Um, this sounds like a couple of unrelated things.
First, there are a huge number of cues to depth, of which stereo is one, but not the only one (shown because pirates (Arr!) can see). You mention parallax (known in vision research by many names, but mostly some variation of structure from motion), which is actually very similar to stereo (If you think about it, the problem a monocular visual system solves combining an image at time N and time N+1 to infer the 3d structure of what it's looking at is very similar to the problem a 2-eyed system solves at any given time step (the big difference is that if both the world and the observer are moving, structure from motion can be more ambiguous, while if you know the geometric relationship between the two eyes, stereo's pretty well constrained)).
However, there are MANY other cues to depth, ranging from familiar size (imagine how much it would mess up your driving if scale-models of Hummers the size of bicycles became popular vehicles (ignore the serious engineering problems for now) - you'd have some real trouble knowing whether that was a big SUV far away, or a tiny car nearby (you'd be able to tell the difference using the distance between it and the visual horizon (meaning: the fact that it got way too low in your visual field), but that's just because you know your own observation height, as well (another cue)). The ability of a single eye to focus is also a cue to distance (Called "accomodation"), but it's useful range is limited to a few meters out. There are other cues as well (Palmer's late 90's textbook "Vision Science" has a nice, and pretty complete list of them (I had to enumerate them for part of my undergrad thesis)).
As I understand it, stereo isn't all that important for driving, anyhow (your eyes are pretty close together, so as objects get further away, the ability to use stereo to distinguish a given distance offset gets smaller pretty fast). Losing vision in one eye would probably have it's greatest effect on your field of view, at least for driving.
RE: your first comment about eye strain, note that the comparison is between "action" video games requiring hand-eye coordination, and non-action video games. This way, the researchers controlled for much of the eye strain (unless doing active visual search for evil soldiers causes more strain than passively watching your little virtual people do little virtual things).
Vision-based puzzles and paining surely involve the visual system, and spatial reasoning, but neither requires the kind of serious on-line (meaning, immediate, time-sensitive) reasoning that shooting before you're shot does. The idea of this line of work is that the more immediate visuo-motor demands translate to improvements in visual sensitivity. A puzzle might require "visualizing" something in your head, as may painting, but neither requires something as immediate (which may well use different on-line mechanisms). As for violence, it's possible that the violent content lends extra immediacy or importance to the learning, if it's sufficiently realistic (The idea of a message from some other part of your brain to the parts to the on-line visuo-motor learning that your very survival depends on your learning this quickly), but I don't think that's been investigated yet (I talked to one of the grad students on this project, and he told me that the problem is controlling for how compelling the video game is (It's tough for a small research crew to make something less violent than, but otherwise identical to, a modern video game).
As for why contrast sensitivity might be important, it's not for tests that look like contrast sensitivity tests (shades of grey next to each other that you have to distinguish between). In the dark (for example) it's often very useful to distinguish one shade of almost-black from another. If you want to tell military camouflage from it's surroundings, you might be able to use it's very slightly different color from whatever it's hiding behind. If you wanted to tell if two pieces of clothing were the same, or almost the same tone, contrast sensitivty might help. There are plenty of other better examples, but I've gotta get back to work.
The problem with this idea is that every time someone spams us, we'll spam the federal government. This will just propagate the spam problem, rather than solving it (what happens when the spam branch of the FCC fraud division shuts down due to email server overload?). On the plus side, this whole scenario would make some Libertarians I know very happy.
"Adobe doesn't currently plan to prevent VBScript or other files from running"
wow... That's the second company who'd rather have visual basic support then protection... and the first one owns a monopoly...
I have to wonder how hard it would be... I mean, can't they at least have default support for that sort of embedded automated stuff turned off? That way, the huge majority of people who use Acrobat would have no problem, which would prevent the virus from spreading at a significant rate...
Why don't they just turn support for embedded stuff off, by default, and have a simple switch/notification system to allow it to be easily reenabled?
I go to a very small, very well-endowed liberal arts college with a well-earned reputation for intesne academics... people tend to live in the main library. Within the past few years, the college filled the ground floor of said library with Aerons... Student reaction has been mixed, from the informal serveys I've done... some folks like them, some hate them (remember, these are students using chairs that they don't even have the pretense of "owning"... so they don't or don't know how to adjust them, often)...
