Well, I'm one of those people - my degree is in robotics, and yes, I've been whacked, hard, by robots while working with them. The second time taught me to be very careful, as it could have killed me if things had gone only a little differently.
It's hard to do a complete lock-out/tag-out type process when you're testing the robot, or more commonly, the interactions between the various devices in the workcell. (No, I'm not saying you shouldn't lock and tag...) There are some things that are much more easily debugged from up close - the danger comes when you *think* you're in a "safe" spot in the work envelope, but one or another of the various programs running has other ideas. (Keep in mind that the average robotic workcell may have a dozen or more controllers running their own mostly to entirely independent control logic.)
In my experience, most robot-related accidents (which thankfully, only rarely lead to serious injury or death) are due to a combination of both human error AND software errors. (Hardware errors are both far less common and far less likely to result in injury.) Like plane crashes, the root cause may be attributed to human error, but there are almost always a set of contributing factors and conditions that stack up to lead to a deadly accident. (And like SCUBA diving, you ALWAYS need a buddy - but in this case, with the big red switch in his hand.)
There are several bigger problems that need fixing - First, 20th century robot technology (which is still practically all that's in use) builds robots that are stupid - really, really stupid. Unlike the robots of SciFi, they have no concept of people or other things, and only the most rudimentary idea of themselves. Generally, they can't feel at all (except *maybe* at their end effector (hand)), and almost none of them can independently avoid collisions even with other machines and static objects in the workcell, much less unpredictable and strangely-shaped things like people.
Giving robots the ability to feel or detect impact (via skin-type force sensing) would go a long way, but then programming would have to catch up, too, so that there are good places to hang autonomic or low-level, high importance safety loops. (BTW, this sort of multi-layered control scheme was what the MIT Media Lab's Rodney Brooks was originally working on before he got seduced by shiny things. His early papers are still surprisingly relevant.) The vast majority of robots today still use what are more or less a series of GOTO instructions in threespace sprinkled with conditionals, with little to no ability to do their own path planning, or react to anything they haven't been preprogrammed specifically to deal with.
As for fixing blame - that's really hard, and very situational. (If it's a software problem, is it due to insufficient safeguards in the underlying system, insufficient care by the implementor, or something that was reasonably unexpected?) Even knowing the full story (which obviously we don't here), it can be very difficult to sort out who is (or should be) responsible for what - especially when the law may not always be congruent with expectations. In general though, it's hardly fair to hold manufacturers responsible for unwise or insufficiently careful use of products that are known to be potentially dangerous. I often use a variant of this quote humorously to refer to Unix/Linux, but it's literally true when applied to robots: "Keep in mind that robots are power tools. And power tools can kill."
Nah, the Obama administration clearly doesn't have the guts to nuke the Russkys - just look at how they're letting them move missiles to threaten eastern Europe.
I figure they'll decide to hack the GOP to get even...
True, the lack of layers in Paint makes it a good choice for this kind of thing - perhaps the only thing it's really good at...
It's stunning how many people do this kind of thing in Photoshop or Acrobat, but leave the layers intact, so you can remove the obscuration with a little advanced editing...
Ten years ago, I was CTO for a company making smart touchscreen devices for restaurant and bar tabletops. We didn't have a camera in any of the ones we fielded (people were still to weirded out by that idea, then), but I did some serious technical investigation on whether we could use an intentionally low-res image to determine basic demographics of the diners w/o voilating their privacy.
In my research, I found an really interesting paper (from France, IIRC, it's been a while) showing that even a 16-pixel (!) image could still be used to determine the age and sex of a person to around 80-90% accuracy, and recognize the same person again over half the time. IIRC, it used both neural networks and some standard image processing, but nothing really exotic or so big that we couldn't run it locally in the display device, if we'd decided to. Even the author was amazed that this was possible, because neither he nor anyone else had thought there was enough information there to perform such a feat of recognition.
But computers really don't look at things like we do, and why even "just metadata" (and it's a lot more than that, now) is so dangerous - with some not-too-complicated processing, the machine can tease out patterns in the data that we cannot.... (Note that this means that the spooks probably really can do some of the "ridiculous" image processing and recognition we tend to laugh at in movies and TV shows. No Way Out, indeed....
Not to slam fitness wearables, but the market research shows that 2/3 of them wind up living in a drawer within six months. They're just not all that compelling for most people (yet?)...
