Natural for what? The only advantage the English system has is that lots of lazy-brained people are accustomed to it.
When dividing by even numbers, english units are a lot easier to deal with: 1 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4inch, 1/8inch, 1/16inch, 1/32inch, 1/64inch etc.
Metric units are generally not marked off in fractions like that, so you quickly end up with unruly decimals: 1cm,.5cm,.25cm,.125cm.0625cm,.03125cm,.015625cm
And in response to the people who are currently reading this and thinking "But you could just say 1/16cm!": When is the last time you've seen a metric measuring device marked off in fractions? English measuring devices take to fractions like that naturally. The only reason you don't like it is because you're accustomed to base10.
Metric does make a ton of sense for anything scientific (1ml of water = 1cc of water = 1g of water is massivly convinient), but the decision for the average person (let alone someone doing carpentry where things are frequently cut by 2's and 4s) to use metric units over english units isn't the massive no-brainer that all of you guys keep making it out to be
As an owner of several neural interface devices, mainly an emotiv neuroheadset and also the brain controlled cat ears, I can confirm that this tech is not only 20 years out, but use as a game controller isn't even the proper application for it. There's a good ~second of input lag, coupled with poor detection over all, and most peoples lack of ability to control their general brain patterns (of the sort that these devices pick up at least) with any degree of speed or precision makes it a very very poor choice for use with anything that needs to be consciously controlled in a timely fashion. And the problem is more fundamental than simple tech hurdles. Even if we could reliably detect and monitor the output of every single neuron in the brain I don't think it would be possible to build a decent gaming control rig just by the nature of how the brain works.
The cat ears on the other hand are a much better application (and I'm saying this as someone who hates anime only slightly less than I hate furries). They're outputting additional data (your mood, as detected/determined by the sensor) without any conscious input and in a situation in which a few seconds of delay really doesn't make a huge difference. Using detection like this for something such as music selection, subtle lighting changes, changing the notification settings on your phone, etc. are applications that this kind of tech is much better suited for.
This was the mechanism for FTL travel in the book, "Forever War". While the ship entering the black hole is ripped apart from the observers reference frame, to the ships reference frame that hasn't happened yet and it pops out the other side.
When you make $40K/year, have a mortgage payment, maybe a kid or two, car loans, maybe student loans, having to pay anywhere from $70/month or higher for slow broadband is not high on ones priority.
If that's your situation, then I don't think it is too unreasonable to suggest that you shouldn't be considering purchasing a next-gen console - or even a previous-gen console.
And in 8 years when the always on "next-gen" console is now previous-gen, then what should he do?
Also, if someone is in a tight financial situation but has some disposable income allocated towards entertainment, why shouldn't they get a console? I always assumed that those people were the target market for the things, since console games are cheap to rent and you don't need to worry about keeping your hardware current as has traditionally been the case with PC games. Add in a requirement for reliable always on internet, and that console suddenly doesn't look as attractive. They'll just go spend their entertainment money elsewhere
As an owner of both the cat ears, and a neuroheadset made by a company called Emotive, I can say from firsthand experience that this sort of technology just isn't quite there yet. And in the case of using it to control things in a conscious manner, probably won't be for a long time. It's hard to rapidly change mental state, and it's often not a binary thing either. Add in the detection lag and even if I could consciously send the correct brainwaves to the thing it would still leave me sitting there wondering why I couldn't have just pressed a button or used a voice command instead.
The cat ears do an ok job of detecting mental state, though I feel like the "concentration" indicator of the ears wildly swinging back and forth is more of an error state than anything else, at least in my pair (after entering it, mine will continue to go nuts even if I remove the headset). In my opinion they're actually a good example of correct application of this kind of technology. Rather than relying on the user for direct control, they're monitoring the user and then taking a non-critical but useful action (indicating mental state to other people) based one what they observe.
In the case of the Emotive headset, it was a massive letdown. Their marketing is completely fine hyping up the "IT READS YOUR BRAIN!!11" selling point, and then showing videos of people controlling wheelchairs or moving a mouse pointer around, implying they're doing that with their thoughts. They actually aren't. Most of that is coming from facial muscles (the headset has pretty good detection of those, and can make an avatar match facial expressions with maybe 80% accuracy), or the gyro in the back of the headset. After a lot of fiddling with it over several weeks, the best I could make it do with pure brain scanning to differentiate between a baseline and 2 other mental states. All of them took me several seconds to get myself into, and it took the headset another second or so on top of that to detect and respond. They'd often get triggered or broken by random external events, and generally weren't reliable enough to actually use to control something.
