In principle you could essentially emulate multiple monitors with one big display.
Well yes, but most that use a three screen setup angle the side screens somewhat so it'd have to be one really big, curved display not just a 21:9+ ultra wide. That would be really sweet for a games setup, multi-monitor gaming just doesn't appeal to me at all with those bezels.
I think it theory you can use the fact that c is constant to prove your absolute speed. Imagine you send a single photon down both ends of a tube and measure where they meet. You know both photons have travelled at the same speed and so covered the same distance. Imagine your ship travels at 0.5c and the tube is 100cm, in the time it takes the photons to cover 50cm each your ship will have moved 25cm so they actually meet at 75/25cm not 50/50cm as you'd expect. Get a perfect 50/50cm in three axis and you will have proved that the relative speed between you and the photons is c and thus your absolute speed must be c - c = 0.
It's probably an entirely different branch of AI, but I think Watson is impressive enough as it is. We produce tons of information and knowledge, for example everything you learn from primary school to far into college or university already exists, if you finally make research to arrive at genuinely new knowledge you're one of the few. Most of us have more of a toolbox picking the most appropriate response to a challenge.
Let's trying a gardening analogy, when the grass is tall you mow it. When there's a draught you water the lawn. When there's dog poop on the lawn you pick it up. If the soil is barren, you fertilize it. If there's leaves on the lawn you rake them away. If there's weeds growing on the lawn you cut them down. It's not revolutionary work but if you can use Watson to make a gardening robot take the appropriate action based on it's knowledge database it saves a human from doing it. Not that every little garden robot would run Watson of course, more like they're simple autonomous units which consult Watson when their garden is somehow not in the desired condition.
Granted, it wouldn't be the ultimate AI but I'd love a "service robot" who'd put dirty dishes in the dish washer, put washed dishes in the shelves, do my laundry and ironing, vacuuming and dusting, prepare dinner, switch light bulbs, water the plants, basically one that'd pick up all the routine tasks most of us still do. And no, wives don't do that anymore;) All of that should be entirely within Watson's capability if we could just pair it with good multi-purpose droid that can make it happen in real life. Imagine the "programming interface", you ask your droid to do a task in normal English, Watson interprets it, the droid executes it. Siri on steroids:)
They would have the capability to act nobler yes, but in practice they can act more ruthlessly without fear of retaliation because no matter how much the population despises you they can't assassinate you, they can't poison your food, they can't blow you up with an IED. Perhaps in the hands of a "kind" enemy going to great lengths to avoid civilian suffering it could be better, but in the hands of an evil enemy it would be far, far worse. Think drones controlled by the same people who run Nazi death camps, the fewer you need to involve the more extreme you can be. Others build the robots and combat systems, only a few really give commands to commit war crimes and the robots obey.
Well, the first thing you should understand is that "code" and "data" are entirely human distinctions, for a computer they're all zeros and ones. Computers have an instruction pointer which points to the memory address of the next instruction it's going to perform. If an attacker can replace the contents of that memory location, it ceases control of the system. Let's take a very basic example:
Program: 1. Load file into memory from $base to $base + $size 2. Read $offset from file 3. Read $value from file 4. Write $value to position $offset in the file.
That's what the code think it does, at least. But what if there's is no bounds checking and $base + $offset > $base + $size? Now you're writing outside the file to some other place in memory, like for example where the instruction pointer is. You trick the software into writing your data to a memory location it shouldn't be and the data gets executed as machine code. Of course this is absolutely brain dead code that will write anything to anywhere in memory and I haven't discussed any of the countermeasures that make this difficult, but that's the gist of it.
The point is, I've used that poem and that method for so many years, and it's such a simple system, that it might be the one thing I'll remember first if I have amnesia.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I have a relative who suffered some brain trauma, he had to relearn parts of his vocabulary and while he'd fairly quickly relearn that an apple is an apple, any passwords, codes or combinations that only he'd known was blasted into oblivion. If that happened to me I'd lose everything on my computer since I use full disk encryption and nobody else knows the key. And it's not so easy to solve, because even if I wrote it down I might not remember that I did, where I hid it or who I gave it to for safekeeping. Essentially you need the trusted person to come to you, "I heard you hit your head pretty bad, do you still remember your password? You gave it to me for safekeeping." which narrows down the list a lot. So far I've decided to still take my chances.
I respectfully disagree. We definitely have something.
