What percentage of still-pristine canned goods does your supermarket throw away? Far less than fruit or vegetables I'll wager, and the "keep the shelves stocked" pressure is exactly the same for both - so what's the difference?
Cans will sit on the shelf basically forever, so there's very little pressure to get the old stuff off the shelves faster than it sells. Throwing away product costs you money - you usually only do it if it's no longer saleable. And the longer something can remain saleable while sitting on the shelf, the easier it is to match the rate you purchase replacements the rate at which they sell.
And nobody is processing the food - they're just putting a protective coating on it. Wash the coating off, and you've got the exact same food you used to have - it just lasted longer on the shelf. In some cases that may even translate to tastier fruit, since it can be allowed to ripen further before being picked, while still having a longer shelf life than it currently has. Because really, there's not much you can do to more effectively kill the flavor of fruit than picking it before it's ripe - and that's sadly the normal practice for most fruit today.
So what? Evolution doens't naturally tend to overburdening the environment. In fact on islands where species evolved with no predators, and thus their greatest threat to survival was overburdening the environment, they evolved to self-regulate their population growth, responding to environmental stress by not mating.
Now, if you're talking a negative value to society - I would agree wholeheartedly.
But if you're the owner? Little perhaps, but as long as it sits untouched in your portfolio it costs you nothing. And any patent not yet actually found completely invalid has a litigation cost associated with doing so. That gives you bargaining power - whether in the threat of a defensive countersuit against an aggresive competitor, or as a troll for some easy cash.
Doesn't matter if it would stand up to any challenge - much of the point of a modern patent portfolio is to have a lot of little soldiers standing ready to be thrown into battle. It doesn't even matter if most of them would end up falling on their own swords, they still look ominous standing in the field. And they serve as a distraction as well, providing some camouflage for the genuine threats - forcing the opposition to waste resources considering every patent in the field for possible relevance and validity.
Almost certainly not what was envisioned when they set up the system - but that's rather ballooned out of all control since they stopped requiring the president to personally sign each patent awarded. I often think perhaps we should reinstate that requirement - if it's not an innovative enough invention to be worth be two seconds of the President's time, then maybe it's really not innovative enough to give you exclusive control over everyone who wants to use it in the next many years.
>"far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats" Really?
Google indicates that 3G typically operates between 1.8GHz and 2.5GHz, 4G between 2 and 8GHz, and 5G between 0.6Ghz and 6GHz, as well as 24-86 GHz
For comparison, microwave ovens, famous for cooking things from the inside out, operate at 2.45GHz. Now, that's tuned to be really well absorbed by oils and water for the purpose of cooking - but it seems to me that 3G, 4G, and the lower range of 5G all straddle that frequency quite nicely, and unless they specifically avoid that particular band, should be expected to have a very similar effect. Not on the same scale of course - unless your phone is transmitting a narrow-band 1+kW signal, but any bio-molecular response is going to happen one microwave photon at a time.
I suspect valuing the patents at $2 is prelude to the CEO starting a new LLC to buy them and keep doing the same thing without all those old debts hanging over their head. Standard corporate shell game - our company imploded, so we're going to buy all the assets at fire-sale prices and start a new company doing the exact same thing but with a different sign over the door. Have fun trying to squeeze that money we owed you out of our old corporate charter!
Nice theory - except that even with people that believe in them, polygraphs are about as effective as flipping a coin. I'm sure this will be much better though - more on par with rolling dice.
Are you sure you're not thinking of I-frames rather than B-frames? I-frames are the static, fully self-contained images, while B-frames are intermediate frames compressed using information from both past and future frames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Other than that, you're right on. To give a sense of the delays involved:
I-frames typically occur every 15-18 frames, and you need two of them to decode the intermediate B frames. US transmission rates are typically 24 or 30 FPS. If we're generous and assume 30FPS, then that's a minimum of ~17/30 = 0.56s delay between beginning to monitor an MPEG stream, and being able to begin playing the video. But you probably didn't happen to tune in just as an I-frame appeared, so you have to wait an average of half that long for the first I-frame to appear, meaning it's an average of 0.85s between tuning in and the video starting to play - though a "responsive" player could at least display the first I-frame as soon as it appears. Which could really be quite handy while channel-surfing - a static image would be a LOT more informative than staring at a black screen for an extra half-second.
