The guy hasn't even used it yet and he's promising it will change the world?
The article makes no mention of having tested or even *seen* a Siri-equipped iPhone, yet he claims it will revolutionize the way we interact with electronics just as dramatically as the mouse changed the personal computing experience.
My favorite example: "Siri, is there any football on right now? When is my team next playing? Could you record it for me?" He's just talking about the same voice-activated, computer-controlled house they've been promising us since 1950. How does he know that yet another random voice recognition program will suddenly make it possible?
Ultimately, most politicians are either rich or attorneys, and the latter is usually also the former.
That's not exactly true. A slight majority of people who graduate law school never work as attorneys, and of those who can get work the average pay is $110,000/year. That's a fantastic wage, but it's hardly enough to qualify someone as "rich" in the sense that they're clueless to the demands of everyday life. A (barely) six-figure salary doesn't really place someone in the same social category as influence-peddling multi-millionares who think the world revolves around them.
There's a big difference between "The law says you can't have it" and "The law says we're only required to give you this much, which we've already done, so tough nuts". Facebook is saying the later (and from the summary the OP apparently understands that), while the former is the title of this story.
The issue is important enough without blatant link-baiting in the form of titles that imply government restrictions on your access to your own information. Facebook is a marketing corporation masquerading as an open social and political forum, and their privacy policy is a disaster. Isn't that enough to pillory them? Do you have to willfully misquote their statements to imply claims of censorship and government interventions?
Between two really unattractive options, backing DoD or pharmaceuticals, I think we picked the wrong side of that one. Pharmaceutical companies are just about the most corrupt, manipulative organizations around. And I'm not saying that because of some CNN sound bite, I've read some good books by business ethics and public health experts on the topic. This one was not only argumentative but surprisingly scholarly and accessible; great stuff. Profits Before People
The people in sales and marketing of prescription drugs are seriously the scum of the Earth. They manipulate prices, patents, medical education, public opinion, public policy, and a thousand other things. What makes them especially annoying to me is their constant press statements and ad campaigns about how they're so generous, so sensitive, and how they're practically non-profit in the long run. At least banks and arms dealers occasionally admit it's all about the money.
Every time I see Ron Wyden associated with something he's the one asking intelligent questions or proposing reasonable legislation. It's gotten to the point where I have to watch myself to make sure I don't agree with him reflexively.
I'm incredibly impressed with him, and I sure wish *he* would run for president. I'm nauseated at the prospect of choosing between Romney and Obama next year.
Sometimes I even want to do this with pictures of Ron. Secret Love Lair
So apparently Wired had the story in the first place, and now they have a second story reporting that the Air Force never knew about the problem until reading about it in their first story? There are two serious problems here.
First, it seems like Wired has motive for some exaggeration or misrepresentation here: "Our investigative reporting is so top notch they don't even know they're being investigated!" Certainly major exposes make it to press without a leak, it happens all the time, but any journalistic entity has ample motive to over-emphasize their cunning and resourcefulness. How about we rely on more than one source for these things, maybe?
Second, and much more importantly, if Wired really did manage the entire investigation completely under the radar, then they went to press with information about severe flaws in a military weapons system before even telling the government about it. That's unforgivably irresponsible. At minimum the Air Force deserved a direct and forceful communication from Wired the very minute the story went public, if not slightly before: these are weapons systems we're talking about, and remote controlled at that. Getting maximum impact for your story and not giving the government time for a cover up is one thing, but national security isn't just some neoconservative buzzword; some things really are secret and sensitive for good reason. You don't just scream "Top Secret files open on this desk over here!", even if there are files there. It's stupid and damaging.
This is no different, in many ways, from finding flaws in Microsoft products or credit card systems: you give the people who need to fix it some kind of heads-up before you go splattering it all over the internet. Yes, if you don't go public no one ever learns and no one is pressured to fix their problems, but going public before you even consider how you're going to communicate with the affected developer is just stupid grandstanding.
Yes, and he knows it will be. This is just some weird way of making a position statement, I assume.
It takes two-thirds in each chamber to override in California, just as with the federal legislature. Brown must know his veto is useless, so ergo he's bluffing or posturing somehow.
Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words
I think Blackberrys made smartphones, both the idea and the devices themselves, familiar and desirable well before Steve Jobs got moving on the iPhone. With tablets I totally agree that he made them fashionable, effective, and familiar long before anyone else managed it (indeed the iPad is still the only popular tablet I know of). I still don't think the iPad was nearly as far ahead of the competition or ahead of it's time as Berners-Lee or Henry Ford were in their day, however.