That there's research into exotic alternatives is fine, but just because they've researched flying cars and fusion reactors for 50 years doesn't mean it will ever matrialize or be usable outside a very narrow niche. If we hit the limits of copper there's no telling if any of these will materialize or just continue to be interesting, but overall uneconomical and impractical to use in consumer products. Like for example supersonic flight, it exists but all commercial passengers go on subsonic flights since the Concorde landed. You can't have exponential growth forever, not even in computers.
The founding fathers never planned to have much if anything of a professional army and the Continental Army was largely disbanded when the fighing was over. In times of need the army would be raised from members of the militia serving a short term as full time soldiers. That's the prelude everyone seems to agree what says: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" which has morphed into the National Guard. Since the armed forces of today should never exist, it's very hard to extrapolate exactly what they'd think about that.
What we do know is that they strongly feared the career military only loyal to the chain of command (like say, the English Crown) or possibly itself who could oppress the general population and that is why they wanted the militia to be a central fighting force and it should under no circumstances be disarmed. It seem clear they really the priciple and ideals of it, even as there as quite a lot of evidence that they performed poorly as military units even back then. In any case, in that respect it's already a massive failure, the armed forces are vast, full of military veterans and excrushiatingly powerful.
It's not the 18th century anymore when a man and his hunting rifle can double as a minuteman. Even if you gave people the opportunity to buy all the military gear they'd like, it'd still be bizarrely expensive gear with relatively little (legal) use in peacetime. There'd be a few more scattered gun nuts able to pull off a Waco stand-off but it'd never amount to any real military threat. There's a reason why the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq use IEDs and hide in the civilian population, if ever the military got to use their big guns they'd be toast. With small arms fire you can be a nusance, with a privately owned tank you're a walking bullseye.
The four boxes of liberty is a meme that proposes: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
Soap box? All their violations of civil rights are hidden under "National Security" Ballot box? Sure, just vote for a third party.... Jury box? "War on [drugs/terror/piracy/jaywalking]" and talk of jury nullification.
No wonder Americans stick so hard to their guns. In any rate if you're comparing Europe in 1775 and Europe in 2013 you may find there's been a few changes while you were away.
I recall an interview with an airline executive many (20?) years ago. He said they heard and listened to customer complaints about the quality of air travel, in particular leg room. He said they tried all sorts of quality of flight improvements, including putting less seats in the plane, but in the end people made their choices largely on the price of the ticket, so they ended up going back to cramming as many seats in the plane they could.
"People" don't have problem with leg room, tall people do and that's really the problem. A friend of mine is around 6'4" and he's miserable in a plane seat, I'm 5'8" and usually find it just okay while someone 5'2" probably has no problem at all. If you increase leg room the tall are happy, but the normal to short go with the cheaper airline. As for really long flights, any chair is uncomfortable and to really be comfortable I'd need to be able to lie down which takes a huge amount of space. I just checked the prices on a flight I went on recently and those seats are +150% compared to an economy ticket.
There's a reason most people skimp on comfort in the air and it's because it's really, really expensive. For the extra 150% I could have upgraded my whole stay to a luxury hotel instead so I'll grumble and sulk about the horrible flight but when push comes to shove no, I'm not willing to pay the price. And particularly not on the short flight I take the most which is under an hour, one cattle class please. I'd sit on a bicycle seat for that one if it passed security.
Oh please, on an apples to apples comparison digital systems often require an order of magnitude less manpower. I just checked my bank (pure online bank) with 370.000 customers and they have 177 employees. Electronic deposit in, online banking + debit card + ATM out, who needs a brick and mortar bank? Granted a few might have stayed on as online customer support and loan application reviewers but by far most are just gone. The rest have moved on, but what's left after agriculture, manufacturing and services being automated away? More services? Also there's an increasing demand on skills, if you replace burger flippers and cab drivers with robot engineers and computer scientists I don't think everyone is cut out for the latter.
Personally I'm not very worried because I'm fairly sure I have skills that will remain employable, but a lot of quite ordinary people who do quite ordinary routine jobs should worry. People who've never really had a problem finding a job for anyone willing to do a solid day's work. I think you'll see it if they get autonomous cars working, it won't be just cab drivers it'll be truck drivers, delivery companies, mail services, pizza delivery, there's a vast number of jobs whose primary job requirement is to drive a vehicle.
You don't fight fair in life or death situations and war is the life and death of nations. Creating rules of war is like trying to settle conflicts with knuckle fights which can be mutually beneficial as both are less likely to end up dead or crippled, but either side can and will abandon them when it serves them. For example it's in the spirit of the conventions to shoot at other military personnel and leave civilians alone, while coming up with the wildest logic to defend the nuking of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it ended the war. By the same logic, we should applaud the Nazis for their bombing of London in their attempt to make Britain capitulate, if it wasn't for that "I've got nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and tears" guy who refused to surrender. Same logic isn't it? Kill the civilians, end the war, the end justifies the means.
