Correct, voice search has been there for a while. According to the video in the article, this is more like a direct port of the new google voice search (as it debuted in Jellybean), with enhanced results on voice queries, like movie showtimes, wikipedia entries, etc.
There IS something capturing about the games of 1990 era. Maybe it's that computers were sufficiently advanced, but not too powerful, which set just the right artistic bounds.
I disagree; I think the reason is that in the 90s, nobody was trying to industrialize game creation, or at least they didn't figure they'd gotten it right. A lot of the shining examples from back then were people that were self-motivated, self-organized, and given some free reign by publishers. As Big Business really got into it, they took the previous profit model--industrialization--and tried to apply it; that meant several things:
* Keeping up with the Joneses - If there's another competitor in your field, you compete with them by going point-for-point on comparable metrics, rather than differentiating your product
* Labor is expendable - "There's nothing special about what we're doing; it doesn't take a skilled artisan with a decade of coding experience, nor even a talented enthusiast, just a codemonkey twisting his wrench over and over like Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times."
* Brand reputation is expendable - It may seem counter-intuitive; after all, if you churn out 100,000 jalopys and can't sell them, your auto-making business will disappear. But company leadership can always sell off whatever's left over to the competition. The skilled labor changes hands, designs change, and some other rich shmoe becomes the new CEO and makes the same decisions as the last one. All of a sudden, it's a new company! Wow! The previous reputation means nothing.
HOWEVER, this is an entirely different thing when it comes to software, because intellectual property (software names, the characters, situations, and setting, along with art and other resources) is attached to the brand. Only one person gets to make, for example, Starsiege Tribes games, and if the person currently making Tribes games is making something you don't like, sorry pal, there's no equivalent good. What's that? You've been waiting 10 years for a sequel and it's a dud? What's that? You think you could do better? Sorry, as a matter of law and intellectual property, it ain't gonna happen. Maybe you could do better, but you won't be allowed to try. That's copyright/trademark for you! Hugs and kisses, signed, the Government.
* Customers are expendable - The industrial age brought the idea of mass consumption of goods from one single source. Compare beer and soda; beer is pre-industrial and there are so many brewing traditions the world over that many places have no need to produce it industrially, because there's enough local supply. However, local supply only matters if locals will buy your product; in contrast, a global product only has to turn a profit in one of the many regions they supply, and then cut their losses everywhere else. If your bad marketing decisions make you the enemy of a locale, culture, or nation, say sayonara and kick back with profits from other areas.
* The product is expendable - As long as you create something good enough to pay back costs (and things become "good enough" quite rapidly if you advertise enough--they're only really thinking about sales), it doesn't matter that your industrial process is flawed. If your process inherently creates defects, it will show up in ever product line you create for a decade, because oh well! Management decided that we're going to move on to the next product, which means not stopping to see what we did wrong. In any serious project management there's things like Lessons Learned, internal and process reviews, etc. I don't know but I'd wager a guess that most gaming industry companies don't take their work seriously enough to study their own behavior and improve it.
* Marketing is god - Industrialization doesn't start local. You don't make a run of 10,000 cars and sell them to the 10,000 closest people. You need sales people on the ground anywhere there could be a sale, sniffing out any profitable deal. If that m
Unfortunately the whole basis of OAM is directional so no go there. OAM is a fancy way to use coherent beams for spatial re-use. Its like a laser. A omni-directional laser is an oxymoron.
It's probably not possible because of distance and interference, but satellite links are highly directional as well as ubiquitous; if a technology like this could be used to increase the bandwidth of terrestrial satellite links (by which I mean a dish at your house connecting to a satellite in fixed or predictable orbit), you could get pretty incredible broadband speeds in very remote areas--including internationally.
Smack in the middle of the market that currently B&N and Amazon hold.
I think you forget what the Nexus line of devices is. Reference platforms are made, among other reasons, so that the people behind the OS know what they're programming for. If people are already using this form factor (size, approximate resolution, pixel density, aspect ratio, etc), then a Nexus-line device standardizes that. (There is some problem with that when it comes to Android devices, but whatever, you get the point) That (in principle) helps app devs, OS devs, and yes hardware devs too.
