Where it works this may be good in the short run, but I see a couple of potential (and sinister) downsides:
1) It makes punishment much more acceptable. I'm not so worried about the deterrent value, but the fact that you might get put under surveillance for unpaid library fines, downloading the wrong file, etc. This yet another slippery slide into a police state.
2) It makes surveillance much more acceptable, and helps fine tune the technology for it. If it turns out that criminals who do not misbehave live perfectly happy lives under the system, and if it is demonstrated that crime goes down when more people are under such surveillance, the "nanny state" types might be pushing for more people to be tagged like this. The typical "if you're doing nothing wrong, why wouldn't want this?" "think of the children" "terrorism, etc." arguments might be advanced by some and swallowed whole by the increasingly surveillance-desensitized public.
2.5) It may make law enforcement lazy, causing them to push for more of this technology (cheaper, more effective, etc). You can draw an analogy with the convenience of warrant-less wiretapping
I'm not sure what the full answer is, but more surveillance (even if it's just for the criminals -- for now --) gives me a very uneasy feeling....
Where the resolution gets divided by the number of views displayed simultaneously. If you could make display with 1000 dpi resolution, you could turn it into an autostereoscopic display with horizontal parallax displaying 10 images at 100 dpi. I imagine a 10000 dpi screen would let you create something indistinguishable from a hologram with no glasses required to view it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera (a type of camera that can let you re-focus (and to a certain extent re-position) images after taking the shot. The problem is that it requires a LOT of resolution to produce acceptable images).
I'm sure there were many filmmakers who resisted to push to color, a small minority with good reason.
Not every movie should be in 3D just like every movie should not necessarily be in color. But I think a lot of the pushback is from people who can't see (or handle) 3D. As others have pointed out, new directors will come up with new ways of using this, just like they did with color.
You will see new tools in the next couple of years that will make 3D movies more 'directable' as well as post-processing tools that will make it hurt your eyes less. I hope the technology catches on this time. I imagine it's easier to shoot a movie in 3D than to convert it to 3D later (this _may_ change with technology, but I kind of hope it doesn't -- watching a movie converted to 3D is as painful as watching a "colorized" classic movie). 3D to 2D conversion is trivial.
Then all 15 billion of us can live in mansions, and drive flying SUVs. The real psychopaths are people like you who wish to deny people the right to live their lives to fullest.
I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism when
1) You have your own SUV to think about
2) You live in a country with abundant natural resources, trees, land, and relatively low population per area
3) Environmental destruction is an abstract concept that only "left wing wackos" and people who want to take away your "right to consume" rail on about...
4) You consume (or produce) commercially sponsored news/research/propaganda
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
I'm no saint. I own an SUV. I commute. I take international flights. I drink bottled water.
But there's a HUGE difference between not living up to your values and actually BELIEVING that what you do would be good policy if everyone else on the planet did it. The latter may make you feel good, but leads to the election of decision makers who create policies that are far more harmful than the actions (good or bad) of a single individual.
I believe most 3D will "make your eyes hurt" for extended use until they solve vergence and accomodation issues. While there is some work (e.g., accommodation display at Fraunhofer and some work at HITlab) to resolve these, I'm afraid we might not see the results of these at Best Buy anytime soon.
Having demonstrated 3D technology to hundreds of adults and kids, my experience has been that kids below 12 _generally_ don't seem to "get" 3D. Perhaps it's their visual system, or perhaps it's because the inter-pupillary-distance (IPD) is wrong on most systems for how far apart their eyes are. I don't this they'll be missing out on too much if they skip out on the 3D games until their visual systems catch up with the tech.
All this aside, I'm personally thrilled that all this 3D technology is becoming mainstream, but I wouldn't (and wouldn't recommend for anyone to) use the 3D technology for more than a couple of hours a day at most. Still, the fear-mongering articles and the 3-D bashing that accompanies them (probably by people who can't see the 3D effect) kind of ticks me off..
There's a point that, if understood by these countries, would make all this nonsense disappear:
They are collectively handing over the decision of what they can and can't see from their country to 12 year old trolls from countries that don't really like them.
Anyone can post a taboo subject for country X to a site like YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, etc. from outside the country for the sole purpose of tricking that country's judicial system into blocking that site.
That's worse than any DDOS I can imagine.