Of course, you can do what I do and wear one of the excellent Seiko 5 watches (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=seiko+5 ), generally regarded as the best watch value on the planet, and frequently making lists of best watches under $500, even though they're an order of magnitude cheaper than that! On top of that, it will still be a good, fully functional device many years from now, which is definitely not true of ANY smartwatch. (Let's see you try to get replacement batteries in 10 or 20 years, even on the off chance your iPhone 12 still supports it...)
These things really are a marvel of modern engineering and manufacturing techniques: A $53 watch with simple, clean lines that has an excellent automatic (no batteries, no winding) day-date movement with sweep second hand, a crystal back that lets you see the works working, and a really nice NATO-style nylon strap with stitched leather trim. The one I had last year kept ridiculously good time (like a quartz watch - my current one is only very good), but it got torn off while sailing in Lake Travis. Yes, when Seiko says it's "water resistant" to 10m, they mean it - swimming, sailing, caught in a downpour - no matter. Seiko doesn't sell the 5 series here in the US, but you can buy them here through Amazon, and they'll even extend the warranty to the US for you. (No real risk because the things just don't break...)
Sure, if I was made of money I might buy a Bremont and a JLC Reverso, but I'm hard on watches, so it's nice to know that even a total loss will only set me back the cost of a few drinks...
Half of the frustration with computers in the past few years is that they no longer do what we tell them - instead, they try to figure out what we really wanted and guess at what they should provide.
In the immortal words of Beka Valentine*, "Override Safety Protocols! Authorization code, 'Shut up and do what I tell you!' "
*And if you don't watch Andromeda, shame on you - it's quality is very uneven in places, but in many ways, it's the the best synthesis of Roddenberry's recurring themes in one show: The nature of humanity of AIs (Data, Questor, etc.) and aliens (Spock, et al), the genetic superman and his culture and realtionship with humanity (Khan, etc.), the heroic underdog, the character of the Captain, and more..
My manifesto for computing in the 21st century: "STOP TRYING TO HELP ME, DAMMIT, JUST DO WHAT I SAY!"
The most important reform we could have of cable, satellite, and other programming bundle vendors (SlingTV, etc.) is that the consumers should be able to pick and choose (and pay for) only the channels they want, with no economic penalty for choosing unbundling. Right now, a fair fraction of cable bills goes for channels that almost no one wants or watches.
I'd love a service like SlingTV, but with the ability to select only the channels I want (for instance, to address the very real sports problem mentioned above, I'd take Fox Sports Southwest, so I could watch the Rangers, but I don't want a dime of my money going to the SJW Nazis at ESPN, which sucks huevos, anyway...)
There is no neutrality, and no real freedom for consumers, until we can CHOOSE what we actually want to buy!
This is the media programming equivalent of saying it's OK for a car dealer to force you to buy bogus upgrades like "paint protection", "upholstery protection", and "fuzzy dice package", or "dealer prep" (beyond ordinary make-ready) regardless of whether you want them or not. (This sort of thing has been such a problem that many states have outlawed this sort of chicanery in recent years...)
No, I didn't demand this, but you're right, far too many did. Apple caved way too easily, and the last great hope of web apps as first-class citizens died with HP's knifing of PalmOS, where *all* apps were web apps, meaning it was even possible to replace the dialler, address book, etc...
Damn, I miss Palm - there's no question that the basic capabilities of Contact Management, Scheduling, and integration with my PC (through Palm Desktop, which was actually quite good) was far better on my Palm Pilot in the mid 90's than it is with the latest iPhone and Android phones of today.
Waiting for someone to reinvent this stuff yet again, which won't happen on today's "we own you" platforms...
Anyone who has ever hunted with a really good bird dog knows how true this is... That incredible nose is useful, for sure, but it's really only a part of what makes dogs great at finding things. The best dog I've ever had (a Springer Spaniel) would sometimes (if she wasn't bounding up over the grass to see for herself) take her last cue of where the bird fell from where I was looking, since I'm taller. The work between hunter and a good bird dog is incredible teamwork - I learned to keep my gaze on the spot of the fall for an extra second so that she could process that along with what she saw herself - then she was stamping her feet waiting for me to tell her, "Back!" so she could go and retrieve.
Dogs *really*, *really* want to please their masters, so I'm pretty skeptical that all these search dogs are really doing the work entirely on their own and not picking up (even subconcious) signals from their owners/trainers.
The true purpose of police is to protect the rule of law. That means preventing crimes where possible, and bringing to justice those who are thought to commit crimes.