I note that they call it the Nexus *7*, which also implies they could be making a Nexus 10, 5, 8, or other screen sizes in the future.
Devil's advocate: Then you're teaching what the statisticians who supposedly polled, for example, climate scientists tell you to. Frankly I have absolutely no knowledge of their methods, nor do I know enough climate scientists to make a statistically significant rebuttal. Do they ask every graduate in every country? Do they do telephone surveys? How many people don't answer those surveys because surveys are retarded?
I don't for a moment think that the religious arguments have any merit, but at the same time, I hear a lot of people touting "Scientists believe X." Which scientists where? I'd really appreciate knowing the margin of error on that statistics, which people specifically were polled, and especially, which weren't. I don't know the bias of any of these statements, and as far as I can recall, I've never, ever seen it mentioned. Considering that that is extremely important in social statistics, it seems lacking.
Yes, programmers shouldn't program in their off time, just like artists shouldn't draw and singers shouldn't sing. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people believe.
"What are you doing?" parents and peers always say. "You're wasting your life." And they keep doing it because they want to.
I say screw people like you, and more power to people like them.
People who say that never go into why copyright infringement isn't theft. Understand, in the following, that IANAL, and it will show, but I think it's important anyway.
Copyright and sales licenses are agreements between people--none of them me, you'll note--that so-and-so gets to profit from sales of a particular work. So-and-so, being so caught up in the idea that this license is exclusive, creates artificial scarcity and does other kinds of social engineering to drive up prices. They use the legal system--which was created to stop or punish abuses of power--to make sure the license remains exclusive, even though what's happening isn't sales of the work; it's free distribution, in ways that violate the exclusivity clause of the license.
Basically, piracy is "But you said only WE can do that! Make them stop! Mom! He won't stop! Make him stop! I want to be a millionaire! Make him stooooooop!"
If your representatives were behaving exactly as you wanted them to, they'd be making your case before the House and/or Senate. If they were really good, they'd find a way to leverage the wit and knowledge of their constituents to make the argument more powerful.
Representing you is. their. job. It is what the job exists to do. Voting on any particular measure is only a small fraction of representing you, and therefore is only a small part of their responsibility.
We now have the technology to do all the cool stuff we dreamed about in the early 90s. The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense (and even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit).
If you had a full computer (mail, etc), displays around the house, TVs, Radio, and an audio system that moved the sound (and voice input) with you... you might be able to do interesting things. Audio notification and voice input from everywhere; video notification and text input from various places around the house.
But the problem is that it's still more about "cool" than function. "I don't have to look at my phone to get text messages" is crucial in the car, but not at home. "I can always get notified of new mail" is a problem solved by smartphones; it's only a minor inconvenience to carry one around the house. And while you may be able to come up with a plausible use for networked lights if you stretch it, the advantages over dumb wiring aren't all that high.
Arguably, "home automation" might be better suited for office environs than home environs; smart locks, location awareness, power control, lights, etc... it makes more sense for you to invest in infrastructure when you never know who will need what services when, or where. But a house is just a house; it's what, four people on average; unless you live in a mansion, you're not controlling dozens of doors or hundreds of lights. It's "cool", it's playful, but it's not what I would consider practical.
I may be speaking from inexperience here, but the problem you're highlighting is a big circular clusterfuck.
Going back to ancient times, once a book is published the first time, it can be copied. When book-copying labor (scribes with pens) was scarce, books were scarce--but at the same time, anyone could be in the business of copying books, if they had the education and a steady hand; demand for more books was virtually infinite, as there were plenty of libraries or individuals that would pay for a copy of, say, philosophy, or math, or something else interesting. (Of course, it was dependent on local demand specifically, or any travelling traders you could sell to, and those are different...) When book copying first became industrial (printing press), book publication (both copying and first edition) became a centralized industry, with a large overhead that had to do with labor, machine costs, and transportation. But because you were doing it in bulk, you could absorb the overhead with margins on each book sold instead of sustaining yourself on a sell-by-sell basis.