So, you should expect to wait an average of almost a second between tuning in to a new channel's video stream, and the video beginning to play. And that's just the unavoidable time to actually start decoding the stream, it completely ignores all the delays associated with actually tuning in to the carrier frequency (which should be tiny unless the hardware is junk) and decoding any encryption (which could be nearly anything).
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw someone with a Rolex watch - they're not exactly what I'd call a popular brand either. Though with their prices they could be hundreds of times less popular than, say, Timex, while still leading them in sales.
No, it definitely isn't. A process that sheds heat when done quickly, will still shed heat when done slowly. You might be thinking isothermal (constant temperature), in which case doing it slowly enough is one way to accomplish the goal. There's a lot of confusion between the two, but they're completely different concepts.
Adiabatic basically means "inside a well-insulated container" - it doesn't care how much the temperature changes, so long as no heat enters or leaves. In the case of compressed air storage, it sounds like the normal adiabatic process is to siphon off the heat generated by compression, store it separately in a medium that can store the same amount of heat with a much smaller temperature change and/or volume than the air, and then use it to re-heat the air as the pressure is released.
The Carnot cycle, basis of the internal combustion engine, actually contains two isothermal stages, in which pressure and volume change inversely (PV=constant) as heat is added and removed, and two reversible adiabatic stages where the gas changes temperature while expanding or contracting, without any external thermal transfer.
I was curious about efficiency myself, and google and this page (http://energystorage.org/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes) suggests that straightforward energy storage as compressed air is about 42% efficient, increasing to 55% efficient if you can use the waste heat.
If you can store the heat separately to make the process adiabatic, then the efficiency climbs to ~70% - but then you've got the additional cost and complexity of trying to store energy as heat, which is arguably a much more challenging task.
For comparison a Li-ion battery is about 99% efficient, and pumped water is generally in the 60%-80% range, with some claims approaching 90%.
I've never found it so. It's just not so well suited to a lot of traditional game styles, and spawned a whole lot of crap cashing in on the novelty.
Pretty much nothing Nintendo did for the platform was awkward - unless you wanted to play some of them sitting down. (I found I did much better even in Zelda if I stood, especially for the boss battles).
A whole lot of 3rd part stuff though was ports from other platforms, with some gimmicky "Wii waggle" controls slapped on. Or similarly gimmicky Wii-exclusive shovel-ware that was just as awkward.
Stuff that received proper attention to exploiting the controls though? Tiger Woods golf is hands-down the best gold simulator I've ever played. We Ski by far the best skiing experience (using a balance board). Wii Sports and Resort by far the best tennis, bowling, etc. games I've played, with immensely subtle and immersive controls.
If Nintendo made one mistake, it's in not freely distributing the source for Sports and Sports Resort. At least the portions related to the motion controls. If those games had represented the baseline motion control fidelity rather than being near the high-water mark, the platform would have shined much brighter.
First off - illegal immigrants don't have access to existing "socialist" programs. What makes you think they'd have access to new ones?
Because both parties are far more interested in kowtowing to their wealthy masters than promoting their supposed ideologies? It's really convenient to have issues to fight passionately over, without hope of making serious headway. Keeps the proles distracted while both parties work together to carry out their masters' wishes.
Besides - the Republicans would never allow it. Get rid of illegal immigrants and they'd lose one of their biggest campaign rallying drums. Seriously - take a good hard look at the Republican proposed "solutions". Like this one, or a 2000 mile wall easily defeated by a $10 ladder or rope. They're doomed to failure by design - but what they do accomplish is riling up the proles and/or making it easier to legally harass non-whites.
Certainly it is. Look at... almost every representation of VR in the media since its conception - photo-realism is rare, VR is about immersing yourself in another, virtual, reality. Not accurately recreating this one.
Very little work is creating new systems - most of it is maintenance, in which case you can probably already find out a great deal about how it's already being used.