By the way, I love your handle. I'm a big Skunk Works fan myself.
Edwin Land would certainly be a good role model for Jobs.
He was probably the greatest developer of optical and photographic technologies in American history. I'm particularly fond of him for designing the folding ultra-high resolution cameras that allowed the U2 spyplane to photograph objects at 2.5 foot resolutions from 60,000 feet up. Those cameras were refined into those used on the blackbird (80,000 feet and resolution high enough to see the stripes on a parking lot) and those used in satellites. These cameras were, of course, was just one of many achievements in his field.
Anyone with those kind of standards would have been a god to Steve Jobs, I'm sure.
So you're arguing that all five of the current justices nominated by conservative presidents are "party hacks" through and through? You don't think that's a bit of an overstatement, not to mention just as partisan and self-righteous as any Republican?
I've finally realized how these types of patents keep cropping up.
The dumber the population gets, including experts, the more the phrase "non-obvious" covers.
I don't think it's that, most of the time. It's just that information accumulates at a much faster rate than people can keep up with; this almost never came up until the last 50 years or so. While some people have made ignorance a kind of vogue I think even they do it out of subconscious fear, for the most part.
Information overload can overwhelm basic cognitive skills like pattern recognition, and that must affect a patent office crippled by bad law and under-funding to the point that their backlog until recently was years worth of work.
I really don't believe that stupidity is becoming more common. Across the human race I'd still bet the ratio of "educated and/or intelligent" to "ignorant and/or stupid" has remained stable enough. It's just that the Red Queen hypothesis applies to human intelligence and education; save true geniuses even the most bright and educated are running as fast as they can just to remain static in overall cognitive power, and really we're all falling ever further behind the rate of global knowledge accumulation.
Personally, I think it's a stupid doctrine. The person should be guilty based on the evidence, but the individuals involved in the illegal conduct should then liable to that person or their family for damages equivalent to the additional sentence imposed as a result of it.
How would this work in murder cases? The guy still goes to death row, and the infringing police are liable for the value of the man's life? You're talking about indentured servitude for cops who screw up; even the value of time in prison often comes to at least $10,000/year when it's calculated in cases of wrongful imprisonment.
Plus not all poisoned evidence comes about from clear-cut police misconduct. It seems semi-common to hear of searches being overturned in court based on simple mistakes that made them technically illegal when they were nevertheless performed entirely in good faith. It would just be another legal and financial minefield added on top of the existing ones.
And then that guy proceeded to utterly ruin the city, smashing through all the upper layers without even pretending to analyze or catalogue them in search of the gold or whatever he expected to find at the bottom.
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.
I've heard people talk about playing a game and being unable to see the game for the involuntary analysis of programming, organizational, or stylistic choices crowding on their brains.
And beta testing...God. You think you're getting paid to play games and it turns out you're getting paid to play *broken* games. And when something breaks you're not supposed to move on or work around it; your job is to break it again and again and again until you can document how, when, and maybe even why it breaks for the developers.
No, I truly pity those who program, write, or test for the gaming industry; and I suspect these maladies are common to all types of programmers in one degree or another.
Of *course* Atlantis existed. Atlanteans are the primary genetic source of the genes predisposing people to believe in conspiracy theories. All of the fine, upstanding men and women who believe in the Illuminati, UFOs, and Lizard Elvis owe their life obsessions to the brave few who escaped that grand City Upon the Sea.
Sometimes a radical idea takes a lot of time to percolate in the minds of those who hear it, or even hear of it, before it starts to make sense to them. It's fine to go seeking more open minds to get the concept ironed out and start making money, but maybe he should also drop the scorned prophet act while he does it. Come back with his billion dollars and his 3 million Indian customers as the best damn proof of concept he could possibly have and negotiate with Detroit from a position of strength rather than badmouth the very people he wishes would do business with him.
Also, take a look at Mr. Cleeves Linkedin profile. His industry appears to be Semiconductors and his summary says "Leadership roles in technology development".
Nothing about engineering or materials or chemistry or any other field I'd imagine central to massively repurposing a large engine. But hey, a semiconductors guy with specialty in "Process management" should have doors flying open for him in Detroit.
I can't imagine a guy with that skill set could have an easy time convincing a heavy industry to listen to him, no matter what his idea. It doesn't mean the industry is a closed-minded bunch of trolls, as he seems to think; it just means that he's got no reputation and no credentials, just like the other thousand outsiders who try to send them ideas or schedule pitch meetings every year.