The book industry now faces two problems: it's incredibly easy to print things (albeit in variable quality), and book copying is now digital: instantaneous and costing virtually nothing. We are back where we were at the beginning, where anyone could get into the business of copying books--and thanks to digital communications, books created anywhere can be printed and distributed anywhere. Book publication as a centralized industry can only exist with the digital equivalent of mercantilism, which means that book publication as an industry needs to use its money as a leverage to prevent the industry from collapsing.
Basically, if the entire book industry collapsed in a pile of dust tomorrow, and there never again was a centralized book publishing regime, we wouldn't lose access to many books. There would be lots of scanning and trading, and a lot of books published digitally and independently, either to be printed locally or used on some sort of reader. Maybe--maybe--certain authors that could only thrive on a centralized industry would fail, but a new decentralized industry would be born. Basically the only people who really, severely don't want that to happen are people who depend on the system as-is, and unfortunately, many of them have been filling out their wallets on those margins for a long time. It'd be nice for them to stop being selfish, but their worldview and their current jobs rely on this system, so I guess it's only to be expected that they think in those terms.
Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.
They make high precision scales, and they're going around the world saying, "Look how our scale gives a different mass measurement for the same object in different places." In the video on their site they talk about how they do in fact go out of their way to adjust the scales for local gravity (wherever they're being shipped to? Somehow?), but they could push that emphasis more.
What they're showing is that the mass reading (as opposed to weight reading, which is accurate) is not consistent when you move them around the world, and that their instruments in particular are sensitive enough to be affected. That's true and important, but they should be making more of a fuss about their calibration services if they're going to be showing off that sensitivity.
Occasionally, and I know this may surprise you, people use exaggerated language in order to complain about something which is, admittedly, a minor issue.
Like how your mom complains about your "microscopic" dick. I know it's very small, but it's biologically impossible for it to be so small you need a microscope.
I was discussing violent videogames elsewhere on the internet and brought this up:
doing ridiculous stuff without fear of consequences whatsoever.
It cuts both ways, in an interesting way. It can be ridiculously interesting destroying things--clearly evil. It can also be ridiculously interesting building things--but when you're building something military, you need an opposing force. You can either be good and assailed by evil, or be evil and be assailed by good. See also games like Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, for the latter.
And I love these games. It's funny, because I don't like the idea of bad people getting away with doing bad things, and I wouldn't really defend them. I certainly wouldn't want to be one of them. But in order to keep testing your ability to defend yourself, you need an unrelenting opponent. If both you and they are good, you would never agree to just throw away lives assaulting one another. If they are evil, they will only do whatever benefits themselves. But, BUT, if you're evil, and they "are Good," they can throw away lives like nobody's business, because it's for The Greater Good.
Similarly, if you want to enjoy yourself destroying random things, you can't be good, because then the people who spend all the effort rebuilding things would just ask you kindly not to do that. You can't be destroying evil, because then you'd be facing an opponent that's probably pretty capable of stopping you. No, if you want to cause wanton destruction, they have to be innocent, and you have to be a horrible monster of some kind. It's the only way the situation works out without straining credulity. (You can completely get rid of the personality of people involved to solve this problem, but then it becomes arcade-y, and that's not always acceptable)
Fortunately most if not all of us have video games to help us indulge these urges without becoming, ourselves, some sort of monster.
In addition, the estimated costs have got to be a factor of 10 too optimistic. 60 billion dollars? For something constructed of tens of thousands of miles of superconducting cable and a structure made to aerospace engineering tolerances that is 1000 miles long? Even 600 billion sounds optimistic for something that large.