You can also observe your employer to see how ethically they use the tools already at their disposal. Yours will after all be used no more ethically than those.
It's getting a bit more indirect, but you can also look at how they value the well-being of their employees - after all it's probably more than they value that of the general populace.
There's also a question of... call it corruptibility. If you help build something extremely powerful, and that power can be exploited for evil - it eventually will be. Power reliably attracts the worst sort of people, and tempts even best. So if you're building such a powerful tool you must constantly ask yourself: how can this be used for evil? And how much good is it realistically likely to offer? And how does that stack up against how much evil will it inevitably enable?
Every choice in life is a weighing of the benefits against the prices that will be paid - and you never really have the whole picture. That doesn't mean you throw away the oars oars and disclaim all responsibility for where you're end up. You make the best choices you can in light of the information available, and you live with the consequences. There may not be easy answers, but you should at least ask the questions, and decided whether you honestly believe the inevitable blood on your hands will be worth it.
>But a whole lot of code is making function foo handle variable X correctly. There's nothing ethical or unethical in that. It just is.
Of course there's something ethical about that - you're building part of a machine, and as such you carry partial responsibility for the existence and use of that machine. If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it. If it's *already* being used for the detriment of humanity, don't help maintain or upgrade it. Or at least own up to the moral responsibility for your actions.
Now, if you're writing a public library, and some of the users of that library use it as part of something evil, that's one thing. But so far as I know, the majority of modern programming is still done in-house. Which means that your library was probably built in-house, in service to the "evil master plan", and you can't duck moral responsibility by saying that that part *you* did wasn't actually evil when taken in isolation.
Agreed on the price - it needs to come down dramatically before it becomes genuinely tempting for most people. Have you actually had the opportunity to compare the two experiences though? I highly recommend it before making any decisions.
As for just looking around, have you ever looked at the TrackIR, OpenTrack, etc? Quite a few cockpit games (and a very few FPSs) support it out of the box, and a lot more via user-made patches. Basically it tracks your head position and updates the in-game camera accordingly, using an adjustable rotation scaling function so that you can look over your shoulder in-game while still able to see the screen. It delivers a great deal of the functionality, if not nearly the immersion. Though personally I found the default scaling settings WAY too touchy, and altered them to deliver ~1:1 tracking while looking almost straight at the screen, scaling out to reach a full 180* at about 60* of actual head-turn, so that the screen was still in view. Dramatically improved the experience so that it felt more like I was actually looking around instead of using my head as a glorified hat-switch.
The problem is that a hotline doesn't help with that at all. Seriously - if you were a victim of a crime, your probably don't even know the name and address of the perpetrator, much less their immigration status. So call the police - that's what they're there for.
That means anyone calling the hotline will almost be reporting someone with dark skin and or speaking a non-English language - the vast majority of whom are either legal immigrants or multi-generation Americans.
If we really want to stop the illegal immigrant problem then we should attack it at its source - the people hiring illegal immigrants. Make it a felony to hire an illegal immigrant, with everyone involved in the process, *especially* the executives , paying stiff fines and probably spending time in prison. The market for illegal immigrant labor would dry up almost overnight, and there would no longer be a compelling reason for illegal immigrants to want to come here.
That we *don't* do that exposes the real nature of the situation - lawmakers are fine with people hiring cheap illegal labor, but they also want to fan the flames of racism for election points.
> Because the recruiters are all under pressure to find female techs/engineers/programmers.
I think that reinforces the point - *if* there's pressure to diversify, it helps counteract the pre-existing bias. If there weren't a pre-existing bias, then there would be no lack of diversity to justify such pressure.
In fairness, 3D movies are considerably more expensive to create, and rarely have much extra to offer except things occasionally flying at your head. They're also plagued by directors trying to put the content in front of the screen instead of behind it, where field-of-view issues don't exist. Understandable for the "experience", but it does a great disservice to what the technology *can* do well by introducing lots of annoying artifacts, especially if you're not sitting directly centered in front of the screen. About the only time I saw it done at all well was an undersea nature documentary at a dynamax, where the screen filled much of my field of view and the animal they focussed on would swim in your lap. Almost made up for the fact that everything else in the scene made my brain hurt as its proximity caused it to go off-screen for one eye or the other.
