to be issued, I can still prove I am me, with my ID card.
Putting that all on one card makes that hard.
Currently, I take out my ID card from my wallet far more rarely than I take out my credit cards. So it's the credit cards that are more likely to get lost or damaged.
A combined ID+payment card would mean the card gets used more often and thus more likely to get lost, damaged or revoked.
Y'know, actually I think a lot of gamers don't care. Well maybe they care before they buy the game. But after they start playing it, they'd care more about other stuff. Like the UI.
For instance, say you are playing a really massively multiplayer game with hundreds (thousands?) of orcs, humans, elves,etc running about in some area.
And you are a healer in a massive realm vs realm battle. You'd be less concerned about how realistic the graphics are, and more concerned about:
1) How do you _quickly_ figure out who on your side has low health (or is in need of a res, or has other problems needing your attention), WITHIN your spell range.
2) How can you consistently select and reselect that person (they're all moving about).
3) How do you quickly figure out where your team/warband/party members are - does the game highlight the player when you click on his/her name on the team sidebar or in the chat/event log?
My cousin was playing Warhammer Online, and to me the UI fails item 3. Maybe it's realistic to not know where your teammates are when you select their names, but to me it detracts from the game.
For 2) in a massive battle, you might have lots of people on your side but not directly in your team (who typically show up in a party/team sidebar). So perhaps right click on that ally should add them to a "quick select ally bar" (and selects them, another shortcut key removes them from the bar while selected - for the cases where you click on the wrong person). And the names should dim or there should be some indication when they go out of your range - (different indications for out of spell range, and out of map range).
After a certain graphic quality level it starts to hit extremely diminishing returns. For instance while Crysis in DX10 is supposedly still better than in DX9 (with the hack on), it's really hard to tell the difference, and the quality in some cases is subjective - you might not like the extra shadows that DX10 provides - the shadows from the artist's created/rendered textures are good enough for you.
Which gets me to another point. For games you are unlikely to need zillions of polygons - great textures cover a multitude of "sins". So you don't need to do fancy realtime ray tracing or whatever they think of next. If the textures look good, it looks good to most people.
You have to press the secret nitro button, not just the turbo button.
Uh, but what you're saying only indicates the low and mid end market for stuff is going away as they end up going "onboard".
:). They are for the higher end of the market.
Nothing you're saying shows that the high end is going away.
There are still high end sound cards (with multiple recording channels, low latency, low noise etc), high end network cards, and high end serial cards. And they cost a lot of $$$.
In fact the cheap motherboards nowadays often have onboard sound, network AND video. These are targeting the low end of the market - cookie cutter office PCs.
It's the expensive motherboards that skip the onboard video
Why punch him? He's paying a higher share of the R&D costs.
The next time you ever need a video card you could offer to buy half (or quarter) of whatever his SLI setup is at that time.
He might just be needing one more excuse to upgrade... And voila, you get a cheap high end video card.
And some have _relatively_ little money because they make _cheap_ stuff for the rich westerners.
:) ).
When you are a factory worker in a Chinese factory making RC cars that are sold for USD4 per piece, you can't earn big bucks in US terms.
You might earn more in local terms. While 4 US dollars might not be much in the USA, it could buy 5 or 6 meals in China.
Meals might be subsidized/provided by the factory too.
Hard life perhaps, but seems a lot of people in China would rather do that than work in a farm (unless it's a farm on WoW
Yes many would prefer to be earning "big bucks" working for Starbucks in the USA, but I doubt the USA wants to let them in to do that.
Lastly while we in the "cheaper world" might not be producing anything particularly valuable, what's produced still does have some value - otherwise it wouldn't be selling in Walmart, newegg, Amazon, etc.
Pieces of paper tend to continue working even many disaster scenarios. I'm not sure if most hospital generators would power _everything_ required to keep the computerized crap up.
Yep skip the 100% digital bullshit. Use paper where it still works better. The computerized stuff is useful too but in most IT stuff you can't quickly read and scribble something on the record and rush off to the next patient. You can do that in paper (ok the minus is the scribble could be unreadable...).
Spending the millions on more staff, better training and protocols[1], MRI, dialysis machines and other things that would really help directly.
[1] For example the handover protocols could probably be improved in many hospitals. That could save a fair number of lives.
See:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/how-can-formula-1-be-useful-for-healthcare/
http://www.formula1.com/news/features/2008/7/8015.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118498011/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0