In order to make this kind of technology continue on without turning it into a pariah (Flying cars and AI research anyone?), they need to do 3 things:
1) improve the detection
2) find useful applications for it that actually make sense. Anything that doesn't need rapid input or fine grained control is a good candidate. Moving a mouse or clicking buttons: bad. Altering which song it queues up next in your home entertainment system based on your current observed mental state: better.
3) expectations management. Detecting brain activity with something like an FMRI is fairly precise, but even then it would be tricky to make it give someone conscious, fine grained control over something. An MRI machine is bulky and expensive, your $50 EEG electrode is $50. These aren't devices that can ~read your brainwaves~, they're a single EEG electrode that's detecting electrical signals that may or may not be emanating from your brain. The people marketing these devices need to emphasize that. Otherwise they're going to end up 10 years down the road with a general public that's bitter over not being able to telepathically communicate like the borg.
Anyway, like I said, perhaps the poster meant something else.
Rather than assume the poster was a total moron, I interpreted it as "once it runs of power, voyager turns into a tiny piece of impossible to track space junk, so doesn't matter if it escapes the oort cloud or not past that point".
Where voice systems fall down is when they try to mimic a human and allow people to talk naturally. The designers should play to the strengths of the system, e.g. it's a way to input things into a computer without having to touch a greasy screen
In theory a well designed voice system designed to respond to a very limited series of short, well chosen commands would be highly accurate and not annoy the user.
If the command tree was structured well, you could order with something like "Coffee. Milk. Confirm." with minimal error rate (lack of sugar is implied because it wasn't explicitly specified). It could even flash the available tree of choices and commands on a non-touch screen embedded in the table or something.
...who looked at that illustration and instantly thought of what would happen if it got punctured by a micrometeor or similar fast moving small object.
lack of compartmentalization and emergency airtight shelters would probably ruin that cocktail party for sure
This kind of monitoring would be terrible to rely on for actual authentication. However, it could be very useful for things like displaying the %match of typing patterns of the person you think you're talking to via IM (a particular bash.org quote comes to mind). Just sending a notification somewhere to say that behavioral patterns suddenly don't match anymore and a real person should go check it out
The key is using it not as an authoritative authentication measure, but as additional information that can be analyzed alongside other information in order to get a more accurate version of what's actually happening.
You make it sound like the govt. is an entire different race of people.
In the case of the US government, they might as well be an entirely different race of people. With the kind of money involved in running for office now, it's pretty hard to get in unless you're already sold your soul to lobbyists and/or one of the already established power blocks.
I'm never coming back at this point. They've started along the path of "WoW in space" and I'm just not interested anymore.
Since I started playing:
- 3 concord buffs
- removal of insurance for suicide ganks
- massive buff to mining barge HP and cargospace
- modal dialogue explaining that you have player aggression if you try to undock with player aggression, because the red timer wasn't enough indication (the dialogue is also subject to all of the issues associated with timers glitching out, so it didn't even fix anything that lowsec dwellers complained about).
- increased cost to wardec
- nerfing of mercenary participation in wardecs shortly after adding that feature
- still haven't fixed the ability to dodge a wardec by joining and leaving an alliance.
- adding faction items to market (less opportunity to scam)
- adding faction icons to ships and modules (less opportunity to scam)
- removing freeform contract (less opportunity to scam, plus they were a nice way to document a gentleman's agreement)
- crimewatch system now makes stealing ore/mission loot as a way to engage highsec bears completely impractical.
- crimewatch system now makes it impossible to make yourself a legal target (even intentionally) unless you explicitly allow it in settings (and there's no reason to if you're a highsec bear).
There are a few other things I know I'm leaving out of that list that I can't remember at the moment, it should be about 25% longer.
Though a lot of these changes were arguably a good thing (particularly the UI improvements), they demonstrate a clear path in the direction of making highsec 100% safe with the exception of officially sanctioned actions that both sides agree to participate in.
