P300 is typically 300ms (thus the name), and the technique I was referring to uses two responses to generate a match (it flashes rows and columns so you need an X and Y response). 600ms or thereabouts is thus the time to beat. It's not lightning fast - nothing like typing - but a whole hell of a lot better than the reference methods that they're referring to. They're solving a brain-computer interface problem that was solved 10 years ago, and that was made irrelevant several years ago when cheap neural interfaces started hitting the commercial commodity market.
Of course this is all relying on TFA, which could be completely misrepresenting their research given the general high quality of modern science journalism.
Also, earlier kidding aside, the article is probably completely missing the point. It is likely that the actual purpose of the research is NOT to develop the current prototype's functionality. It is more likely that it is exploring the ability to take, reduce, and analyze data of this type. The fact that you can build (buy off-the-shelf for peanuts) a BCI whose functionality is equal to or greater than their prototype using less invasive methods is probably completely beside the point.
It uses "not new" technology to select words with 50% accuracy from a list such as "yes" and "no"...really. (Okay, it hits 90% accuracy with only two items and goes down to 48% with 10.)
In other news, you can use P300 responses picked up with a $300 off-the-shelf over-the-hair EEG receiver to select from a grid of visual stimuli at a pretty good rate and with something like 95%+ accuracy (presumably nearly 100% with the sort of training that goes into touchscreen or voice activated interfaces). Those items can be letters, words, pictures...whatever. Anything quickly recognizable. Congrats guys, you just invented a crappy version of something I can buy for $300 which requires cutting open the person's skull and implanting things on the surface of their brain.
FYI, to whoever funded this, please give the lab I work at the grant monies next time. We'll make much better use of it.
That is some Odysseus-grade cunning right there. You've done your species proud. Please have lots of grandkids and then tell them about this repeatedly.
They're hypothetically faster in the case of quantum-quantum operations since they're analog with hypothetically infinite data density (where a binary bit stores a 0 or a 1, a qbit stores any value between 0 and 1). But without improved ways to interface with this, it's of fairly limited use. Nature simulates itself with perfect fidelity, which is not really of help to us unless we can find a reliable way to reduce the answer to something consistent and human-understandable.
It's true but potentially misleading to say that quantum computers are not supercomputers...for the simple reason that they operate on a completely different principle. The effective power of an ideal quantum computer for applications to which it is well-suited would be several orders of magnitude better, but once this gets out of the lab we will probably be looking at a hybrid approach rather than a complete transition which leaves the old approach behind.
Quantum encryption is an any-time-now technology (I believe it has actually been implemented on a test scale in military / industrial / banking applications). Quantum computing is a "20 years" technology - scientist speak for "we can see it just over the horizon" which tends to evaluate to somewhere between 10 years and 100 or more. If you want to get a really hard look at the future of computing, try looking back twenty years. Man without time machine is doomed to make wild guesses about future.
Incidentally, I am posting this from a "quantum computer" - modern solid state physics relies heavily on quantum mechanics.
It has impact, no argument. But I'm talking about it more in the context of what the brain goes through than what the mind goes through, if that makes sense. Any input you can sense can have input, but that doesn't mean the brain will consider the input to be real or natural in the sense that it matches up to the patterns it has evolved to expect.
By the way, you should really consider not allowing your 7 year old daughter to view 3D yet. Below the age of about 10 or 11, stereoscopic displays can cause developmental impairment because of the mixed messages it sends the brain. Older, you just risk headaches and nausea...younger, and it can permanently affect the brain.
Linear polarization is a terrible approach. If your head is rotated from vertical at all, the intended image becomes attenuated. Simultaneously, you start getting crosstalk from the unintended / opposite-eye image.
Circular polarization works much better. On the other hand, it is still vulnerable to non-ideal viewing positions. The problem is that the polarized light is rotating about an axis. If you're dead on that axis, everything is just dandy. But there's no way to be on axis for the entire screen unless you're eye is at the focal point of the projection system. Otherwise, you're off axis, which leads to some attenuation in the brightness. Your viewing axis isn't equal to the polarization axis. Fortunately, crosstalk is a very minor problem in comparison to linear polarization, and the viewer's distance from the screen means that the angle of deviation is kept to a reasonably low figure. Try sitting in a side seat next time you're in a 3D movie, or even just turning your head a bit to the side instead of looking directly at the screen - you'll see.