Note that this latter function, which is arguably more important for the system at large, actually has the police protecting the criminals from the citizenry until the accused can be fairly tried and punished if found guilty. Protecting the citizenry from criminals is far harder, without any a priori knowledge of criminal intent.
In any country with a properly functioning legal system, police maintain order by protecting both citizens and criminals from each other. When your police have SWAT tanks and you need protection from them, then the system is broken...
I misplace/lose all kinds of things around the house (especially tools: razor knives and tape measures seem to be especially furtive), but I think I've misplaced my keys maybe four or five times in my entire life - How in the world can you possibly lose your car keys?
(I'm not even particularly organized here, but if I'm wearing anything at all over my skivvies, then the keys are in the right front pocket (phone goes in the left). If I'm not wearing pant/trousers/shorts, then the keys are either in the pocket of whatever I wore last (if I just hung them up on a hook), or on the bathroom counter or the top of the dresser, all within about a dozen steps. I'm honestly mystified that anyone would ever buy (or even ever need) something like Tile or other key-finders...)
The answer is yes. The technology to detect the difference has been around for over a decade, but it's not in any iris scanner for security that I'm aware of.
My Mom and Dad (yes, both of them, this one was actually Mom's idea), hold a patent on a method for using a laser and optical system to measure a bunch of things about the eyeball, including intraocular pressure. It's sensitive enough to not only measure the internal eyeball pressure, but you can very easily see the pulse, and with a bit of clever math, it's even possible to use it to generate a non-contact blood pressure measurement.
So, in short, It's certainly possible to tell the difference between a live eyeball and a dead one in ways that are pretty difficult, and certainly cumbersome, to fake, if you care enough to do so. Combining this with some other methods could easily result in a very accurate system that would also be very hard to spoof...
I'm no MS fanboi, for sure, but Overzeetop has it right here - the docking station is one of the best features of the Surface Pro line. Combined with the pen which allows a whole new kind of computer interaction, it truly changes the way you work with computers.
Macs are fine computers, but there is no Mac that can even approach the kind of power and utility you can get with the Surface Pro 3 or 4 or Surface Book. The SP4 is more powerful and far more useful than the MacBook Air, and the the SB is likewise superior to the MacBook Pros. I bought an SP3 when it came out, and it absolutely changed the kinds of things I could do (and more importantly, wanted to do) with a computer.
If you haven't tried living with one (especially with docking stations at home and work), then you really just don't get it. There is no laptop I'd trade for. I want all my computers to work this way - the SP4 is as far beyond a regular laptop as the first thin and powerful laptops were beyond clunky old desktops.
Don't underestimate the power of moving the context of all your work to wherever you are, and getting a way better experience when you're docked. It's really amazing. While Win10 still has some pretty ugly seams showing where they lashed the UWP apps onto the desktop OS, it does produce an experience you just can't get anywhere else.
I'm really looking forward to the updates coming in a couple of weeks, which should also enable Ubuntu on Windows for everyone with Developer access enabled, not just those on the Fast Ring of the Preview program.
Actually, if you have a Surface Pro, Win 10 is heading in a great direction, if not quite done yet. Once you've lived with (and used) great multitouch and pen apps (and there are far too few of them, now), it will forever change the way you work with computers.
Heck, Sketchbook Pro alone on the SP4 is enough reason for me to doggedly put up with all the other pains of WIndows (and they are legion, but Win 10 really is getting better, and may have grabbed the crown of "getting better faster than any other OS" from Linux...)
Oh, and I'll switch from Linux VMs to Ubuntu on Windows when Win10 Redstone comes out in a couple of weeks. Really seems like it might be the best of both worlds.
It's way more than bash on Windows - it runs almost any command line program that doesn't need Dbus now, and there are even (currently hackish) workarounds for that and X already.
OK, we know you weren't there or you'd have written 110 baud - and no, both ways meant full duplex, which was big medicine back then.
I do have a 300 baud acoustically coupled modem and an ADM 3a out in the garage that I can't bear to part with, even though the 3a's CRT is suffering from quite a bit of internal bubble rot. Man I loved that keyboard, but *waiting* for a screen of text to render (even at the fast speeds) got pretty old, and the fonts were seriously butt-ugly, since lower case was an afterthought/upgrade. I last used it setting up high performance storage gear 15 years ago: (~6 GB of spinning disk in my study, back then, that meant extension cords running to circuits all over the downstairs and no way the A/C could keep up in the summer...)
I'll take the Surface Pro 4 for $1200, Alec. It's literally beyond the dreams of science fiction when that modem/terminal setup was new...