VR doesn't suffer from most of those problems. Most especially, it doesn't inherently suffer from considerable production expense - all the content is already in 3D, it's just a matter of rendering the same thing twice. The interface is currently more expensive to develop - but a lot of that is just growing pains and will disappear once the industry settles o good standards. Just as virtually all modern FPS games use the same basic interface. It wasn't always that way, in the early days there was a lot of variation, but once the "mouse and keyboard" control scheme dominated pretty much everyone settled on basically the same interface.
And yes, VR does solve a consumer problem - the desire for more immersive games. (There's also professional VR, but that's a separate market that predated the Oculus, though it did explode with the introduction of cheap consumer VR of semi-comparable quality)
Why? I'm no fan of Facebook, but Oculus is hardly synonymous with VR, and the Vive kicks butt.
It *is* a shame they fragmented the market - it sounded like Steam and Oculus were talking big on interoperability prior to the sale, and that seems to have largely gone out the window under Facebook.
There's an easy way to avoid the uncanny valley without enormous horsepower - just stay away from it. There's no need for realism in a fun game. Nintendo has embraced that aesthetic - Mario, Zelda, etc. make for fun, immersive games without any uncanny valley problems, and very little computational demand. It seems likely that consumer-level VR would be wise to embrace a similar aesthetic for the forseeable future - otherwise the target market is limited to people willing to spend an outrageous amount of money on a high-end gaming computer, plus a bunch more for the headset, etc. At a $2-3k entry price to desktop VR, I'm not at all surprised the market is currently very limited - that's well into the seriously hard-core gamer price point there. Fortunately there's the professional market to help drive the development of high-end stuff that will eventually trickle down. Engineering, medicine, etc.
As much as I dislike Facebook, I think the Oculus Quest is heading in the right direction to create a market for consumer VR - cheap and easy, with full immersion. It's not sunglasses, but so long as it's light enough to not be particularly uncomfortable - so what? You can't see them while playing, and opaque sunglasses aren't exactly going to make you look a whole lot "cooler".
And really, sitting on the settee misses much of the potential of VR - if you're going for full immersion, you want to actually move in and interact with the world, not just look around. Racing, flying, and other such "cockpit games" can work well by presenting a compelling scenario where you're just sitting is expected (especially if you have proper physical controls and are only using the headset for audio/visual immersion), but the real promise is in actually being in a virtual world. Plus, that lets you actually *move* while playing, which stimulates both health and endorphin production (a.k.a. pleasure) - something that the rise of digital entertainment has largely stripped from modern playing. There's a reason that the Wii was so popular - heck, I know lots of people that still have and use them, many who never bothered to upgrade because the only thing that's improved is the graphics, which are largely irrelevant to the fun. I still bowl, play golf, shoot pool, etc. that way on a semi-regular basis.
And, if they can work out the details to let a desktop PC drive the same cordless VR headset, then there'd an easy path for more serious enthusiasts to get more involved. Whether that means pushing many millions of pixels wirelessly, or utilizing the on-board processing power to apply zero overdraw, perspective correct texture fills to pre-transformed and pre-clipped geometry.
And then of course there's AR - now *that* I think will really shine once they make AR "sunglasses". But despite much technological overlap, that's targeting a *very* different experience.
Because the nature of the community is changing - I thought I made that clear.
Let me be more explicit - the community has traditionally been dominated by white men, with a strong streak of the sort of insular shit-talking routinely present in groups of white men.
It's now expanding to include ever more non-whites and women, and a lot of that insular shit talking that's deemed acceptable among white men, is *not* acceptable to non-whites and women. So, either we grow up, start acting as part of an inclusive community, or we become a fringe hate group, while the larger community moves on without us.
Slashdot Mirror
That presupposes that incompetence is substantially more common than malice - I'm not sure that holds in politics, where both seem nearly ubiquitous.