As a computer science major, though, who spends more time in the computer lab than the library, I'd have to say that I'd prefer either newer toys there, AC in nonacademic buildings, or those nifty beanbag constructs that I hear Oberlin's got...
Wow... this makes about as much sense as letting Amazon patent "one click" technology... and worse, it's more anti-competitive... Regardless of whether or not they were the first auto-updating virus scanner... The US PTO should be ashamed of itself for allowing this sort of thing through... but it does it as often as such things are submitted...
Maybe I should patent something...
Thought:
This patent means that all information not sanctioned by McAffe that's transfered over the internet without explicit user request must not contain code/executables, right?
"The patent encompasses the ability to deliver software capabilities encapsulated within markup language (HTML/XML) communications units delivered over a logical Internet connection to a browser which then executes scripts to automatically perform one or more tasks on a computer" -the McAffe press release
Wow... couldn't this be argued to include any code that automatically updated itself?
anyone remember that weird cnet article about 6 months ago that spoke of massive corruption and media manipulation by Linux companies? I found it particularly amusing when the article charged that Mandrake was giving reviewers free copies of it's operating system... in fact, the article's only charge against linux companies was that they were giving reviewers free software... (the irony of this article being on CNet should not be lost on the reader...)
Now this seems to flip it around a bit... but can anyone explain something to me... WHY?
sorry... at this point, this makes as much sense to me as SONY's marketing team inventing a reviewer to rave about the last Rob Schneider movie does...
I haven't spetn much time with linux of any flavor... but my friend, an MS betatester, has been RAVING about the user interface and application integration (watch out on that second one... MSN Messenger is tight with the OS)...
and from some of the stuff I've read elsewhere, it also does really nice disk access (I guess MS decided that their next bottleneck was the harddrive)
I would argue that, for all those who aren't quality freaks, pirated movies are pretty acceptable... I have a fair amount of experience in that area, and can say from experience that most of the pirated versions of movies available now (and ESPECIALLY the dvd rips) are of sufficiently high quality that a dorm room full of people can watch a movie on a computer monitor, and be just about as happy as if it were on a big screen...
(remember, the acquisition only requires one person, ususally while they sleep... and for college students, the price makes a big difference)...
so that's why movies...
on the other hand, they're hard enough to acquire in reasonable quality, especially on the bandwidth that most consumers have, that the movie piracy numbers must be so low as to be completely trivial...
Hey ya'll... a little while ago, I was a victim of this... on the one hand, it cured me of my diablo 2 addiction... on the other hand...
1) You have to realize that diablo 2 items, characters, and accounts can be sold on ebay, and other such sites, for cold hard cash... granted, this cash could be virtual... but no more virtual than the use of a credit card.
2) People spend huge amounts of time with this stuff... I was on the low end of the addicts... and there were months were I spent 3 hours / day playing... imagine if you're a teenager, and you spend, literally, 8 hours / day playing a video game with security features to prevent cheating, so everyone knows everything you have is legitimate... then, suddenly, it's completely gone... That hurts...
3) the stuff is just stuff in a video game... but the entertainment value can be there (it's fun to have better stuff, to constantly improve your character (this is the secret to Diablo 2's success))... so if items can make a game more entertaining... then how are they really different from a game, in and of themselves (in that they may exist entirely in the vapor we call the internet... but they still provide tangible mental benefits that people consider worth paying for)... to put a finer point on it... what about expansion packs?
4) observation - others agree with me... I've seen an individual bow going for upwards of $1200 on ebay...
Small liberal arts school... I'm a rising sophomore, and it seems sometimes like there must have been some instances of academic dishonesty before I arrived, because ability to do any sort of labwork with others is strictly controlled and limited... much more so than with any other department I've seen... GPLing stuff is a no-no, until you get to the upper level courses... then you have more freedom (it's not a research institution, so I think they don't care as much about ownership of your ideas)...
In a bullfrog game named Syndicate, corporations (I think) battle for world control, including stealing each-other's top researchers... I'm sure that that's what this is really all about.:-)
Absolutely... I didn't miss it... it just doesn't apply here... no one's saying "Microsoft's next OS won't let me run linux.", are they?