Your premise is false. If the condition can be completely addressed through corrective eyewear, it shouldn't interfere at all with your ability to use any current 3D display technology.
You would need filter glasses which go in front of your prescription eyewear for filter-based stereoscopy. This approach is currently the most common, coming in shutter and polarization varieties. There have been numerous designs to this effect for anti-brightness and anti-UV "sunglasses" which attach to or sit over prescription eyewear for eons now - the same principle applies. It may be awkward, but it works. ADA probably requires theaters to make such available beside the normal-fit filter glasses. You could also apply permanent polarized filters to your glasses provided that you will only encounter one polarization configuration which you know in advance (simultaneously serving the more traditional functions of polarized glasses).
You should be able to view autostereoscopic (i.e. "no glasses") 3D displays without any special accommodation.
It's bad for young children, roughly 10 and under, because the mixed visual cues can cause developmental impairment. It shouldn't be harmful for adults beyond the tendency to induce simulator sickness.
3D is the future...but it's not here yet.
on
The Joke Known As 3D TV
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Accommodative input is the future. Period. We will eventually have technology which allows us to adapt content to the human receiver. This is not in dispute. Presentation and interaction methods which use these techniques well will dominate over those that don't. You can already see examples of this. The experience of watching a movie on a large theater screen is vastly different from watching it on a cheap 19" TV. Cruddy audio equipment doesn't have the same impact as a live performance. A real book is much easier to become absorbed in than the same content on most e-readers. Video games with poor camera behavior and non-intuitive controls aren't as fun to play. Psychologists and technologists have studied the hell out of it - immersion, emotional design, adaptive interfaces...they make up new names for different aspects of the problem almost every week. But for the most part, this is the future. There is a lot of promise, but for the most part we have to settle for emulating "real" versus contrived input and interaction to some functional level of fidelity which we can tolerate in order to pick up additional functionality (often portability) which the technological approach enables. Other cases do work better, but only if you're talking about expensive research prototypes which address a single aspect of a broader frontier.
The problem is that this leads to the mistaken assumption that our current implementations are accurate representations of their eventual successors. In most cases, they're not. 3D is probably one of the biggest culprits here. It's too easy to go "hey look, 3D displays - it's just like looking at real objects!"...but that's not really it. We've managed to come up with a number of technologies which give decent approximations of several depth cues beyond those available in a static 2D image (e.g. shadows, object occlusion, perspective methods). This is wonderful. But it's important to keep one point in mind, a point which is constantly overlooked.
All current 3D display technology falls well short of producing fully "believable" input.
Yeah. And that's setting aside the whole "movie producers keep producing trashy fake 3D pictures to raise ticket prices" issue - which is a major complication of itself. If you use good current 3D hardware to display a well-made 3D picture which was shot for 3D and where the medium was used intelligently...it will still degrade the image quality over 2D, people will still get simulator sickness, and a fairly large slice of your audience will even still see it in 2D.
The first problem, degradation, can be minimized through special screens and top-end equipment, but you can't really eliminate it since there it provides a much more complex problem compared to doing the same thing in 2D with the same grade of equipment - or worse (and more realistically), the same budget. This is orders of magnitude worse if you want your 3D installation to be a theater setting since you have to serve many people sitting at many distances and viewing angles, each of whom is using different eyes and different brains to process the input. Honestly, with any existing technology, the only thing you can do in a 3D theater is try to minimize how bad it is and minimize how much it costs you to set up. There is no good solution here. Polarized light projection is really the best way...but it's quite vulnerable to off-axis viewing. Alternating frame projection is better in that sense - off-axis problems are comparatively minor - but the headsets are quite expensive (polarized glasses can be effectively disposable) and many viewers will perceive constant flickering which is annoying at best but more likely a quick trigger for simulator sickness (above the already inherent risk with 3D from conflicting visual cues).
The second and third problems are more or less related. The human visual system relies on a large set of visual cues to create a 3D model of your environment, and stereoscopy is only one factor. Admittedly, it's a fairly major factor, and a
For that matter, the definition of bittorrent use as copyright infringement is a little contrived itself. Are you making a copy, or receiving one after consenting to have one be made? And is it really a copy at all? If I duplicate the data from the completed download on my own hard drive 100 times...how many copies do I really have? And why is it substantially different from loaning a DVD to your buddy, or showing it while you're throwing a party?