What percentage of still-pristine canned goods does your supermarket throw away? Far less than fruit or vegetables I'll wager, and the "keep the shelves stocked" pressure is exactly the same for both - so what's the difference?
Cans will sit on the shelf basically forever, so there's very little pressure to get the old stuff off the shelves faster than it sells. Throwing away product costs you money - you usually only do it if it's no longer saleable. And the longer something can remain saleable while sitting on the shelf, the easier it is to match the rate you purchase replacements the rate at which they sell.
And nobody is processing the food - they're just putting a protective coating on it. Wash the coating off, and you've got the exact same food you used to have - it just lasted longer on the shelf. In some cases that may even translate to tastier fruit, since it can be allowed to ripen further before being picked, while still having a longer shelf life than it currently has. Because really, there's not much you can do to more effectively kill the flavor of fruit than picking it before it's ripe - and that's sadly the normal practice for most fruit today.
So what? Evolution doens't naturally tend to overburdening the environment. In fact on islands where species evolved with no predators, and thus their greatest threat to survival was overburdening the environment, they evolved to self-regulate their population growth, responding to environmental stress by not mating.
Now, if you're talking a negative value to society - I would agree wholeheartedly.
But if you're the owner? Little perhaps, but as long as it sits untouched in your portfolio it costs you nothing. And any patent not yet actually found completely invalid has a litigation cost associated with doing so. That gives you bargaining power - whether in the threat of a defensive countersuit against an aggresive competitor, or as a troll for some easy cash.
Doesn't matter if it would stand up to any challenge - much of the point of a modern patent portfolio is to have a lot of little soldiers standing ready to be thrown into battle. It doesn't even matter if most of them would end up falling on their own swords, they still look ominous standing in the field. And they serve as a distraction as well, providing some camouflage for the genuine threats - forcing the opposition to waste resources considering every patent in the field for possible relevance and validity.
Almost certainly not what was envisioned when they set up the system - but that's rather ballooned out of all control since they stopped requiring the president to personally sign each patent awarded. I often think perhaps we should reinstate that requirement - if it's not an innovative enough invention to be worth be two seconds of the President's time, then maybe it's really not innovative enough to give you exclusive control over everyone who wants to use it in the next many years.
>"far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats"
Really?
Google indicates that 3G typically operates between 1.8GHz and 2.5GHz, 4G between 2 and 8GHz, and 5G between 0.6Ghz and 6GHz, as well as 24-86 GHz
For comparison, microwave ovens, famous for cooking things from the inside out, operate at 2.45GHz. Now, that's tuned to be really well absorbed by oils and water for the purpose of cooking - but it seems to me that 3G, 4G, and the lower range of 5G all straddle that frequency quite nicely, and unless they specifically avoid that particular band, should be expected to have a very similar effect. Not on the same scale of course - unless your phone is transmitting a narrow-band 1+kW signal, but any bio-molecular response is going to happen one microwave photon at a time.
Why would they do that though?
I suspect valuing the patents at $2 is prelude to the CEO starting a new LLC to buy them and keep doing the same thing without all those old debts hanging over their head. Standard corporate shell game - our company imploded, so we're going to buy all the assets at fire-sale prices and start a new company doing the exact same thing but with a different sign over the door. Have fun trying to squeeze that money we owed you out of our old corporate charter!
Nice theory - except that even with people that believe in them, polygraphs are about as effective as flipping a coin. I'm sure this will be much better though - more on par with rolling dice.
Are you sure you're not thinking of I-frames rather than B-frames? I-frames are the static, fully self-contained images, while B-frames are intermediate frames compressed using information from both past and future frames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Other than that, you're right on. To give a sense of the delays involved:
I-frames typically occur every 15-18 frames, and you need two of them to decode the intermediate B frames. US transmission rates are typically 24 or 30 FPS. If we're generous and assume 30FPS, then that's a minimum of ~17/30 = 0.56s delay between beginning to monitor an MPEG stream, and being able to begin playing the video. But you probably didn't happen to tune in just as an I-frame appeared, so you have to wait an average of half that long for the first I-frame to appear, meaning it's an average of 0.85s between tuning in and the video starting to play - though a "responsive" player could at least display the first I-frame as soon as it appears. Which could really be quite handy while channel-surfing - a static image would be a LOT more informative than staring at a black screen for an extra half-second.