While this point is obvious to US Slashdotters, there are many (otherwise intelligent) people in these countries who agree with their censors thinking that they are "showing the west" the consequences of its disrespect.
I would think that it would be more productive to put a copy of this "digital key" online as a community accessible and editable (with moderation) resource. Open source programs that read these old formats (i.e., a library of sorts), ASCII documentation on each one, schematics of reference hardware, and the fostering of a community to maintain such a library (perhaps with funding) would probably go a longer way to ensure that an *.odt or *.xlsx document from today is still easily readable in 25 years.
That being said, good paper documentation is probably good too.
(I'm afraid my password protected FREDWriter documents on AppleII disks from 198* are long gone even if I could find the disks...)
Autostereoscopic (i.e., 3D without Glasses) type of displays is why we want large screens with high resolution.
Both Lenticular and Parallax Barrier autostereoscopic displays provide additional viewpoints at the expense of resolution. The more resolution you have, the more your 3D image looks like a hologram that you can walk around.
This is why you see displays like the Synthagram (9 viewpoints, coarse lenticular screen superimposed on ~ 3000x4000 LCD) or the now discontinued Sharp 3D LCD (similar principle) which you would not really want in your living room versus very nice looking 3D prints (48+ decent looking viewpoints enabled by a 1440 dpi print and a fine lenticular screen). Geeky technical details aside, the more resolution you have, the better looking "glasses free" 3D you can enable on a monitor.
I realize that this is a true niche right now, but with 3DTVs making it to market, and the technology actually making it possible, we should see these type of displays in the next 5-10 years (sooner, I would hope, but things rarely happen so nicely in the real world).
I was also upset when they discontinued Crystal Pepsi.
I guess the point is we have to live with the evolution of knowledge. I still want Crystal Pepsi back, and will miss Drosophila (the concept -- not the annoying white-eyed mutant flies that fill the dorm rooms of biology students -- who I believe will be oblivious to the change).
I have not had the misfortune of buying one of their books, but if I were Amazon or B&N, I would do something about this book equivalent of SPAM (something which costs NOTHING to produce that you can posts thousands of, with the proviso that you print it when someone shells out $60...).
The sad thing is, as long as you post enough of these on Amazon, you will make money. The scheme will multiply. I'm sure they'll fix it (perhaps require that they send a single printed & bound copy and have a human look over it for not being absolute drivel) -- because it sounds VERY annoying...
Usually there's an "invert" button on the IR emitter to swap left/right eye -- you should press this if things look 3D, but horribly wrong somehow (or if the scene gets better when you turn the 3D glasses upside down and look through them).
All verbal confusion aside, it's good that they are offering a setup service -- while the setup on the devices is not that complicated, it's a bit less trivial than programming a VCR. I could see a lot of inexperienced users (which is 99.999% of the population at this point in history) banging their head against the wall.
For example, on one Samsung model, only one HDMI input supports 3D, the TV has to be specifically switched to 3D mode, the emitter has to be hooked up to the right place, IR interference from other sources must be eliminated, etc.
That sounds horrendous. I wonder how he built the company to be that large in the first place.
I can only imagine the type of work that would require that much paranoia (covering up rogue UFO landings, grooming the dogs of the rich & famous, or a Freejack style temporal recovery operation...
Create a live CD image to boot off of. This probably means Linux, but I'm sure you could probably hack something with XP Embedded if you tried hard enough.
You could do a network boot, but someone could still infect that.
In your CD image, disable all nonsense such as Autorun. When someone needs something installed, install it on a freshly reconstituted image machine and burn a custom CD-R for them. Keep your image machines offline, and under physical security.
For that matter, push all your updates via new CDs, with a simple version numbering scheme.
Save work on network drives. Scan the drives for macro and other forms of viruses.
I don't understand why we have to wait until 2014 to get pre-existing condition exceptions repealed. I'm proud of the Congress for some sort of insurance reform, but am appalled that such a basic part of this reform goes into effect so late.
Perhaps I'm missing something about how these laws work...
From one of the articles:
People with "preexisting" health problems: Six months after the bills are enacted, health plans would be prohibited from excluding children who have preexisting conditions. In 2014, this prohibition would be extended to adults. That year, insurers would no longer be allowed to set annual limits, rescind coverage, or impose excessive waiting periods before coverage starts.