I was another holdout from registration, more as opposition to creeping accountism than privacy - Heck, I used to sign most of my/. posts with my email address. Probably wouldn't have beaten Blade's number, though...(Yeah, them wuz the olden days, when spam was rare, and the net was a mostly friendly place just off of AUPs. I've got one email address that I've had since 1991, and it still gets spam in languages I don't read...)
Slashdot was cool because *something* had to replace the NCSA What's New page!
On the other hand, a pair of 4K monitors plus the SP4's native display doesn't seem so impressive now...
Yep, but for every one of you, there's someone like the (smart, maybe too smart for his own good) intern who wrote the first large Perl program I had written (an enterprise program designed to collect and report machine hardware and software configurations for all Unix machines in the Fortune 10 corp we worked for.)
The problem was that his approach was the polar opposite of yours - there were few comments, and he prided himself on "cleverly" using idomatic Perl - the kind of crap that looks like modem line noise "but it saves 20 lines of code!" No matter, becasue several weeks later, even he couldn't understand what his code did. It was a really good system, but absolutely unmaintainable as written, and impossible to really bring along in to the future.
I've only used Perl for one other project since then, and ESR and I chatted about this at O'Reilly's Open Source conference here in Austin years ago - he had recently switched to Python largely because he found he also couldn't read his own Perl code just a few months after writing it. I think unless you're disciplined enough to 1) really not use Perl the way it encourages you to, and 2) REALLY document your code, since Perl code itself is NOT AT ALL self documenting, then Perl is a losing bet.
What you can do with Perl is amazing, but it's awful for anything you need to fix, maintain, or grow, since both its syntax and it's insistence on many ways to do things means it's probably the closest thing to a write-only language ever to gain any real traction.
This is the response that's really the most telling for those who aren't as ignorant of history as our current leading BHA (youngsters can google BHA and Apple to understand...):
Critics also say that a totally rational form of government has been tried before during the French Revolution, and “The Terror” was the result. There are many roads to rational choices, as noted in a National Review article, and politics pretending to be science has gained popularity. Many decisions made on rational thought don’t necessarily work when dealing with people on earth.
From http://moneyinc.com/rationalia... - this isn't where I ran across the perfectly appropriate reference to the Terror on this topic, but it seems to be the original source...
Competitiveness is not a magic solution. When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it's patented and over time other companies can sell generic versions and conduct their own research with it and variants of it. But when a pharmaceutical company researches a drug and the drug is deemed to ineffective or unsafe to bring to market, it's buried - and there's a good chance a dozen other pharmaceutical companies will have researched and then dropped the same drug.
But that's almost entirely because incredibly stupid and increasingly far-reaching government interference has increasingly deformed the pharma industry for nearly a century. The FDA's draconian rules, regulations, penalties, bureaucracy, and accompanying exponential costs have killed far more people than all their efforts have ever saved. We would be better off without an FDA at all, than the monstrosity we have now - the exorbitant cost of FDA compliance is WHY pharma can't bring cheap effective treatments to market - they have to recover the $1-3 billion cost of endless trials and regulatory approval - in the meantime, patients die. It's time to let people try any reasonable (or maybe even unreasonable) therapy, and end this silliness that all tests and studies must be double-blind by pretending that there is only a single active substance involved in the action of drugs. (And we still have NO idea what drug interactions are or do - tests must be designed to avoid that, despite the fact that most people on "maintenance drugs" (the kiss of death) take at least SIX prescription drugs...)
Or look at planned obsolescence. Do cars need their styling tweaked every four years, and the cupholder layout rearranged? How about smart phones, wonderful pieces of engineering that consumers are expected to discard in two years because it's better for the vendor - not the consumer - if they do.
When we had real competition and properly functioning markets (and that's the core of capitalism), things actually lasted much longer. (Cars are an exception in that the manufacturing technologies have made them longer lasting, if not always more durable.
I recently went in for a part for our washing machine, and the first thing the counter guy asked was, "How old is it?" "Twenty-eight years", I replied. "Oh, well you definitely want to fix it then - the new ones are all crap...")
Appliances actually used to be durable goods in TWO important senses: 1) they were actually designed to last for decades, and 2) you could get parts for them for that long. The parts supply house said that Chinese and Korean appliances are discontinuing parts in as little as four or five years. That's a bigger problem than poor initial design, although with only a few exceptions, "Made in China" is a sure mark of poor quality.
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Well, I'm one of those people - my degree is in robotics, and yes, I've been whacked, hard, by robots while working with them. The second time taught me to be very careful, as it could have killed me if things had gone only a little differently.
