If you really think this is all useless and not really going to happen, then why don't you ignore it? That would be the reasonable thing to do.
By posting here, you are drawing attention to something that you don't like. No one compelled you to read any of the posts about the Raspberry Pi system. If you are right, ignore it and it will go away.
Your position is self contradictory. What is wrong with you>
Sometimes charging for a good/service will cause the user to assign it a higher utility value. This happens all the time with luxury goods like jewelry and perfume. It can also apply to software. If something is open source, it can be difficult to get users to see that it is worthwhile. This happened in the early days of Linux. Given the success of the open source movement, this is not as much of a problem as it used to be.
I think that users are accepting of open source solutions in areas where there is a well defined niche. Think of Firefox and Microsoft IE. Users know what a browser is supposed to do and they know Firefox is "real", so they can choose it over IE and feel comfortable. Even though both are "free" (no overt cost), they are both seen as viable options.
In more specialized markets this is not always the case. If existing tools are expensive, users may assume that a "free" solution is bound to be less effective. Sometimes this is correct. There is not always a viable economic model for open source, because software developers need money like everyone else.
If software targets applications that are specialized and related to business/employment, customers may not be comfortable with a free solution. This is not a stupid position. They want to make sure that the vendor has an economic stake in the product. Buyers don't want to have to do software support on everything they use. It doesn't make economic sense.
The short version: one size does not fit all. A lot of software succeeds because it is free/open source. Some software requires money.
This post is clearly intended to legitimatize the right wing push to attack Iran.
Is there any other reason to lionize Teller at this moment in time? The text of the link includes the phrase "a matter of life and horrible death". In other words, an existential threat to Western Civilization. The implied parallel is that Islam and international Communism are similar threats to the West. If Teller is a hero for his position, the all the Republican presidential hopefuls are also heroes for calling for an attack against Iran. And Obama, along with anyone else who advocates caution, is a spineless traitor who want to destroy democracy.
Pure right wing propaganda.
Instead of looking back more then 60 years to the late 1940's, let's consider a much more recent and infinitely more relevant event: G. W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. This was a war of choice, and has emerged as the single worst policy mistake in the history of the USA. It cost the US and it's allies hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of US casualties, and over one hundred thousand civilian causalities in Iraq.
It made Iran much more powerful, and alienated the entire world from the US. All the European leaders who supported the war fell out of favor. Radical Islamic movements, who really do want to destroy the West, have much more influence in Islamic politics. Even with the nominal end of combat, no one knows when it will really end or how much it will cost, in both life and treasure. We still don't know how badly screwed up we are over this.
And now Republicans, who lied their teeth out over Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, are screaming that WE MUST ATTACK IRAN RIGHT NOW!!! So someone decides it's time to raise H-Bomb Teller from his crypt, wrap him up in the stars and stripes, and declare that he saved civilization from the Godless Hoards. Meanwhile, G. W. Bush, who is very much alive and well, is completely missing. He is so off the charts it's like he never existed.
As far as the Republicans and the mainstream media is concerned, Clinton left office, the world hibernated for 8 years, and then Obama took over. Now there is talk of more war in the Middle East, and no one even speaks the name of Bush. It's not like someone asked his opinion and he responded "no comment". No one is even asking. He has been edited out of history, like in 1984.
This topic is a de facto intelligence test. If you looked at it and wondered why anyone would be saying these kinds of things about Teller then you pass. If you saw nothing unusual, you failed. Given the kind of comments I've seen so far, everyone reading Slashdot is politically brain dead. If there was some way I could turn off life support for all the flat-lined Slashdot readers, I'd do it in an instant.
Smith wrote science fiction with the imagination of fantasy. His work was extremely innovative for it's time (the 60's), and is still "far out" today. He had a career in psychological warfare, and grew up in China before the Communist revolution. His book "Psychological Warfare" is a classic, and his godfather was Sun Yat Sen, the father or modern China.
His output was very limited, and all set in a unified future history. It is available in two books; The Rediscovery of Man a collection of short stories, and Norstilla, a novel. His work is very unusual, so a short description does not do it justice. As Wikipedia says "Linebarger's stories are unusual, sometimes being written in narrative styles closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith.
Contact your US senator and House members. It won't do any good, but it is very easy to do. If enough voters do this it can have an influence. It's like voting; if you don't bother to vote you have abandoned your right to have an opinion. Posting on Slashdot will get you exposure, but I don't see how it will help much.
