IMO we shouldn't outlaw a technology purely because of what someone could do with it. It's the act of invading someone's privacy that should be outlawed. This accomplishes the same thing while preserving the multitude of legitimate uses for these devices.
I don't have any problem with them being used for security surveillance on private property. If I own a large area that is prone to break ins and theft I should be allowed to patrol it with drones automatically.
I should be able to order a pizza and have it delivered by drone 5min after it's out of the oven. Or to get a package across town before the close of business.
I do have a problem with the police using them in a similar manner as constant eyes in the sky everywhere though. Or if privately owned drones were trespassing on private land trying to peek through windows.
Ground transportation is slow and dangerous. why clog up the roads with more cars?
funny that I had to come this far down to see an actual response to the OP.
in addition to these things you anticipate I also think some good stuff is on the way: Minecraft is awesome but I really think it needs top to bottom rewrite done by really good engineers who are more able to take advantage of the current hardware.
-better multithreading support -Shaders -bumpmaps -better textures -much farther view distance -LOD -Dynamic Lighting -actual physics -vehicles/heavy machinery that can operate on more than one block at a time -multiplayer game modes (CTF, rampart style battles etc) -a marketplace where players can sell their creations to other players (similar to the steam workshop for TF2)
This video explores the following question "why are there less female engineers than male engineers and why are women over represented in careers focused on human interaction". Research across disciplines shows there is clear evidence that these differences are based in biological processes and are not purely cultural. This video interviews numerous scientists from various fields and exhibits the cognitive dissonance portrayed by proponents of gender studies and sociology.
watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
Afterwards you will understand why women will never be equally represented in technical fields like engineering and programming. Across all cultures even from birth women are generally less interested in mechanical things. There is evidence that this is biological and related to testosterone. For the same reason, men will always be underrepresented in fields focused on people like nursing, psychology etc. It's simply what each gender is more inclined to be interested in. There's nothing wrong with that either.
Equal opportunity != equal outcome. nor should it be.
just watch, the headline in 10 years: "intel's diversity not reflected in team leads or management" (because they lowered the bar for underrepresented groups the over represented group's relative performance was better and hence will be promoted more)
followed by: "intel pushes for new diversity initiative in promotions" 10 years later: "intel files for bankruptcy after repeated market failures related to its line of privilege checking chips which underclock themselves based on the current user's level of privilege metric."
As far as voice commands go, people are inconsistent too! someone from the deep south is going to have a bit of trouble talking to someone from the UK. Especially when using slang and idioms. People from different age groups say things differently as well!
Hell, even when people are from the same area and are same age they'll need to hear something more than once before they can make sense of what's being said.
It goes well beyond just accents though. phrasing, tone, cadence, context and a bunch of other things all play important roles in voice communication.
I believe this means there can't be a "one size fits all" speech recognition system that is ready to accept input from everyone equally accurately. Speech recognition will need to take all of these factors into account to/some/ degree in order to approach the accuracy of people. Pure statistical modeling of sounds matched to commands won't cut it because even with perfect microphones in silent rooms dissimilar phrases will sound alike unless you know who it's coming from.
There are CSS tricks used to correct for this. For example both my nexus 7" tablet and galaxy nexus phone have a 1280x720 screen. yet both get different versions of web pages based on the physical size of the screen and not just the resolution.
For phones sure. But for applications in VR Head Mounted Displays like http://www.oculusvr.com/ where the small screen takes up your entire field of view even 2560x1400 isn't going to be good enough.
To meet the resolution of the human eye (a murky subject but around 576 megapixels per eye for a 120 degree field of view) we're going to need screens that are around 24,000x24,000 pixels per eye. Plus these screens would have to be small enough to fit on a head mounted display (think 7" tablet or smaller).
Well there is a very small amount of atmosphere at the orbit the ISS has, Breaking a projectile up into infinitely small bits would increase the surface area and (admittedly small) drag. Maybe just dispersing them enough that they wouldn't cause any damage.
Another idea would be to heat up one side of the projectile which could vaporize small amounts of the material giving it some thrust. That thrust could push them out of the way.
Actually I'm pretty sure I copy/pasted the headline from the article, which means it was probably the editor who inserted the typo in the first place haha.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought this was going to be a guide.
IMO we shouldn't outlaw a technology purely because of what someone could do with it. It's the act of invading someone's privacy that should be outlawed. This accomplishes the same thing while preserving the multitude of legitimate uses for these devices.
I don't have any problem with them being used for security surveillance on private property. If I own a large area that is prone to break ins and theft I should be allowed to patrol it with drones automatically.
I should be able to order a pizza and have it delivered by drone 5min after it's out of the oven. Or to get a package across town before the close of business.
I do have a problem with the police using them in a similar manner as constant eyes in the sky everywhere though. Or if privately owned drones were trespassing on private land trying to peek through windows.
Ground transportation is slow and dangerous. why clog up the roads with more cars?
one step at a time. I think the time savings we'll see from being able to just go straight to the destination bypassing traffic will be a huge boost.