You can argue all you want that this is somehow a better form of eve (and maybe it is), but it's not the eve I signed up to play 6 years ago. The entire appeal to me was that I wasn't safe anywhere except for docked in a station (and even then maybe not), and neither was anyone else. With that becoming less and less true each patch, there's just no appeal in the game for me anymore.
To clarify this a bit, those numbers don't mean that people actually spent $3600 on their ships.
The real money-->isk conversion works by players buying gametime in 30 day blocks (plex). They then sell the plex on the market for ingame currency (isk). The conversion usually floats between ~300m - ~600m isk per plex. There's no way to directly exchange real money for isk (it must go through the player driven market as plex), and there's no legal way to exchange isk for real money (unless you want to pay the next 10 years of your eve subscription). It's a somewhat subtle, but vital, difference between the more common microtransaction/RMT schemes out there
If you're a player with a few billion in isk (pretty normal amount to have if you're the type who plays conservatively and saves), it's not hard to leverage it to make 500m in a month (or at least wasn't as of last year, I quit over the whole incarna debacle).
Overthrowing the government can be discussed until everyone is blue in the face, but it never gets anywhere.
In my opinion, the point of the second amendment was so that the population doesn't need to be dependent on the government for self defense/protection. The country was founded with competition in mind, it can be seen in how the branches of government are setup to all hold power over each other. By allowing citizens to own guns and protect themselves, you deny the government a monopoly on force. Armed homeowners aren't only a deterrent to robbers, but also to governmental abuse and police state-like actions. Governments don't become tyrannical overnight, they do it in increments.
If one day they decide to label a political blogger as a terrorist and send the thug squad to kick his door in at 2am without identifying themselves or having a warrant, they'll have a lot tougher time of doing it quietly if he's armed. They'd need to not only worry about showing up and keeping a low profile as they enter the house, but also about the thug squad getting involved in a firefight with the homeowner. Not only would a shooting draw attention to the event, but it would probably result in a pretty high profile court case in which the judge would be likely to take the side of the homeowner (or his surviving family).
Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns, according to Department of Justice statistics.
I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.
This is a matter of vital importance to the public safety...
...I'm confused. You cite handgun statistics (do those include gang on gang violence btw?), and then advocate banning semiautomatic rifles. Were you under the impression that AK-47's are classified as handguns, or was your post just a clever troll?
As a trackIR user, I can say that when using these sorts of devices it's helpful to think of your head as controlling a joystick that's moving your view, rather than being directly linked (most people set their trackIR profiles up to amplify movement on a curve, which also helps break that illusion). You don't get annoyed at having to move your hand a little bit to see something in an FPS when you could have just flicked your eyes instead because your brain understands that the mouse is a controller. It doesn't need to be any different for your head.
Also, one of the features of the rift that makes it different is that it has a wide FOV, so there's much less of the looking through a straw feeling that happens with current gen VR headsets.
uuuuhhhhh, a tablet can't fit in a backpack? How about a smartphone you can fit in your pocket. The issue is not the form factor of the computer, they're (more or less) powerful enough and plenty small enough.
Way to misinterpret my post.
This new tablet is rather useless in my opinion because:
1) gaming on a 10 inch screen sounds painful
2) gaming with a touch interface? Maybe if you want to play angry birds or fruit ninja, but you don't need an I7 to run those
If you remove the screen from the tablet and include an HDMI connector, now it's suddenly a lot more useful for actual gaming because you could plug in a display device such as an oculus rift or the vuzix glasses and have a bigger display with less power usage. Add a mouse + keyboard and suddenly you can play FPS anywhere you can get a decent mousing surface. Bring a joystick in your carry on and now you can play FSX on your cross country plane flight.
By "gaming potential" I first thought you meant "gaming the system", which would be when I show up with my RFID gear and sniff the ID off everyone's bracelets in order to be first in line for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural for what? The only advantage the English system has is that lots of lazy-brained people are accustomed to it.