OR, re:music
No one's saying "Napster won't let me share the files that I have a right to share" (artists contracts with the record labels are horrible evil slave-deeds, but they're legally binding... I would argue that there's the greatest example of moral right to pirate... it lies with the artist...
Or do you mean one's own toy as file sharing:
I think that creating my own toy is fine, but if it includes, implicitly or explicitly, other peoples' toys, it must not prevent those toys from reaching their purpose, as defined by the creator and said toys' popular usage.
Disclaimer: These are not necesarily what I believe/feel...
Is it wrong for the Star Wars Holiday Special to end with C3PO advertising Star Wars toys? If not, is it wrong for MS to default windows' web browsing to Internet Explorer (as long as IE is free)? (note: this is not a comment on the morality of using a webbrowser as an operating system's main interface)
Is it wrong for MS to offer a liscense they choose? is it wrong for them to choose to enforce that liscense with technology, if the law doesn't work?
Granted, these are disconnected... but my point is, they have the right to do all of these... because the question needn't even be about legality... handle morality first... it's their toy... if you want to play with it under the capitalist system we all live in (and, hence, sanction), we play with their toy by their rules...
Same goes for music... whether or not piracy helps or hurts music companies is not the issue. The fact of the matter is that piracy is, literally, theft. You can't dance around it, even if the victim makes a profit, it isn't your right to pirate...
Like all of us, I've been wrestling with these issues for a while... No matter how I slice it, this argument doesn't work. When I was young, it was my argument, allowing me to pirate anything I wanted... but it doesn't work... I wish it did...
Also, to counter the utilitarian response, I think obeying a government's laws is binary, rather than obeying some and disregarding others... Peace
1) I thought the antipiracy thing had at least as much to do with the individual users, as the massive piracy factories...
2) I dunno about you, but I can see pirates developing, and mass producing little holographic stickers...
note: I do NOT know ANYTHING about holograms... so if my thoughts are WAY out of whack with reality (holographs cannot be replicated, e.t.c.)... then tell me so, but don't bother flaming...
Slashdot Mirror
Um, this sounds like a couple of unrelated things.
First, there are a huge number of cues to depth, of which stereo is one, but not the only one (shown because pirates (Arr!) can see). You mention parallax (known in vision research by many names, but mostly some variation of structure from motion), which is actually very similar to stereo (If you think about it, the problem a monocular visual system solves combining an image at time N and time N+1 to infer the 3d structure of what it's looking at is very similar to the problem a 2-eyed system solves at any given time step (the big difference is that if both the world and the observer are moving, structure from motion can be more ambiguous, while if you know the geometric relationship between the two eyes, stereo's pretty well constrained)).
However, there are MANY other cues to depth, ranging from familiar size (imagine how much it would mess up your driving if scale-models of Hummers the size of bicycles became popular vehicles (ignore the serious engineering problems for now) - you'd have some real trouble knowing whether that was a big SUV far away, or a tiny car nearby (you'd be able to tell the difference using the distance between it and the visual horizon (meaning: the fact that it got way too low in your visual field), but that's just because you know your own observation height, as well (another cue)). The ability of a single eye to focus is also a cue to distance (Called "accomodation"), but it's useful range is limited to a few meters out. There are other cues as well (Palmer's late 90's textbook "Vision Science" has a nice, and pretty complete list of them (I had to enumerate them for part of my undergrad thesis)).
As I understand it, stereo isn't all that important for driving, anyhow (your eyes are pretty close together, so as objects get further away, the ability to use stereo to distinguish a given distance offset gets smaller pretty fast). Losing vision in one eye would probably have it's greatest effect on your field of view, at least for driving.
-Ross
RE: your first comment about eye strain, note that the comparison is between "action" video games requiring hand-eye coordination, and non-action video games. This way, the researchers controlled for much of the eye strain (unless doing active visual search for evil soldiers causes more strain than passively watching your little virtual people do little virtual things).