So, you should expect to wait an average of almost a second between tuning in to a new channel's video stream, and the video beginning to play. And that's just the unavoidable time to actually start decoding the stream, it completely ignores all the delays associated with actually tuning in to the carrier frequency (which should be tiny unless the hardware is junk) and decoding any encryption (which could be nearly anything).
Nope. You forgot to convert from liters to m^3. 120L liquid * (754 L gas/L liquid) = 90,480 liters of gas. And 1m3 = 1000L, so that's only 90.5m^3
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw someone with a Rolex watch - they're not exactly what I'd call a popular brand either. Though with their prices they could be hundreds of times less popular than, say, Timex, while still leading them in sales.
No, it definitely isn't. A process that sheds heat when done quickly, will still shed heat when done slowly. You might be thinking isothermal (constant temperature), in which case doing it slowly enough is one way to accomplish the goal. There's a lot of confusion between the two, but they're completely different concepts.
Adiabatic basically means "inside a well-insulated container" - it doesn't care how much the temperature changes, so long as no heat enters or leaves. In the case of compressed air storage, it sounds like the normal adiabatic process is to siphon off the heat generated by compression, store it separately in a medium that can store the same amount of heat with a much smaller temperature change and/or volume than the air, and then use it to re-heat the air as the pressure is released.
The Carnot cycle, basis of the internal combustion engine, actually contains two isothermal stages, in which pressure and volume change inversely (PV=constant) as heat is added and removed, and two reversible adiabatic stages where the gas changes temperature while expanding or contracting, without any external thermal transfer.
I was curious about efficiency myself, and google and this page (http://energystorage.org/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes) suggests that straightforward energy storage as compressed air is about 42% efficient, increasing to 55% efficient if you can use the waste heat.
If you can store the heat separately to make the process adiabatic, then the efficiency climbs to ~70% - but then you've got the additional cost and complexity of trying to store energy as heat, which is arguably a much more challenging task.
For comparison a Li-ion battery is about 99% efficient, and pumped water is generally in the 60%-80% range, with some claims approaching 90%.
India also doesn't mind if a family of six rides down the highway all balanced on a single scooter. Safety is relative.
I've never found it so. It's just not so well suited to a lot of traditional game styles, and spawned a whole lot of crap cashing in on the novelty.
Pretty much nothing Nintendo did for the platform was awkward - unless you wanted to play some of them sitting down. (I found I did much better even in Zelda if I stood, especially for the boss battles).
A whole lot of 3rd part stuff though was ports from other platforms, with some gimmicky "Wii waggle" controls slapped on. Or similarly gimmicky Wii-exclusive shovel-ware that was just as awkward.
Stuff that received proper attention to exploiting the controls though? Tiger Woods golf is hands-down the best gold simulator I've ever played. We Ski by far the best skiing experience (using a balance board). Wii Sports and Resort by far the best tennis, bowling, etc. games I've played, with immensely subtle and immersive controls.
If Nintendo made one mistake, it's in not freely distributing the source for Sports and Sports Resort. At least the portions related to the motion controls. If those games had represented the baseline motion control fidelity rather than being near the high-water mark, the platform would have shined much brighter.
First off - illegal immigrants don't have access to existing "socialist" programs. What makes you think they'd have access to new ones?
Because both parties are far more interested in kowtowing to their wealthy masters than promoting their supposed ideologies? It's really convenient to have issues to fight passionately over, without hope of making serious headway. Keeps the proles distracted while both parties work together to carry out their masters' wishes.
Besides - the Republicans would never allow it. Get rid of illegal immigrants and they'd lose one of their biggest campaign rallying drums. Seriously - take a good hard look at the Republican proposed "solutions". Like this one, or a 2000 mile wall easily defeated by a $10 ladder or rope. They're doomed to failure by design - but what they do accomplish is riling up the proles and/or making it easier to legally harass non-whites.