When dividing by even numbers, english units are a lot easier to deal with: 1 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4inch, 1/8inch, 1/16inch, 1/32inch, 1/64inch etc. .5cm, .25cm, .125cm .0625cm, .03125cm, .015625cm
Metric units are generally not marked off in fractions like that, so you quickly end up with unruly decimals: 1cm,
And in response to the people who are currently reading this and thinking "But you could just say 1/16cm!": When is the last time you've seen a metric measuring device marked off in fractions? English measuring devices take to fractions like that naturally. The only reason you don't like it is because you're accustomed to base10.
Metric does make a ton of sense for anything scientific (1ml of water = 1cc of water = 1g of water is massivly convinient), but the decision for the average person (let alone someone doing carpentry where things are frequently cut by 2's and 4s) to use metric units over english units isn't the massive no-brainer that all of you guys keep making it out to be
As an owner of several neural interface devices, mainly an emotiv neuroheadset and also the brain controlled cat ears, I can confirm that this tech is not only 20 years out, but use as a game controller isn't even the proper application for it. There's a good ~second of input lag, coupled with poor detection over all, and most peoples lack of ability to control their general brain patterns (of the sort that these devices pick up at least) with any degree of speed or precision makes it a very very poor choice for use with anything that needs to be consciously controlled in a timely fashion. And the problem is more fundamental than simple tech hurdles. Even if we could reliably detect and monitor the output of every single neuron in the brain I don't think it would be possible to build a decent gaming control rig just by the nature of how the brain works.
The cat ears on the other hand are a much better application (and I'm saying this as someone who hates anime only slightly less than I hate furries). They're outputting additional data (your mood, as detected/determined by the sensor) without any conscious input and in a situation in which a few seconds of delay really doesn't make a huge difference. Using detection like this for something such as music selection, subtle lighting changes, changing the notification settings on your phone, etc. are applications that this kind of tech is much better suited for.
For all we know Earth is dirt all the way down
Are you sure it's dirt and not turtles?
One of the few posts I've found worth modding that hasn't been modded already, and I'm out of modpoints.
This was the mechanism for FTL travel in the book, "Forever War". While the ship entering the black hole is ripped apart from the observers reference frame, to the ships reference frame that hasn't happened yet and it pops out the other side.
If that's your situation, then I don't think it is too unreasonable to suggest that you shouldn't be considering purchasing a next-gen console - or even a previous-gen console.
And in 8 years when the always on "next-gen" console is now previous-gen, then what should he do?
Also, if someone is in a tight financial situation but has some disposable income allocated towards entertainment, why shouldn't they get a console? I always assumed that those people were the target market for the things, since console games are cheap to rent and you don't need to worry about keeping your hardware current as has traditionally been the case with PC games. Add in a requirement for reliable always on internet, and that console suddenly doesn't look as attractive. They'll just go spend their entertainment money elsewhere
As an owner of both the cat ears, and a neuroheadset made by a company called Emotive, I can say from firsthand experience that this sort of technology just isn't quite there yet. And in the case of using it to control things in a conscious manner, probably won't be for a long time. It's hard to rapidly change mental state, and it's often not a binary thing either. Add in the detection lag and even if I could consciously send the correct brainwaves to the thing it would still leave me sitting there wondering why I couldn't have just pressed a button or used a voice command instead.
The cat ears do an ok job of detecting mental state, though I feel like the "concentration" indicator of the ears wildly swinging back and forth is more of an error state than anything else, at least in my pair (after entering it, mine will continue to go nuts even if I remove the headset). In my opinion they're actually a good example of correct application of this kind of technology. Rather than relying on the user for direct control, they're monitoring the user and then taking a non-critical but useful action (indicating mental state to other people) based one what they observe.
In the case of the Emotive headset, it was a massive letdown. Their marketing is completely fine hyping up the "IT READS YOUR BRAIN!!11" selling point, and then showing videos of people controlling wheelchairs or moving a mouse pointer around, implying they're doing that with their thoughts. They actually aren't. Most of that is coming from facial muscles (the headset has pretty good detection of those, and can make an avatar match facial expressions with maybe 80% accuracy), or the gyro in the back of the headset. After a lot of fiddling with it over several weeks, the best I could make it do with pure brain scanning to differentiate between a baseline and 2 other mental states. All of them took me several seconds to get myself into, and it took the headset another second or so on top of that to detect and respond. They'd often get triggered or broken by random external events, and generally weren't reliable enough to actually use to control something.