This is kind of cool, but what you need is a voice recorder, battery, _and_ a micro SD card inside a coin that can be read through bluetooth without opening it. It would have to be induction chargeable (or charge itself with kinetic energy).
Then, and only then, would it be worthy of Slashdot...
Perhaps this article is a good analogue to illustrate what happens when technologically illiterate lawmakers propose technology legislation.
It's true that it is IMPOSSIBLE to eat a low sodium diet if you're eating out without severely restricting what you consume (if you disagree, I'd love to hear which items worked for you besides lettuce and hard-boiled eggs).
It's also near impossible to eat even a regular sodium diet if you eat out a lot, like I do.
Perhaps there needs to be some law to require *LARGE* restaurants to offer a low-sodium (but not salt free) option for maybe 10% of their menu items, or to regulate the sodium in a single portion to less than a day's recommended allowance (a lot of current dishes will fail).
While Apple, as a corporation, has a legal right to impose whatever terms it wants on its developers, I think this is a "Bad Thing". As someone else observed, these terms are very similar to game console development terms, and is leading us towards trusted computing as the dominant paradigm.
If we're not careful, we are on the path to "state of the art" devices always being draconian game-console-like things where a corporation or government always has the kill switch. Do not be fooled into thinking that your open source software will always run on these things, or that there will be acceptable hardware alternatives.
Five to ten years from now, you might be tinkering with getting a Linux kernel to boot on the latest 32 Mhz Arduino board while everyone runs around with $50 14 Ghz multi-core handhelds that run either SecureWindows or MacOS 13, whose development keys are off-limits to you on account of your having failed the Patriot Act 3.0 mandated trusted developer polygraph test...
Slashdot Mirror
The galaxies in the simulation develop planets, scientists, and their own Galaxy Simulators???
Has anyone else been bothered the fact that energy is quantized? It always made me feel like we were looking at pixels we weren't supposed to see :)
Where it works this may be good in the short run, but I see a couple of potential (and sinister) downsides:
1) It makes punishment much more acceptable. I'm not so worried about the deterrent value, but the fact that you might get put under surveillance for unpaid library fines, downloading the wrong file, etc. This yet another slippery slide into a police state.
2) It makes surveillance much more acceptable, and helps fine tune the technology for it. If it turns out that criminals who do not misbehave live perfectly happy lives under the system, and if it is demonstrated that crime goes down when more people are under such surveillance, the "nanny state" types might be pushing for more people to be tagged like this. The typical "if you're doing nothing wrong, why wouldn't want this?" "think of the children" "terrorism, etc." arguments might be advanced by some and swallowed whole by the increasingly surveillance-desensitized public.
2.5) It may make law enforcement lazy, causing them to push for more of this technology (cheaper, more effective, etc). You can draw an analogy with the convenience of warrant-less wiretapping
I'm not sure what the full answer is, but more surveillance (even if it's just for the criminals -- for now --) gives me a very uneasy feeling....
Where the resolution gets divided by the number of views displayed simultaneously. If you could make display with 1000 dpi resolution, you could turn it into an autostereoscopic display with horizontal parallax displaying 10 images at 100 dpi. I imagine a 10000 dpi screen would let you create something indistinguishable from a hologram with no glasses required to view it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1320857
I'm sure it'll be perfect for this application:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera (a type of camera that can let you re-focus (and to a certain extent re-position) images after taking the shot. The problem is that it requires a LOT of resolution to produce acceptable images).
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H7yx31yslM&NR=1 (demo video from paper above)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3cyntPC2NU
Here's one built with a 250 MP Flatbet scanner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O5fPoacF3Q&feature=related
I believe it may be time to organize a "Buy-Cott" of this newspaper -- buy subscriptions just to encourage this type of journalism and accountability.
That being said, I haven't R'ed the FA yet...
I'm sure there were many filmmakers who resisted to push to color, a small minority with good reason.
Not every movie should be in 3D just like every movie should not necessarily be in color. But I think a lot of the pushback is from people who can't see (or handle) 3D. As others have pointed out, new directors will come up with new ways of using this, just like they did with color.
You will see new tools in the next couple of years that will make 3D movies more 'directable' as well as post-processing tools that will make it hurt your eyes less. I hope the technology catches on this time. I imagine it's easier to shoot a movie in 3D than to convert it to 3D later (this _may_ change with technology, but I kind of hope it doesn't -- watching a movie converted to 3D is as painful as watching a "colorized" classic movie). 3D to 2D conversion is trivial.