(1) wouldn't be very practical until it applied in most of the world and without a claim of who placed it in the public domain it'd be like grabbing random things with no copyright notice off web pages. Granted, you'd probably replace the two clause with "Placed in the public domain by [name], [year]" but it wouldn't really make it any easier to show that all your code is legally licensed.
(2) would be silly since everything derives from the public domain, you're trying to narrow down a direct reproduction (slap a license on it) as something special but you'd end up in a legal quagmire over how little needs to change. You can take a BSD codebase, add 0.01% spice and sell it as your own closed source binary, the public domain would be the same.
Recently Ive switched to driving but before that it used to be bus or tram or subway and it's perfect downtime to try catching a star in Angry Birds or whatever. Mobile gaming is usable in a lot of places consoles could never reach.
At least with voting booths it's hard to connect people to votes, with online voting you need to generate some kind of token to ensure each eligible voter gets one and only one vote and it is completely impossible to verify that the system hasn't kept the link between person and token and won't link your vote to your person when you submit it. Sure you can audit it but you're suffering from the NSA problem, there's no certainty that there's not some secret backdoor/wiretap going on. For that matter, a trojan could capture your input on the client side and send a different vote to the server and you'd be none the wiser. Obviously you could solve a lot of these by giving the voters the ability to verify their vote, but then you're opening a huge can of worms.
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years.
That is a statistical fallacy, if we're getting better at treating cancer but even better at treating non-cancer diseases and injuries the relative share of cancer deaths may go up. Most of the people diagnosed with cancer are quite old and while we're getting better at emulating the body's "functions" with artificial hearts, artificial lungs, dialysis machines and so on we're not making the same kind of progress on cancer. I've had several ill and frail relatives but modern medicine kept them alive until the cancer got them, I consider it more of a success than a failure of the medical system. Eventually everybody dies from something.
True that there's many different causes and the type of cells causing the problems lead to many forms of cancer, but the basic problem with it is still the same - uncontrolled cell growth. And that is per se the problem, over time many of your cells probably go defective but as long as it's <1% of your liver and the other 99% work fine that's not really a big problem. So if you're looking to eradicate the causes that's a vast subject, but if you're just trying to find a cure then it's really one catch-all, find cells growing uncontrollably and kill/remove them. As an analogy you can break many bones in many ways, but the cure is roughly the same.
Of course, that's just curing the symptoms, if we really wanted to fix the underlying issue we'd probably need DNA-level ECC. Little nanobots running around resetting any bit flips in our DNA caused by mutations. But that's much, much further off so until we have that, statistically you can do a few things to reduce mutations but they they can't be avoided and lightning may or may not strike you. The world's longest living person Jeanne Calmant smoked from 21 to 117, no lung cancer there. Others have had little kids die from cancer. That's what you get with random bit flips in your biological computer.
The Founding Fathers were traitors to the Crown, whatever history will think of them London wanted to see them hang. Any Nazi commander who refused to take part in the Holocaust faced an execution squad. Historians might argue, but if Snowden ever sets foot on US soil he'd never see the outside of a prison cell ever again. Many people will argue that Snowden has not only exposed a runaway government agency, he's also exposed the nation's secrets to its enemies. That despite the best of intentions, you can't have people running around exposing classified documents as they feel like. Even those who like the message would kill the messenger.
The DCI spec won't change because it's a cinema standard to protect cinema content, but there's no reason for consumer level gear to follow it. Whether you have a 16:9 (HDTV), 17:9 (DCI) or 21:9 (ultra wide) ratio screen it should play consumer movies just fine. The only question is if the delivery system will have a 17:9 version of the movie, it depends on how they've reframed the movie. If you could take the 3840x2160 stream and add a 256x2160 slice left/right you could have "dual format" discs that'd give you the full 4K DCI picture, assuming you have a 17:9 screen. That would be rather neat.
However, most consumers will get 16:9 screens to avoid black bars/stretching on HDTV and BluRays, it'd just be for niche movie buffs who really want those last pixels and will buy a 17:9 screen to get it. It's not ever going to become a mainstream resolution when 16:9 is so entrenched as it is now.
Don't get your hopes up too high because I've heard the same all the way back to the VP3-based Theora and every version since. It's the escape hatch/emergency break to keep H.264/HEVC from abusing their near monopoly but in reality nobody seems to want to abandon them, not even Google. Kind of like how VC-1 is in the BluRay standard and in every player but 99% of recent discs use H.264. Even Firefox finally bit the bullet in October this year and said they'd use Cisco's H.264 blob on platforms that don't have native support rather than try fighting the windmills any longer, effectively waving the white flag.