In order to make this kind of technology continue on without turning it into a pariah (Flying cars and AI research anyone?), they need to do 3 things:
1) improve the detection
2) find useful applications for it that actually make sense. Anything that doesn't need rapid input or fine grained control is a good candidate. Moving a mouse or clicking buttons: bad. Altering which song it queues up next in your home entertainment system based on your current observed mental state: better.
3) expectations management. Detecting brain activity with something like an FMRI is fairly precise, but even then it would be tricky to make it give someone conscious, fine grained control over something. An MRI machine is bulky and expensive, your $50 EEG electrode is $50. These aren't devices that can ~read your brainwaves~, they're a single EEG electrode that's detecting electrical signals that may or may not be emanating from your brain. The people marketing these devices need to emphasize that. Otherwise they're going to end up 10 years down the road with a general public that's bitter over not being able to telepathically communicate like the borg.
People in the business of robbing banks have lots of money? You don't say! I wonder where they got it all from?
There's only one company on that list that seems qualified to me, and that would be Mozilla.
We can have a pointless major new revision of web openness standards every week!
Anyway, like I said, perhaps the poster meant something else.
Rather than assume the poster was a total moron, I interpreted it as "once it runs of power, voyager turns into a tiny piece of impossible to track space junk, so doesn't matter if it escapes the oort cloud or not past that point".
Obligatory XKCD: http://whatif.xkcd.com/29/
China and Apple have the same mentality:
We know what is best for you, and we will not give you any choice about that.
There can only be one!
Counting to 10 sounds more like an even technique to me. Might I suggest 11 or 9 instead?
Where voice systems fall down is when they try to mimic a human and allow people to talk naturally. The designers should play to the strengths of the system, e.g. it's a way to input things into a computer without having to touch a greasy screen
In theory a well designed voice system designed to respond to a very limited series of short, well chosen commands would be highly accurate and not annoy the user.
If the command tree was structured well, you could order with something like "Coffee. Milk. Confirm." with minimal error rate (lack of sugar is implied because it wasn't explicitly specified). It could even flash the available tree of choices and commands on a non-touch screen embedded in the table or something.
...who looked at that illustration and instantly thought of what would happen if it got punctured by a micrometeor or similar fast moving small object.
lack of compartmentalization and emergency airtight shelters would probably ruin that cocktail party for sure
This kind of monitoring would be terrible to rely on for actual authentication. However, it could be very useful for things like displaying the %match of typing patterns of the person you think you're talking to via IM (a particular bash.org quote comes to mind). Just sending a notification somewhere to say that behavioral patterns suddenly don't match anymore and a real person should go check it out
The key is using it not as an authoritative authentication measure, but as additional information that can be analyzed alongside other information in order to get a more accurate version of what's actually happening.
You make it sound like the govt. is an entire different race of people.
In the case of the US government, they might as well be an entirely different race of people. With the kind of money involved in running for office now, it's pretty hard to get in unless you're already sold your soul to lobbyists and/or one of the already established power blocks.
I'm never coming back at this point. They've started along the path of "WoW in space" and I'm just not interested anymore.
Since I started playing: - 3 concord buffs
- removal of insurance for suicide ganks
- massive buff to mining barge HP and cargospace
- modal dialogue explaining that you have player aggression if you try to undock with player aggression, because the red timer wasn't enough indication (the dialogue is also subject to all of the issues associated with timers glitching out, so it didn't even fix anything that lowsec dwellers complained about).
- increased cost to wardec
- nerfing of mercenary participation in wardecs shortly after adding that feature
- still haven't fixed the ability to dodge a wardec by joining and leaving an alliance.
- adding faction items to market (less opportunity to scam)
- adding faction icons to ships and modules (less opportunity to scam)
- removing freeform contract (less opportunity to scam, plus they were a nice way to document a gentleman's agreement)
- crimewatch system now makes stealing ore/mission loot as a way to engage highsec bears completely impractical.
- crimewatch system now makes it impossible to make yourself a legal target (even intentionally) unless you explicitly allow it in settings (and there's no reason to if you're a highsec bear).