Not to mention that the idea is that the entire tube holds a vacuum, which buoys it up, and it's held DOWN with tethers. How do you even construct that? There are no cranes to LEO. Even if you put them in place, and empty out the gas slowly so that it rises (without coming to a sudden stop at the end that breaks a tether), each segment is probably hundreds of pounds of metal. Imagine being miles in the air, wrestling with an enormous hunk of metal that's tied to the earth in what you can only hope is the right position, in order to get the end to line up with the last piece...
Well, okay, it sounds like a heck of an exciting job. But it also sounds like it could go wrong so terribly easily...
A PITA, of course, but much better than getting a DWI on your record...which can then keep you out of jobs, kills your insurance rates...and cost $$$$.
Jobs: If you're driving under the influence, you've showed you're either negligent, or actively willing to endanger yourself and others for a night's entertainment. I understand your argument about "a grown man, having two drinks with a meal"--but it's just a drink. Most restaurants have something else you can quench your thirst with that won't make you unable to drive. If you're so (pardon the term) drunk on the taste and sensation of a beer with your dinner that you're in danger of going over, maybe you can't be trusted to know the limit in the first place.
Go figure that people might not consider you a pristine employee. I mean sure, you might do a very good job at whatever it is they hire you for. You might also be a surly, insensitive jackass that ends up breaking property or assaulting people, which may in turn cost them more than you'll ever be worth.
Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?
Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.
It's not like there's no corruption and malevolence in the police, or that there's nowhere that police do a shitty job of keeping people safe. But if you want to make an argument like that, pick something other than harsh drunk driving laws.
I'd prefer not to be cynical about a group like Mozilla, but that's blatant deceit. The default is what happens before a choice is made, so there is one unless you are physically restrained from using the browser until you make a choice.
The actual answer is that nobody knows what would happen to advertising, which like it or not is the underpinning of the web, if DNT was enabled for everyone. But you can't say that for two reasons. 1) It makes Mozilla look like a total sellout 2) If normal people actually understood that the web as we know it wouldn't exist without tracking-enhanced adverts, the magic would go away. They'd be hesitant to go to random websites about strange things because they're being tracked. They'd hesitate to be as honest about searching the web. They'd cease to believe that you can find everything you want online, because someone is watching. In other words, they'd become afraid of the internet, afraid of browsing, afraid of speaking out online.
Which, maybe they should be afraid, maybe they shouldn't. That's a different argument altogether.
There are still satellites (the manmade kind), which are not shielded against high velocity shrapnel. Any orbiting ships or stations will also want to avoid shrapnel, if at all possible, down to sizes that are essentially impossible to detect.
Also consider this: Coming at the planet are 200 basketball-sized, high-metal rocks, and a nuclear bomb (EMP) with no EM signature (such as radio communications back home) that could burst in orbit, at the edge of the atmosphere, or on touchdown. Radar can't tell them apart. They have a tiny angular cross-section even assuming they're bunched up together, which they need not be. If they're spread out over several miles you'd barely know they're there. After a series of them turned out to just be metal asteroids, would stop caring and let them burn up, or keep destroying every last one? At what cost? Assuming the war has multiple fronts, how many people are you going to assign to this task rather than something more constructive?
Yeah, and I'm sure it wouldn't intimidate him at all to know that federal prosecutors were breathing down his neck, looking for ANYTHING illegal.
Because a guy like that has an otherwise clean record, yup yup.
Aside: The question I ask myself sometimes about corruption is, what is it like to be the first person to be corrupt. Not knowing for sure that paying off a cop is going to work, not having a whole citadel of corruption around you showing you that people get away with it. The first cop running crooked, not knowing if he'll be stopped; the first politico scared shitless that someone will figure out he's taking bribes.
Or maybe they're doing it because they're on drugs or alcohol and can't think straight for crap. I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, voice search has been there for a while. According to the video in the article, this is more like a direct port of the new google voice search (as it debuted in Jellybean), with enhanced results on voice queries, like movie showtimes, wikipedia entries, etc.
"At best". Nobody was talking about you.
There IS something capturing about the games of 1990 era. Maybe it's that computers were sufficiently advanced, but not too powerful, which set just the right artistic bounds.