The ethics are a bit ambiguous because we're a bit new to the potential scenarios enabled by modern technology. The law is likewise ambiguous (except where lobbying over the last ten years or so has changed it). The big IP owners (mostly not creators) have been taking advantage of this to set ethics through propaganda and to set law through lobbying and one-sided big corp vs. individual legal maneuvers. Well, I'm all for the right of someone who worked hard on a creative work to make a living off of it. But I only see one side here which is clearly behaving unethically. Downloading content you could have paid for is at least a bit grey...downloading content you couldn't have, probably less so, especially if you make a habit of purchasing your favorites once you have the opportunity. (This additionally makes the policy of rewarding good content and abstaining from rewarding the mediocre tripe which makes up the bulk of today's market...)
Likewise, the only clear lawbreaking going on is in the sense that one side is exploiting it for things it was never intended to be used for. C'mon, mass lawsuits against more-or-less defenseless individuals whose only choice is how much of a mess you're going to make of their life and finances and for how long? That's really supposed to be within the scope of the law? Really? I grok the whole anti-download thing, even if I don't think it's practically going to work that way in the end. Models are going to have to change. You have to adapt when the fundamental situation has changed or you will eventually have to face the consequences. But it's really, really hard to empathize with people complaining about individuals doing something questionably ethical when the accuser is doing something wildly unethical, immoral, and abusive of the very legal system which they're using to prop up their extortionist policy.
Also, it occurs to me that if they don't have a warrant allowing them to install the device, they have no legal standing to prevent me from removing the device.
Aside from using a technological tracker, this doesn't seem like it's any more an infringement of privacy than simply having the police follow you everywhere you go. Which they also do not need a warrant to do. Now, to attach a tracker to a car sitting in a driveway would be trespassing... unless the car was parked on a public street, or inside a garage.
Yes, of course it's different from just following somebody. But that's an argument which people will try to use to defend this.
This sort of ethical issue often arises when it is possible to move a task from something done by an individual to something done en masse by a machine. The most immediate problems are those of accountability and scale. Who is doing the act? How many times can the act be done?
Following someone around is an ethically questionable act to begin with since the presumption is that they are innocent until it is proven otherwise. By questionable, I mean that there are numerous valid arguments for either side. We often take this to mean that the action is also excusable provided that the potential harm is carefully limited and matters aren't taken to the stage that they can be clearly construed as harassment and have no solid justification. If I hand the job off to a computer, it is being done by a list, by a machine. There is no immediate ethical accountability. It can be done countless times, there is no practical manpower restriction. These two things combined make abuses almost inevitable - someone might do something wrong, so we might as well monitor them too, after all it doesn't take much extra work to make that list a little longer!
You get this same sort of issue moderately often with computers. There are practical limits on what you can do without significant effort in the way of violating privacy on an individual level, but there are very few limits when you start using computers.
There's an important distinction here which isn't mentioned above.
From the look of it, they didn't declare that it's explicitly allowed by law, they only declared that it's not prohibited by law under the fourth amendment. IANAL, but that sounds like we're in a much better situation in terms of fighting this than we could be.
Gamers will not play a game with anything less than brilliant graphics.
Nintendo would probably beg to differ with you, but they're too busy rolling in piles of cash.
A game can be visually compelling without being photorealistic or whatever, it's just that photorealism is easier to buy than creativity. In most cases, this leads to rather predictable decisions by game producers, especially given that they're waging rather large up-front budgets against possible payoffs several years down the road.
The truly tragic part here is that making the product visually compelling through artistic means rather than through uber-high polygon counts will be compelling more or less forever, while the high polygon count game will necessarily be using technology that is several years old by the time it gets to market. It's a losing game which only works at all because you're competing against other companies with the same problems which are making the same mistakes.
So it's not really that gamers won't accept anything else. Yeah, it does have its uses as a selling point. But it's more about market dynamics than gamer preferences.
It probably matters if you have an order of magnitude increase. Pixels in the sensor don't have to translate directly to pixels in the final image. If your target final resolution is significantly smaller than your initial resolution, this tends to translate to a significant increase in image quality.
Also, loads of people print poster-sized images (not that you need 120MP for a poster, and not that 35mm is directly relevant). Ever hear of this thing called advertising?
