We would have had a good view of it where I am, in Vancouver Canada, seeing as much as 80% coverage, but it's raining, and the forecast for today shows that it's going to stay overcast for the next couple of days.
I even managed to secure some special solar filter glasses especially for the occasion, and I won't get to actually see it.
Sometimes I hate living here.
Next one in my area, afaik, is in 2017... hopefully it won't be raining then as well, but knowing Vancouver, it's anybody's guess.
I think carrying a weapon in a zip-lock should be a firing offense for all cops. There is NO legitimate reason for them to be doing so.
When they have recovered legitimate evidence from a crime scene, wouldn't that be a justifiable reason to have a gun in a zip-lock bag, until it is handed over for analysis?
For some reason many cops carry untraceable weapons around in zip-lock bags.
If they had their own weapon that they were trying to pin on you, then it should reasonably have your fingerprints on it if you were not wearing any gloves. They would therefore need to have some gloves handy that they would have to claim are yours as well, *AND* that have a glove size that fits, and further, if this alleged "evidence" is turned in reasonably quickly, the cop's story would be disproven by the lack of any DNA traces that belonged to you within the gloves, since people shed skin constantly. Finally, if your pictures, as I said before, were securely uploaded to a safe location, and the cop was doing something illegal or wrong in those photos, it would incriminate him sufficiently that it would draw his testimony of the claims of your actions into question
In a nutshell, the cop would end up having to go to extremely elaborate measures to do this, and the danger always exists, however small it might be perceived to be, that the truth could be uncovered. If a cop actually went to that much trouble to frame somebody that they were "arresting" and was found out, they would not only lose their badge, but they would almost certainly spend some considerable time behind bars unless they had one helluva lawyer that was also corrupt enough to help out a cop that was doing this.
You have to prove that the cop didn't have a good reason to beat you half to death in order to subdue you.
Assuming that the data has been uploaded somewhere secure, which for most pictures should take only seconds, whatever you were taking pictures of that incited the cop to go after you would probably be sufficient.
You will be accused of things like.... assault and battery with a deadly weapon...
Doesn't that require that they actually... oh, I don't know... have the weapon to present as evidence?
Are you making skype work from your cellphone? When it's not connected to wifi? Impressive. In my experience, mobile wireless data transfer speeds are atrocious... comparable to 56k dial-up modems.
Although it may be technically possible today already, it's my own experience that wireless data transfer speeds are still to slow to handle real time video.
...is that you can take pictures, and it won't matter if the cops take or even if they destroy your device. As technology improves, and the service gets faster, it expect it may even become possible to upload video in real time.
... you were born in the USA, but moved to another country, and weren't allowed to become a citizen there without sacrificing your citizenship in your country of origin?
It'll be interesting to see if the various DVD ripping, copying, and resizing tools sold in stores today are still legal for sale post-C-11.
If they remove locks that the distributor put in place to prevent copying in the first place, then probably not.
And look into the CDR levy in Canada -- the "deal" that the music industry made to "tax" blank media in order to recoup their "losses" due to piracy
Actually, that's a (very) popular misconception. If you review the actual text of the levy's purpose, the levy actually exists only to compensate artists for completely legal private copying onto digital media. It is not a tax to compensate for piracy, since piracy is illegal, and it would be entirely illegal to tax people for activities that they are not allowed to legally do in the first place.
To that end, the conservatives, who support C-11, which prohibits the removal of digital locks, also endorse the elimination of the blank digital media levy. Under C-11, it makes sense to eliminate anyways, since the so-called legal private copying that consumers are being granted permission to do by the levy is effectively blocked by the circumvention prohibitions of C-11.
If the levy exists simultaneously with C-11, then the levy is being collected for something that the consumer will not even generally have the ability to legally exercise except with technologies that will only grow increasingly obsolete. The levy would thus become effectively illegal for the government to collect, and would have to be discontinued. Of course, this is under a post-C11, where it will be illegal to, for example, format shift that blu-ray movie to your tablet computer unless the manufacturer said you could... so it's hardly all good.
Considering that "dirty" energy sources are going to continue to go up in price anyways, and people will happily pay it because the alternative will be to not have said energy at all, I'm not sure why they'd only be happy to pay a little more for clean energy.
The reason that most bittorrent traffic is illegal is because it is an efficient data distribution mechanism. If something more efficient is developed in the future, you can be sure that pirates will migrate to that just as quickly as they dominated bittorrent.
That is, for many ISP's, a violation of the TOS for non-commercial clients... which requires that you not further distribute the service to other parties.
It won't become entirely illegal... it just won't be legal unless the copyright holder gives permission for it to occur (which implies that they would have to provide the tools or decryption keys necessary to accomplish it), or else not employ any form of digital lock at all, in which case the end user has all the conventional fair dealing privileges.
