It looks like it may be similar to Innovega's display at CES. Details (heavy in the marketing gloss) are available here.
To summarize, the human eye is pretty bad at focusing on things nearby. Close one eye and hold your hand a couple inches in front of the other, and you'll see what I mean. In order to get around this so far, all the augmented reality glasses you refer to need to use some tricks to make it seem like the image is farther away than it really is. This makes the screens bulkier, more expensive, etc. The idea here is to create a contact lens onto which you can project an image so that it gets superimposed on one's vision, in focus, without any trickery, thus simplifying the design and allowing the AR devices to be lighter, cheaper, maybe use less power, and so on.
As to how well it works, I have no idea. The info I linked to is quite obviously intended to attract investors and should be taken with a grain of salt. But if DARPA is working in the same vein, that would lend it some support.
So, if Al Qaeda attacks on superbowl Sunday, you can bet your eyeteeth they'll go for Six Flags Texas, or the Mall of America, or the Golden Gate bridge. Something totally unexpected, rather than walking into a highly visible trap.
Only because IT IS a highly visible trap. Security by intimidation of potential attackers only works if you actually do intimidate the potential attackers.
And, FYI, you do not look out for yourself. You can't. No one can. No one is always alert, all the time, for any emergency. We rely on each other to look out for us when we let our guard down (which is all the time). That's the great thing about society. I wish the anarchists could understand that, but they're all convinced that they are supermen. Gods incarnate who can look after their every need.
I'm going to basically repeat what the AC said, since some jackass modded him down...
This attitude is fucking stupid.
This is a great advancement, as anyone who has ever wasted ten minutes looking for a parking space can tell you. But no, you anarchist luddites have to race in to scream and cry about "Oh boo hoo! Now I actually have to pay parking fines instead of just parking wherever the hell I want and fuck everyone else!"
Stop trying to find shit to complain about in every goddamn thing. It doesn't make you cool or edgy or wise. It makes you an ass.
Summerfest is also much less densely packed, making it a vastly inferior target. And it's not nationally televised, so it wouldn't have the same impact on national morale that an attack on the Super Bowl would. This isn't rocket science, here.
That is some deeply flawed logic. You can always say "if it was going to happen, it would have", right up to the point where it does happen. And then a few years later, you start saying "if it was going to happen again..."
The actuarial value of a human life is around $100k per remaining healthy year. Let's take the average age of Super Bowl attendees to be 40 years. The life expectancy of a 40 year old American male is 78 years, which puts their worth at $3.8M. If a hypothetical Super Bowl bombing kills 10k people, it's negative value is $38B.
Therefore, if there is a 0.1% chance of an attack, it is worth spending up to $38M to prevent it. But such a likelihood only gives a 10% (1 -.999^100) chance of happening in a century, so your statement, "If something major was going to happen, it would've already" falls flat.
Security theater is bad. But not all security is theater.
Welcome to democracy. Most of us are quite willing to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from being murdered on national television.
You're entitled to your own views. You are not entitled to force them on the majority.
It's the government's job to protect its citizens. Even the most hardcore libertarians usually will at least concede that much. The Super Bowl is an obvious target for anyone who wants to kill a bunch of people to make some deluded point. If we follow your approach, then what does the government do?
Besides, I feel much safer being looked after by the government (whose top concern is reelection) than a private, for-profit organization (whose top concern is saving money).
This "bullet box" rhetoric needs to end. The people who mod it up should be ashamed of themselves, and the people who post it ought to be on government watch lists.
What makes you think the people posting such rhetoric aren't FBI provocateurs?
...my sanity?
Agents provocateurs are used to make a movement look bad. What "movement" would the FBI be trying to disparage here? Slashdot isn't exactly at the forefront of American politics. Besides, if such posts are provocateurs, all the more reason to mod them down.
It's not too late at all. We still have free elections. We can protest without the tanks rolling in. If you pay attention, then you saw what happened when the Iranians tried to have an election, and when they tried to protest. They are past the point of no return. We're not. But we will be if you get your civil war.
You could go out and get involved in activism. Find candidates who you trust, and push for them in primaries. They'll need to wear the brandname of one of the two political parties, but that's just a label. You can make a difference. It's just hard as hell.