Right, except that there are physical limits to what you can accomplish when recording in a bedroom. The homemade vocal booth might fare a bit better...if this hypothetical poor musician manages to scrape together the cash for this and for the necessary professional recording and mixing equipment, and has the construction and audio engineering skills. So basically what you're saying is - music for the people, but only where the people are financially well-off home owners with a loads of free time and the ability to independently build and operate a professional recording studio in their basement.
Yeah, I see why that's totally changed modern music.
Right, it's just NSF and DOH funding. Cutting it off will do absolutely nothing to prevent researchers from working on the subject. The expensive equipment will somehow turn up for free, the facilities bill will pay itself, and graduate students looking for a RA position won't mind that they can't get funding to pay for their tuition and room and board and medical and so forth if they work in such a lab - which won't do anything to curtail the production of future researchers in the general topic area.
Schools are really only to ensure that the public at large has access to a fundamental level of education anyway. The key element in obtaining a good education is always a combination of at home and independent education. Many parents and many students lack the capacity or inclination to do this. It takes extra time, extra work, and you have to learn how to do it on top of learning how to do your math homework. People are lazy. But if you want a good education, all the schools can ever do is get you started and point you in the right direction.
This isn't a software engineering problem, it's a social engineering problem. DRM can help to some extent, but it can't possibly be a complete solution and it can't be strong enough to approximate a complete solution without causing a host of problems. There are a few key points:
Almost all DRM is hackable, especially DRM which is advertised as unhackable.
Strong DRM and weak DRM both have the effect of curtailing casual copying, but it's unlikely that any DRM can curtail determined copying.
"More powerful" DRM is also much more likely to cause problems for your paying customers.
This suggests that the best approach is to use weak DRM then do everything else through social and design factors. It will be as effective as possible in curtailing casual copying, and it won't piss off or drive away your potential paying customers over a futile effort to spite the people who were never going to pay you anyway. At worst, an increased reliance on social and design factors to prevent copying will be equally effective while not pissing off your customer base. If done well, it may be much more effective.
DRM is not a magic bullet. If it was, it would have been working for all these years in which production houses have been erroneously treating it as one. Careful use of DRM may be part of the solution. But it cannot provide a complete solution. Over-reliance on it can do a lot of harm by damaging your customer satisfaction while failing to adequately address the problem of unauthorized copying. It's a bit like the guys taking the abstinence-only approach to sex ed - there's plenty of proof to show that this "solution" only makes the problem worse.
Slashdot Mirror
P300 is typically 300ms (thus the name), and the technique I was referring to uses two responses to generate a match (it flashes rows and columns so you need an X and Y response). 600ms or thereabouts is thus the time to beat. It's not lightning fast - nothing like typing - but a whole hell of a lot better than the reference methods that they're referring to. They're solving a brain-computer interface problem that was solved 10 years ago, and that was made irrelevant several years ago when cheap neural interfaces started hitting the commercial commodity market.
Of course this is all relying on TFA, which could be completely misrepresenting their research given the general high quality of modern science journalism.
Also, earlier kidding aside, the article is probably completely missing the point. It is likely that the actual purpose of the research is NOT to develop the current prototype's functionality. It is more likely that it is exploring the ability to take, reduce, and analyze data of this type. The fact that you can build (buy off-the-shelf for peanuts) a BCI whose functionality is equal to or greater than their prototype using less invasive methods is probably completely beside the point.
Different parts of the brain do each. A "complete thought" involves coordination among several different regions.
It uses "not new" technology to select words with 50% accuracy from a list such as "yes" and "no"...really. (Okay, it hits 90% accuracy with only two items and goes down to 48% with 10.)
In other news, you can use P300 responses picked up with a $300 off-the-shelf over-the-hair EEG receiver to select from a grid of visual stimuli at a pretty good rate and with something like 95%+ accuracy (presumably nearly 100% with the sort of training that goes into touchscreen or voice activated interfaces). Those items can be letters, words, pictures...whatever. Anything quickly recognizable. Congrats guys, you just invented a crappy version of something I can buy for $300 which requires cutting open the person's skull and implanting things on the surface of their brain.
FYI, to whoever funded this, please give the lab I work at the grant monies next time. We'll make much better use of it.
That is some Odysseus-grade cunning right there. You've done your species proud. Please have lots of grandkids and then tell them about this repeatedly.