Of course you could claim it'll be different next generation, that VP9 will be the new H.264 and HEVC the sideshow but I'd call you delusional. Despite the long list of VP9 supporters they're all HEVC backers too and that list is even longer, quite soon I expect native HEVC cameras to appear (there are already a few security cameras, but no "normal" ones) and while Google might have some clout on the Internet and mobile devices it's Sony, Canon, Panasonic, JVC and so on who still set the trends in video capture. Show me Google pushing hard for a VP9-reconding Android phone and I might change my mind, but I think it's just blustering like how they were supposed to remove native H.264 support from Chrome but quietly backed away.
And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity.
You're like an echo from 15 years ago when 1920x1080 was to replace NTSC 640x480, both HD porn and HD sports looks great despite the naysaying. Movies and TV too, if the costumes, props, backdrops or special effects no longer looked real they simply had to improve until they did. Why should UHD be any different? It might be that many people meet it with a yawn like Super Audio CD vs CD, for the vast majority a regular CD was more than good enough already but the "too much detail" should be thoroughly debunked by now.
Unfortunately the current crop of monitors is aimed mainly at the photography professional, since being able to see 8MP of a still instead of 2MP is immediately useful to anyone with a modern camera. The downside - for us that want affordable monitors at least - is that they then also put great emphasis on color accuracy and coverage, that $3k buys you a Dell UltraSharp 32 with 99% AdobeRGB coverage and factory calibration to a delta-e 2. In short, they promise you plug it in and the colors are pretty much perfect. Early this year should see the first consumerish monitors, Dell has promised a 28" inch 4K monitor for under $1000 early this year.
I expect the same will happen with 4K cameras soon, currently the state of the art is $4-5k professional/hyperentusiast cameras but a $1500-2000 high end consumer camera can't be that far off. If you can get amateur content from YouTube and professional content from Netflix in 4K, the snowball might really start rolling. It of course also wouldn't hurt if Apple offered a Retina iMac, they seem to do a better job with high DPI displays than Windows. In any case, there's really no "anti-4K" resistance like there was against 3D, it's only a matter of being worth the price. And I don't think anyone can dispute that it went way down in 2013 and the trend for 2014 looks to be the same.
The reason it can't become more stable (with a click of a button) is that not enough people use it. Deflationary and supply issues aside, there just isnt enough capitalization (with respect to other currencies) to prevent huge swings due to speculation.
This is a nice theory but was fairly thoroughly proven false during the 2008 financial crisis, it doesn't help how many investors you have when all of them stampede away from a rotten apple. Call it systemic failure, call it a house of cards, call it a domino effect but I don't see adding more speculators having much stabilizing effect because their market behavior is very, very similar.
Exactly, it's still trivially easy but it's more about intent and premeditation. It's more like the logic of a cooldown period for gun purchase, you shouldn't be able to go directly from getting fired down to the gun store, buy a gun and go postal. Same way you can't go nuts with SnapChat pictures you never saved and if you did it proves you planned to keep those pictures against your partner's will and you went to great lengths to be deceptive about it - there is really no other reason to avoid the standard screenshot which will notify the sender. So many will be unable to leak the photos, the rest will be punished harder because they've prepared to share the photos.
Also, people are lazy. If I want to send someone a photo and delete it after they've seen it (in case the phone gets lost, stolen, hacked, sold, whatever) I have to rely on the recipient to actively do it. I'm sure you all know 90%+ never change their defaults. SnapChat flips that default around, unless the recipient has done something very particular in order to keep it the default is that it will be deleted. It's a pretty big friendly hint that hey look at this it's cool, but you don't want Facebook to have a huge dossier on you. When it comes to social media you really should compare it to the alternatives...
And I think this is the point -- the Lecture-then-let-the-students-struggle-to-solve-homework-problems-never-discussed-in-class model is INCREDIBLY frustrating (...) Its a model for disaster.
It's a model for disaster in the real world too, it's just much less noticable. Even in good universities that have very bright professors you get a lot of them that are brilliant researchers and to write papers but suck at lecturing. But a prestigious professor makes the school prestigious which makes the degree prestigious which means bright people come to study there so the competition is hard and good grades a really good indicator you know your stuff. Some I even felt were counterproductive, I'd be better off studying the book for an hour than listening to the professor.
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In principle you could essentially emulate multiple monitors with one big display.