Hollywood has conditioned us to want fast answers, typically through violence. No problem takes more than a few hours to resolve, and most can be resolved by shooting someone. That's not how real life works. It will take many years to climb out of the hole dug over the past few decades. But a civil war will take even longer, and be far less pleasant. You need to wrap your head around that. You've never lived though the sort of violent social upheaval you're describing, so maybe it's hard for you to imagine it. But look around the world. Take a good hard look at other countries that have undergone civil war in the past twenty years or so. Ask yourself if life in America is really worse than life in Iran or Iraq or Somalia or the Congo or Moldova or Sri Lanka.
If a 270 year old dead guy told you to jump off a bridge, would you?
Stop prostrating yourself at the feet of the founding fathers. They were men, not gods. They did a pretty decent job, all things considered, but they don't have all the answers. And if you find you must follow the teachings of some old dead guy instead of analyzing situations for yourself, then why Jefferson? Why not Gandhi, or Jesus? They might tell you to do something very different.
Obama is a Republican circa 1990. Modern Republicans add pro-corporate-personhood, anti-Medicare, anti-Social-Security, anti-taxes-of-any-kind (except sales taxes since they target the working class), anti-regulation, anti-intellectual, pro-occupation (very different from the Libya war), and so on to the list.
The entire country has moved to the right. Democrats are where the Republicans used to be, and Republicans are out in Crazy Town (pop. Way Too Many).
Sorry, but have you ever hear the little song behind the word "jingoism"?
We don't want to go to war but by Jingo if we do We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too
That's how you're coming across. "I don't want to kill people to get my way, but..."
Things in this country aren't bad enough to warrant the sort of massive, decades long bloodshed you're talking about. Not even close. We can turn things around through peaceful means. You're looking at one tiny slice of history and declaring that this is the worst things have ever been. It's not. Not even close.
Not long ago, a huge portion of the country was treated as subhuman while our leaders were playing with the idea of wiping out human civilization. We got through that, and we can sure as hell get through this. The only thing we need is the will to try. If all the people who have given up on politics were to get off their asses and vote in the general election AND THE PRIMARIES then we could fix this all in short order. But instead they figure that their one vote won't make a difference and so they don't bother. And then when their non-vote doesn't elicit change, they decide that the whole system is FUBAR'ed and start talking about mass murder to solve their problems. Can you really not see how stupid and self-defeating that is?
Chris Dodd says, "If you don't support the policies I like, I won't give you money in the future," and that deserves an investigation.
Someone else says, "If you don't support the policies I like, I will take up arms and start murdering people," but to investigate that would be a horrible abuse of civil rights.
You think the Iraqis were "terrified villagers living in stone age conditions" prior to our showing up? How fucking clueless can you be?
You're being melodramatic and angsty because it's fun to imagine yourself as a freedom fighter up against some great evil. Let's introduce some perspective. We're talking about some asshole senator who was bribed to help a few companies make more money off of us. Do you have any idea how often that has happened throughout our history? Can you name a single fucking decade in which that has not happened?
But no, rather than accept that the country will always be messy and that we should do the best we can, you want to burn it all down. You want to kill because Hollywood has taught you that violence can solve all your problems. The scrappy rebels always win and ride off into the sunset.
They aren't obligated to even have the service. They're doing it to get feedback from a self-selected minority of the public. I certainly hope they don't make major policy decisions based on it. If it gets them to stand up on one significant issue (and it has: see SOPA), then it's worthwhile.
Don't be stupid. As soon as bullets start flying, the country is dead. It won't come back in your lifetime, or your kids' lifetimes for that matter. Technological advancement has brought us easily available explosives, which make clean revolutions absolutely impossible. So long as even 0.001% of the population doesn't like the new government, they can just start slaughtering people to force a change. The only reason they don't do so now is because it's seen as "unacceptable" and would be counterproductive to their goals. As soon as violence becomes the norm, the only way back is through decades of bloodshed.
Just look at the Troubles. Four decades of violence, and that's in a country with 2% of America's population and less access to weapons, at a time when technology didn't make mass murder as simple as it is today. That would look like a picnic next to a new revolution in the US. We're talking hundreds of thousands dead, maybe millions, and you will not live to see the end of it.
This "bullet box" rhetoric needs to end. The people who mod it up should be ashamed of themselves, and the people who post it ought to be on government watch lists.
A more accurate statement is "manufacturing jobs are all but dead". The US's real manufacturing output (in inflation adjusted dollars) has doubled over the past thirty years, and aside from a temporary dip during the recession has been steadily rising. But the number of people employed in manufacturing has fallen by ~30% over the same period... and that's without accounting for the population increase!
The problem with the "decline" of manufacturing is that American workers are crazy productive. We can produce all that we need with far less than full employment. This should be a good thing, but because of our idiotic love affair with the failed "trickle down" theory of economics, we end up punishing millions of people, not because they're unwilling to work, but because we simply don't need them to.