The USA is well on it's way to 3rd world status. We will fall behind because we are not funding fundamental research.
We have no ability to put humans in space.
We no longer host any major sub-atomic research facility. The generation after the CERN will not be in the US. We're not even in the running.
The next big ground based radio telescope will not be in the US.
The NASA planetary exploration budget is being diverted to fund private launch companies. If there was a viable economic model for space transport, then private sector equity funding would be available. It's not. Many of the commercial space ventures are funded by individuals who made fortunes in software (Musk, Carmac, Bezos, Allen. Branson, but in music and transportation), Wall Street is not betting on making money in the launch sector. Putting NASA money into launch ventures is not basic science R&D.
We are, however teaching creationism and climate change denial in schools. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are anti-evolution. Santorum just said that he is "pro-science", and the Democrats are anti-science. This is clearly in 1984 territory: Ignorance Is Strength.
Most Slashdot readers will experience the slide into 3rd world status during the course of their lives.
After the fall of the Soviet Bloc, both US and Russia and it's satellite states have followed a very similar course. The governments are merging with the money/power elites. In Russia they are relatively honest, and talk about the "oligarchs". In the US this is going on under the radar.
There are differences. In Russia the oligarchs are untouchable as long as they don't challenge Putin politically or economically. All policy foreign and domestic is under sole control of the state.
In the US it is the opposite. Large areas of government policy are being controlled by the corporate elites. That is was ACTA/SOPA/etc are all about, as is TARP and the ongoing bank/Wall Street bailout. The government is shielding corrupt and inefficient corporate entities from the consequences of their incompetent behavior.
When Jamie Diamon, head of JPMorgan, said that "we have a right to make a profit", he was speaking literally. He thinks that the big banks are not subject to capitalism and should have guaranteed success. This is much closer to a feudal society, where the landed aristocracy always has the best, even when the peasants are starving. It is not capitalism, where failure is always an option. FDR called this "economic royalism", which is a good description of our current economic system.
Is there some way this kind of bullshit metric could be applied to lawyers? Perhaps take the number of pages generated and compare it to the number of hours in the courtroom, or the outcome of the case,
I figure that this class of mind numbingly stupid patent results from the bastard mating of lawyers who want to patent all human activity with managers who want to have so many patents that they will never be blamed for not having a legal rabbit to pull out of the hat.
So if someone comes up with a meaningless way to judge the "output" of lawyers and makes their lives a living hell, it would be appropriate "justice". They would get to experience the kind of crap that they have been shoveling into the lives of normal humans.
Has everyone forgotten that the goal of the Iraq war was to get access to their oil? (And get revenge for the first Gulf War.) It was never about "weapons of mass destruction". The warmongers who came in with Bush (i.e. Cheney and his crew) were calling to overthrow Hussein the entire time Bill Clinton was in office. This is all well documented, even if it was never reported in the main stream press.
So Iraq was supposed to be a push over, and the US was going to install a puppet government that would do what the US oil cartel wanted. This would be a counterbalance to Saudi oil power. Remember Bush and Cheney are both originally oil men, and they wanted to go back to the "good old days" of western dominance of Middle Eastern oil production.
There was no planning about anything except securing the oil resources. They made no plans about securing any civil society, not just the schools. They didn't even have a real plan to secure any weapons, or even the known stockpiles of uranium ore (yellow cake) that Iraq had obtained. Access to weapons was one of the things that made the following civil war so bloody, and made it hard for the occupation forces to restore order.
All the top military US military leaders left right after the collapse of the Hussein regime because they knew that it was going to be a disaster, and they didn't want their legacy to be associated with the resulting fuckup. Something like half the administrators who went over in the first wave to try and restore some kind of government did not have passports! They had never been outside the US. A sizable chunk were people who had worked for the Bush/Cheney election campaign and had no relevant experience. In short, completely clueless.
The winner on all of this has been Iran. Their regional power and influence in the Arab world has increased dramatically. A lot of the weapons that were looted during the lawless fall of Iraq ended up in Iran, by the way. Meanwhile, the US has been mauled by asymmetrical warfare in both Iran and Afghanistan. They win, we loose. The unexpected result that thwarted Iran has been the Arab Spring, specifically the near civil war in Syria. Otherwise they are well on their way to being the dominant Gulf power. They may still come out on top.
