Obama's opening line of the meeting. "Gentlemen, how much privacy and how many rights of your users are you willing to sacrifice in the name of patriotism and the fight against terrorism?"
So I'm a software developer and an amateur radio operator, and I still have no idea what the point of that article was (besides the fact that Hellschreiber starts with "hell" and apparently the author found that to be terrifically funny or clever or something).
How many times is this going to be rehashed? Wasn't Java going to accomplish this 15 years ago? The web browser has turned into a VM - a very convoluted, inconsistent, difficult to develop for, hodgepodge mess of a VM. We've got WebGL and Web Audio API and all the HTML5 stuff (local storage, canvas rendering, etc, etc), and still it's a pathetic step-child of a "platform" to develop for compared to pretty much any proper platform. If "write once, run everywhere" is what you want, then sure, go for the lowest common denominator (HTML5 "apps") and you will end up with the end result of the lowest common denominator of performance and platform integration.
This is just stupid. So I don't need a dedicated "single piece of glowing display" in my hand anymore, because I happen to have a doorknob nearby with "some sort of chip implanted within" that is "connected to the internet". So to read a message, I will go touch the doorknob, and then a nearby light begins flashing the message out in morse code? I know that sounds dumb, but that is what he is inferring, right? You don't need a device in your hand because there's just a random assortment of connected stuff all around?
Dedicated devices purpose-built for interacting with humans will not go away until we have some kind of direct mental link to computers. The keyboard hasn't been replaced by touch screen devices. It serves a specific purpose that cannot be replaced by any other method of input, including speech recognition (I can just see myself coding with speech recognition - "Next line. Next line. Next line. Move right 5 words. Left one word. Right one character. Right one character. Delete. Ampersand." Uh huh.)
There is also the personal / privacy aspect. Just because I can project something on a wall 10' wide on the other side of the room doesn't mean I want to read and reply to my private messages in that way. What if there are 5 people in the same room? Who gets the wall? Or do we carve it up into 5 pieces? "Son, you take the left half of the coffee table, and mom, please take you feet off the coffee table so our daughter can use the other half. I get the west wall today, and hun, you can do your FB on the ceiling."
The number of holes in this silly prediction of the future are simply too great. It will not unfold in this manner.
This is a horrendous idea for a number of reasons. First of all, we've all used apps that constantly pester us to rate it in the app store. Voting would become the same thing. Lobbyists and candidates would be pushing links down our throats continuously to cast a vote for whatever it is they're pushing.
The second problem is voter intimidation. When voting occurs on a single day, it vastly limits the scope and method in which those wishing to influence an election by threat or force can operate. They can only be in so many places at once, and they cannot intimidate on a wide enough scale to cause much harm. However, if they have the ability, at their leisure, to intimidate voters one on one and force them to vote on the spot, well, the abuse would be horrendous.
They already test fire all rocket engines multiple times before launch. They've fired these kinds of engines through multiple simulated full-length launch duration burns on the ground. They already have a very good idea of whether or not it is feasible to use them, and obviously the mechanical side indicates that it warrants recovery of the hardware. So the "we'll have to see" part is pretty much already been determined.
Note how Mickey has the two buttons on top of his pants.
To me, Mickey is not overly derived from Oswald. Mickey has more detail and a different style. Now of course these cartoons were black and white, and captured on grainy film, so you were limited to black and white and bold strokes, so that part of course would be similar.
That clearly has copied Mickey's style. Oswald is now wearing shoes and gloves, which Mickey had in 1929. I'm hardly a cartoon historian, but it sure seems to me that it was the other way around, and Oswald was changed to look like Mickey after Disney was successful and not the other way around.
Great minds think alike. I was about to make a sarcastic post to the same effect. The entire point is NOT showing it in real-time, which would take weeks to watch.
So the gist of it is that, after capturing data and training the AI, the car functions using only regular old cameras. The prohibitive cost in current self driving cars is the expensive sensors. So his system is much more economical. He envisions a kit to turn cars into self driving cars costing $1000 (obviously only certain cars with the ability to control steering digitally, etc, would be supported).
This is just lame. For starters, anyone who saw Star Wars once in 1977, and never watched it again until now, is clearly not a big fan of the sci-fi genre in the first place. Even if you managed to avoid it on VHS, DVD, etc, the original trilogy was re-released to theaters multiple times, the last being in 1997. I saw it again on the big screen then, and it held up as well as ever.
As for his specific points, and how things didn't exactly align to what he remembered from four decades ago, Luke was whiny at first - it is a coming of age story. C3PO has always been a "nervous wreck". He's was a vaudeville type comedy relief. Obi-Wan simply put Luke on the right path and their time together was very short. The movie isn't about Obi-Wan. Costumes were fine, and as for the aliens, I'd rather have practical effects that are slightly flawed than 100% perfect CGI aliens (is that really what he wants??). And finally, it is a very fast paced action movie with only a couple breathers in the whole thing. Yet it manages to create such a vast world with so many nuances in short time - you couldn't take it all in in a single viewing (Ah, maybe that's his problem right there! LOL)
It is hypothesized that our first dose of this bacteria comes from normal child birth and then we are put in our mothers arms so kissing and cuddling further transfers the bacteria.