It's hard to do a complete lock-out/tag-out type process when you're testing the robot, or more commonly, the interactions between the various devices in the workcell. (No, I'm not saying you shouldn't lock and tag...) There are some things that are much more easily debugged from up close - the danger comes when you *think* you're in a "safe" spot in the work envelope, but one or another of the various programs running has other ideas. (Keep in mind that the average robotic workcell may have a dozen or more controllers running their own mostly to entirely independent control logic.)
In my experience, most robot-related accidents (which thankfully, only rarely lead to serious injury or death) are due to a combination of both human error AND software errors. (Hardware errors are both far less common and far less likely to result in injury.) Like plane crashes, the root cause may be attributed to human error, but there are almost always a set of contributing factors and conditions that stack up to lead to a deadly accident. (And like SCUBA diving, you ALWAYS need a buddy - but in this case, with the big red switch in his hand.)
There are several bigger problems that need fixing - First, 20th century robot technology (which is still practically all that's in use) builds robots that are stupid - really, really stupid. Unlike the robots of SciFi, they have no concept of people or other things, and only the most rudimentary idea of themselves. Generally, they can't feel at all (except *maybe* at their end effector (hand)), and almost none of them can independently avoid collisions even with other machines and static objects in the workcell, much less unpredictable and strangely-shaped things like people.
Giving robots the ability to feel or detect impact (via skin-type force sensing) would go a long way, but then programming would have to catch up, too, so that there are good places to hang autonomic or low-level, high importance safety loops. (BTW, this sort of multi-layered control scheme was what the MIT Media Lab's Rodney Brooks was originally working on before he got seduced by shiny things. His early papers are still surprisingly relevant.) The vast majority of robots today still use what are more or less a series of GOTO instructions in threespace sprinkled with conditionals, with little to no ability to do their own path planning, or react to anything they haven't been preprogrammed specifically to deal with.
As for fixing blame - that's really hard, and very situational. (If it's a software problem, is it due to insufficient safeguards in the underlying system, insufficient care by the implementor, or something that was reasonably unexpected?) Even knowing the full story (which obviously we don't here), it can be very difficult to sort out who is (or should be) responsible for what - especially when the law may not always be congruent with expectations. In general though, it's hardly fair to hold manufacturers responsible for unwise or insufficiently careful use of products that are known to be potentially dangerous. I often use a variant of this quote humorously to refer to Unix/Linux, but it's literally true when applied to robots: "Keep in mind that robots are power tools. And power tools can kill."
Nah, the Obama administration clearly doesn't have the guts to nuke the Russkys - just look at how they're letting them move missiles to threaten eastern Europe.
I figure they'll decide to hack the GOP to get even...
True, the lack of layers in Paint makes it a good choice for this kind of thing - perhaps the only thing it's really good at...
It's stunning how many people do this kind of thing in Photoshop or Acrobat, but leave the layers intact, so you can remove the obscuration with a little advanced editing...
It's not necessary to reconstruct the image to perform a good recognition on it.
Ten years ago, I was CTO for a company making smart touchscreen devices for restaurant and bar tabletops. We didn't have a camera in any of the ones we fielded (people were still to weirded out by that idea, then), but I did some serious technical investigation on whether we could use an intentionally low-res image to determine basic demographics of the diners w/o voilating their privacy.
In my research, I found an really interesting paper (from France, IIRC, it's been a while) showing that even a 16-pixel (!) image could still be used to determine the age and sex of a person to around 80-90% accuracy, and recognize the same person again over half the time. IIRC, it used both neural networks and some standard image processing, but nothing really exotic or so big that we couldn't run it locally in the display device, if we'd decided to. Even the author was amazed that this was possible, because neither he nor anyone else had thought there was enough information there to perform such a feat of recognition.
But computers really don't look at things like we do, and why even "just metadata" (and it's a lot more than that, now) is so dangerous - with some not-too-complicated processing, the machine can tease out patterns in the data that we cannot.... (Note that this means that the spooks probably really can do some of the "ridiculous" image processing and recognition we tend to laugh at in movies and TV shows. No Way Out, indeed....
Let me know when the batteries last a week or a month and I'll think about being mildly interested... (Another reason we need full color e-ink!)
Not to slam fitness wearables, but the market research shows that 2/3 of them wind up living in a drawer within six months. They're just not all that compelling for most people (yet?)...
To each his own, but I think the Apple Watch is butt-ugly, and one of the clumsiest of Ives' designs.