Reasonably well said. And a special place in hell for whatever jerk modded this a troll. It certainly seems on-topic, reasonable, and basically civil to me.
If you think Detroit is going to commit a production run to an engine that has maybe 10 prototype copies, you've got to be kidding. Think of the cost of recalls. Get a few thousand built, demonstrate the efficiency, get some patents to protect the IP and Detroit as well as Japan, Korea, Germany, etc. will have a look.
The man claims that the scooters he wants to build for India will consume 25 to 50 percent less fuel while being cheaper, lighter, and adaptable to every fuel from diesel to ethanol with a trivial change in the piston spacing. Presumably he believes he can do all of that with cars.
If they're offered that kind of improvement anyone will deal with prototypes. Any car maker on Earth will open an entire division just to produce a few hundred a year, even if largely by hand, and sell them to green-guilted celebrities for $300,000 a pop.
If the man can't get people to listen to him it's because he's not telling the whole story and he doesn't have all the problems even nearly worked out. I just can't imagine a more likely alternative.
Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
This one I don't find at all implausible, at least taken by itself. Greece is collapsing economically, corruption is hilariously wide-spread, and international energy interests include the likes of OPEC and Exxon; I wouldn't put a damn thing past those organizations, and Greek officials are probably about the easiest in the world to bribe at the moment.
I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.
The guy doesn't answer to us. We're not experts; the vast majority of us aren't even educated layman on the topic of nuclear physics. How pretentious and pointless is it inviting him to waste time justifying his "claims" to us rather than suggesting he have an open Q&A with the staff at CERN or something?
I think it's a little pedantic to point out that anecdotes do not make science; that's entirely obvious and you must assume that I'm an outright fool to bother stating it. I'm simply pointing out that some alternative treatments have very suggestive anecdotal evidence which haven't been tested scientifically. Anecdotes are, in fact, some of the best starting points for good science, especially in health.
Slashdot Mirror
Watch the video
I tried, but it's in fucking QuickTime. Which no sane person has on their machine unless it was forced on them by Apple.
Which is exactly why I'm hoping Siri *isn't* a miracle. If it is, the very last corporation I want holding the magic is Apple, Inc.
I like products over which, once I've paid for them and they're supposedly mine, I have some tiny shard of control.
The guy hasn't even used it yet and he's promising it will change the world?
The article makes no mention of having tested or even *seen* a Siri-equipped iPhone, yet he claims it will revolutionize the way we interact with electronics just as dramatically as the mouse changed the personal computing experience.
My favorite example: "Siri, is there any football on right now? When is my team next playing? Could you record it for me?" He's just talking about the same voice-activated, computer-controlled house they've been promising us since 1950. How does he know that yet another random voice recognition program will suddenly make it possible?
What a bunch of empty drivel.
Yeah! It was totally that petition I posted to my Facebook Wall that got them to back down.
The self-importance of some people....
When I saw this story I thought I was entering a lovely dream in which whining on message boards got results and counted as political participation.
Then you woke me up. Jerk.
Ultimately, most politicians are either rich or attorneys, and the latter is usually also the former.
That's not exactly true. A slight majority of people who graduate law school never work as attorneys, and of those who can get work the average pay is $110,000/year. That's a fantastic wage, but it's hardly enough to qualify someone as "rich" in the sense that they're clueless to the demands of everyday life. A (barely) six-figure salary doesn't really place someone in the same social category as influence-peddling multi-millionares who think the world revolves around them.
There's a big difference between "The law says you can't have it" and "The law says we're only required to give you this much, which we've already done, so tough nuts". Facebook is saying the later (and from the summary the OP apparently understands that), while the former is the title of this story.
The issue is important enough without blatant link-baiting in the form of titles that imply government restrictions on your access to your own information. Facebook is a marketing corporation masquerading as an open social and political forum, and their privacy policy is a disaster. Isn't that enough to pillory them? Do you have to willfully misquote their statements to imply claims of censorship and government interventions?
Between two really unattractive options, backing DoD or pharmaceuticals, I think we picked the wrong side of that one. Pharmaceutical companies are just about the most corrupt, manipulative organizations around. And I'm not saying that because of some CNN sound bite, I've read some good books by business ethics and public health experts on the topic. This one was not only argumentative but surprisingly scholarly and accessible; great stuff. Profits Before People
The people in sales and marketing of prescription drugs are seriously the scum of the Earth. They manipulate prices, patents, medical education, public opinion, public policy, and a thousand other things. What makes them especially annoying to me is their constant press statements and ad campaigns about how they're so generous, so sensitive, and how they're practically non-profit in the long run. At least banks and arms dealers occasionally admit it's all about the money.