What about babies born prematurely via cesarean that are placed immediately in an incubator and not touched by ungloved hands?
And it's a valid decision. Local government is concerned primarily with what is right in front of their faces. The local economy is paramount in their decision making. This additional land for solar farms will be locked up for decades and essentially be taken away from the community for any possible revenue generation in the future. They get absolutely nothing in return for the solar farm economically, with the exception of several thousand dollars training funds for the local fire department to deal with whatever kinds of electrical or chemical fires might result from a solar farm.
I'm not sure where the cancer risk concept is coming from, but I can think of some valid (although far-fetched) concerns. One would be if the panels have a chemical coating or break down over time releasing chemicals into the groundwater. A possibly more legitimate concern would be transformers and batteries, which are chemical based and indeed contain (especially the transformers) known carcinogens.
Also, we're talking about NC here. It is likely these agricultural areas they are trying to rezone were used in the past for growing tobacco. So they used to make a lot of money for the community, and now they're asked to give away the land forever to an industry that will not share in the profits at all. So there is that mindset as well.
The Last Starfighter wasn't a bad movie. Technologically, it was incredibly groundbreaking. Pretty much any movie incorporating CGI is simply following in the footsteps of TLS. The Rotten Tomato and IMDB scores are all pretty good as well. The movie made a profit of several million dollars.
The huge problem with ANY video game version of TLS back then is that it could never, ever hold a candle to the game as shown in the movie. It would suck in comparison no matter what, thus it was wise to not try and market a game under that name. The game as shown then was absolutely amazing, and was rendered frame by frame on a Cray in the same way the CGI for the "realistic" scenes was created. The technology didn't exist then to create the game as depicted in the movie.
BTW, there is a freeware version of the game available, which appears to be incredibly true to the game as depicted in the film.
The potential mining aspect doesn't make much sense. Why would you go to great expense to try and mine bitcoins if you already have over a million of them? Or is anonymity that important to him that he doesn't dare spend the bitcoins associated with Satoshi Nakamoto?
Good point. How any business can have 1/7 of the entire population of the planet as users and be considered "struggling" is a bit strange. Unless they are bleeding money giving it all away for free in order to have that many users.
really... what does it matter who "invented" bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a bit like a pyramid scheme, in that blocks become progressively more computationally expensive to calculate over time. Thus the first blocks were very low-hanging fruit that were quick and easy to calculate. Of course those easy blocks were calculated by the creator of Bitcoin, and it is estimated Satoshi has at least 1 million bitcoins (the current value of which is over $400 million dollars). So I think many people are curious as to who holds this wealth, which is an unduly massive reward for having created a crpytocurrency. It also raises the question of whether bitcoin was created merely to enrich the creator, or if it really was for some larger purpose. The only person who knows the answer to that is Satoshi.
That was always one of my favorite things about hamfests - not the commercial vendors with their shiny new rigs I couldn't afford - but the flea market out back full of every kind of electronic gadget you could think of.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between male and female in Minecraft is exactly 3 pixels.
Wait a second. You're saying Slashdot is posting news too fast??? What alternate reality are we in?
Obama's opening line of the meeting. "Gentlemen, how much privacy and how many rights of your users are you willing to sacrifice in the name of patriotism and the fight against terrorism?"
Swift's developers don't want to replace Brace Syntax with Python-style indentation.
Good, it seems Swift's developers aren't idiots.
So I'm a software developer and an amateur radio operator, and I still have no idea what the point of that article was (besides the fact that Hellschreiber starts with "hell" and apparently the author found that to be terrifically funny or clever or something).
How many times is this going to be rehashed? Wasn't Java going to accomplish this 15 years ago? The web browser has turned into a VM - a very convoluted, inconsistent, difficult to develop for, hodgepodge mess of a VM. We've got WebGL and Web Audio API and all the HTML5 stuff (local storage, canvas rendering, etc, etc), and still it's a pathetic step-child of a "platform" to develop for compared to pretty much any proper platform. If "write once, run everywhere" is what you want, then sure, go for the lowest common denominator (HTML5 "apps") and you will end up with the end result of the lowest common denominator of performance and platform integration.
Burn it. It's far better to burn it than let it escape as methane.
This is just stupid. So I don't need a dedicated "single piece of glowing display" in my hand anymore, because I happen to have a doorknob nearby with "some sort of chip implanted within" that is "connected to the internet". So to read a message, I will go touch the doorknob, and then a nearby light begins flashing the message out in morse code? I know that sounds dumb, but that is what he is inferring, right? You don't need a device in your hand because there's just a random assortment of connected stuff all around?