I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism when
1) You have your own SUV to think about
2) You live in a country with abundant natural resources, trees, land, and relatively low population per area
3) Environmental destruction is an abstract concept that only "left wing wackos" and people who want to take away your "right to consume" rail on about...
4) You consume (or produce) commercially sponsored news/research/propaganda
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
I'm no saint. I own an SUV. I commute. I take international flights. I drink bottled water.
But there's a HUGE difference between not living up to your values and actually BELIEVING that what you do would be good policy if everyone else on the planet did it. The latter may make you feel good, but leads to the election of decision makers who create policies that are far more harmful than the actions (good or bad) of a single individual.
The coolest one I've seen was on a girl who had the digits of e (2.71828183...) spiraling around her arm...
I'd say be nerdier than that and get a Feigenbaum number (or, in the same vein, a Bifurcation Diagram).
I believe most 3D will "make your eyes hurt" for extended use until they solve vergence and accomodation issues. While there is some work (e.g., accommodation display at Fraunhofer and some work at HITlab) to resolve these, I'm afraid we might not see the results of these at Best Buy anytime soon.
Having demonstrated 3D technology to hundreds of adults and kids, my experience has been that kids below 12 _generally_ don't seem to "get" 3D. Perhaps it's their visual system, or perhaps it's because the inter-pupillary-distance (IPD) is wrong on most systems for how far apart their eyes are. I don't this they'll be missing out on too much if they skip out on the 3D games until their visual systems catch up with the tech.
All this aside, I'm personally thrilled that all this 3D technology is becoming mainstream, but I wouldn't (and wouldn't recommend for anyone to) use the 3D technology for more than a couple of hours a day at most. Still, the fear-mongering articles and the 3-D bashing that accompanies them (probably by people who can't see the 3D effect) kind of ticks me off..
There's a point that, if understood by these countries, would make all this nonsense disappear:
They are collectively handing over the decision of what they can and can't see from their country to 12 year old trolls from countries that don't really like them.
Anyone can post a taboo subject for country X to a site like YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, etc. from outside the country for the sole purpose of tricking that country's judicial system into blocking that site.
That's worse than any DDOS I can imagine.
While this point is obvious to US Slashdotters, there are many (otherwise intelligent) people in these countries who agree with their censors thinking that they are "showing the west" the consequences of its disrespect.
I would think that it would be more productive to put a copy of this "digital key" online as a community accessible and editable (with moderation) resource. Open source programs that read these old formats (i.e., a library of sorts), ASCII documentation on each one, schematics of reference hardware, and the fostering of a community to maintain such a library (perhaps with funding) would probably go a longer way to ensure that an *.odt or *.xlsx document from today is still easily readable in 25 years.
That being said, good paper documentation is probably good too.
(I'm afraid my password protected FREDWriter documents on AppleII disks from 198* are long gone even if I could find the disks...)
The application com.Chevy.Volt.brake has stopped responding. Force Close?
Autostereoscopic (i.e., 3D without Glasses) type of displays is why we want large screens with high resolution.
Both Lenticular and Parallax Barrier autostereoscopic displays provide additional viewpoints at the expense of resolution. The more resolution you have, the more your 3D image looks like a hologram that you can walk around.
This is why you see displays like the Synthagram (9 viewpoints, coarse lenticular screen superimposed on ~ 3000x4000 LCD) or the now discontinued Sharp 3D LCD (similar principle) which you would not really want in your living room versus very nice looking 3D prints (48+ decent looking viewpoints enabled by a 1440 dpi print and a fine lenticular screen). Geeky technical details aside, the more resolution you have, the better looking "glasses free" 3D you can enable on a monitor.
I realize that this is a true niche right now, but with 3DTVs making it to market, and the technology actually making it possible, we should see these type of displays in the next 5-10 years (sooner, I would hope, but things rarely happen so nicely in the real world).
Science is full of confusing nomenclature that is sometimes made more confusing by the use of inside jokes, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog, the Lunatic Fringe gene, etc.
I was upset when they split Monera into Archabacteria and Eubacteria (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-empire_system ), and when they demoed Pluto.
I was also upset when they discontinued Crystal Pepsi.