Well yes, but most that use a three screen setup angle the side screens somewhat so it'd have to be one really big, curved display not just a 21:9+ ultra wide. That would be really sweet for a games setup, multi-monitor gaming just doesn't appeal to me at all with those bezels.
I think it theory you can use the fact that c is constant to prove your absolute speed. Imagine you send a single photon down both ends of a tube and measure where they meet. You know both photons have travelled at the same speed and so covered the same distance. Imagine your ship travels at 0.5c and the tube is 100cm, in the time it takes the photons to cover 50cm each your ship will have moved 25cm so they actually meet at 75/25cm not 50/50cm as you'd expect. Get a perfect 50/50cm in three axis and you will have proved that the relative speed between you and the photons is c and thus your absolute speed must be c - c = 0.
It's probably an entirely different branch of AI, but I think Watson is impressive enough as it is. We produce tons of information and knowledge, for example everything you learn from primary school to far into college or university already exists, if you finally make research to arrive at genuinely new knowledge you're one of the few. Most of us have more of a toolbox picking the most appropriate response to a challenge.
Let's trying a gardening analogy, when the grass is tall you mow it. When there's a draught you water the lawn. When there's dog poop on the lawn you pick it up. If the soil is barren, you fertilize it. If there's leaves on the lawn you rake them away. If there's weeds growing on the lawn you cut them down. It's not revolutionary work but if you can use Watson to make a gardening robot take the appropriate action based on it's knowledge database it saves a human from doing it. Not that every little garden robot would run Watson of course, more like they're simple autonomous units which consult Watson when their garden is somehow not in the desired condition.
Granted, it wouldn't be the ultimate AI but I'd love a "service robot" who'd put dirty dishes in the dish washer, put washed dishes in the shelves, do my laundry and ironing, vacuuming and dusting, prepare dinner, switch light bulbs, water the plants, basically one that'd pick up all the routine tasks most of us still do. And no, wives don't do that anymore ;) All of that should be entirely within Watson's capability if we could just pair it with good multi-purpose droid that can make it happen in real life. Imagine the "programming interface", you ask your droid to do a task in normal English, Watson interprets it, the droid executes it. Siri on steroids :)
They would have the capability to act nobler yes, but in practice they can act more ruthlessly without fear of retaliation because no matter how much the population despises you they can't assassinate you, they can't poison your food, they can't blow you up with an IED. Perhaps in the hands of a "kind" enemy going to great lengths to avoid civilian suffering it could be better, but in the hands of an evil enemy it would be far, far worse. Think drones controlled by the same people who run Nazi death camps, the fewer you need to involve the more extreme you can be. Others build the robots and combat systems, only a few really give commands to commit war crimes and the robots obey.
Well, the first thing you should understand is that "code" and "data" are entirely human distinctions, for a computer they're all zeros and ones. Computers have an instruction pointer which points to the memory address of the next instruction it's going to perform. If an attacker can replace the contents of that memory location, it ceases control of the system. Let's take a very basic example:
Program:
1. Load file into memory from $base to $base + $size
2. Read $offset from file
3. Read $value from file
4. Write $value to position $offset in the file.
That's what the code think it does, at least. But what if there's is no bounds checking and $base + $offset > $base + $size? Now you're writing outside the file to some other place in memory, like for example where the instruction pointer is. You trick the software into writing your data to a memory location it shouldn't be and the data gets executed as machine code. Of course this is absolutely brain dead code that will write anything to anywhere in memory and I haven't discussed any of the countermeasures that make this difficult, but that's the gist of it.
The point is, I've used that poem and that method for so many years, and it's such a simple system, that it might be the one thing I'll remember first if I have amnesia.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I have a relative who suffered some brain trauma, he had to relearn parts of his vocabulary and while he'd fairly quickly relearn that an apple is an apple, any passwords, codes or combinations that only he'd known was blasted into oblivion. If that happened to me I'd lose everything on my computer since I use full disk encryption and nobody else knows the key. And it's not so easy to solve, because even if I wrote it down I might not remember that I did, where I hid it or who I gave it to for safekeeping. Essentially you need the trusted person to come to you, "I heard you hit your head pretty bad, do you still remember your password? You gave it to me for safekeeping." which narrows down the list a lot. So far I've decided to still take my chances.
I respectfully disagree. We definitely have something.
That there's research into exotic alternatives is fine, but just because they've researched flying cars and fusion reactors for 50 years doesn't mean it will ever matrialize or be usable outside a very narrow niche. If we hit the limits of copper there's no telling if any of these will materialize or just continue to be interesting, but overall uneconomical and impractical to use in consumer products. Like for example supersonic flight, it exists but all commercial passengers go on subsonic flights since the Concorde landed. You can't have exponential growth forever, not even in computers.