Of course, you can do what I do and wear one of the excellent Seiko 5 watches (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=seiko+5 ), generally regarded as the best watch value on the planet, and frequently making lists of best watches under $500, even though they're an order of magnitude cheaper than that! On top of that, it will still be a good, fully functional device many years from now, which is definitely not true of ANY smartwatch. (Let's see you try to get replacement batteries in 10 or 20 years, even on the off chance your iPhone 12 still supports it...)
These things really are a marvel of modern engineering and manufacturing techniques: A $53 watch with simple, clean lines that has an excellent automatic (no batteries, no winding) day-date movement with sweep second hand, a crystal back that lets you see the works working, and a really nice NATO-style nylon strap with stitched leather trim. The one I had last year kept ridiculously good time (like a quartz watch - my current one is only very good), but it got torn off while sailing in Lake Travis. Yes, when Seiko says it's "water resistant" to 10m, they mean it - swimming, sailing, caught in a downpour - no matter. Seiko doesn't sell the 5 series here in the US, but you can buy them here through Amazon, and they'll even extend the warranty to the US for you. (No real risk because the things just don't break...)
Sure, if I was made of money I might buy a Bremont and a JLC Reverso, but I'm hard on watches, so it's nice to know that even a total loss will only set me back the cost of a few drinks...
Half of the frustration with computers in the past few years is that they no longer do what we tell them - instead, they try to figure out what we really wanted and guess at what they should provide.
In the immortal words of Beka Valentine*, "Override Safety Protocols! Authorization code, 'Shut up and do what I tell you!' "
*And if you don't watch Andromeda, shame on you - it's quality is very uneven in places, but in many ways, it's the the best synthesis of Roddenberry's recurring themes in one show: The nature of humanity of AIs (Data, Questor, etc.) and aliens (Spock, et al), the genetic superman and his culture and realtionship with humanity (Khan, etc.), the heroic underdog, the character of the Captain, and more..
My manifesto for computing in the 21st century: "STOP TRYING TO HELP ME, DAMMIT, JUST DO WHAT I SAY!"
The most important reform we could have of cable, satellite, and other programming bundle vendors (SlingTV, etc.) is that the consumers should be able to pick and choose (and pay for) only the channels they want, with no economic penalty for choosing unbundling. Right now, a fair fraction of cable bills goes for channels that almost no one wants or watches.
I'd love a service like SlingTV, but with the ability to select only the channels I want (for instance, to address the very real sports problem mentioned above, I'd take Fox Sports Southwest, so I could watch the Rangers, but I don't want a dime of my money going to the SJW Nazis at ESPN, which sucks huevos, anyway...)
There is no neutrality, and no real freedom for consumers, until we can CHOOSE what we actually want to buy!
This is the media programming equivalent of saying it's OK for a car dealer to force you to buy bogus upgrades like "paint protection", "upholstery protection", and "fuzzy dice package", or "dealer prep" (beyond ordinary make-ready) regardless of whether you want them or not. (This sort of thing has been such a problem that many states have outlawed this sort of chicanery in recent years...)
No, I didn't demand this, but you're right, far too many did. Apple caved way too easily, and the last great hope of web apps as first-class citizens died with HP's knifing of PalmOS, where *all* apps were web apps, meaning it was even possible to replace the dialler, address book, etc...
Damn, I miss Palm - there's no question that the basic capabilities of Contact Management, Scheduling, and integration with my PC (through Palm Desktop, which was actually quite good) was far better on my Palm Pilot in the mid 90's than it is with the latest iPhone and Android phones of today.
Waiting for someone to reinvent this stuff yet again, which won't happen on today's "we own you" platforms...
Anyone who has ever hunted with a really good bird dog knows how true this is... That incredible nose is useful, for sure, but it's really only a part of what makes dogs great at finding things. The best dog I've ever had (a Springer Spaniel) would sometimes (if she wasn't bounding up over the grass to see for herself) take her last cue of where the bird fell from where I was looking, since I'm taller. The work between hunter and a good bird dog is incredible teamwork - I learned to keep my gaze on the spot of the fall for an extra second so that she could process that along with what she saw herself - then she was stamping her feet waiting for me to tell her, "Back!" so she could go and retrieve.
Dogs *really*, *really* want to please their masters, so I'm pretty skeptical that all these search dogs are really doing the work entirely on their own and not picking up (even subconcious) signals from their owners/trainers.