So here is the bonus question: Why has GW Bush been the invisible man during the current presidential campaign? The US withdrew combat troops from Iran and Bush's name never came up. That's like talking about the US Civil War without talking about Lincoln, or WWII without FDR or Churchill or Stalin. You would expect that he would be asked about the end of the conflict he started. We get nothing.
Now the press is all over the perceived weakness of the Republican contenders. It would be reasonable for someone in the press to ask the last elected Republican candidate, even if all they got was a "no comment". Again, nothing. When the Republicans scream about how Obama hasn't fixed the economy, no one, Democrat or Republican talks about how the Bush administration screwed it all up. Remember TARP and it's bailout were authorized when Bush was still in office. If you look at the press accounts, it's like our economic mess fell from the sky without human intervention.
I'm wondering what will happen during the Republican convention. Will Bush show up? Whoever the nominee is, do you think they want to be seen with Bush on stage? It would be like being endorsed by Charlie Manson. If Bush is a no show, will the press ignore the non-event? I assume that McCain will be there, and Palin will get some air time, so how could they not talk about Bush?
The disappearance of GW Bush is emblematic of the memory hole that now dominates US political discourse. We don't need the complexities of New Speak or the Ministry of Truth. Collective amnesia in the media is so much more effective.
Why is anyone linking to space.com? The first thing I saw was a splash screen for "Publishers Clearing House" and I had to click on it to see the article. This is not appropriate for a Slashdot link for a story. Get your act together and find a legitimate web site, not some sleazy link farm. "News for Nerds" does not include page hits for misleading scams that have a business model based on enticing suckers by offering a "big cash prize". What's next, an iPad for $10?
If you don't care about the Raspberry PI, don't read the article or post about it.
If you think it gets too much attention on Slashdot, don't read the article or post about it.
If you think it should be a kit, design a similar system and only sell it as a kit. The people behind the R. PI didn't just sit around and whine, they did something. Don't just complain about it.
If don't like the closed source drivers, then reverse engineer them yourself. Or get together with the people who want an kit and write their software. Do something beside bitching.
If you think that assembling a kit at this scale is easy, set up a web site that shows how it can be done. Sell a kit of supplies for the process. Don't just emit hot air.
You people act as if the motto of Slashdot was News for crybabies, Stuff that sucks
The SEC is a meaningless dog and pony show that is deliberately intended to as little as possible. It's goal is to give the illusion of oversight without interfering with the ability of the big inside players to steal as much money as they can get away with. Examples:
Madoff. One word suffices. He was detected a decade before he finally took himself down, and the SEC went out of their way to not investigate. Why? Because he was an insider. The only reason he was caught was that the market went down, and his investors started needing their money. The SEC only got wise after it was far too late.
Enron. Again, only one word is needed. They were cooking the books for many years before they folded. Once again the SEC was asleep at the switch, and only found out when it was far too late.
Long Term Capital Management. Not as well known as the others, and somewhat earlier, it was the prototype of the modern trading failure and bailout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_term_capital_management They got in way over their head with too much leverage and had to be bailed out by the US government. No lessons were learned.
(Not that the SEC is doing a better job at the current time. The current focus on insider trading is like writing parking tickets while a riot is in progress. It is a deliberate attempt to avoid the big picture and look busy while the economy sinks.)
It would be better if no one at the SEC went in to work. They should all just stay home and collect their pay and do nothing. Then there would be no pretense that there was anyone protecting investors, which is the true situation. Wall Street has one purpose these days, which is to funnel as much money as is humanly possible into the hands of insiders. The upper management steals from their clients, their investors and their workers. A deaf, mute, blind and toothless SEC is just one medium sized cog in the mechanism that enables the massive ongoing looting of the US and world economy.
The national security implications of climate change are very real. As temperatures rise, water and food supplies will likely be affected, destabilizing poor countries in the tropics—and potentially seeding the ground for civil wars and other conflicts. Melting polar ice caps will change global transport and open up new energy resources, setting off a far northern race for influence. On the whole, a warmer world is likely to be a more dangerous one—for the U.S. and other nations. That’s why in the battle over warming, it’s time for our spies to come in from the cold.