Vision-based puzzles and paining surely involve the visual system, and spatial reasoning, but neither requires the kind of serious on-line (meaning, immediate, time-sensitive) reasoning that shooting before you're shot does. The idea of this line of work is that the more immediate visuo-motor demands translate to improvements in visual sensitivity. A puzzle might require "visualizing" something in your head, as may painting, but neither requires something as immediate (which may well use different on-line mechanisms). As for violence, it's possible that the violent content lends extra immediacy or importance to the learning, if it's sufficiently realistic (The idea of a message from some other part of your brain to the parts to the on-line visuo-motor learning that your very survival depends on your learning this quickly), but I don't think that's been investigated yet (I talked to one of the grad students on this project, and he told me that the problem is controlling for how compelling the video game is (It's tough for a small research crew to make something less violent than, but otherwise identical to, a modern video game).
As for why contrast sensitivity might be important, it's not for tests that look like contrast sensitivity tests (shades of grey next to each other that you have to distinguish between). In the dark (for example) it's often very useful to distinguish one shade of almost-black from another. If you want to tell military camouflage from it's surroundings, you might be able to use it's very slightly different color from whatever it's hiding behind. If you wanted to tell if two pieces of clothing were the same, or almost the same tone, contrast sensitivty might help. There are plenty of other better examples, but I've gotta get back to work.
-Ross
The problem with this idea is that every time someone spams us, we'll spam the federal government. This will just propagate the spam problem, rather than solving it (what happens when the spam branch of the FCC fraud division shuts down due to email server overload?). On the plus side, this whole scenario would make some Libertarians I know very happy.
wow... That's the second company who'd rather have visual basic support then protection... and the first one owns a monopoly...
I have to wonder how hard it would be... I mean, can't they at least have default support for that sort of embedded automated stuff turned off? That way, the huge majority of people who use Acrobat would have no problem, which would prevent the virus from spreading at a significant rate...
Why don't they just turn support for embedded stuff off, by default, and have a simple switch/notification system to allow it to be easily reenabled?
I go to a very small, very well-endowed liberal arts college with a well-earned reputation for intesne academics... people tend to live in the main library. Within the past few years, the college filled the ground floor of said library with Aerons... Student reaction has been mixed, from the informal serveys I've done... some folks like them, some hate them (remember, these are students using chairs that they don't even have the pretense of "owning"... so they don't or don't know how to adjust them, often)... As a computer science major, though, who spends more time in the computer lab than the library, I'd have to say that I'd prefer either newer toys there, AC in nonacademic buildings, or those nifty beanbag constructs that I hear Oberlin's got...
Wow... this makes about as much sense as letting Amazon patent "one click" technology... and worse, it's more anti-competitive... Regardless of whether or not they were the first auto-updating virus scanner... The US PTO should be ashamed of itself for allowing this sort of thing through... but it does it as often as such things are submitted...
:-)
Maybe I should patent something...
Thought:
This patent means that all information not sanctioned by McAffe that's transfered over the internet without explicit user request must not contain code/executables, right?
HEY... Does that mean they patented viruses?
"The patent encompasses the ability to deliver software capabilities encapsulated within markup language (HTML/XML) communications units delivered over a logical Internet connection to a browser which then executes scripts to automatically perform one or more tasks on a computer" -the McAffe press release
Wow... couldn't this be argued to include any code that automatically updated itself?
Hmm... does this have any relevance to any politcally touchy biomedical ethics debates we've been seeing recently?
anyone remember that weird cnet article about 6 months ago that spoke of massive corruption and media manipulation by Linux companies? I found it particularly amusing when the article charged that Mandrake was giving reviewers free copies of it's operating system... in fact, the article's only charge against linux companies was that they were giving reviewers free software... (the irony of this article being on CNet should not be lost on the reader...)
Now this seems to flip it around a bit... but can anyone explain something to me... WHY?
sorry... at this point, this makes as much sense to me as SONY's marketing team inventing a reviewer to rave about the last Rob Schneider movie does...