The true purpose of police is to protect the rule of law. That means preventing crimes where possible, and bringing to justice those who are thought to commit crimes.
Note that this latter function, which is arguably more important for the system at large, actually has the police protecting the criminals from the citizenry until the accused can be fairly tried and punished if found guilty. Protecting the citizenry from criminals is far harder, without any a priori knowledge of criminal intent.
In any country with a properly functioning legal system, police maintain order by protecting both citizens and criminals from each other. When your police have SWAT tanks and you need protection from them, then the system is broken...
I misplace/lose all kinds of things around the house (especially tools: razor knives and tape measures seem to be especially furtive), but I think I've misplaced my keys maybe four or five times in my entire life - How in the world can you possibly lose your car keys?
(I'm not even particularly organized here, but if I'm wearing anything at all over my skivvies, then the keys are in the right front pocket (phone goes in the left). If I'm not wearing pant/trousers/shorts, then the keys are either in the pocket of whatever I wore last (if I just hung them up on a hook), or on the bathroom counter or the top of the dresser, all within about a dozen steps. I'm honestly mystified that anyone would ever buy (or even ever need) something like Tile or other key-finders...)
The answer is yes. The technology to detect the difference has been around for over a decade, but it's not in any iris scanner for security that I'm aware of.
My Mom and Dad (yes, both of them, this one was actually Mom's idea), hold a patent on a method for using a laser and optical system to measure a bunch of things about the eyeball, including intraocular pressure. It's sensitive enough to not only measure the internal eyeball pressure, but you can very easily see the pulse, and with a bit of clever math, it's even possible to use it to generate a non-contact blood pressure measurement.
So, in short, It's certainly possible to tell the difference between a live eyeball and a dead one in ways that are pretty difficult, and certainly cumbersome, to fake, if you care enough to do so. Combining this with some other methods could easily result in a very accurate system that would also be very hard to spoof...
I'm no MS fanboi, for sure, but Overzeetop has it right here - the docking station is one of the best features of the Surface Pro line. Combined with the pen which allows a whole new kind of computer interaction, it truly changes the way you work with computers.
Macs are fine computers, but there is no Mac that can even approach the kind of power and utility you can get with the Surface Pro 3 or 4 or Surface Book. The SP4 is more powerful and far more useful than the MacBook Air, and the the SB is likewise superior to the MacBook Pros. I bought an SP3 when it came out, and it absolutely changed the kinds of things I could do (and more importantly, wanted to do) with a computer.
If you haven't tried living with one (especially with docking stations at home and work), then you really just don't get it. There is no laptop I'd trade for. I want all my computers to work this way - the SP4 is as far beyond a regular laptop as the first thin and powerful laptops were beyond clunky old desktops.
Don't underestimate the power of moving the context of all your work to wherever you are, and getting a way better experience when you're docked. It's really amazing. While Win10 still has some pretty ugly seams showing where they lashed the UWP apps onto the desktop OS, it does produce an experience you just can't get anywhere else.
I'm really looking forward to the updates coming in a couple of weeks, which should also enable Ubuntu on Windows for everyone with Developer access enabled, not just those on the Fast Ring of the Preview program.
Actually, if you have a Surface Pro, Win 10 is heading in a great direction, if not quite done yet. Once you've lived with (and used) great multitouch and pen apps (and there are far too few of them, now), it will forever change the way you work with computers.
Heck, Sketchbook Pro alone on the SP4 is enough reason for me to doggedly put up with all the other pains of WIndows (and they are legion, but Win 10 really is getting better, and may have grabbed the crown of "getting better faster than any other OS" from Linux...)
Oh, and I'll switch from Linux VMs to Ubuntu on Windows when Win10 Redstone comes out in a couple of weeks. Really seems like it might be the best of both worlds.
It's way more than bash on Windows - it runs almost any command line program that doesn't need Dbus now, and there are even (currently hackish) workarounds for that and X already.
OK, we know you weren't there or you'd have written 110 baud - and no, both ways meant full duplex, which was big medicine back then.
I do have a 300 baud acoustically coupled modem and an ADM 3a out in the garage that I can't bear to part with, even though the 3a's CRT is suffering from quite a bit of internal bubble rot. Man I loved that keyboard, but *waiting* for a screen of text to render (even at the fast speeds) got pretty old, and the fonts were seriously butt-ugly, since lower case was an afterthought/upgrade. I last used it setting up high performance storage gear 15 years ago: (~6 GB of spinning disk in my study, back then, that meant extension cords running to circuits all over the downstairs and no way the A/C could keep up in the summer...)