As climate change in the Americas intensifies, those most effected will migrate north, into the US. Given the choice between staying where they are and dieing, they will move. The numbers will be so large, and the desperation so high, no border will stop them. If your life was at risk you would do exactly the same thing. So if you think that your geographical position makes you immune, you are mentally deficient. And an asshat.
The OpenCV library, which was originally an Intel sponsored project, has a stereo correspondence algorithm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opencv
If you look on Google under "OpenCV stereo vision" you will find links showing how the code runs. There are video examples using two web cams that run in real time at around 5 frames per second. If you record and run off line you can get reasonable playback frame rates.
This code generates a depth map for the scene, so each pixel is assigned a distance from the camera. These techniques are derived from robotic vision research, so it is an image processing solution, not a 3D computer graphics solution. It does not generate 3D surfaces. What you do with the depth map is up to you.
If they had their way, this is the kind of "justice" that they want: the worst penalty they can get away with, using the full power of the state, and no effective appeal. In both cases, tyranny is the desired result.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said, "Amen."
Just more US corporate corruption
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This was never about energy independence to begin with, it was another corporate raid on tax credits and subsidies. In this case it was agribusiness and big oil. It did not help consumers or farmers, it was bad for the economy in the long run, and it did not help the environment. Remember that farmers are not really agribusiness insiders, they are just the front end of the pipeline. The big players who really scored on this are the likes of Monsanto, Cargill and ADM. That's where the real money is.
This the same kind of crap as Medicare Part D, where the federal government is not allowed to negotiate bulk drug prices with the pharmaceutical manufacturers. The Veterans Administration gets bulk rates, and their costs are significantly lower.
Every big financial sector is in on this game. SOPA/PIPA anyone? The mortgage meltdown and the bank bailout. This is endemic corruption, where all the big players rewrite the rules so they automatically make a profit. Even Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan-Chase said he had a "right to make money". That's not capitalism. He has a right to engage in business, and make money if he is successful, and loose money if he doesn't. What we have now is a rigged game, and it not so slowly destroying the US economy.
Yesterday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nick George, a Pomona College student who was detained and aggressively interrogated by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) authorities, by the FBI and by Pennsylvania police when he tried to board a plane carrying Arabic language flash cards.
You heard right: Not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. Flash cards.
George, a physics major who's studying Arabic, was pulled aside for secondary screening at the Philadelphia International Airport as he tried to go through security. When he emptied his pockets, the inspector saw his flash cards and he was arrested, handcuffed, locked in a cell for hours and aggressively questioned. Because of some flash cards.
The following exchange took place between George and a TSA supervisor who questioned him:
TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11?
George: Osama bin Laden.
TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke?
You owners are tired of your whining. It is interfering with their collection of all the economic resources in the USA. If you keep talking among yourselves you might get the erroneous archaic idea that as a citizen you have basic rights. You only have value as long as you can put money in the pockets of the economic royalists who now own the country. As soon as you cease to be a source of profit, you are expected to crawl off and die in a gutter. You are not allowed to die in the presence of you owners, it spoils their view. Why have you not figured this out yet?
Age discrimination is a fact of life in software. The offshoring and 1Hb are just making it easier. Your two long term options are move into management or start your own business. As soon as you are older then your managers they will start getting uncomfortable. You make them think about their future, and if they have any sense it will scare them shitless. Until recently going into academia was an option, but "no new taxes" == "no academic career", so you are also screwed there.
I read the article: it's only a rumor that Balmer flipped out over poor performance on a Qualcom Windows 8 prototype system. No actual facts are apparent.
Windows 8 is only in an early state. Qualcom and Microsoft are both very motivated to expend resources to make this happen. Between the two of them, they can make it happen. It might be late and over budget, but it will happen.
I despise Windows software as much as any Unix/MacOS geek, but I can be objective. This will happen. It might die for other reasons. but both companies have extremely strong motivation for seeing this is the market place. Badmouthing based on rumors is a waste of bandwidth.
Starting your argument by referring to the opposing opinion as "fanboys" does not help your position, it weakens it.
There are market and structural forces that are driving x86 and ARM into competition. First, because of smart phones, ARM has a huge installed base. No matter what Anandtech says, I don't see a lot of x86 pushback in that area. Ignoring technical considerations, ARM has won that battle, just the same way that x86 won the desktop/laptop battle. (Note the use of past tense.)