It's not about you. It's about maintaining developer confidence that the console is an effective DRM device.
They're hypothetically faster in the case of quantum-quantum operations since they're analog with hypothetically infinite data density (where a binary bit stores a 0 or a 1, a qbit stores any value between 0 and 1). But without improved ways to interface with this, it's of fairly limited use. Nature simulates itself with perfect fidelity, which is not really of help to us unless we can find a reliable way to reduce the answer to something consistent and human-understandable.
It's true but potentially misleading to say that quantum computers are not supercomputers...for the simple reason that they operate on a completely different principle. The effective power of an ideal quantum computer for applications to which it is well-suited would be several orders of magnitude better, but once this gets out of the lab we will probably be looking at a hybrid approach rather than a complete transition which leaves the old approach behind.
Quantum encryption is an any-time-now technology (I believe it has actually been implemented on a test scale in military / industrial / banking applications). Quantum computing is a "20 years" technology - scientist speak for "we can see it just over the horizon" which tends to evaluate to somewhere between 10 years and 100 or more. If you want to get a really hard look at the future of computing, try looking back twenty years. Man without time machine is doomed to make wild guesses about future.
Incidentally, I am posting this from a "quantum computer" - modern solid state physics relies heavily on quantum mechanics.
It has impact, no argument. But I'm talking about it more in the context of what the brain goes through than what the mind goes through, if that makes sense. Any input you can sense can have input, but that doesn't mean the brain will consider the input to be real or natural in the sense that it matches up to the patterns it has evolved to expect.
By the way, you should really consider not allowing your 7 year old daughter to view 3D yet. Below the age of about 10 or 11, stereoscopic displays can cause developmental impairment because of the mixed messages it sends the brain. Older, you just risk headaches and nausea...younger, and it can permanently affect the brain.
Linear polarization is a terrible approach. If your head is rotated from vertical at all, the intended image becomes attenuated. Simultaneously, you start getting crosstalk from the unintended / opposite-eye image.
Circular polarization works much better. On the other hand, it is still vulnerable to non-ideal viewing positions. The problem is that the polarized light is rotating about an axis. If you're dead on that axis, everything is just dandy. But there's no way to be on axis for the entire screen unless you're eye is at the focal point of the projection system. Otherwise, you're off axis, which leads to some attenuation in the brightness. Your viewing axis isn't equal to the polarization axis. Fortunately, crosstalk is a very minor problem in comparison to linear polarization, and the viewer's distance from the screen means that the angle of deviation is kept to a reasonably low figure. Try sitting in a side seat next time you're in a 3D movie, or even just turning your head a bit to the side instead of looking directly at the screen - you'll see.
You're in marketing, aren't you?
Research. It's almost as bad. ;)
Your premise is false. If the condition can be completely addressed through corrective eyewear, it shouldn't interfere at all with your ability to use any current 3D display technology.
It's bad for young children, roughly 10 and under, because the mixed visual cues can cause developmental impairment. It shouldn't be harmful for adults beyond the tendency to induce simulator sickness.
Accommodative input is the future. Period. We will eventually have technology which allows us to adapt content to the human receiver. This is not in dispute. Presentation and interaction methods which use these techniques well will dominate over those that don't. You can already see examples of this. The experience of watching a movie on a large theater screen is vastly different from watching it on a cheap 19" TV. Cruddy audio equipment doesn't have the same impact as a live performance. A real book is much easier to become absorbed in than the same content on most e-readers. Video games with poor camera behavior and non-intuitive controls aren't as fun to play. Psychologists and technologists have studied the hell out of it - immersion, emotional design, adaptive interfaces...they make up new names for different aspects of the problem almost every week. But for the most part, this is the future. There is a lot of promise, but for the most part we have to settle for emulating "real" versus contrived input and interaction to some functional level of fidelity which we can tolerate in order to pick up additional functionality (often portability) which the technological approach enables. Other cases do work better, but only if you're talking about expensive research prototypes which address a single aspect of a broader frontier.
The problem is that this leads to the mistaken assumption that our current implementations are accurate representations of their eventual successors. In most cases, they're not. 3D is probably one of the biggest culprits here. It's too easy to go "hey look, 3D displays - it's just like looking at real objects!"...but that's not really it. We've managed to come up with a number of technologies which give decent approximations of several depth cues beyond those available in a static 2D image (e.g. shadows, object occlusion, perspective methods). This is wonderful. But it's important to keep one point in mind, a point which is constantly overlooked.