I guess the point is we have to live with the evolution of knowledge. I still want Crystal Pepsi back, and will miss Drosophila (the concept -- not the annoying white-eyed mutant flies that fill the dorm rooms of biology students -- who I believe will be oblivious to the change).
I have not had the misfortune of buying one of their books, but if I were Amazon or B&N, I would do something about this book equivalent of SPAM (something which costs NOTHING to produce that you can posts thousands of, with the proviso that you print it when someone shells out $60...).
The sad thing is, as long as you post enough of these on Amazon, you will make money. The scheme will multiply. I'm sure they'll fix it (perhaps require that they send a single printed & bound copy and have a human look over it for not being absolute drivel) -- because it sounds VERY annoying...
Usually there's an "invert" button on the IR emitter to swap left/right eye -- you should press this if things look 3D, but horribly wrong somehow (or if the scene gets better when you turn the 3D glasses upside down and look through them).
All verbal confusion aside, it's good that they are offering a setup service -- while the setup on the devices is not that complicated, it's a bit less trivial than programming a VCR. I could see a lot of inexperienced users (which is 99.999% of the population at this point in history) banging their head against the wall.
For example, on one Samsung model, only one HDMI input supports 3D, the TV has to be specifically switched to 3D mode, the emitter has to be hooked up to the right place, IR interference from other sources must be eliminated, etc.
That sounds horrendous. I wonder how he built the company to be that large in the first place.
I can only imagine the type of work that would require that much paranoia (covering up rogue UFO landings, grooming the dogs of the rich & famous, or a Freejack style temporal recovery operation...
Create a live CD image to boot off of. This probably means Linux, but I'm sure you could probably hack something with XP Embedded if you tried hard enough.
You could do a network boot, but someone could still infect that.
In your CD image, disable all nonsense such as Autorun. When someone needs something installed, install it on a freshly reconstituted image machine and burn a custom CD-R for them. Keep your image machines offline, and under physical security.
For that matter, push all your updates via new CDs, with a simple version numbering scheme.
Save work on network drives. Scan the drives for macro and other forms of viruses.
I hope to God that nobody takes this advice :)
I don't understand why we have to wait until 2014 to get pre-existing condition exceptions repealed. I'm proud of the Congress for some sort of insurance reform, but am appalled that such a basic part of this reform goes into effect so late.
Perhaps I'm missing something about how these laws work...
From one of the articles:
Almost, not quite: http://www.spysource.net/micox18.htm
This is kind of cool, but what you need is a voice recorder, battery, _and_ a micro SD card inside a coin that can be read through bluetooth without opening it. It would have to be induction chargeable (or charge itself with kinetic energy).
Then, and only then, would it be worthy of Slashdot...
Onto the halfbakery ...
But this isn't that something.
Perhaps this article is a good analogue to illustrate what happens when technologically illiterate lawmakers propose technology legislation.
It's true that it is IMPOSSIBLE to eat a low sodium diet if you're eating out without severely restricting what you consume (if you disagree, I'd love to hear which items worked for you besides lettuce and hard-boiled eggs).
It's also near impossible to eat even a regular sodium diet if you eat out a lot, like I do.
Perhaps there needs to be some law to require *LARGE* restaurants to offer a low-sodium (but not salt free) option for maybe 10% of their menu items, or to regulate the sodium in a single portion to less than a day's recommended allowance (a lot of current dishes will fail).
As crazy as it sounds, this seems like more of an angry rant than an extortion request:
http://pastebin.com/DiBd9kAL
While Apple, as a corporation, has a legal right to impose whatever terms it wants on its developers, I think this is a "Bad Thing". As someone else observed, these terms are very similar to game console development terms, and is leading us towards trusted computing as the dominant paradigm.
If we're not careful, we are on the path to "state of the art" devices always being draconian game-console-like things where a corporation or government always has the kill switch. Do not be fooled into thinking that your open source software will always run on these things, or that there will be acceptable hardware alternatives.
Five to ten years from now, you might be tinkering with getting a Linux kernel to boot on the latest 32 Mhz Arduino board while everyone runs around with $50 14 Ghz multi-core handhelds that run either SecureWindows or MacOS 13, whose development keys are off-limits to you on account of your having failed the Patriot Act 3.0 mandated trusted developer polygraph test ...
mod parent up, as it brings up a valid point, despite being an AC