If we could get over our fear that someone might get something for nothing, we could simply start giving everyone enough money to get by, with jobs being something people do to get ahead, not to survive. If we don't do it soon, increasing automation will force the issue within a few decades.
You press the voice command key on your Android phone and say "Set alarm for 5:30 am". It responds with a few beeps instead of a computer generated voice, but it works.
What makes that different from the built-in Android voice search? I can already search Google, text/call/email people, play music, get directions, set alarms, etc... through voice commands. The only thing that makes Siri interesting (aside from talking back to you, which is more of a gimmick) is that it can do more context sensitive searches, as with your "Where can I get a sandwich?" example. If Evi doesn't do those, then it doesn't sound like it's doing anything that a default Android install doesn't do.
There are two ways to use RF signaling to gauge distances.
The easy (but not at all accurate) way is to use signal power, relating higher received power to closer proximity. This method is very inaccurate, as the shortest path might not be (in fact, probably won't be) the path with the least attenuation. You can do this sort of thing in a wide open space, but in an office environment it's likely to be all but useless. It gets even less accurate when you introduce mobile devices, since the antenna's orientation is likely to be changing depending on how you hold it, which can vary received power by several decibels.
The better way is with timing, similar to how GPS works. However, you still have the "shortest path != least attenuated path" problem. For example, consider a signal that follows two paths to reach the receiver. One travels 100' and experiences 70 dB of attenuation, the other bounces around a wall instead of going through it, and ends up traveling 150' while only experiencing 60 dB of attenuation. After ~50 ns, the signal from the first path (which accurately represents the distance) will be swamped out by the signal from the second path. In order to get the info you need, you have two options: Either use a very high throughput signal (>1 Gbps) or have a special receiver architecture that recognizes those first symbols were an earlier path of the received signal and notes the time at which they arrived.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like it may be similar to Innovega's display at CES. Details (heavy in the marketing gloss) are available here.
To summarize, the human eye is pretty bad at focusing on things nearby. Close one eye and hold your hand a couple inches in front of the other, and you'll see what I mean. In order to get around this so far, all the augmented reality glasses you refer to need to use some tricks to make it seem like the image is farther away than it really is. This makes the screens bulkier, more expensive, etc. The idea here is to create a contact lens onto which you can project an image so that it gets superimposed on one's vision, in focus, without any trickery, thus simplifying the design and allowing the AR devices to be lighter, cheaper, maybe use less power, and so on.
As to how well it works, I have no idea. The info I linked to is quite obviously intended to attract investors and should be taken with a grain of salt. But if DARPA is working in the same vein, that would lend it some support.
So, if Al Qaeda attacks on superbowl Sunday, you can bet your eyeteeth they'll go for Six Flags Texas, or the Mall of America, or the Golden Gate bridge. Something totally unexpected, rather than walking into a highly visible trap.
Only because IT IS a highly visible trap. Security by intimidation of potential attackers only works if you actually do intimidate the potential attackers.
And, FYI, you do not look out for yourself. You can't. No one can. No one is always alert, all the time, for any emergency. We rely on each other to look out for us when we let our guard down (which is all the time). That's the great thing about society. I wish the anarchists could understand that, but they're all convinced that they are supermen. Gods incarnate who can look after their every need.
I'm going to basically repeat what the AC said, since some jackass modded him down...
This attitude is fucking stupid.
This is a great advancement, as anyone who has ever wasted ten minutes looking for a parking space can tell you. But no, you anarchist luddites have to race in to scream and cry about "Oh boo hoo! Now I actually have to pay parking fines instead of just parking wherever the hell I want and fuck everyone else!"
Stop trying to find shit to complain about in every goddamn thing. It doesn't make you cool or edgy or wise. It makes you an ass.
I'm not a Republican you fucking dipshit. I'm about as far from one as a human being can be.
Summerfest is also much less densely packed, making it a vastly inferior target. And it's not nationally televised, so it wouldn't have the same impact on national morale that an attack on the Super Bowl would. This isn't rocket science, here.
That is some deeply flawed logic. You can always say "if it was going to happen, it would have", right up to the point where it does happen. And then a few years later, you start saying "if it was going to happen again..."
The actuarial value of a human life is around $100k per remaining healthy year. Let's take the average age of Super Bowl attendees to be 40 years. The life expectancy of a 40 year old American male is 78 years, which puts their worth at $3.8M. If a hypothetical Super Bowl bombing kills 10k people, it's negative value is $38B.