All current 3D display technology falls well short of producing fully "believable" input.
Yeah. And that's setting aside the whole "movie producers keep producing trashy fake 3D pictures to raise ticket prices" issue - which is a major complication of itself. If you use good current 3D hardware to display a well-made 3D picture which was shot for 3D and where the medium was used intelligently...it will still degrade the image quality over 2D, people will still get simulator sickness, and a fairly large slice of your audience will even still see it in 2D.
The first problem, degradation, can be minimized through special screens and top-end equipment, but you can't really eliminate it since there it provides a much more complex problem compared to doing the same thing in 2D with the same grade of equipment - or worse (and more realistically), the same budget. This is orders of magnitude worse if you want your 3D installation to be a theater setting since you have to serve many people sitting at many distances and viewing angles, each of whom is using different eyes and different brains to process the input. Honestly, with any existing technology, the only thing you can do in a 3D theater is try to minimize how bad it is and minimize how much it costs you to set up. There is no good solution here. Polarized light projection is really the best way...but it's quite vulnerable to off-axis viewing. Alternating frame projection is better in that sense - off-axis problems are comparatively minor - but the headsets are quite expensive (polarized glasses can be effectively disposable) and many viewers will perceive constant flickering which is annoying at best but more likely a quick trigger for simulator sickness (above the already inherent risk with 3D from conflicting visual cues).
The second and third problems are more or less related. The human visual system relies on a large set of visual cues to create a 3D model of your environment, and stereoscopy is only one factor. Admittedly, it's a fairly major factor, and a
For that matter, the definition of bittorrent use as copyright infringement is a little contrived itself. Are you making a copy, or receiving one after consenting to have one be made? And is it really a copy at all? If I duplicate the data from the completed download on my own hard drive 100 times...how many copies do I really have? And why is it substantially different from loaning a DVD to your buddy, or showing it while you're throwing a party?
The ethics are a bit ambiguous because we're a bit new to the potential scenarios enabled by modern technology. The law is likewise ambiguous (except where lobbying over the last ten years or so has changed it). The big IP owners (mostly not creators) have been taking advantage of this to set ethics through propaganda and to set law through lobbying and one-sided big corp vs. individual legal maneuvers. Well, I'm all for the right of someone who worked hard on a creative work to make a living off of it. But I only see one side here which is clearly behaving unethically. Downloading content you could have paid for is at least a bit grey...downloading content you couldn't have, probably less so, especially if you make a habit of purchasing your favorites once you have the opportunity. (This additionally makes the policy of rewarding good content and abstaining from rewarding the mediocre tripe which makes up the bulk of today's market...)
Likewise, the only clear lawbreaking going on is in the sense that one side is exploiting it for things it was never intended to be used for. C'mon, mass lawsuits against more-or-less defenseless individuals whose only choice is how much of a mess you're going to make of their life and finances and for how long? That's really supposed to be within the scope of the law? Really? I grok the whole anti-download thing, even if I don't think it's practically going to work that way in the end. Models are going to have to change. You have to adapt when the fundamental situation has changed or you will eventually have to face the consequences. But it's really, really hard to empathize with people complaining about individuals doing something questionably ethical when the accuser is doing something wildly unethical, immoral, and abusive of the very legal system which they're using to prop up their extortionist policy.
All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...
Radioactive decay ISN'T constant.
It's statistical.
Also, it occurs to me that if they don't have a warrant allowing them to install the device, they have no legal standing to prevent me from removing the device.
Anyone in the market for an EM sniffer?
Aside from using a technological tracker, this doesn't seem like it's any more an infringement of privacy than simply having the police follow you everywhere you go. Which they also do not need a warrant to do. Now, to attach a tracker to a car sitting in a driveway would be trespassing... unless the car was parked on a public street, or inside a garage.
Yes, of course it's different from just following somebody. But that's an argument which people will try to use to defend this.
This sort of ethical issue often arises when it is possible to move a task from something done by an individual to something done en masse by a machine. The most immediate problems are those of accountability and scale. Who is doing the act? How many times can the act be done?