I disagree; I think the reason is that in the 90s, nobody was trying to industrialize game creation, or at least they didn't figure they'd gotten it right. A lot of the shining examples from back then were people that were self-motivated, self-organized, and given some free reign by publishers. As Big Business really got into it, they took the previous profit model--industrialization--and tried to apply it; that meant several things:
* Keeping up with the Joneses - If there's another competitor in your field, you compete with them by going point-for-point on comparable metrics, rather than differentiating your product
* Labor is expendable - "There's nothing special about what we're doing; it doesn't take a skilled artisan with a decade of coding experience, nor even a talented enthusiast, just a codemonkey twisting his wrench over and over like Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times."
* Brand reputation is expendable - It may seem counter-intuitive; after all, if you churn out 100,000 jalopys and can't sell them, your auto-making business will disappear. But company leadership can always sell off whatever's left over to the competition. The skilled labor changes hands, designs change, and some other rich shmoe becomes the new CEO and makes the same decisions as the last one. All of a sudden, it's a new company! Wow! The previous reputation means nothing.
HOWEVER, this is an entirely different thing when it comes to software, because intellectual property (software names, the characters, situations, and setting, along with art and other resources) is attached to the brand. Only one person gets to make, for example, Starsiege Tribes games, and if the person currently making Tribes games is making something you don't like, sorry pal, there's no equivalent good. What's that? You've been waiting 10 years for a sequel and it's a dud? What's that? You think you could do better? Sorry, as a matter of law and intellectual property, it ain't gonna happen. Maybe you could do better, but you won't be allowed to try. That's copyright/trademark for you! Hugs and kisses, signed, the Government.
* Customers are expendable - The industrial age brought the idea of mass consumption of goods from one single source. Compare beer and soda; beer is pre-industrial and there are so many brewing traditions the world over that many places have no need to produce it industrially, because there's enough local supply. However, local supply only matters if locals will buy your product; in contrast, a global product only has to turn a profit in one of the many regions they supply, and then cut their losses everywhere else. If your bad marketing decisions make you the enemy of a locale, culture, or nation, say sayonara and kick back with profits from other areas.
* The product is expendable - As long as you create something good enough to pay back costs (and things become "good enough" quite rapidly if you advertise enough--they're only really thinking about sales), it doesn't matter that your industrial process is flawed. If your process inherently creates defects, it will show up in ever product line you create for a decade, because oh well! Management decided that we're going to move on to the next product, which means not stopping to see what we did wrong. In any serious project management there's things like Lessons Learned, internal and process reviews, etc. I don't know but I'd wager a guess that most gaming industry companies don't take their work seriously enough to study their own behavior and improve it.
* Marketing is god - Industrialization doesn't start local. You don't make a run of 10,000 cars and sell them to the 10,000 closest people. You need sales people on the ground anywhere there could be a sale, sniffing out any profitable deal. If that m
Unfortunately the whole basis of OAM is directional so no go there. OAM is a fancy way to use coherent beams for spatial re-use. Its like a laser. A omni-directional laser is an oxymoron.
It's probably not possible because of distance and interference, but satellite links are highly directional as well as ubiquitous; if a technology like this could be used to increase the bandwidth of terrestrial satellite links (by which I mean a dish at your house connecting to a satellite in fixed or predictable orbit), you could get pretty incredible broadband speeds in very remote areas--including internationally.
Smack in the middle of the market that currently B&N and Amazon hold.
I think you forget what the Nexus line of devices is. Reference platforms are made, among other reasons, so that the people behind the OS know what they're programming for. If people are already using this form factor (size, approximate resolution, pixel density, aspect ratio, etc), then a Nexus-line device standardizes that. (There is some problem with that when it comes to Android devices, but whatever, you get the point) That (in principle) helps app devs, OS devs, and yes hardware devs too.
I note that they call it the Nexus *7*, which also implies they could be making a Nexus 10, 5, 8, or other screen sizes in the future.