I'll take the Surface Pro 4 for $1200, Alec. It's literally beyond the dreams of science fiction when that modem/terminal setup was new...
I was another holdout from registration, more as opposition to creeping accountism than privacy - Heck, I used to sign most of my /. posts with my email address. Probably wouldn't have beaten Blade's number, though...(Yeah, them wuz the olden days, when spam was rare, and the net was a mostly friendly place just off of AUPs. I've got one email address that I've had since 1991, and it still gets spam in languages I don't read...)
Slashdot was cool because *something* had to replace the NCSA What's New page!
On the other hand, a pair of 4K monitors plus the SP4's native display doesn't seem so impressive now...
Yep, but for every one of you, there's someone like the (smart, maybe too smart for his own good) intern who wrote the first large Perl program I had written (an enterprise program designed to collect and report machine hardware and software configurations for all Unix machines in the Fortune 10 corp we worked for.)
The problem was that his approach was the polar opposite of yours - there were few comments, and he prided himself on "cleverly" using idomatic Perl - the kind of crap that looks like modem line noise "but it saves 20 lines of code!" No matter, becasue several weeks later, even he couldn't understand what his code did. It was a really good system, but absolutely unmaintainable as written, and impossible to really bring along in to the future.
I've only used Perl for one other project since then, and ESR and I chatted about this at O'Reilly's Open Source conference here in Austin years ago - he had recently switched to Python largely because he found he also couldn't read his own Perl code just a few months after writing it. I think unless you're disciplined enough to 1) really not use Perl the way it encourages you to, and 2) REALLY document your code, since Perl code itself is NOT AT ALL self documenting, then Perl is a losing bet.
What you can do with Perl is amazing, but it's awful for anything you need to fix, maintain, or grow, since both its syntax and it's insistence on many ways to do things means it's probably the closest thing to a write-only language ever to gain any real traction.
This is the response that's really the most telling for those who aren't as ignorant of history as our current leading BHA (youngsters can google BHA and Apple to understand...):
From http://moneyinc.com/rationalia... - this isn't where I ran across the perfectly appropriate reference to the Terror on this topic, but it seems to be the original source...
This is the best response I've seen to Tyson's arrogant ignorance (I thought it was a tweet, but I can't find it there...)
Anyway, it went along the lines of, "We tried that already. It was called 'The Terror'..."
Competitiveness is not a magic solution. When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it's patented and over time other companies can sell generic versions and conduct their own research with it and variants of it. But when a pharmaceutical company researches a drug and the drug is deemed to ineffective or unsafe to bring to market, it's buried - and there's a good chance a dozen other pharmaceutical companies will have researched and then dropped the same drug.
But that's almost entirely because incredibly stupid and increasingly far-reaching government interference has increasingly deformed the pharma industry for nearly a century. The FDA's draconian rules, regulations, penalties, bureaucracy, and accompanying exponential costs have killed far more people than all their efforts have ever saved. We would be better off without an FDA at all, than the monstrosity we have now - the exorbitant cost of FDA compliance is WHY pharma can't bring cheap effective treatments to market - they have to recover the $1-3 billion cost of endless trials and regulatory approval - in the meantime, patients die. It's time to let people try any reasonable (or maybe even unreasonable) therapy, and end this silliness that all tests and studies must be double-blind by pretending that there is only a single active substance involved in the action of drugs. (And we still have NO idea what drug interactions are or do - tests must be designed to avoid that, despite the fact that most people on "maintenance drugs" (the kiss of death) take at least SIX prescription drugs...)
Or look at planned obsolescence. Do cars need their styling tweaked every four years, and the cupholder layout rearranged? How about smart phones, wonderful pieces of engineering that consumers are expected to discard in two years because it's better for the vendor - not the consumer - if they do.
When we had real competition and properly functioning markets (and that's the core of capitalism), things actually lasted much longer. (Cars are an exception in that the manufacturing technologies have made them longer lasting, if not always more durable.
I recently went in for a part for our washing machine, and the first thing the counter guy asked was, "How old is it?" "Twenty-eight years", I replied. "Oh, well you definitely want to fix it then - the new ones are all crap...")
Appliances actually used to be durable goods in TWO important senses: 1) they were actually designed to last for decades, and 2) you could get parts for them for that long. The parts supply house said that Chinese and Korean appliances are discontinuing parts in as little as four or five years. That's a bigger problem than poor initial design, although with only a few exceptions, "Made in China" is a sure mark of poor quality.