Following someone around is an ethically questionable act to begin with since the presumption is that they are innocent until it is proven otherwise. By questionable, I mean that there are numerous valid arguments for either side. We often take this to mean that the action is also excusable provided that the potential harm is carefully limited and matters aren't taken to the stage that they can be clearly construed as harassment and have no solid justification. If I hand the job off to a computer, it is being done by a list, by a machine. There is no immediate ethical accountability. It can be done countless times, there is no practical manpower restriction. These two things combined make abuses almost inevitable - someone might do something wrong, so we might as well monitor them too, after all it doesn't take much extra work to make that list a little longer!
You get this same sort of issue moderately often with computers. There are practical limits on what you can do without significant effort in the way of violating privacy on an individual level, but there are very few limits when you start using computers.
There's an important distinction here which isn't mentioned above.
From the look of it, they didn't declare that it's explicitly allowed by law, they only declared that it's not prohibited by law under the fourth amendment. IANAL, but that sounds like we're in a much better situation in terms of fighting this than we could be.
Gamers will not play a game with anything less than brilliant graphics.
Nintendo would probably beg to differ with you, but they're too busy rolling in piles of cash.
A game can be visually compelling without being photorealistic or whatever, it's just that photorealism is easier to buy than creativity. In most cases, this leads to rather predictable decisions by game producers, especially given that they're waging rather large up-front budgets against possible payoffs several years down the road.
The truly tragic part here is that making the product visually compelling through artistic means rather than through uber-high polygon counts will be compelling more or less forever, while the high polygon count game will necessarily be using technology that is several years old by the time it gets to market. It's a losing game which only works at all because you're competing against other companies with the same problems which are making the same mistakes.
So it's not really that gamers won't accept anything else. Yeah, it does have its uses as a selling point. But it's more about market dynamics than gamer preferences.
It probably matters if you have an order of magnitude increase. Pixels in the sensor don't have to translate directly to pixels in the final image. If your target final resolution is significantly smaller than your initial resolution, this tends to translate to a significant increase in image quality.
Also, loads of people print poster-sized images (not that you need 120MP for a poster, and not that 35mm is directly relevant). Ever hear of this thing called advertising?
Right, except that there are physical limits to what you can accomplish when recording in a bedroom. The homemade vocal booth might fare a bit better...if this hypothetical poor musician manages to scrape together the cash for this and for the necessary professional recording and mixing equipment, and has the construction and audio engineering skills. So basically what you're saying is - music for the people, but only where the people are financially well-off home owners with a loads of free time and the ability to independently build and operate a professional recording studio in their basement.
Yeah, I see why that's totally changed modern music.
Right, it's just NSF and DOH funding. Cutting it off will do absolutely nothing to prevent researchers from working on the subject. The expensive equipment will somehow turn up for free, the facilities bill will pay itself, and graduate students looking for a RA position won't mind that they can't get funding to pay for their tuition and room and board and medical and so forth if they work in such a lab - which won't do anything to curtail the production of future researchers in the general topic area.
It's just federal funding. Right?
Schools are really only to ensure that the public at large has access to a fundamental level of education anyway. The key element in obtaining a good education is always a combination of at home and independent education. Many parents and many students lack the capacity or inclination to do this. It takes extra time, extra work, and you have to learn how to do it on top of learning how to do your math homework. People are lazy. But if you want a good education, all the schools can ever do is get you started and point you in the right direction.
This isn't a software engineering problem, it's a social engineering problem. DRM can help to some extent, but it can't possibly be a complete solution and it can't be strong enough to approximate a complete solution without causing a host of problems. There are a few key points:
This suggests that the best approach is to use weak DRM then do everything else through social and design factors. It will be as effective as possible in curtailing casual copying, and it won't piss off or drive away your potential paying customers over a futile effort to spite the people who were never going to pay you anyway. At worst, an increased reliance on social and design factors to prevent copying will be equally effective while not pissing off your customer base. If done well, it may be much more effective.
DRM is not a magic bullet. If it was, it would have been working for all these years in which production houses have been erroneously treating it as one. Careful use of DRM may be part of the solution. But it cannot provide a complete solution. Over-reliance on it can do a lot of harm by damaging your customer satisfaction while failing to adequately address the problem of unauthorized copying. It's a bit like the guys taking the abstinence-only approach to sex ed - there's plenty of proof to show that this "solution" only makes the problem worse.
Well you would say that, wouldn't you, you dirty terrorist?
That's right, I saw you smoking that marijuana.