Devil's advocate: Then you're teaching what the statisticians who supposedly polled, for example, climate scientists tell you to. Frankly I have absolutely no knowledge of their methods, nor do I know enough climate scientists to make a statistically significant rebuttal. Do they ask every graduate in every country? Do they do telephone surveys? How many people don't answer those surveys because surveys are retarded?
I don't for a moment think that the religious arguments have any merit, but at the same time, I hear a lot of people touting "Scientists believe X." Which scientists where? I'd really appreciate knowing the margin of error on that statistics, which people specifically were polled, and especially, which weren't. I don't know the bias of any of these statements, and as far as I can recall, I've never, ever seen it mentioned. Considering that that is extremely important in social statistics, it seems lacking.
Yes, programmers shouldn't program in their off time, just like artists shouldn't draw and singers shouldn't sing. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people believe.
"What are you doing?" parents and peers always say. "You're wasting your life." And they keep doing it because they want to.
I say screw people like you, and more power to people like them.
People who say that never go into why copyright infringement isn't theft. Understand, in the following, that IANAL, and it will show, but I think it's important anyway.
Copyright and sales licenses are agreements between people--none of them me, you'll note--that so-and-so gets to profit from sales of a particular work. So-and-so, being so caught up in the idea that this license is exclusive, creates artificial scarcity and does other kinds of social engineering to drive up prices. They use the legal system--which was created to stop or punish abuses of power--to make sure the license remains exclusive, even though what's happening isn't sales of the work; it's free distribution, in ways that violate the exclusivity clause of the license.
Basically, piracy is "But you said only WE can do that! Make them stop! Mom! He won't stop! Make him stop! I want to be a millionaire! Make him stooooooop!"
If your representatives were behaving exactly as you wanted them to, they'd be making your case before the House and/or Senate. If they were really good, they'd find a way to leverage the wit and knowledge of their constituents to make the argument more powerful.
Representing you is. their. job. It is what the job exists to do. Voting on any particular measure is only a small fraction of representing you, and therefore is only a small part of their responsibility.
We now have the technology to do all the cool stuff we dreamed about in the early 90s. The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense (and even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit).
If you had a full computer (mail, etc), displays around the house, TVs, Radio, and an audio system that moved the sound (and voice input) with you... you might be able to do interesting things. Audio notification and voice input from everywhere; video notification and text input from various places around the house.
But the problem is that it's still more about "cool" than function. "I don't have to look at my phone to get text messages" is crucial in the car, but not at home. "I can always get notified of new mail" is a problem solved by smartphones; it's only a minor inconvenience to carry one around the house. And while you may be able to come up with a plausible use for networked lights if you stretch it, the advantages over dumb wiring aren't all that high.
Arguably, "home automation" might be better suited for office environs than home environs; smart locks, location awareness, power control, lights, etc... it makes more sense for you to invest in infrastructure when you never know who will need what services when, or where. But a house is just a house; it's what, four people on average; unless you live in a mansion, you're not controlling dozens of doors or hundreds of lights. It's "cool", it's playful, but it's not what I would consider practical.
"Cloud, cloud, drive, spam, box, spam, and drive. It hasn't got much spam in it..."
I was going for a monty python reference, but I'm sure enterprising netizens will find a way to put the other kind of spam on there, too.
I may be speaking from inexperience here, but the problem you're highlighting is a big circular clusterfuck.
Going back to ancient times, once a book is published the first time, it can be copied. When book-copying labor (scribes with pens) was scarce, books were scarce--but at the same time, anyone could be in the business of copying books, if they had the education and a steady hand; demand for more books was virtually infinite, as there were plenty of libraries or individuals that would pay for a copy of, say, philosophy, or math, or something else interesting. (Of course, it was dependent on local demand specifically, or any travelling traders you could sell to, and those are different...) When book copying first became industrial (printing press), book publication (both copying and first edition) became a centralized industry, with a large overhead that had to do with labor, machine costs, and transportation. But because you were doing it in bulk, you could absorb the overhead with margins on each book sold instead of sustaining yourself on a sell-by-sell basis.
