8k won't be ready for anything any time soon. HDMI 2.0 doesn't even support 8k 30Hz, and few TVs have Displayport. 4k Blurays are taking their time arriving to market, and 50GB arguably won't be enough for 8k without a codec upgrade which would itself require a new disc player. What portion of existing bluray players have old HDMI ports or processors that can't handle 4k content? It's not like 4k TVs are high-margin items anymore -- I saw a nice 50" one at Walmart for $699 a few weeks ago, and there were cheaper ones online. The price has hit rock bottom before there's even the demand for them. Unlike 4k cameras, there are only a couple prototypes of 8k cameras, so almost all content will be rendered CG for a while.
I'd read countless arguments on Slashdot that human eyes can't discern resolution higher than 1080p in a 50" TV over 10 feet or so, before I actually watched a demo 4k TV running 4k content, for about 15 minutes. If you have a 50" TV in your bedroom, 5 feet away from where you're sitting, you can definitely notice a huge improvement in detail. I stepped about 15 feet away and in most scenes it was still usually an obvious, substantial improvement over 1080p. An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit. I seem to recall when the Apple retina display claims first came out, a scientist mentioned that humans' actual acuity was about 50% better than what Apple was claiming. It's also worth noting that while a single still retina image may be at a certain DPI, there are psychovisual effects (like depth perception) that can improve the resolution inside the brain, beyond what one retina picks up at one time. The eyes also saccade all the time, which I seem to recall can be interpolated to improve resolution.
Maybe they should, you know, NOT launch massive amounts of child abuse, inflicted by database. That sounds pretty bad. Wait, maybe I parsed this wrong.
They haven't announced an Assassin's Creed game for next year, yet. Hopefully they'll learn from their mistake, and delay it until fall 2016. That'd give them time to fix up the performance issues and myriad glitches with the updated engine. Maybe at the same time they'll rethink the idea of the microtransaction-unlocked chests.
I, for one, am certain that the only thing standing between Africa and prosperity is 4k cat videos. And/or pornography. Support the diaspora of your neocolonialist hegemony today!
The summary implies (by omission) that congestion for Comcast customers hasn't improved since Netflix paid off Comcast. What're they getting for their money?
Sure, I'll cancel my broadband subscription with the local monopoly and go back to dialup. But who do they get their upstream bandwidth from? At&t, Verizon, Time Warner or Comcast. Doh!
I agree, I should've made an addendum that politicians may make laws that are primarily intended to increase the security or safety of a privileged few.
Jefferson said lots of great things about freedom, too, but quickly became corrupt once he became president. It's easy to be an idealist when you don't have power.
All laws involve giving up freedom to do a certain thing, usually in exchange for security or safety for the society. Other laws, particularly regulations, ensure justice via making society more fair; for example the USA's Civil Rights Act prohibits a variety of forms of discrimination. The problem is that our overlords use propaganda to convince the plebes that a broad selectively-enforced law is necessary when a narrow strictly-enforced law would lead to more security for the society. Being secure in your belief that you won't be imprisoned falsely, or under a law that wasn't intended or reasonable to apply to your situation, is also an important aspect of society's security.
Now all they need are robotic gazelles. Its silent electric motor lets it sneak up on its prey on the robo-savannah, consuming its delicious battery juices so it can live another day.
Nintendo took the legally safe option by recommending children under 7 not use the 3DS' 3d mode, although research wasn't conclusive that it could cause Lazy Eye. Palmer Luckey (CEO of Oculus) actually directly responded to a query about this. I seem to recall him saying that it could eventually be made safe for children. The 3DS uses an adjustable virtual inter-pupillary distance (IPD) which is most likely set different from your real IPD. In contrast, the Oculus Rift is calibrated to use your real IPD, and your eyes focus at infinity while using it. Given that, the Rift should be far less likely to cause Strabismus.
There's been little point in developing those technologies thus far, though. Until VR software exists where the programmers intend to adopt technologies which maximize the immersion of the player, and players are in a mindset where they want their immersion to be maximized, it won't happen. Haptics and motion tech are reasonably far along, sound is nearly there, taste is pretty much there, but smell is going to be trouble with current tech though. According to many people who have used the Rift, it subjectively 'feels' like you're in there, even if some senses contradict the world presented.