Another important component is the number of players in the x86 vs. ARM competition. For x86 there is Intel, AMD and VIA. Any others are truly niche players. Even though ARM manufacturers all are licensed, the range of products and room for innovation is far greater in the ARM world because of the shear number of vendors. To succeed with an ARM product you have to stand out from the crowd, so innovation and price/performance are required to just stay in business. Even if a big player fails that will not change the dynamic.
So x86 "fanboys" should be happy about the ARM, because without the competition Intel would do what all other monopolies do: build products that are overly expensive, poorly performing, have built in obsolesce, and insure lock in, i.e. Microsoft. If it were not for ARM, it is very unlikely that the Intel ATOM would even exist. AMD is having trouble eve breathing, and VIA is small change. Without competition from ARM the x86 will die a slow death.
So smart phone and tablet manufacturers want to expand their market. One way is to expand the low end, and the other way is to invade the high end. It is inevitable that both will happen. Therefor ARM based products will end up competing with x86 products, and they will have success. The only question is when it will happen and how much market share they will take.
Microsoft has figured this out, because Windows 8 will do both. In this case I think they know what they are doing, even if they usually have their head in the sand. As long as ARM Windows 8 supports the core Microsoft apps, for a huge fraction of the customer base it makes no different what CPU they have. And there will be Windows 8 ARM hardware that says "Intel Inside". They can't afford to give up on that part of the market.
It's not about "fanboys". At some level, it is not even about technology. It is about market forces.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really think this is all useless and not really going to happen, then why don't you ignore it? That would be the reasonable thing to do.
By posting here, you are drawing attention to something that you don't like. No one compelled you to read any of the posts about the Raspberry Pi system. If you are right, ignore it and it will go away.
Your position is self contradictory. What is wrong with you>
I think that users are accepting of open source solutions in areas where there is a well defined niche. Think of Firefox and Microsoft IE. Users know what a browser is supposed to do and they know Firefox is "real", so they can choose it over IE and feel comfortable. Even though both are "free" (no overt cost), they are both seen as viable options.
In more specialized markets this is not always the case. If existing tools are expensive, users may assume that a "free" solution is bound to be less effective. Sometimes this is correct. There is not always a viable economic model for open source, because software developers need money like everyone else.
If software targets applications that are specialized and related to business/employment, customers may not be comfortable with a free solution. This is not a stupid position. They want to make sure that the vendor has an economic stake in the product. Buyers don't want to have to do software support on everything they use. It doesn't make economic sense.
The short version: one size does not fit all. A lot of software succeeds because it is free/open source. Some software requires money.
Is there any other reason to lionize Teller at this moment in time? The text of the link includes the phrase "a matter of life and horrible death". In other words, an existential threat to Western Civilization. The implied parallel is that Islam and international Communism are similar threats to the West. If Teller is a hero for his position, the all the Republican presidential hopefuls are also heroes for calling for an attack against Iran. And Obama, along with anyone else who advocates caution, is a spineless traitor who want to destroy democracy.
Pure right wing propaganda.
Instead of looking back more then 60 years to the late 1940's, let's consider a much more recent and infinitely more relevant event: G. W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. This was a war of choice, and has emerged as the single worst policy mistake in the history of the USA. It cost the US and it's allies hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of US casualties, and over one hundred thousand civilian causalities in Iraq.
It made Iran much more powerful, and alienated the entire world from the US. All the European leaders who supported the war fell out of favor. Radical Islamic movements, who really do want to destroy the West, have much more influence in Islamic politics. Even with the nominal end of combat, no one knows when it will really end or how much it will cost, in both life and treasure. We still don't know how badly screwed up we are over this.
And now Republicans, who lied their teeth out over Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, are screaming that WE MUST ATTACK IRAN RIGHT NOW!!! So someone decides it's time to raise H-Bomb Teller from his crypt, wrap him up in the stars and stripes, and declare that he saved civilization from the Godless Hoards. Meanwhile, G. W. Bush, who is very much alive and well, is completely missing. He is so off the charts it's like he never existed.
As far as the Republicans and the mainstream media is concerned, Clinton left office, the world hibernated for 8 years, and then Obama took over. Now there is talk of more war in the Middle East, and no one even speaks the name of Bush. It's not like someone asked his opinion and he responded "no comment". No one is even asking. He has been edited out of history, like in 1984.