There are a few other things I know I'm leaving out of that list that I can't remember at the moment, it should be about 25% longer.
Though a lot of these changes were arguably a good thing (particularly the UI improvements), they demonstrate a clear path in the direction of making highsec 100% safe with the exception of officially sanctioned actions that both sides agree to participate in.
You can argue all you want that this is somehow a better form of eve (and maybe it is), but it's not the eve I signed up to play 6 years ago. The entire appeal to me was that I wasn't safe anywhere except for docked in a station (and even then maybe not), and neither was anyone else. With that becoming less and less true each patch, there's just no appeal in the game for me anymore.
To clarify this a bit, those numbers don't mean that people actually spent $3600 on their ships.
The real money-->isk conversion works by players buying gametime in 30 day blocks (plex). They then sell the plex on the market for ingame currency (isk). The conversion usually floats between ~300m - ~600m isk per plex. There's no way to directly exchange real money for isk (it must go through the player driven market as plex), and there's no legal way to exchange isk for real money (unless you want to pay the next 10 years of your eve subscription). It's a somewhat subtle, but vital, difference between the more common microtransaction/RMT schemes out there
If you're a player with a few billion in isk (pretty normal amount to have if you're the type who plays conservatively and saves), it's not hard to leverage it to make 500m in a month (or at least wasn't as of last year, I quit over the whole incarna debacle).
Overthrowing the government can be discussed until everyone is blue in the face, but it never gets anywhere.
In my opinion, the point of the second amendment was so that the population doesn't need to be dependent on the government for self defense/protection. The country was founded with competition in mind, it can be seen in how the branches of government are setup to all hold power over each other. By allowing citizens to own guns and protect themselves, you deny the government a monopoly on force. Armed homeowners aren't only a deterrent to robbers, but also to governmental abuse and police state-like actions. Governments don't become tyrannical overnight, they do it in increments.
If one day they decide to label a political blogger as a terrorist and send the thug squad to kick his door in at 2am without identifying themselves or having a warrant, they'll have a lot tougher time of doing it quietly if he's armed. They'd need to not only worry about showing up and keeping a low profile as they enter the house, but also about the thug squad getting involved in a firefight with the homeowner. Not only would a shooting draw attention to the event, but it would probably result in a pretty high profile court case in which the judge would be likely to take the side of the homeowner (or his surviving family).
Here are my views on gun control:
Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns, according to Department of Justice statistics.
I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.
This is a matter of vital importance to the public safety ...
...I'm confused. You cite handgun statistics (do those include gang on gang violence btw?), and then advocate banning semiautomatic rifles. Were you under the impression that AK-47's are classified as handguns, or was your post just a clever troll?
Obligatory: http://i.imgur.com/YF3Iu.jpg
As a trackIR user, I can say that when using these sorts of devices it's helpful to think of your head as controlling a joystick that's moving your view, rather than being directly linked (most people set their trackIR profiles up to amplify movement on a curve, which also helps break that illusion). You don't get annoyed at having to move your hand a little bit to see something in an FPS when you could have just flicked your eyes instead because your brain understands that the mouse is a controller. It doesn't need to be any different for your head.
Also, one of the features of the rift that makes it different is that it has a wide FOV, so there's much less of the looking through a straw feeling that happens with current gen VR headsets.
uuuuhhhhh, a tablet can't fit in a backpack? How about a smartphone you can fit in your pocket. The issue is not the form factor of the computer, they're (more or less) powerful enough and plenty small enough.
Way to misinterpret my post.
This new tablet is rather useless in my opinion because:
1) gaming on a 10 inch screen sounds painful
2) gaming with a touch interface? Maybe if you want to play angry birds or fruit ninja, but you don't need an I7 to run those
If you remove the screen from the tablet and include an HDMI connector, now it's suddenly a lot more useful for actual gaming because you could plug in a display device such as an oculus rift or the vuzix glasses and have a bigger display with less power usage. Add a mouse + keyboard and suddenly you can play FPS anywhere you can get a decent mousing surface. Bring a joystick in your carry on and now you can play FSX on your cross country plane flight.
By "gaming potential" I first thought you meant "gaming the system", which would be when I show up with my RFID gear and sniff the ID off everyone's bracelets in order to be first in line for everything.