If they decided to eat the fine and get sucked dry, they could spend every last dying breath telling everyone on the internet how injust this was. It would've gone on long enough for something to happen.
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments.
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments. In practice, this means that form-letters done via the EFF website etc. are tossed out, while lawyer-produced walls of text that read like Congressional legal pronouncements get serious consideration. Almost always, the latter are produced by big businesses with lots of money to spend on lawyers to ensure the decision goes in the direction of greater profits for themselves.
The only way to undermine this is for organizations like the EFF, and individuals, to gather and present as much easily-digestible data as possible and edit and refine their message until it's intelligible and palatable to a politician. Mindless ranting is immediately dismissed as uninformed. Probably only a dozen or so of these 1.7 million messages will actually be read by a decision-maker.
Fax is the best medium to contact your agencies with, as it tends to be printed and read by a human, rather than a keyword-search-delete-all like can be done for email ("delete all emails containing superlatives"). Also, 1.7 million sounds alot bigger when pushcarts full of paper can be wheeled into their office, rather than the messages easily fitting on a disc or flash drive. I presume they don't tend to auto-OCR faxes.
One side-effect of this is that people who eat this fish will consume more mercury, PCBs and other harmful substances compared to if they ate the native (potentially restricted-catch) fish. This is due to the northern snakehead consuming poisons in the water plus toxins accumulated in the flesh of their prey. Humans who eat this fish (or any predatory fish) would thus consume more toxins than if they ate a fish (like much of its prey likely is) that only eats primary producers.
The obvious solution involves Needle Snakes. Seriously though, how much can we interfere with nature to ensure some animals' survival, and continue to call it 'nature' with a straight face? Eventually, the figurative and literal cage bars make it indistinguishable from captivity. Isn't there a point where we should let evolution do its thing? I know that often leads to extinction, but if we're only keeping wild animals alive so we can eat their tasty flesh, then we may as well keep enough to eat captive.
Just what I want -- for my NSA-backdoored, malware-infested, free-apps-spying-on-me smart device to ALSO be able to exfiltrate my vital signs. You think GPS location and when you use your device tells alot about your life habits, wait until heartrate and blood pressure are available. Advertisers would LOVE this data: "look, our ad is exciting to this person". Worse, they could also detect heart conditions and uniquely identify the person wearing the earbuds. Think about that for a second. Instead of just assuming that this iPhone was registered by person X so it's probably being used by that person, it'd be able to know if someone's borrowing it (and using a cloud data lookup, by whom.) Wait until the NSA ("we kill people based on metadata") starts using vital sign 'fingerprints' and bombing them with no verification.
With designer drugs, scientists can't agree on what exactly a 'drug analogue' means, so an analogue law would be unenforceable. All drugs invented after, say, 1950 without FDA approval could be banned; but then trade of the drug wouldn't be prosecutable until it were proven that it's artificial and invented; if it were naturally occurring (say, from Psilocybin mushrooms) then it can only be discovered and not invented. The drug scheduling works as a blacklist, but could be reworked to only allow whitelisted drugs.
A law targeting artificially-created drugs or GMO-created drugs would be unenforceable. Many pharmaceuticals are mass-produced nowadays with genetically-engineered organisms (fungi, often) that secrete the target chemical. There's no way to always distinguish a GMO from a crypto-organism, or in other words, an artificially-created drug factory from a naturally-occurring drug factory. Therefore, there'd be no way to prove that a drug was made artificially rather than naturally. So White-listing could still stop trade, but that'd only work until...
Homebrew. As genetic modification tech gets cheaper and easier to use, there will be cheap DIY kits to make your own designer drugs and the organisms to produce them. Later, easily-obtainable underground apps will help you design drugs with certain target effects, based on (but sufficiently modified from) existing recreational drug molecules. Once the international effort to use supercomputers to model the human body's physiology gains open access, people can submit potential molecules to the system and see their effects (and side-effects). No 30-year studies with methodology errors mixed with decades of FUD and hand-wringing, just the truth in black and white for everyone to see. New molecules that aren't simply modified versions of existing chemicals can be brute-forced that have certain effects, avoiding any existing analogue laws. This will enable an explosion in the effectiveness and safety of designer drugs, as there's an uncomfortable (to some) overlap with the effects of medicinal pharmaceuticals, leading to the end of support for drug restrictions.