That would be, in most cases, far too easy to shoot down as slanderous. Not that I'm suggesting that what Mr. Toews was saying has any basis in reality, but what a person secretly supports or endorses, as opposed to something that they personally actually do, is much more susceptible to opinion, and therefore considerably harder to present infallible evidence to refute it.
Of course, the rhetoric that Mr. Toews used in his now highly publicized claim is widely known as poisoning the well, and is usually considered a type of logical fallacy related to ad-hominem and appeal to ridicule (a special case of appeal to emotion). I have absolutely no doubt that this bill will be killed before the next election.
This paper actually explains it fairly well. Just looking at figure 3 in the paper alone should clarify how an array of IR sensors and LED's can detect multiple contact points (although the picture only shows 3 contacts, it should be plain that it can handle dozens). The occlusion problem you describe is still theoretically possible, but only when you have both relatively large and small contact points occurring together at the same time, and too close together. For something like the tips of fingers, you'd have no problem...
Using this with TV's is a pretty piss poor choice of use case that doesn't fairly demonstrate the poteential for this technology.
Where I think it would be better served is in large displays (or any large rectangular area, actually) that could be served by multi-touch sensitivity and would ordinarily benefit from direct physical interaction, but where developing an accurate multi-touch sensitive film to cover the entire area would be cost prohibitive.
It's not the first time I've accidentally hit submit when I meant to hit preview. My apologies for the bad netiquette, but slashdot does not see fit to provide us with an "edit" button, if the submitter only realizes that he has mistyped something after its been posted.
When you read pages "all in one go", as it were, being able to see the entire page at once is extremely important. For people who read more quickly, the additional effort of panning and scrolling is going to create a significant interruption in the reading process, and absorbing the text, as a person must redirect their attention to manipulating a UI, instead of just reading, which requires nothing more than normal eye cadences, and occasional page flips.
FWIW, pagination interrupts the flow of reading too, but since the human field of vision is finite anyways, there's ultimately only so much data you can fit into a person's field of view at one time anyways. At least entire pages generally consist of multiple paragraphs, each several sentences long, and one would not have to be constantly scrolling after almost every sentence read.
1/75 of an inch held at 12 inches from the face takes up 3.1 arc minutes of viewing area. The human eye's resolution is about 16 arcseconds - over an order of magnitude better. Most people with good vision would almost certainly notice a level of blockiness and poor quality.
Apple's retina display is the first one I've seen that I don't notice individual pixels on unless I'm paying attention for them.
You're probably right, of course... but people who suggest these sorts of things in the first place never seriously consider that possibility, or at best think that it such concerns are baseless paranoia.
Slashdot Mirror
We would have had a good view of it where I am, in Vancouver Canada, seeing as much as 80% coverage, but it's raining, and the forecast for today shows that it's going to stay overcast for the next couple of days.
I even managed to secure some special solar filter glasses especially for the occasion, and I won't get to actually see it.
Sometimes I hate living here.
Next one in my area, afaik, is in 2017... hopefully it won't be raining then as well, but knowing Vancouver, it's anybody's guess.
" Anything that's not intended for distribution to the public." -- Already can be legally protected by trade secret status
When they have recovered legitimate evidence from a crime scene, wouldn't that be a justifiable reason to have a gun in a zip-lock bag, until it is handed over for analysis?
If they had their own weapon that they were trying to pin on you, then it should reasonably have your fingerprints on it if you were not wearing any gloves. They would therefore need to have some gloves handy that they would have to claim are yours as well, *AND* that have a glove size that fits, and further, if this alleged "evidence" is turned in reasonably quickly, the cop's story would be disproven by the lack of any DNA traces that belonged to you within the gloves, since people shed skin constantly. Finally, if your pictures, as I said before, were securely uploaded to a safe location, and the cop was doing something illegal or wrong in those photos, it would incriminate him sufficiently that it would draw his testimony of the claims of your actions into question
In a nutshell, the cop would end up having to go to extremely elaborate measures to do this, and the danger always exists, however small it might be perceived to be, that the truth could be uncovered. If a cop actually went to that much trouble to frame somebody that they were "arresting" and was found out, they would not only lose their badge, but they would almost certainly spend some considerable time behind bars unless they had one helluva lawyer that was also corrupt enough to help out a cop that was doing this.
Assuming that the data has been uploaded somewhere secure, which for most pictures should take only seconds, whatever you were taking pictures of that incited the cop to go after you would probably be sufficient.
Doesn't that require that they actually... oh, I don't know... have the weapon to present as evidence?
Are you making skype work from your cellphone? When it's not connected to wifi? Impressive. In my experience, mobile wireless data transfer speeds are atrocious... comparable to 56k dial-up modems.