Every time I see Ron Wyden associated with something he's the one asking intelligent questions or proposing reasonable legislation. It's gotten to the point where I have to watch myself to make sure I don't agree with him reflexively.
I'm incredibly impressed with him, and I sure wish *he* would run for president. I'm nauseated at the prospect of choosing between Romney and Obama next year.
Sometimes I even want to do this with pictures of Ron. Secret Love Lair
So apparently Wired had the story in the first place, and now they have a second story reporting that the Air Force never knew about the problem until reading about it in their first story? There are two serious problems here.
First, it seems like Wired has motive for some exaggeration or misrepresentation here: "Our investigative reporting is so top notch they don't even know they're being investigated!" Certainly major exposes make it to press without a leak, it happens all the time, but any journalistic entity has ample motive to over-emphasize their cunning and resourcefulness. How about we rely on more than one source for these things, maybe?
Second, and much more importantly, if Wired really did manage the entire investigation completely under the radar, then they went to press with information about severe flaws in a military weapons system before even telling the government about it. That's unforgivably irresponsible. At minimum the Air Force deserved a direct and forceful communication from Wired the very minute the story went public, if not slightly before: these are weapons systems we're talking about, and remote controlled at that. Getting maximum impact for your story and not giving the government time for a cover up is one thing, but national security isn't just some neoconservative buzzword; some things really are secret and sensitive for good reason. You don't just scream "Top Secret files open on this desk over here!", even if there are files there. It's stupid and damaging.
This is no different, in many ways, from finding flaws in Microsoft products or credit card systems: you give the people who need to fix it some kind of heads-up before you go splattering it all over the internet. Yes, if you don't go public no one ever learns and no one is pressured to fix their problems, but going public before you even consider how you're going to communicate with the affected developer is just stupid grandstanding.
I for one welcome our new....screw it, this one's too easy.
Yes, and he knows it will be. This is just some weird way of making a position statement, I assume.
It takes two-thirds in each chamber to override in California, just as with the federal legislature. Brown must know his veto is useless, so ergo he's bluffing or posturing somehow.
Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words
I think Blackberrys made smartphones, both the idea and the devices themselves, familiar and desirable well before Steve Jobs got moving on the iPhone. With tablets I totally agree that he made them fashionable, effective, and familiar long before anyone else managed it (indeed the iPad is still the only popular tablet I know of). I still don't think the iPad was nearly as far ahead of the competition or ahead of it's time as Berners-Lee or Henry Ford were in their day, however.
By the way, I love your handle. I'm a big Skunk Works fan myself.
Edwin Land would certainly be a good role model for Jobs.
He was probably the greatest developer of optical and photographic technologies in American history. I'm particularly fond of him for designing the folding ultra-high resolution cameras that allowed the U2 spyplane to photograph objects at 2.5 foot resolutions from 60,000 feet up. Those cameras were refined into those used on the blackbird (80,000 feet and resolution high enough to see the stripes on a parking lot) and those used in satellites. These cameras were, of course, was just one of many achievements in his field.
Anyone with those kind of standards would have been a god to Steve Jobs, I'm sure.
So you're arguing that all five of the current justices nominated by conservative presidents are "party hacks" through and through? You don't think that's a bit of an overstatement, not to mention just as partisan and self-righteous as any Republican?
I've finally realized how these types of patents keep cropping up.
The dumber the population gets, including experts, the more the phrase "non-obvious" covers.
I don't think it's that, most of the time. It's just that information accumulates at a much faster rate than people can keep up with; this almost never came up until the last 50 years or so. While some people have made ignorance a kind of vogue I think even they do it out of subconscious fear, for the most part.
Information overload can overwhelm basic cognitive skills like pattern recognition, and that must affect a patent office crippled by bad law and under-funding to the point that their backlog until recently was years worth of work.
I really don't believe that stupidity is becoming more common. Across the human race I'd still bet the ratio of "educated and/or intelligent" to "ignorant and/or stupid" has remained stable enough. It's just that the Red Queen hypothesis applies to human intelligence and education; save true geniuses even the most bright and educated are running as fast as they can just to remain static in overall cognitive power, and really we're all falling ever further behind the rate of global knowledge accumulation.
Dilbert and Dogbert on knowledge gaps
Personally, I think it's a stupid doctrine. The person should be guilty based on the evidence, but the individuals involved in the illegal conduct should then liable to that person or their family for damages equivalent to the additional sentence imposed as a result of it.