If the public/private key pair is created at account creation, then people accustomed to everything being in the cloud will frequently forget to backup their private key (which isn't stored on any central server). A common occurrence will be "Hey Alice, it's Bob. I lost my private key so this is my new account now." Potentially, Bob is in jail and a fed is masquerading as him.
Also from my experience with DHT, it doesn't work unless you already know an IP running the protocol -- who you usually find through, yes, a centralized server. If that server were TOR-based it might work, but then that raises the question of what functionality is added by this protocol that a messaging program running thru TOR doesn't offer. Having Mixmaster-style message queueing in addition to onion routing would offer improved resistance to topology attacks as well. I'm referring to TOR's hidden services protocol, by the way, rather than the standard web proxy where an unencrypted message would be sent to a messaging server after several encrypted hops.
Presumably this water will need to be accessed via drilling and pumping the water. Imagine the horrors if there were a water spill, contaminating all that ocean water with its freshness!
The fear comes from propaganda penned by the elite. The elite that control America's politics and economy are constantly afraid of the Sword of Damocles -- an angry mob of Americans calling for their blood for their failure to do something or other. Fifty years ago it was a fear of a communist revolt, where the people take away their power if not their life. Now it's a fear of some crisis happening and being seen as not having done enough to prevent it. As a result, politicians want to be seen as "doing something", even if what they're doing is ineffective or counterproductive. If there's supposedly a "drug crisis", politicians will pass laws to be seen as "tough on drugs". It works the same for terrorism or any other societal ill, real or perceived. Opportunistic politicians, as opposed to being afraid, turn this around and sponsor a bill, make a story and pretend as if there's a real problem, in order to gain popularity or power; this is the malice on the flipside of the former problem's ignorance.
Despite most Americans being more interested in money than politics, big business and finance tend to get less public scrutiny than government. These sectors are equally afraid of the people though: witness how quickly they used government resources and propaganda to cause the Occupy movement to lose steam.
Slashdot Mirror
8k won't be ready for anything any time soon. HDMI 2.0 doesn't even support 8k 30Hz, and few TVs have Displayport. 4k Blurays are taking their time arriving to market, and 50GB arguably won't be enough for 8k without a codec upgrade which would itself require a new disc player. What portion of existing bluray players have old HDMI ports or processors that can't handle 4k content? It's not like 4k TVs are high-margin items anymore -- I saw a nice 50" one at Walmart for $699 a few weeks ago, and there were cheaper ones online. The price has hit rock bottom before there's even the demand for them. Unlike 4k cameras, there are only a couple prototypes of 8k cameras, so almost all content will be rendered CG for a while.
I'd read countless arguments on Slashdot that human eyes can't discern resolution higher than 1080p in a 50" TV over 10 feet or so, before I actually watched a demo 4k TV running 4k content, for about 15 minutes. If you have a 50" TV in your bedroom, 5 feet away from where you're sitting, you can definitely notice a huge improvement in detail. I stepped about 15 feet away and in most scenes it was still usually an obvious, substantial improvement over 1080p.
An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit. I seem to recall when the Apple retina display claims first came out, a scientist mentioned that humans' actual acuity was about 50% better than what Apple was claiming. It's also worth noting that while a single still retina image may be at a certain DPI, there are psychovisual effects (like depth perception) that can improve the resolution inside the brain, beyond what one retina picks up at one time. The eyes also saccade all the time, which I seem to recall can be interpolated to improve resolution.
Maybe they should, you know, NOT launch massive amounts of child abuse, inflicted by database. That sounds pretty bad.
Wait, maybe I parsed this wrong.
They haven't announced an Assassin's Creed game for next year, yet. Hopefully they'll learn from their mistake, and delay it until fall 2016. That'd give them time to fix up the performance issues and myriad glitches with the updated engine. Maybe at the same time they'll rethink the idea of the microtransaction-unlocked chests.
I, for one, am certain that the only thing standing between Africa and prosperity is 4k cat videos. And/or pornography. Support the diaspora of your neocolonialist hegemony today!
The summary implies (by omission) that congestion for Comcast customers hasn't improved since Netflix paid off Comcast. What're they getting for their money?