Certainly it is. Look at... almost every representation of VR in the media since its conception - photo-realism is rare, VR is about immersing yourself in another, virtual, reality. Not accurately recreating this one.
Very little work is creating new systems - most of it is maintenance, in which case you can probably already find out a great deal about how it's already being used.
You can also observe your employer to see how ethically they use the tools already at their disposal. Yours will after all be used no more ethically than those.
It's getting a bit more indirect, but you can also look at how they value the well-being of their employees - after all it's probably more than they value that of the general populace.
There's also a question of... call it corruptibility. If you help build something extremely powerful, and that power can be exploited for evil - it eventually will be. Power reliably attracts the worst sort of people, and tempts even best. So if you're building such a powerful tool you must constantly ask yourself: how can this be used for evil? And how much good is it realistically likely to offer? And how does that stack up against how much evil will it inevitably enable?
Every choice in life is a weighing of the benefits against the prices that will be paid - and you never really have the whole picture. That doesn't mean you throw away the oars oars and disclaim all responsibility for where you're end up. You make the best choices you can in light of the information available, and you live with the consequences. There may not be easy answers, but you should at least ask the questions, and decided whether you honestly believe the inevitable blood on your hands will be worth it.
>But a whole lot of code is making function foo handle variable X correctly. There's nothing ethical or unethical in that. It just is.
Of course there's something ethical about that - you're building part of a machine, and as such you carry partial responsibility for the existence and use of that machine. If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it. If it's *already* being used for the detriment of humanity, don't help maintain or upgrade it. Or at least own up to the moral responsibility for your actions.
Now, if you're writing a public library, and some of the users of that library use it as part of something evil, that's one thing. But so far as I know, the majority of modern programming is still done in-house. Which means that your library was probably built in-house, in service to the "evil master plan", and you can't duck moral responsibility by saying that that part *you* did wasn't actually evil when taken in isolation.
Agreed on the price - it needs to come down dramatically before it becomes genuinely tempting for most people. Have you actually had the opportunity to compare the two experiences though? I highly recommend it before making any decisions.
As for just looking around, have you ever looked at the TrackIR, OpenTrack, etc? Quite a few cockpit games (and a very few FPSs) support it out of the box, and a lot more via user-made patches. Basically it tracks your head position and updates the in-game camera accordingly, using an adjustable rotation scaling function so that you can look over your shoulder in-game while still able to see the screen. It delivers a great deal of the functionality, if not nearly the immersion. Though personally I found the default scaling settings WAY too touchy, and altered them to deliver ~1:1 tracking while looking almost straight at the screen, scaling out to reach a full 180* at about 60* of actual head-turn, so that the screen was still in view. Dramatically improved the experience so that it felt more like I was actually looking around instead of using my head as a glorified hat-switch.
The problem is that a hotline doesn't help with that at all. Seriously - if you were a victim of a crime, your probably don't even know the name and address of the perpetrator, much less their immigration status. So call the police - that's what they're there for.
That means anyone calling the hotline will almost be reporting someone with dark skin and or speaking a non-English language - the vast majority of whom are either legal immigrants or multi-generation Americans.
If we really want to stop the illegal immigrant problem then we should attack it at its source - the people hiring illegal immigrants. Make it a felony to hire an illegal immigrant, with everyone involved in the process, *especially* the executives , paying stiff fines and probably spending time in prison. The market for illegal immigrant labor would dry up almost overnight, and there would no longer be a compelling reason for illegal immigrants to want to come here.
That we *don't* do that exposes the real nature of the situation - lawmakers are fine with people hiring cheap illegal labor, but they also want to fan the flames of racism for election points.
> Because the recruiters are all under pressure to find female techs/engineers/programmers.
I think that reinforces the point - *if* there's pressure to diversify, it helps counteract the pre-existing bias. If there weren't a pre-existing bias, then there would be no lack of diversity to justify such pressure.