This topic is a de facto intelligence test. If you looked at it and wondered why anyone would be saying these kinds of things about Teller then you pass. If you saw nothing unusual, you failed. Given the kind of comments I've seen so far, everyone reading Slashdot is politically brain dead. If there was some way I could turn off life support for all the flat-lined Slashdot readers, I'd do it in an instant.
His output was very limited, and all set in a unified future history. It is available in two books; The Rediscovery of Man a collection of short stories, and Norstilla, a novel. His work is very unusual, so a short description does not do it justice. As Wikipedia says "Linebarger's stories are unusual, sometimes being written in narrative styles closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith.
You can read some of his work on line. I suggest
Scanners Live in Vain" http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm
Game of Rat and Dragon http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29614
Hmm, so Obama is just another "rich old white guy". What universe do you live in? I don't think I ever visited that particular universe.
Contact your US senator and House members. It won't do any good, but it is very easy to do. If enough voters do this it can have an influence. It's like voting; if you don't bother to vote you have abandoned your right to have an opinion. Posting on Slashdot will get you exposure, but I don't see how it will help much.
We have no ability to put humans in space.
We no longer host any major sub-atomic research facility. The generation after the CERN will not be in the US. We're not even in the running.
The next big ground based radio telescope will not be in the US.
The NASA planetary exploration budget is being diverted to fund private launch companies. If there was a viable economic model for space transport, then private sector equity funding would be available. It's not. Many of the commercial space ventures are funded by individuals who made fortunes in software (Musk, Carmac, Bezos, Allen. Branson, but in music and transportation), Wall Street is not betting on making money in the launch sector. Putting NASA money into launch ventures is not basic science R&D.
We are, however teaching creationism and climate change denial in schools. Most of the Republican presidential candidates are anti-evolution. Santorum just said that he is "pro-science", and the Democrats are anti-science. This is clearly in 1984 territory: Ignorance Is Strength.
Most Slashdot readers will experience the slide into 3rd world status during the course of their lives.
Life, a Quaker Oats cereal.
There are differences. In Russia the oligarchs are untouchable as long as they don't challenge Putin politically or economically. All policy foreign and domestic is under sole control of the state.
In the US it is the opposite. Large areas of government policy are being controlled by the corporate elites. That is was ACTA/SOPA/etc are all about, as is TARP and the ongoing bank/Wall Street bailout. The government is shielding corrupt and inefficient corporate entities from the consequences of their incompetent behavior.
When Jamie Diamon, head of JPMorgan, said that "we have a right to make a profit", he was speaking literally. He thinks that the big banks are not subject to capitalism and should have guaranteed success. This is much closer to a feudal society, where the landed aristocracy always has the best, even when the peasants are starving. It is not capitalism, where failure is always an option. FDR called this "economic royalism", which is a good description of our current economic system.
I figure that this class of mind numbingly stupid patent results from the bastard mating of lawyers who want to patent all human activity with managers who want to have so many patents that they will never be blamed for not having a legal rabbit to pull out of the hat.
So if someone comes up with a meaningless way to judge the "output" of lawyers and makes their lives a living hell, it would be appropriate "justice". They would get to experience the kind of crap that they have been shoveling into the lives of normal humans.
So Iraq was supposed to be a push over, and the US was going to install a puppet government that would do what the US oil cartel wanted. This would be a counterbalance to Saudi oil power. Remember Bush and Cheney are both originally oil men, and they wanted to go back to the "good old days" of western dominance of Middle Eastern oil production.
There was no planning about anything except securing the oil resources. They made no plans about securing any civil society, not just the schools. They didn't even have a real plan to secure any weapons, or even the known stockpiles of uranium ore (yellow cake) that Iraq had obtained. Access to weapons was one of the things that made the following civil war so bloody, and made it hard for the occupation forces to restore order.
All the top military US military leaders left right after the collapse of the Hussein regime because they knew that it was going to be a disaster, and they didn't want their legacy to be associated with the resulting fuckup. Something like half the administrators who went over in the first wave to try and restore some kind of government did not have passports! They had never been outside the US. A sizable chunk were people who had worked for the Bush/Cheney election campaign and had no relevant experience. In short, completely clueless.