Sure, I'll cancel my broadband subscription with the local monopoly and go back to dialup. But who do they get their upstream bandwidth from? At&t, Verizon, Time Warner or Comcast. Doh!
I agree, I should've made an addendum that politicians may make laws that are primarily intended to increase the security or safety of a privileged few.
Jefferson said lots of great things about freedom, too, but quickly became corrupt once he became president. It's easy to be an idealist when you don't have power.
All laws involve giving up freedom to do a certain thing, usually in exchange for security or safety for the society. Other laws, particularly regulations, ensure justice via making society more fair; for example the USA's Civil Rights Act prohibits a variety of forms of discrimination. The problem is that our overlords use propaganda to convince the plebes that a broad selectively-enforced law is necessary when a narrow strictly-enforced law would lead to more security for the society. Being secure in your belief that you won't be imprisoned falsely, or under a law that wasn't intended or reasonable to apply to your situation, is also an important aspect of society's security.
Now all they need are robotic gazelles. Its silent electric motor lets it sneak up on its prey on the robo-savannah, consuming its delicious battery juices so it can live another day.
Nintendo took the legally safe option by recommending children under 7 not use the 3DS' 3d mode, although research wasn't conclusive that it could cause Lazy Eye. Palmer Luckey (CEO of Oculus) actually directly responded to a query about this. I seem to recall him saying that it could eventually be made safe for children. The 3DS uses an adjustable virtual inter-pupillary distance (IPD) which is most likely set different from your real IPD. In contrast, the Oculus Rift is calibrated to use your real IPD, and your eyes focus at infinity while using it. Given that, the Rift should be far less likely to cause Strabismus.
There's been little point in developing those technologies thus far, though. Until VR software exists where the programmers intend to adopt technologies which maximize the immersion of the player, and players are in a mindset where they want their immersion to be maximized, it won't happen. Haptics and motion tech are reasonably far along, sound is nearly there, taste is pretty much there, but smell is going to be trouble with current tech though. According to many people who have used the Rift, it subjectively 'feels' like you're in there, even if some senses contradict the world presented.
If they decided to eat the fine and get sucked dry, they could spend every last dying breath telling everyone on the internet how injust this was. It would've gone on long enough for something to happen.
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments. In practice, this means that form-letters done via the EFF website etc. are tossed out, while lawyer-produced walls of text that read like Congressional legal pronouncements get serious consideration. Almost always, the latter are produced by big businesses with lots of money to spend on lawyers to ensure the decision goes in the direction of greater profits for themselves.
The only way to undermine this is for organizations like the EFF, and individuals, to gather and present as much easily-digestible data as possible and edit and refine their message until it's intelligible and palatable to a politician. Mindless ranting is immediately dismissed as uninformed. Probably only a dozen or so of these 1.7 million messages will actually be read by a decision-maker.
Fax is the best medium to contact your agencies with, as it tends to be printed and read by a human, rather than a keyword-search-delete-all like can be done for email ("delete all emails containing superlatives"). Also, 1.7 million sounds alot bigger when pushcarts full of paper can be wheeled into their office, rather than the messages easily fitting on a disc or flash drive. I presume they don't tend to auto-OCR faxes.
One side-effect of this is that people who eat this fish will consume more mercury, PCBs and other harmful substances compared to if they ate the native (potentially restricted-catch) fish. This is due to the northern snakehead consuming poisons in the water plus toxins accumulated in the flesh of their prey. Humans who eat this fish (or any predatory fish) would thus consume more toxins than if they ate a fish (like much of its prey likely is) that only eats primary producers.
The obvious solution involves Needle Snakes.
Seriously though, how much can we interfere with nature to ensure some animals' survival, and continue to call it 'nature' with a straight face? Eventually, the figurative and literal cage bars make it indistinguishable from captivity. Isn't there a point where we should let evolution do its thing? I know that often leads to extinction, but if we're only keeping wild animals alive so we can eat their tasty flesh, then we may as well keep enough to eat captive.
This will create a Sharknado, won't it?
They tend to bump into the same walls repeatedly before learning they're there and proceeding to bump into the adjacent wall.