In fairness, 3D movies are considerably more expensive to create, and rarely have much extra to offer except things occasionally flying at your head. They're also plagued by directors trying to put the content in front of the screen instead of behind it, where field-of-view issues don't exist. Understandable for the "experience", but it does a great disservice to what the technology *can* do well by introducing lots of annoying artifacts, especially if you're not sitting directly centered in front of the screen. About the only time I saw it done at all well was an undersea nature documentary at a dynamax, where the screen filled much of my field of view and the animal they focussed on would swim in your lap. Almost made up for the fact that everything else in the scene made my brain hurt as its proximity caused it to go off-screen for one eye or the other.
VR doesn't suffer from most of those problems. Most especially, it doesn't inherently suffer from considerable production expense - all the content is already in 3D, it's just a matter of rendering the same thing twice. The interface is currently more expensive to develop - but a lot of that is just growing pains and will disappear once the industry settles o good standards. Just as virtually all modern FPS games use the same basic interface. It wasn't always that way, in the early days there was a lot of variation, but once the "mouse and keyboard" control scheme dominated pretty much everyone settled on basically the same interface.
And yes, VR does solve a consumer problem - the desire for more immersive games. (There's also professional VR, but that's a separate market that predated the Oculus, though it did explode with the introduction of cheap consumer VR of semi-comparable quality)
Why? I'm no fan of Facebook, but Oculus is hardly synonymous with VR, and the Vive kicks butt.
It *is* a shame they fragmented the market - it sounded like Steam and Oculus were talking big on interoperability prior to the sale, and that seems to have largely gone out the window under Facebook.
There's an easy way to avoid the uncanny valley without enormous horsepower - just stay away from it. There's no need for realism in a fun game. Nintendo has embraced that aesthetic - Mario, Zelda, etc. make for fun, immersive games without any uncanny valley problems, and very little computational demand. It seems likely that consumer-level VR would be wise to embrace a similar aesthetic for the forseeable future - otherwise the target market is limited to people willing to spend an outrageous amount of money on a high-end gaming computer, plus a bunch more for the headset, etc. At a $2-3k entry price to desktop VR, I'm not at all surprised the market is currently very limited - that's well into the seriously hard-core gamer price point there. Fortunately there's the professional market to help drive the development of high-end stuff that will eventually trickle down. Engineering, medicine, etc.
As much as I dislike Facebook, I think the Oculus Quest is heading in the right direction to create a market for consumer VR - cheap and easy, with full immersion. It's not sunglasses, but so long as it's light enough to not be particularly uncomfortable - so what? You can't see them while playing, and opaque sunglasses aren't exactly going to make you look a whole lot "cooler".
And really, sitting on the settee misses much of the potential of VR - if you're going for full immersion, you want to actually move in and interact with the world, not just look around. Racing, flying, and other such "cockpit games" can work well by presenting a compelling scenario where you're just sitting is expected (especially if you have proper physical controls and are only using the headset for audio/visual immersion), but the real promise is in actually being in a virtual world. Plus, that lets you actually *move* while playing, which stimulates both health and endorphin production (a.k.a. pleasure) - something that the rise of digital entertainment has largely stripped from modern playing. There's a reason that the Wii was so popular - heck, I know lots of people that still have and use them, many who never bothered to upgrade because the only thing that's improved is the graphics, which are largely irrelevant to the fun. I still bowl, play golf, shoot pool, etc. that way on a semi-regular basis.
And, if they can work out the details to let a desktop PC drive the same cordless VR headset, then there'd an easy path for more serious enthusiasts to get more involved. Whether that means pushing many millions of pixels wirelessly, or utilizing the on-board processing power to apply zero overdraw, perspective correct texture fills to pre-transformed and pre-clipped geometry.
And then of course there's AR - now *that* I think will really shine once they make AR "sunglasses". But despite much technological overlap, that's targeting a *very* different experience.
Because the nature of the community is changing - I thought I made that clear.
Let me be more explicit - the community has traditionally been dominated by white men, with a strong streak of the sort of insular shit-talking routinely present in groups of white men.
It's now expanding to include ever more non-whites and women, and a lot of that insular shit talking that's deemed acceptable among white men, is *not* acceptable to non-whites and women. So, either we grow up, start acting as part of an inclusive community, or we become a fringe hate group, while the larger community moves on without us.