The winner on all of this has been Iran. Their regional power and influence in the Arab world has increased dramatically. A lot of the weapons that were looted during the lawless fall of Iraq ended up in Iran, by the way. Meanwhile, the US has been mauled by asymmetrical warfare in both Iran and Afghanistan. They win, we loose. The unexpected result that thwarted Iran has been the Arab Spring, specifically the near civil war in Syria. Otherwise they are well on their way to being the dominant Gulf power. They may still come out on top.
So here is the bonus question: Why has GW Bush been the invisible man during the current presidential campaign? The US withdrew combat troops from Iran and Bush's name never came up. That's like talking about the US Civil War without talking about Lincoln, or WWII without FDR or Churchill or Stalin. You would expect that he would be asked about the end of the conflict he started. We get nothing.
Now the press is all over the perceived weakness of the Republican contenders. It would be reasonable for someone in the press to ask the last elected Republican candidate, even if all they got was a "no comment". Again, nothing. When the Republicans scream about how Obama hasn't fixed the economy, no one, Democrat or Republican talks about how the Bush administration screwed it all up. Remember TARP and it's bailout were authorized when Bush was still in office. If you look at the press accounts, it's like our economic mess fell from the sky without human intervention.
I'm wondering what will happen during the Republican convention. Will Bush show up? Whoever the nominee is, do you think they want to be seen with Bush on stage? It would be like being endorsed by Charlie Manson. If Bush is a no show, will the press ignore the non-event? I assume that McCain will be there, and Palin will get some air time, so how could they not talk about Bush?
The disappearance of GW Bush is emblematic of the memory hole that now dominates US political discourse. We don't need the complexities of New Speak or the Ministry of Truth. Collective amnesia in the media is so much more effective.
Why is anyone linking to space.com? The first thing I saw was a splash screen for "Publishers Clearing House" and I had to click on it to see the article. This is not appropriate for a Slashdot link for a story. Get your act together and find a legitimate web site, not some sleazy link farm. "News for Nerds" does not include page hits for misleading scams that have a business model based on enticing suckers by offering a "big cash prize". What's next, an iPad for $10?
If you think it gets too much attention on Slashdot, don't read the article or post about it.
If you think it should be a kit, design a similar system and only sell it as a kit. The people behind the R. PI didn't just sit around and whine, they did something. Don't just complain about it.
If don't like the closed source drivers, then reverse engineer them yourself. Or get together with the people who want an kit and write their software. Do something beside bitching.
If you think that assembling a kit at this scale is easy, set up a web site that shows how it can be done. Sell a kit of supplies for the process. Don't just emit hot air.
You people act as if the motto of Slashdot was News for crybabies, Stuff that sucks
Madoff. One word suffices. He was detected a decade before he finally took himself down, and the SEC went out of their way to not investigate. Why? Because he was an insider. The only reason he was caught was that the market went down, and his investors started needing their money. The SEC only got wise after it was far too late.
Enron. Again, only one word is needed. They were cooking the books for many years before they folded. Once again the SEC was asleep at the switch, and only found out when it was far too late.
Long Term Capital Management. Not as well known as the others, and somewhat earlier, it was the prototype of the modern trading failure and bailout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_term_capital_management They got in way over their head with too much leverage and had to be bailed out by the US government. No lessons were learned.
The current world wide recession/depression. The greed and stupidity of Wall Street is at least as great as it was before the depression of the 1930's. All of the structures put in place as a result were negated, and the SEC led the way. Harvey Pitt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Pitt#Criticism Donaldson http://mobile.businessweek.com/magazine/destruction-at-the-sec-09012011.html and Cox http://seekingalpha.com/article/96487-5-failures-of-sec-chairman-cox all sat around with their thumbs in their butts while the biggest fraud in the history of the world was in progress. They all had their marching orders, which was to do absolutely nothing to rock the boat, and they did exactly what they were told.
(Not that the SEC is doing a better job at the current time. The current focus on insider trading is like writing parking tickets while a riot is in progress. It is a deliberate attempt to avoid the big picture and look busy while the economy sinks.)
It would be better if no one at the SEC went in to work. They should all just stay home and collect their pay and do nothing. Then there would be no pretense that there was anyone protecting investors, which is the true situation. Wall Street has one purpose these days, which is to funnel as much money as is humanly possible into the hands of insiders. The upper management steals from their clients, their investors and their workers. A deaf, mute, blind and toothless SEC is just one medium sized cog in the mechanism that enables the massive ongoing looting of the US and world economy.