The founding fathers never planned to have much if anything of a professional army and the Continental Army was largely disbanded when the fighing was over. In times of need the army would be raised from members of the militia serving a short term as full time soldiers. That's the prelude everyone seems to agree what says: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" which has morphed into the National Guard. Since the armed forces of today should never exist, it's very hard to extrapolate exactly what they'd think about that.
What we do know is that they strongly feared the career military only loyal to the chain of command (like say, the English Crown) or possibly itself who could oppress the general population and that is why they wanted the militia to be a central fighting force and it should under no circumstances be disarmed. It seem clear they really the priciple and ideals of it, even as there as quite a lot of evidence that they performed poorly as military units even back then. In any case, in that respect it's already a massive failure, the armed forces are vast, full of military veterans and excrushiatingly powerful.
It's not the 18th century anymore when a man and his hunting rifle can double as a minuteman. Even if you gave people the opportunity to buy all the military gear they'd like, it'd still be bizarrely expensive gear with relatively little (legal) use in peacetime. There'd be a few more scattered gun nuts able to pull off a Waco stand-off but it'd never amount to any real military threat. There's a reason why the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq use IEDs and hide in the civilian population, if ever the military got to use their big guns they'd be toast. With small arms fire you can be a nusance, with a privately owned tank you're a walking bullseye.
The four boxes of liberty is a meme that proposes: "There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
Soap box? All their violations of civil rights are hidden under "National Security"
Ballot box? Sure, just vote for a third party....
Jury box? "War on [drugs/terror/piracy/jaywalking]" and talk of jury nullification.
No wonder Americans stick so hard to their guns. In any rate if you're comparing Europe in 1775 and Europe in 2013 you may find there's been a few changes while you were away.
I recall an interview with an airline executive many (20?) years ago. He said they heard and listened to customer complaints about the quality of air travel, in particular leg room. He said they tried all sorts of quality of flight improvements, including putting less seats in the plane, but in the end people made their choices largely on the price of the ticket, so they ended up going back to cramming as many seats in the plane they could.
"People" don't have problem with leg room, tall people do and that's really the problem. A friend of mine is around 6'4" and he's miserable in a plane seat, I'm 5'8" and usually find it just okay while someone 5'2" probably has no problem at all. If you increase leg room the tall are happy, but the normal to short go with the cheaper airline. As for really long flights, any chair is uncomfortable and to really be comfortable I'd need to be able to lie down which takes a huge amount of space. I just checked the prices on a flight I went on recently and those seats are +150% compared to an economy ticket.
There's a reason most people skimp on comfort in the air and it's because it's really, really expensive. For the extra 150% I could have upgraded my whole stay to a luxury hotel instead so I'll grumble and sulk about the horrible flight but when push comes to shove no, I'm not willing to pay the price. And particularly not on the short flight I take the most which is under an hour, one cattle class please. I'd sit on a bicycle seat for that one if it passed security.
Oh please, on an apples to apples comparison digital systems often require an order of magnitude less manpower. I just checked my bank (pure online bank) with 370.000 customers and they have 177 employees. Electronic deposit in, online banking + debit card + ATM out, who needs a brick and mortar bank? Granted a few might have stayed on as online customer support and loan application reviewers but by far most are just gone. The rest have moved on, but what's left after agriculture, manufacturing and services being automated away? More services? Also there's an increasing demand on skills, if you replace burger flippers and cab drivers with robot engineers and computer scientists I don't think everyone is cut out for the latter.
Personally I'm not very worried because I'm fairly sure I have skills that will remain employable, but a lot of quite ordinary people who do quite ordinary routine jobs should worry. People who've never really had a problem finding a job for anyone willing to do a solid day's work. I think you'll see it if they get autonomous cars working, it won't be just cab drivers it'll be truck drivers, delivery companies, mail services, pizza delivery, there's a vast number of jobs whose primary job requirement is to drive a vehicle.
You don't fight fair in life or death situations and war is the life and death of nations. Creating rules of war is like trying to settle conflicts with knuckle fights which can be mutually beneficial as both are less likely to end up dead or crippled, but either side can and will abandon them when it serves them. For example it's in the spirit of the conventions to shoot at other military personnel and leave civilians alone, while coming up with the wildest logic to defend the nuking of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it ended the war. By the same logic, we should applaud the Nazis for their bombing of London in their attempt to make Britain capitulate, if it wasn't for that "I've got nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and tears" guy who refused to surrender. Same logic isn't it? Kill the civilians, end the war, the end justifies the means.