Because the dialog is terrible and makes everyone look like an idiot.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/oliver-miller/2012/07/50-quotes-from-the-star-wars-prequels-ranked-in-order-of-terribleness/
http://whatculture.com/film/10-absurdly-bad-lines-of-movie-dialogue-clearly-written-by-crazy-people.php
There is more unix nature in one line of shell script than in 10,000 lines of c.
Allow me to warn you that this is bad. and broken. It depended on oculus overlay which no longer works.
Put up or shut up. Here was my stab at it a couple years ago when I got the DK1.
https://github.com/ubernaut/OculusRift-HelloWorld-Panda3d
funny that I had to come this far down to see an actual response to the OP.
in addition to these things you anticipate I also think some good stuff is on the way: Minecraft is awesome but I really think it needs top to bottom rewrite done by really good engineers who are more able to take advantage of the current hardware.
-better multithreading support
-Shaders
-bumpmaps
-better textures
-much farther view distance
-LOD
-Dynamic Lighting
-actual physics
-vehicles/heavy machinery that can operate on more than one block at a time
-multiplayer game modes (CTF, rampart style battles etc)
-a marketplace where players can sell their creations to other players (similar to the steam workshop for TF2)
FIRST POST
Nah, he means the white males being hired are too fat and we should be hiring skinnier ones.
This video explores the following question "why are there less female engineers than male engineers and why are women over represented in careers focused on human interaction". Research across disciplines shows there is clear evidence that these differences are based in biological processes and are not purely cultural. This video interviews numerous scientists from various fields and exhibits the cognitive dissonance portrayed by proponents of gender studies and sociology.
watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
Afterwards you will understand why women will never be equally represented in technical fields like engineering and programming. Across all cultures even from birth women are generally less interested in mechanical things. There is evidence that this is biological and related to testosterone. For the same reason, men will always be underrepresented in fields focused on people like nursing, psychology etc. It's simply what each gender is more inclined to be interested in. There's nothing wrong with that either.
Exactly my feeling as well.
Equal opportunity != equal outcome. nor should it be.
just watch, the headline in 10 years:
"intel's diversity not reflected in team leads or management" (because they lowered the bar for underrepresented groups the over represented group's relative performance was better and hence will be promoted more)
followed by:
"intel pushes for new diversity initiative in promotions"
10 years later:
"intel files for bankruptcy after repeated market failures related to its line of privilege checking chips which underclock themselves based on the current user's level of privilege metric."
As far as voice commands go, people are inconsistent too! someone from the deep south is going to have a bit of trouble talking to someone from the UK. Especially when using slang and idioms. People from different age groups say things differently as well!
Hell, even when people are from the same area and are same age they'll need to hear something more than once before they can make sense of what's being said.
It goes well beyond just accents though. phrasing, tone, cadence, context and a bunch of other things all play important roles in voice communication.
I believe this means there can't be a "one size fits all" speech recognition system that is ready to accept input from everyone equally accurately. Speech recognition will need to take all of these factors into account to /some/ degree in order to approach the accuracy of people. Pure statistical modeling of sounds matched to commands won't cut it because even with perfect microphones in silent rooms dissimilar phrases will sound alike unless you know who it's coming from.
It's better if you have an SSD.
I'll sell it to ya for $50.
There are CSS tricks used to correct for this. For example both my nexus 7" tablet and galaxy nexus phone have a 1280x720 screen. yet both get different versions of web pages based on the physical size of the screen and not just the resolution.
For phones sure. But for applications in VR Head Mounted Displays like http://www.oculusvr.com/ where the small screen takes up your entire field of view even 2560x1400 isn't going to be good enough.
To meet the resolution of the human eye (a murky subject but around 576 megapixels per eye for a 120 degree field of view) we're going to need screens that are around 24,000x24,000 pixels per eye. Plus these screens would have to be small enough to fit on a head mounted display (think 7" tablet or smaller).
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
http://static5.infoimages.net/resources/originals/41a32a7f101271bc9729ab421de3d97e070938dd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juTfsdL7M8g (haha)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh0SXBtT_lA (a more tacticool version)
personally I think these shotguns are a hell of a lot more dangerous and readily available than anything made with a crazy expensive 3d printer.
Cognitive Dissonance. People don't mind it as much when it's "their guy" doing it, or they simply ignore it and put it out of mind.
Well there is a very small amount of atmosphere at the orbit the ISS has, Breaking a projectile up into infinitely small bits would increase the surface area and (admittedly small) drag. Maybe just dispersing them enough that they wouldn't cause any damage.
Another idea would be to heat up one side of the projectile which could vaporize small amounts of the material giving it some thrust. That thrust could push them out of the way.
What about laser weapons? http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/08/17658147-navy-unveils-powerful-ship-mounted-laser-weapon?lite
Maybe it's possible to vaporize the smaller projectiles when there isn't enough time to dodge them.
I wonder if our radar tech is advanced enough to be able to see these small projectiles in time to intercept them.
Actually I'm pretty sure I copy/pasted the headline from the article, which means it was probably the editor who inserted the typo in the first place haha.
Oops my bad. Been on slashdot for more than 13 years you'd think i'd be more careful with my first submission haha.