I haven't spetn much time with linux of any flavor... but my friend, an MS betatester, has been RAVING about the user interface and application integration (watch out on that second one... MSN Messenger is tight with the OS)...
and from some of the stuff I've read elsewhere, it also does really nice disk access (I guess MS decided that their next bottleneck was the harddrive)
I would argue that, for all those who aren't quality freaks, pirated movies are pretty acceptable... I have a fair amount of experience in that area, and can say from experience that most of the pirated versions of movies available now (and ESPECIALLY the dvd rips) are of sufficiently high quality that a dorm room full of people can watch a movie on a computer monitor, and be just about as happy as if it were on a big screen...
(remember, the acquisition only requires one person, ususally while they sleep... and for college students, the price makes a big difference)...
so that's why movies...
on the other hand, they're hard enough to acquire in reasonable quality, especially on the bandwidth that most consumers have, that the movie piracy numbers must be so low as to be completely trivial...
1) You have to realize that diablo 2 items, characters, and accounts can be sold on ebay, and other such sites, for cold hard cash... granted, this cash could be virtual... but no more virtual than the use of a credit card.
2) People spend huge amounts of time with this stuff... I was on the low end of the addicts... and there were months were I spent 3 hours / day playing... imagine if you're a teenager, and you spend, literally, 8 hours / day playing a video game with security features to prevent cheating, so everyone knows everything you have is legitimate... then, suddenly, it's completely gone... That hurts...
3) the stuff is just stuff in a video game... but the entertainment value can be there (it's fun to have better stuff, to constantly improve your character (this is the secret to Diablo 2's success))... so if items can make a game more entertaining... then how are they really different from a game, in and of themselves (in that they may exist entirely in the vapor we call the internet... but they still provide tangible mental benefits that people consider worth paying for)... to put a finer point on it... what about expansion packs?
4) observation - others agree with me... I've seen an individual bow going for upwards of $1200 on ebay...
Small liberal arts school... I'm a rising sophomore, and it seems sometimes like there must have been some instances of academic dishonesty before I arrived, because ability to do any sort of labwork with others is strictly controlled and limited... much more so than with any other department I've seen... GPLing stuff is a no-no, until you get to the upper level courses... then you have more freedom (it's not a research institution, so I think they don't care as much about ownership of your ideas)...
In a bullfrog game named Syndicate, corporations (I think) battle for world control, including stealing each-other's top researchers... I'm sure that that's what this is really all about. :-)
OR, re:music
No one's saying "Napster won't let me share the files that I have a right to share" (artists contracts with the record labels are horrible evil slave-deeds, but they're legally binding... I would argue that there's the greatest example of moral right to pirate... it lies with the artist...
Or do you mean one's own toy as file sharing: I think that creating my own toy is fine, but if it includes, implicitly or explicitly, other peoples' toys, it must not prevent those toys from reaching their purpose, as defined by the creator and said toys' popular usage.
- Is it wrong for the Star Wars Holiday Special to end with C3PO advertising Star Wars toys? If not, is it wrong for MS to default windows' web browsing to Internet Explorer (as long as IE is free)? (note: this is not a comment on the morality of using a webbrowser as an operating system's main interface)
- Is it wrong for MS to offer a liscense they choose? is it wrong for them to choose to enforce that liscense with technology, if the law doesn't work?
Granted, these are disconnected... but my point is, they have the right to do all of these... because the question needn't even be about legality... handle morality first... it's their toy... if you want to play with it under the capitalist system we all live in (and, hence, sanction), we play with their toy by their rules...Same goes for music... whether or not piracy helps or hurts music companies is not the issue. The fact of the matter is that piracy is, literally, theft. You can't dance around it, even if the victim makes a profit, it isn't your right to pirate...
Like all of us, I've been wrestling with these issues for a while... No matter how I slice it, this argument doesn't work. When I was young, it was my argument, allowing me to pirate anything I wanted... but it doesn't work... I wish it did...
Also, to counter the utilitarian response, I think obeying a government's laws is binary, rather than obeying some and disregarding others... Peace
hmm... 2 thoughts:
1) I thought the antipiracy thing had at least as much to do with the individual users, as the massive piracy factories...
2) I dunno about you, but I can see pirates developing, and mass producing little holographic stickers...
note: I do NOT know ANYTHING about holograms... so if my thoughts are WAY out of whack with reality (holographs cannot be replicated, e.t.c.)... then tell me so, but don't bother flaming...