(1) wouldn't be very practical until it applied in most of the world and without a claim of who placed it in the public domain it'd be like grabbing random things with no copyright notice off web pages. Granted, you'd probably replace the two clause with "Placed in the public domain by [name], [year]" but it wouldn't really make it any easier to show that all your code is legally licensed.
(2) would be silly since everything derives from the public domain, you're trying to narrow down a direct reproduction (slap a license on it) as something special but you'd end up in a legal quagmire over how little needs to change. You can take a BSD codebase, add 0.01% spice and sell it as your own closed source binary, the public domain would be the same.
Recently Ive switched to driving but before that it used to be bus or tram or subway and it's perfect downtime to try catching a star in Angry Birds or whatever. Mobile gaming is usable in a lot of places consoles could never reach.
At least with voting booths it's hard to connect people to votes, with online voting you need to generate some kind of token to ensure each eligible voter gets one and only one vote and it is completely impossible to verify that the system hasn't kept the link between person and token and won't link your vote to your person when you submit it. Sure you can audit it but you're suffering from the NSA problem, there's no certainty that there's not some secret backdoor/wiretap going on. For that matter, a trojan could capture your input on the client side and send a different vote to the server and you'd be none the wiser. Obviously you could solve a lot of these by giving the voters the ability to verify their vote, but then you're opening a huge can of worms.
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years.
That is a statistical fallacy, if we're getting better at treating cancer but even better at treating non-cancer diseases and injuries the relative share of cancer deaths may go up. Most of the people diagnosed with cancer are quite old and while we're getting better at emulating the body's "functions" with artificial hearts, artificial lungs, dialysis machines and so on we're not making the same kind of progress on cancer. I've had several ill and frail relatives but modern medicine kept them alive until the cancer got them, I consider it more of a success than a failure of the medical system. Eventually everybody dies from something.
True that there's many different causes and the type of cells causing the problems lead to many forms of cancer, but the basic problem with it is still the same - uncontrolled cell growth. And that is per se the problem, over time many of your cells probably go defective but as long as it's <1% of your liver and the other 99% work fine that's not really a big problem. So if you're looking to eradicate the causes that's a vast subject, but if you're just trying to find a cure then it's really one catch-all, find cells growing uncontrollably and kill/remove them. As an analogy you can break many bones in many ways, but the cure is roughly the same.
Of course, that's just curing the symptoms, if we really wanted to fix the underlying issue we'd probably need DNA-level ECC. Little nanobots running around resetting any bit flips in our DNA caused by mutations. But that's much, much further off so until we have that, statistically you can do a few things to reduce mutations but they they can't be avoided and lightning may or may not strike you. The world's longest living person Jeanne Calmant smoked from 21 to 117, no lung cancer there. Others have had little kids die from cancer. That's what you get with random bit flips in your biological computer.
The Founding Fathers were traitors to the Crown, whatever history will think of them London wanted to see them hang. Any Nazi commander who refused to take part in the Holocaust faced an execution squad. Historians might argue, but if Snowden ever sets foot on US soil he'd never see the outside of a prison cell ever again. Many people will argue that Snowden has not only exposed a runaway government agency, he's also exposed the nation's secrets to its enemies. That despite the best of intentions, you can't have people running around exposing classified documents as they feel like. Even those who like the message would kill the messenger.
The DCI spec won't change because it's a cinema standard to protect cinema content, but there's no reason for consumer level gear to follow it. Whether you have a 16:9 (HDTV), 17:9 (DCI) or 21:9 (ultra wide) ratio screen it should play consumer movies just fine. The only question is if the delivery system will have a 17:9 version of the movie, it depends on how they've reframed the movie. If you could take the 3840x2160 stream and add a 256x2160 slice left/right you could have "dual format" discs that'd give you the full 4K DCI picture, assuming you have a 17:9 screen. That would be rather neat.
However, most consumers will get 16:9 screens to avoid black bars/stretching on HDTV and BluRays, it'd just be for niche movie buffs who really want those last pixels and will buy a 17:9 screen to get it. It's not ever going to become a mainstream resolution when 16:9 is so entrenched as it is now.
Don't get your hopes up too high because I've heard the same all the way back to the VP3-based Theora and every version since. It's the escape hatch/emergency break to keep H.264/HEVC from abusing their near monopoly but in reality nobody seems to want to abandon them, not even Google. Kind of like how VC-1 is in the BluRay standard and in every player but 99% of recent discs use H.264. Even Firefox finally bit the bullet in October this year and said they'd use Cisco's H.264 blob on platforms that don't have native support rather than try fighting the windmills any longer, effectively waving the white flag.