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/11/15/the-cia-has-a-climate-change-program%E2%80%94and-it-shouldnt-be-secret/
As climate change in the Americas intensifies, those most effected will migrate north, into the US. Given the choice between staying where they are and dieing, they will move. The numbers will be so large, and the desperation so high, no border will stop them. If your life was at risk you would do exactly the same thing. So if you think that your geographical position makes you immune, you are mentally deficient. And an asshat.
If you look on Google under "OpenCV stereo vision" you will find links showing how the code runs. There are video examples using two web cams that run in real time at around 5 frames per second. If you record and run off line you can get reasonable playback frame rates.
This code generates a depth map for the scene, so each pixel is assigned a distance from the camera. These techniques are derived from robotic vision research, so it is an image processing solution, not a 3D computer graphics solution. It does not generate 3D surfaces. What you do with the depth map is up to you.
If they had their way, this is the kind of "justice" that they want: the worst penalty they can get away with, using the full power of the state, and no effective appeal. In both cases, tyranny is the desired result.
This the same kind of crap as Medicare Part D, where the federal government is not allowed to negotiate bulk drug prices with the pharmaceutical manufacturers. The Veterans Administration gets bulk rates, and their costs are significantly lower.
Every big financial sector is in on this game. SOPA/PIPA anyone? The mortgage meltdown and the bank bailout. This is endemic corruption, where all the big players rewrite the rules so they automatically make a profit. Even Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan-Chase said he had a "right to make money". That's not capitalism. He has a right to engage in business, and make money if he is successful, and loose money if he doesn't. What we have now is a rigged game, and it not so slowly destroying the US economy.
You owners are tired of your whining. It is interfering with their collection of all the economic resources in the USA. If you keep talking among yourselves you might get the erroneous archaic idea that as a citizen you have basic rights. You only have value as long as you can put money in the pockets of the economic royalists who now own the country. As soon as you cease to be a source of profit, you are expected to crawl off and die in a gutter. You are not allowed to die in the presence of you owners, it spoils their view. Why have you not figured this out yet?
The best option: don't get old.
Windows 8 is only in an early state. Qualcom and Microsoft are both very motivated to expend resources to make this happen. Between the two of them, they can make it happen. It might be late and over budget, but it will happen.
I despise Windows software as much as any Unix/MacOS geek, but I can be objective. This will happen. It might die for other reasons. but both companies have extremely strong motivation for seeing this is the market place. Badmouthing based on rumors is a waste of bandwidth.
There are market and structural forces that are driving x86 and ARM into competition. First, because of smart phones, ARM has a huge installed base. No matter what Anandtech says, I don't see a lot of x86 pushback in that area. Ignoring technical considerations, ARM has won that battle, just the same way that x86 won the desktop/laptop battle. (Note the use of past tense.)
Another important component is the number of players in the x86 vs. ARM competition. For x86 there is Intel, AMD and VIA. Any others are truly niche players. Even though ARM manufacturers all are licensed, the range of products and room for innovation is far greater in the ARM world because of the shear number of vendors. To succeed with an ARM product you have to stand out from the crowd, so innovation and price/performance are required to just stay in business. Even if a big player fails that will not change the dynamic.
So x86 "fanboys" should be happy about the ARM, because without the competition Intel would do what all other monopolies do: build products that are overly expensive, poorly performing, have built in obsolesce, and insure lock in, i.e. Microsoft. If it were not for ARM, it is very unlikely that the Intel ATOM would even exist. AMD is having trouble eve breathing, and VIA is small change. Without competition from ARM the x86 will die a slow death.
So smart phone and tablet manufacturers want to expand their market. One way is to expand the low end, and the other way is to invade the high end. It is inevitable that both will happen. Therefor ARM based products will end up competing with x86 products, and they will have success. The only question is when it will happen and how much market share they will take.
Microsoft has figured this out, because Windows 8 will do both. In this case I think they know what they are doing, even if they usually have their head in the sand. As long as ARM Windows 8 supports the core Microsoft apps, for a huge fraction of the customer base it makes no different what CPU they have. And there will be Windows 8 ARM hardware that says "Intel Inside". They can't afford to give up on that part of the market.
It's not about "fanboys". At some level, it is not even about technology. It is about market forces.
Not my original quote,