Although it may be technically possible today already, it's my own experience that wireless data transfer speeds are still to slow to handle real time video.
...is that you can take pictures, and it won't matter if the cops take or even if they destroy your device. As technology improves, and the service gets faster, it expect it may even become possible to upload video in real time.
Star Wars, but I guess baby steps are better than no steps.
Just sayin'....
... you were born in the USA, but moved to another country, and weren't allowed to become a citizen there without sacrificing your citizenship in your country of origin?
If they remove locks that the distributor put in place to prevent copying in the first place, then probably not.
Actually, that's a (very) popular misconception. If you review the actual text of the levy's purpose, the levy actually exists only to compensate artists for completely legal private copying onto digital media. It is not a tax to compensate for piracy, since piracy is illegal, and it would be entirely illegal to tax people for activities that they are not allowed to legally do in the first place.
To that end, the conservatives, who support C-11, which prohibits the removal of digital locks, also endorse the elimination of the blank digital media levy. Under C-11, it makes sense to eliminate anyways, since the so-called legal private copying that consumers are being granted permission to do by the levy is effectively blocked by the circumvention prohibitions of C-11.
If the levy exists simultaneously with C-11, then the levy is being collected for something that the consumer will not even generally have the ability to legally exercise except with technologies that will only grow increasingly obsolete. The levy would thus become effectively illegal for the government to collect, and would have to be discontinued. Of course, this is under a post-C11, where it will be illegal to, for example, format shift that blu-ray movie to your tablet computer unless the manufacturer said you could... so it's hardly all good.
Considering that "dirty" energy sources are going to continue to go up in price anyways, and people will happily pay it because the alternative will be to not have said energy at all, I'm not sure why they'd only be happy to pay a little more for clean energy.
The reason that most bittorrent traffic is illegal is because it is an efficient data distribution mechanism. If something more efficient is developed in the future, you can be sure that pirates will migrate to that just as quickly as they dominated bittorrent.
That is, for many ISP's, a violation of the TOS for non-commercial clients... which requires that you not further distribute the service to other parties.
It won't become entirely illegal... it just won't be legal unless the copyright holder gives permission for it to occur (which implies that they would have to provide the tools or decryption keys necessary to accomplish it), or else not employ any form of digital lock at all, in which case the end user has all the conventional fair dealing privileges.
That would be, in most cases, far too easy to shoot down as slanderous. Not that I'm suggesting that what Mr. Toews was saying has any basis in reality, but what a person secretly supports or endorses, as opposed to something that they personally actually do, is much more susceptible to opinion, and therefore considerably harder to present infallible evidence to refute it.
Of course, the rhetoric that Mr. Toews used in his now highly publicized claim is widely known as poisoning the well, and is usually considered a type of logical fallacy related to ad-hominem and appeal to ridicule (a special case of appeal to emotion). I have absolutely no doubt that this bill will be killed before the next election.
This paper actually explains it fairly well. Just looking at figure 3 in the paper alone should clarify how an array of IR sensors and LED's can detect multiple contact points (although the picture only shows 3 contacts, it should be plain that it can handle dozens). The occlusion problem you describe is still theoretically possible, but only when you have both relatively large and small contact points occurring together at the same time, and too close together. For something like the tips of fingers, you'd have no problem...
order of magnitude = power of ten.
3.1 arc-minutes = 186 arc-seconds.
186 arc-seconds/16 arc-seconds = 11.625, which is more than ten.
Hence more than an order of magnitude better.
Wait...
Using this with TV's is a pretty piss poor choice of use case that doesn't fairly demonstrate the poteential for this technology.
Where I think it would be better served is in large displays (or any large rectangular area, actually) that could be served by multi-touch sensitivity and would ordinarily benefit from direct physical interaction, but where developing an accurate multi-touch sensitive film to cover the entire area would be cost prohibitive.
It's not the first time I've accidentally hit submit when I meant to hit preview. My apologies for the bad netiquette, but slashdot does not see fit to provide us with an "edit" button, if the submitter only realizes that he has mistyped something after its been posted.
I agree, but then you can't effectively have superpowers. By augmenting our bodies with synthetic constructs, we can.
1/75 of an inch held at 12 inches from the face takes up 3.1 arc minutes of viewing area. The human eye's resolution is about 16 arcseconds - over an order of magnitude better. Most people with good vision would almost certainly notice a level of blockiness and poor quality.
Apple's retina display is the first one I've seen that I don't notice individual pixels on unless I'm paying attention for them.
You're probably right, of course... but people who suggest these sorts of things in the first place never seriously consider that possibility, or at best think that it such concerns are baseless paranoia.