Just what I want -- for my NSA-backdoored, malware-infested, free-apps-spying-on-me smart device to ALSO be able to exfiltrate my vital signs. You think GPS location and when you use your device tells alot about your life habits, wait until heartrate and blood pressure are available. Advertisers would LOVE this data: "look, our ad is exciting to this person". Worse, they could also detect heart conditions and uniquely identify the person wearing the earbuds. Think about that for a second. Instead of just assuming that this iPhone was registered by person X so it's probably being used by that person, it'd be able to know if someone's borrowing it (and using a cloud data lookup, by whom.) Wait until the NSA ("we kill people based on metadata") starts using vital sign 'fingerprints' and bombing them with no verification.
for the first time in British legal history in an unprecedented departure from the principles of open justice
Wrong
With designer drugs, scientists can't agree on what exactly a 'drug analogue' means, so an analogue law would be unenforceable. All drugs invented after, say, 1950 without FDA approval could be banned; but then trade of the drug wouldn't be prosecutable until it were proven that it's artificial and invented; if it were naturally occurring (say, from Psilocybin mushrooms) then it can only be discovered and not invented. The drug scheduling works as a blacklist, but could be reworked to only allow whitelisted drugs.
A law targeting artificially-created drugs or GMO-created drugs would be unenforceable. Many pharmaceuticals are mass-produced nowadays with genetically-engineered organisms (fungi, often) that secrete the target chemical. There's no way to always distinguish a GMO from a crypto-organism, or in other words, an artificially-created drug factory from a naturally-occurring drug factory. Therefore, there'd be no way to prove that a drug was made artificially rather than naturally. So White-listing could still stop trade, but that'd only work until...
Homebrew. As genetic modification tech gets cheaper and easier to use, there will be cheap DIY kits to make your own designer drugs and the organisms to produce them. Later, easily-obtainable underground apps will help you design drugs with certain target effects, based on (but sufficiently modified from) existing recreational drug molecules. Once the international effort to use supercomputers to model the human body's physiology gains open access, people can submit potential molecules to the system and see their effects (and side-effects). No 30-year studies with methodology errors mixed with decades of FUD and hand-wringing, just the truth in black and white for everyone to see. New molecules that aren't simply modified versions of existing chemicals can be brute-forced that have certain effects, avoiding any existing analogue laws. This will enable an explosion in the effectiveness and safety of designer drugs, as there's an uncomfortable (to some) overlap with the effects of medicinal pharmaceuticals, leading to the end of support for drug restrictions.
If the public/private key pair is created at account creation, then people accustomed to everything being in the cloud will frequently forget to backup their private key (which isn't stored on any central server). A common occurrence will be "Hey Alice, it's Bob. I lost my private key so this is my new account now." Potentially, Bob is in jail and a fed is masquerading as him.
Also from my experience with DHT, it doesn't work unless you already know an IP running the protocol -- who you usually find through, yes, a centralized server. If that server were TOR-based it might work, but then that raises the question of what functionality is added by this protocol that a messaging program running thru TOR doesn't offer. Having Mixmaster-style message queueing in addition to onion routing would offer improved resistance to topology attacks as well. I'm referring to TOR's hidden services protocol, by the way, rather than the standard web proxy where an unencrypted message would be sent to a messaging server after several encrypted hops.
Presumably this water will need to be accessed via drilling and pumping the water. Imagine the horrors if there were a water spill, contaminating all that ocean water with its freshness!
The fear comes from propaganda penned by the elite. The elite that control America's politics and economy are constantly afraid of the Sword of Damocles -- an angry mob of Americans calling for their blood for their failure to do something or other. Fifty years ago it was a fear of a communist revolt, where the people take away their power if not their life. Now it's a fear of some crisis happening and being seen as not having done enough to prevent it. As a result, politicians want to be seen as "doing something", even if what they're doing is ineffective or counterproductive. If there's supposedly a "drug crisis", politicians will pass laws to be seen as "tough on drugs". It works the same for terrorism or any other societal ill, real or perceived. Opportunistic politicians, as opposed to being afraid, turn this around and sponsor a bill, make a story and pretend as if there's a real problem, in order to gain popularity or power; this is the malice on the flipside of the former problem's ignorance.
Despite most Americans being more interested in money than politics, big business and finance tend to get less public scrutiny than government. These sectors are equally afraid of the people though: witness how quickly they used government resources and propaganda to cause the Occupy movement to lose steam.
The Mars rocks will be brought back, at astronomical speeds, straight to the NASA budgeting subcommittee.