How would this work in murder cases? The guy still goes to death row, and the infringing police are liable for the value of the man's life? You're talking about indentured servitude for cops who screw up; even the value of time in prison often comes to at least $10,000/year when it's calculated in cases of wrongful imprisonment.
Plus not all poisoned evidence comes about from clear-cut police misconduct. It seems semi-common to hear of searches being overturned in court based on simple mistakes that made them technically illegal when they were nevertheless performed entirely in good faith. It would just be another legal and financial minefield added on top of the existing ones.
And then that guy proceeded to utterly ruin the city, smashing through all the upper layers without even pretending to analyze or catalogue them in search of the gold or whatever he expected to find at the bottom.
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.
I've heard people talk about playing a game and being unable to see the game for the involuntary analysis of programming, organizational, or stylistic choices crowding on their brains.
And beta testing...God. You think you're getting paid to play games and it turns out you're getting paid to play *broken* games. And when something breaks you're not supposed to move on or work around it; your job is to break it again and again and again until you can document how, when, and maybe even why it breaks for the developers.
No, I truly pity those who program, write, or test for the gaming industry; and I suspect these maladies are common to all types of programmers in one degree or another.
Of *course* Atlantis existed. Atlanteans are the primary genetic source of the genes predisposing people to believe in conspiracy theories. All of the fine, upstanding men and women who believe in the Illuminati, UFOs, and Lizard Elvis owe their life obsessions to the brave few who escaped that grand City Upon the Sea.
Sometimes a radical idea takes a lot of time to percolate in the minds of those who hear it, or even hear of it, before it starts to make sense to them. It's fine to go seeking more open minds to get the concept ironed out and start making money, but maybe he should also drop the scorned prophet act while he does it. Come back with his billion dollars and his 3 million Indian customers as the best damn proof of concept he could possibly have and negotiate with Detroit from a position of strength rather than badmouth the very people he wishes would do business with him.
Also, take a look at Mr. Cleeves Linkedin profile. His industry appears to be Semiconductors and his summary says "Leadership roles in technology development".
Nothing about engineering or materials or chemistry or any other field I'd imagine central to massively repurposing a large engine. But hey, a semiconductors guy with specialty in "Process management" should have doors flying open for him in Detroit.
I can't imagine a guy with that skill set could have an easy time convincing a heavy industry to listen to him, no matter what his idea. It doesn't mean the industry is a closed-minded bunch of trolls, as he seems to think; it just means that he's got no reputation and no credentials, just like the other thousand outsiders who try to send them ideas or schedule pitch meetings every year.
Reasonably well said. And a special place in hell for whatever jerk modded this a troll. It certainly seems on-topic, reasonable, and basically civil to me.
If you think Detroit is going to commit a production run to an engine that has maybe 10 prototype copies, you've got to be kidding. Think of the cost of recalls. Get a few thousand built, demonstrate the efficiency, get some patents to protect the IP and Detroit as well as Japan, Korea, Germany, etc. will have a look.
The man claims that the scooters he wants to build for India will consume 25 to 50 percent less fuel while being cheaper, lighter, and adaptable to every fuel from diesel to ethanol with a trivial change in the piston spacing. Presumably he believes he can do all of that with cars.
If they're offered that kind of improvement anyone will deal with prototypes. Any car maker on Earth will open an entire division just to produce a few hundred a year, even if largely by hand, and sell them to green-guilted celebrities for $300,000 a pop.
If the man can't get people to listen to him it's because he's not telling the whole story and he doesn't have all the problems even nearly worked out. I just can't imagine a more likely alternative.
Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
This one I don't find at all implausible, at least taken by itself. Greece is collapsing economically, corruption is hilariously wide-spread, and international energy interests include the likes of OPEC and Exxon; I wouldn't put a damn thing past those organizations, and Greek officials are probably about the easiest in the world to bribe at the moment.
I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.
The guy doesn't answer to us. We're not experts; the vast majority of us aren't even educated layman on the topic of nuclear physics. How pretentious and pointless is it inviting him to waste time justifying his "claims" to us rather than suggesting he have an open Q&A with the staff at CERN or something?
I think it's a little pedantic to point out that anecdotes do not make science; that's entirely obvious and you must assume that I'm an outright fool to bother stating it. I'm simply pointing out that some alternative treatments have very suggestive anecdotal evidence which haven't been tested scientifically. Anecdotes are, in fact, some of the best starting points for good science, especially in health.