Therefore, if there is a 0.1% chance of an attack, it is worth spending up to $38M to prevent it. But such a likelihood only gives a 10% (1 - .999^100) chance of happening in a century, so your statement, "If something major was going to happen, it would've already" falls flat.
Security theater is bad. But not all security is theater.
Hurr hurr! You're hilarious! You should do stand-up!
Do the one about the metric system next!
Welcome to democracy. Most of us are quite willing to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from being murdered on national television.
You're entitled to your own views. You are not entitled to force them on the majority.
It's the government's job to protect its citizens. Even the most hardcore libertarians usually will at least concede that much. The Super Bowl is an obvious target for anyone who wants to kill a bunch of people to make some deluded point. If we follow your approach, then what does the government do?
Besides, I feel much safer being looked after by the government (whose top concern is reelection) than a private, for-profit organization (whose top concern is saving money).
Sadly, he lacks the zeroeth law, and is not only able, but eager, to harm humanity.
This "bullet box" rhetoric needs to end. The people who mod it up should be ashamed of themselves, and the people who post it ought to be on government watch lists.
What makes you think the people posting such rhetoric aren't FBI provocateurs?
...my sanity?
Agents provocateurs are used to make a movement look bad. What "movement" would the FBI be trying to disparage here? Slashdot isn't exactly at the forefront of American politics. Besides, if such posts are provocateurs, all the more reason to mod them down.
It's not too late at all. We still have free elections. We can protest without the tanks rolling in. If you pay attention, then you saw what happened when the Iranians tried to have an election, and when they tried to protest. They are past the point of no return. We're not. But we will be if you get your civil war.
You could go out and get involved in activism. Find candidates who you trust, and push for them in primaries. They'll need to wear the brandname of one of the two political parties, but that's just a label. You can make a difference. It's just hard as hell.
Hollywood has conditioned us to want fast answers, typically through violence. No problem takes more than a few hours to resolve, and most can be resolved by shooting someone. That's not how real life works. It will take many years to climb out of the hole dug over the past few decades. But a civil war will take even longer, and be far less pleasant. You need to wrap your head around that. You've never lived though the sort of violent social upheaval you're describing, so maybe it's hard for you to imagine it. But look around the world. Take a good hard look at other countries that have undergone civil war in the past twenty years or so. Ask yourself if life in America is really worse than life in Iran or Iraq or Somalia or the Congo or Moldova or Sri Lanka.
If a 270 year old dead guy told you to jump off a bridge, would you?
Stop prostrating yourself at the feet of the founding fathers. They were men, not gods. They did a pretty decent job, all things considered, but they don't have all the answers. And if you find you must follow the teachings of some old dead guy instead of analyzing situations for yourself, then why Jefferson? Why not Gandhi, or Jesus? They might tell you to do something very different.
Obama is a Republican circa 1990. Modern Republicans add pro-corporate-personhood, anti-Medicare, anti-Social-Security, anti-taxes-of-any-kind (except sales taxes since they target the working class), anti-regulation, anti-intellectual, pro-occupation (very different from the Libya war), and so on to the list.
The entire country has moved to the right. Democrats are where the Republicans used to be, and Republicans are out in Crazy Town (pop. Way Too Many).
Sorry, but have you ever hear the little song behind the word "jingoism"?
We don't want to go to war but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too
That's how you're coming across. "I don't want to kill people to get my way, but..."
Things in this country aren't bad enough to warrant the sort of massive, decades long bloodshed you're talking about. Not even close. We can turn things around through peaceful means. You're looking at one tiny slice of history and declaring that this is the worst things have ever been. It's not. Not even close.
Not long ago, a huge portion of the country was treated as subhuman while our leaders were playing with the idea of wiping out human civilization. We got through that, and we can sure as hell get through this. The only thing we need is the will to try. If all the people who have given up on politics were to get off their asses and vote in the general election AND THE PRIMARIES then we could fix this all in short order. But instead they figure that their one vote won't make a difference and so they don't bother. And then when their non-vote doesn't elicit change, they decide that the whole system is FUBAR'ed and start talking about mass murder to solve their problems. Can you really not see how stupid and self-defeating that is?
Just so we're clear:
Chris Dodd says, "If you don't support the policies I like, I won't give you money in the future," and that deserves an investigation.
Someone else says, "If you don't support the policies I like, I will take up arms and start murdering people," but to investigate that would be a horrible abuse of civil rights.