Of course you could claim it'll be different next generation, that VP9 will be the new H.264 and HEVC the sideshow but I'd call you delusional. Despite the long list of VP9 supporters they're all HEVC backers too and that list is even longer, quite soon I expect native HEVC cameras to appear (there are already a few security cameras, but no "normal" ones) and while Google might have some clout on the Internet and mobile devices it's Sony, Canon, Panasonic, JVC and so on who still set the trends in video capture. Show me Google pushing hard for a VP9-reconding Android phone and I might change my mind, but I think it's just blustering like how they were supposed to remove native H.264 support from Chrome but quietly backed away.
And with that resolution you can see the layers of pancake makeup on your favourite actors and actresses, plus all that spitting during sports events in astounding clarity.
You're like an echo from 15 years ago when 1920x1080 was to replace NTSC 640x480, both HD porn and HD sports looks great despite the naysaying. Movies and TV too, if the costumes, props, backdrops or special effects no longer looked real they simply had to improve until they did. Why should UHD be any different? It might be that many people meet it with a yawn like Super Audio CD vs CD, for the vast majority a regular CD was more than good enough already but the "too much detail" should be thoroughly debunked by now.
Unfortunately the current crop of monitors is aimed mainly at the photography professional, since being able to see 8MP of a still instead of 2MP is immediately useful to anyone with a modern camera. The downside - for us that want affordable monitors at least - is that they then also put great emphasis on color accuracy and coverage, that $3k buys you a Dell UltraSharp 32 with 99% AdobeRGB coverage and factory calibration to a delta-e 2. In short, they promise you plug it in and the colors are pretty much perfect. Early this year should see the first consumerish monitors, Dell has promised a 28" inch 4K monitor for under $1000 early this year.
I expect the same will happen with 4K cameras soon, currently the state of the art is $4-5k professional/hyperentusiast cameras but a $1500-2000 high end consumer camera can't be that far off. If you can get amateur content from YouTube and professional content from Netflix in 4K, the snowball might really start rolling. It of course also wouldn't hurt if Apple offered a Retina iMac, they seem to do a better job with high DPI displays than Windows. In any case, there's really no "anti-4K" resistance like there was against 3D, it's only a matter of being worth the price. And I don't think anyone can dispute that it went way down in 2013 and the trend for 2014 looks to be the same.
The reason it can't become more stable (with a click of a button) is that not enough people use it. Deflationary and supply issues aside, there just isnt enough capitalization (with respect to other currencies) to prevent huge swings due to speculation.
This is a nice theory but was fairly thoroughly proven false during the 2008 financial crisis, it doesn't help how many investors you have when all of them stampede away from a rotten apple. Call it systemic failure, call it a house of cards, call it a domino effect but I don't see adding more speculators having much stabilizing effect because their market behavior is very, very similar.
Exactly, it's still trivially easy but it's more about intent and premeditation. It's more like the logic of a cooldown period for gun purchase, you shouldn't be able to go directly from getting fired down to the gun store, buy a gun and go postal. Same way you can't go nuts with SnapChat pictures you never saved and if you did it proves you planned to keep those pictures against your partner's will and you went to great lengths to be deceptive about it - there is really no other reason to avoid the standard screenshot which will notify the sender. So many will be unable to leak the photos, the rest will be punished harder because they've prepared to share the photos.
Also, people are lazy. If I want to send someone a photo and delete it after they've seen it (in case the phone gets lost, stolen, hacked, sold, whatever) I have to rely on the recipient to actively do it. I'm sure you all know 90%+ never change their defaults. SnapChat flips that default around, unless the recipient has done something very particular in order to keep it the default is that it will be deleted. It's a pretty big friendly hint that hey look at this it's cool, but you don't want Facebook to have a huge dossier on you. When it comes to social media you really should compare it to the alternatives...
And I think this is the point -- the Lecture-then-let-the-students-struggle-to-solve-homework-problems-never-discussed-in-class model is INCREDIBLY frustrating (...) Its a model for disaster.
It's a model for disaster in the real world too, it's just much less noticable. Even in good universities that have very bright professors you get a lot of them that are brilliant researchers and to write papers but suck at lecturing. But a prestigious professor makes the school prestigious which makes the degree prestigious which means bright people come to study there so the competition is hard and good grades a really good indicator you know your stuff. Some I even felt were counterproductive, I'd be better off studying the book for an hour than listening to the professor.