The book industry now faces two problems: it's incredibly easy to print things (albeit in variable quality), and book copying is now digital: instantaneous and costing virtually nothing. We are back where we were at the beginning, where anyone could get into the business of copying books--and thanks to digital communications, books created anywhere can be printed and distributed anywhere. Book publication as a centralized industry can only exist with the digital equivalent of mercantilism, which means that book publication as an industry needs to use its money as a leverage to prevent the industry from collapsing.
Basically, if the entire book industry collapsed in a pile of dust tomorrow, and there never again was a centralized book publishing regime, we wouldn't lose access to many books. There would be lots of scanning and trading, and a lot of books published digitally and independently, either to be printed locally or used on some sort of reader. Maybe--maybe--certain authors that could only thrive on a centralized industry would fail, but a new decentralized industry would be born. Basically the only people who really, severely don't want that to happen are people who depend on the system as-is, and unfortunately, many of them have been filling out their wallets on those margins for a long time. It'd be nice for them to stop being selfish, but their worldview and their current jobs rely on this system, so I guess it's only to be expected that they think in those terms.
Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.
Why would you say it is a mistake?
They make high precision scales, and they're going around the world saying, "Look how our scale gives a different mass measurement for the same object in different places." In the video on their site they talk about how they do in fact go out of their way to adjust the scales for local gravity (wherever they're being shipped to? Somehow?), but they could push that emphasis more.
What they're showing is that the mass reading (as opposed to weight reading, which is accurate) is not consistent when you move them around the world, and that their instruments in particular are sensitive enough to be affected. That's true and important, but they should be making more of a fuss about their calibration services if they're going to be showing off that sensitivity.
Million-dolar spacecraft have been lost for less. Units matter.
I don't know why a company that made scales would make that particular mistake, but then, if NASA can do it, who am I to judge.
I don't see the problem. All he has to do is roll doubles.
Occasionally, and I know this may surprise you, people use exaggerated language in order to complain about something which is, admittedly, a minor issue.
Like how your mom complains about your "microscopic" dick. I know it's very small, but it's biologically impossible for it to be so small you need a microscope.
I was discussing violent videogames elsewhere on the internet and brought this up:
doing ridiculous stuff without fear of consequences whatsoever.
It cuts both ways, in an interesting way. It can be ridiculously interesting destroying things--clearly evil. It can also be ridiculously interesting building things--but when you're building something military, you need an opposing force. You can either be good and assailed by evil, or be evil and be assailed by good. See also games like Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, for the latter.
And I love these games. It's funny, because I don't like the idea of bad people getting away with doing bad things, and I wouldn't really defend them. I certainly wouldn't want to be one of them. But in order to keep testing your ability to defend yourself, you need an unrelenting opponent. If both you and they are good, you would never agree to just throw away lives assaulting one another. If they are evil, they will only do whatever benefits themselves. But, BUT, if you're evil, and they "are Good," they can throw away lives like nobody's business, because it's for The Greater Good.
Similarly, if you want to enjoy yourself destroying random things, you can't be good, because then the people who spend all the effort rebuilding things would just ask you kindly not to do that. You can't be destroying evil, because then you'd be facing an opponent that's probably pretty capable of stopping you. No, if you want to cause wanton destruction, they have to be innocent, and you have to be a horrible monster of some kind. It's the only way the situation works out without straining credulity. (You can completely get rid of the personality of people involved to solve this problem, but then it becomes arcade-y, and that's not always acceptable)
Fortunately most if not all of us have video games to help us indulge these urges without becoming, ourselves, some sort of monster.
In addition, the estimated costs have got to be a factor of 10 too optimistic. 60 billion dollars? For something constructed of tens of thousands of miles of superconducting cable and a structure made to aerospace engineering tolerances that is 1000 miles long? Even 600 billion sounds optimistic for something that large.