You think the Iraqis were "terrified villagers living in stone age conditions" prior to our showing up? How fucking clueless can you be?
You're being melodramatic and angsty because it's fun to imagine yourself as a freedom fighter up against some great evil. Let's introduce some perspective. We're talking about some asshole senator who was bribed to help a few companies make more money off of us. Do you have any idea how often that has happened throughout our history? Can you name a single fucking decade in which that has not happened?
But no, rather than accept that the country will always be messy and that we should do the best we can, you want to burn it all down. You want to kill because Hollywood has taught you that violence can solve all your problems. The scrappy rebels always win and ride off into the sunset.
Grow up.
Stasi. Fascism. Totalitarianism. Police state. Freedom.
Choose any two.
So, you can have a police state with freedom?
But not a police state in a totalitarian fascism. I think the GP didn't really think that one through.
It got them to come out against SOPA didn't it?
They aren't obligated to even have the service. They're doing it to get feedback from a self-selected minority of the public. I certainly hope they don't make major policy decisions based on it. If it gets them to stand up on one significant issue (and it has: see SOPA), then it's worthwhile.
Don't be stupid. As soon as bullets start flying, the country is dead. It won't come back in your lifetime, or your kids' lifetimes for that matter. Technological advancement has brought us easily available explosives, which make clean revolutions absolutely impossible. So long as even 0.001% of the population doesn't like the new government, they can just start slaughtering people to force a change. The only reason they don't do so now is because it's seen as "unacceptable" and would be counterproductive to their goals. As soon as violence becomes the norm, the only way back is through decades of bloodshed.
Just look at the Troubles. Four decades of violence, and that's in a country with 2% of America's population and less access to weapons, at a time when technology didn't make mass murder as simple as it is today. That would look like a picnic next to a new revolution in the US. We're talking hundreds of thousands dead, maybe millions, and you will not live to see the end of it.
This "bullet box" rhetoric needs to end. The people who mod it up should be ashamed of themselves, and the people who post it ought to be on government watch lists.
Or we could demand brain scans of politicians to see what they really intend to do if elected. But I guess defeatism works too.
A more accurate statement is "manufacturing jobs are all but dead". The US's real manufacturing output (in inflation adjusted dollars) has doubled over the past thirty years, and aside from a temporary dip during the recession has been steadily rising. But the number of people employed in manufacturing has fallen by ~30% over the same period... and that's without accounting for the population increase!
The problem with the "decline" of manufacturing is that American workers are crazy productive. We can produce all that we need with far less than full employment. This should be a good thing, but because of our idiotic love affair with the failed "trickle down" theory of economics, we end up punishing millions of people, not because they're unwilling to work, but because we simply don't need them to.
If we could get over our fear that someone might get something for nothing, we could simply start giving everyone enough money to get by, with jobs being something people do to get ahead, not to survive. If we don't do it soon, increasing automation will force the issue within a few decades.
You press the voice command key on your Android phone and say "Set alarm for 5:30 am". It responds with a few beeps instead of a computer generated voice, but it works.
What makes that different from the built-in Android voice search? I can already search Google, text/call/email people, play music, get directions, set alarms, etc... through voice commands. The only thing that makes Siri interesting (aside from talking back to you, which is more of a gimmick) is that it can do more context sensitive searches, as with your "Where can I get a sandwich?" example. If Evi doesn't do those, then it doesn't sound like it's doing anything that a default Android install doesn't do.
There are two ways to use RF signaling to gauge distances.
The easy (but not at all accurate) way is to use signal power, relating higher received power to closer proximity. This method is very inaccurate, as the shortest path might not be (in fact, probably won't be) the path with the least attenuation. You can do this sort of thing in a wide open space, but in an office environment it's likely to be all but useless. It gets even less accurate when you introduce mobile devices, since the antenna's orientation is likely to be changing depending on how you hold it, which can vary received power by several decibels.
The better way is with timing, similar to how GPS works. However, you still have the "shortest path != least attenuated path" problem. For example, consider a signal that follows two paths to reach the receiver. One travels 100' and experiences 70 dB of attenuation, the other bounces around a wall instead of going through it, and ends up traveling 150' while only experiencing 60 dB of attenuation. After ~50 ns, the signal from the first path (which accurately represents the distance) will be swamped out by the signal from the second path. In order to get the info you need, you have two options: Either use a very high throughput signal (>1 Gbps) or have a special receiver architecture that recognizes those first symbols were an earlier path of the received signal and notes the time at which they arrived.