Not to mention that the idea is that the entire tube holds a vacuum, which buoys it up, and it's held DOWN with tethers. How do you even construct that? There are no cranes to LEO. Even if you put them in place, and empty out the gas slowly so that it rises (without coming to a sudden stop at the end that breaks a tether), each segment is probably hundreds of pounds of metal. Imagine being miles in the air, wrestling with an enormous hunk of metal that's tied to the earth in what you can only hope is the right position, in order to get the end to line up with the last piece...
Well, okay, it sounds like a heck of an exciting job. But it also sounds like it could go wrong so terribly easily...
A PITA, of course, but much better than getting a DWI on your record...which can then keep you out of jobs, kills your insurance rates...and cost $$$$.
Jobs: If you're driving under the influence, you've showed you're either negligent, or actively willing to endanger yourself and others for a night's entertainment. I understand your argument about "a grown man, having two drinks with a meal"--but it's just a drink. Most restaurants have something else you can quench your thirst with that won't make you unable to drive. If you're so (pardon the term) drunk on the taste and sensation of a beer with your dinner that you're in danger of going over, maybe you can't be trusted to know the limit in the first place.
Go figure that people might not consider you a pristine employee. I mean sure, you might do a very good job at whatever it is they hire you for. You might also be a surly, insensitive jackass that ends up breaking property or assaulting people, which may in turn cost them more than you'll ever be worth.
Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?
Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.
It's not like there's no corruption and malevolence in the police, or that there's nowhere that police do a shitty job of keeping people safe. But if you want to make an argument like that, pick something other than harsh drunk driving laws.
I strongly hope this leads to criminal investigations and long jailtime.
I'd be rather offended if anyone didn't hope for the same.
I'd prefer not to be cynical about a group like Mozilla, but that's blatant deceit. The default is what happens before a choice is made, so there is one unless you are physically restrained from using the browser until you make a choice.
The actual answer is that nobody knows what would happen to advertising, which like it or not is the underpinning of the web, if DNT was enabled for everyone. But you can't say that for two reasons.
1) It makes Mozilla look like a total sellout
2) If normal people actually understood that the web as we know it wouldn't exist without tracking-enhanced adverts, the magic would go away. They'd be hesitant to go to random websites about strange things because they're being tracked. They'd hesitate to be as honest about searching the web. They'd cease to believe that you can find everything you want online, because someone is watching. In other words, they'd become afraid of the internet, afraid of browsing, afraid of speaking out online.
Which, maybe they should be afraid, maybe they shouldn't. That's a different argument altogether.
There are still satellites (the manmade kind), which are not shielded against high velocity shrapnel. Any orbiting ships or stations will also want to avoid shrapnel, if at all possible, down to sizes that are essentially impossible to detect.
Also consider this: Coming at the planet are 200 basketball-sized, high-metal rocks, and a nuclear bomb (EMP) with no EM signature (such as radio communications back home) that could burst in orbit, at the edge of the atmosphere, or on touchdown. Radar can't tell them apart. They have a tiny angular cross-section even assuming they're bunched up together, which they need not be. If they're spread out over several miles you'd barely know they're there. After a series of them turned out to just be metal asteroids, would stop caring and let them burn up, or keep destroying every last one? At what cost? Assuming the war has multiple fronts, how many people are you going to assign to this task rather than something more constructive?
Yeah, and I'm sure it wouldn't intimidate him at all to know that federal prosecutors were breathing down his neck, looking for ANYTHING illegal.
Because a guy like that has an otherwise clean record, yup yup.
Aside: The question I ask myself sometimes about corruption is, what is it like to be the first person to be corrupt. Not knowing for sure that paying off a cop is going to work, not having a whole citadel of corruption around you showing you that people get away with it. The first cop running crooked, not knowing if he'll be stopped; the first politico scared shitless that someone will figure out he's taking bribes.
Or maybe they're doing it because they're on drugs or alcohol and can't think straight for crap. I don't know.
We can make other things fly, just not cars. What we have here is clearly a failure of engineering.