Dedicated devices purpose-built for interacting with humans will not go away until we have some kind of direct mental link to computers. The keyboard hasn't been replaced by touch screen devices. It serves a specific purpose that cannot be replaced by any other method of input, including speech recognition (I can just see myself coding with speech recognition - "Next line. Next line. Next line. Move right 5 words. Left one word. Right one character. Right one character. Delete. Ampersand." Uh huh.)
There is also the personal / privacy aspect. Just because I can project something on a wall 10' wide on the other side of the room doesn't mean I want to read and reply to my private messages in that way. What if there are 5 people in the same room? Who gets the wall? Or do we carve it up into 5 pieces? "Son, you take the left half of the coffee table, and mom, please take you feet off the coffee table so our daughter can use the other half. I get the west wall today, and hun, you can do your FB on the ceiling."
The number of holes in this silly prediction of the future are simply too great. It will not unfold in this manner.
This is a horrendous idea for a number of reasons. First of all, we've all used apps that constantly pester us to rate it in the app store. Voting would become the same thing. Lobbyists and candidates would be pushing links down our throats continuously to cast a vote for whatever it is they're pushing.
The second problem is voter intimidation. When voting occurs on a single day, it vastly limits the scope and method in which those wishing to influence an election by threat or force can operate. They can only be in so many places at once, and they cannot intimidate on a wide enough scale to cause much harm. However, if they have the ability, at their leisure, to intimidate voters one on one and force them to vote on the spot, well, the abuse would be horrendous.
Terrible idea.
They already test fire all rocket engines multiple times before launch. They've fired these kinds of engines through multiple simulated full-length launch duration burns on the ground. They already have a very good idea of whether or not it is feasible to use them, and obviously the mechanical side indicates that it warrants recovery of the hardware. So the "we'll have to see" part is pretty much already been determined.
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Does anyone see the problem here? Why are companies able to sell and transfer copyrights for items that are 80 frigging years old???????
The mechanism by which stresses in rocks produce electric fields.
Alex, what is piezoelectricity?
This is interesting. So here is the initial Oswald:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And here is the initial Mickey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note how Mickey has the two buttons on top of his pants.
To me, Mickey is not overly derived from Oswald. Mickey has more detail and a different style. Now of course these cartoons were black and white, and captured on grainy film, so you were limited to black and white and bold strokes, so that part of course would be similar.
But here's what I find interesting. Take a look at Oswald a few years later in 1933:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That clearly has copied Mickey's style. Oswald is now wearing shoes and gloves, which Mickey had in 1929. I'm hardly a cartoon historian, but it sure seems to me that it was the other way around, and Oswald was changed to look like Mickey after Disney was successful and not the other way around.
Great minds think alike. I was about to make a sarcastic post to the same effect. The entire point is NOT showing it in real-time, which would take weeks to watch.
So the gist of it is that, after capturing data and training the AI, the car functions using only regular old cameras. The prohibitive cost in current self driving cars is the expensive sensors. So his system is much more economical. He envisions a kit to turn cars into self driving cars costing $1000 (obviously only certain cars with the ability to control steering digitally, etc, would be supported).
This is just lame. For starters, anyone who saw Star Wars once in 1977, and never watched it again until now, is clearly not a big fan of the sci-fi genre in the first place. Even if you managed to avoid it on VHS, DVD, etc, the original trilogy was re-released to theaters multiple times, the last being in 1997. I saw it again on the big screen then, and it held up as well as ever.
As for his specific points, and how things didn't exactly align to what he remembered from four decades ago, Luke was whiny at first - it is a coming of age story. C3PO has always been a "nervous wreck". He's was a vaudeville type comedy relief. Obi-Wan simply put Luke on the right path and their time together was very short. The movie isn't about Obi-Wan. Costumes were fine, and as for the aliens, I'd rather have practical effects that are slightly flawed than 100% perfect CGI aliens (is that really what he wants??). And finally, it is a very fast paced action movie with only a couple breathers in the whole thing. Yet it manages to create such a vast world with so many nuances in short time - you couldn't take it all in in a single viewing (Ah, maybe that's his problem right there! LOL)
That article was just silly.
It is hypothesized that our first dose of this bacteria comes from normal child birth and then we are put in our mothers arms so kissing and cuddling further transfers the bacteria.
What about babies born prematurely via cesarean that are placed immediately in an incubator and not touched by ungloved hands?
And it's a valid decision. Local government is concerned primarily with what is right in front of their faces. The local economy is paramount in their decision making. This additional land for solar farms will be locked up for decades and essentially be taken away from the community for any possible revenue generation in the future. They get absolutely nothing in return for the solar farm economically, with the exception of several thousand dollars training funds for the local fire department to deal with whatever kinds of electrical or chemical fires might result from a solar farm.
I'm not sure where the cancer risk concept is coming from, but I can think of some valid (although far-fetched) concerns. One would be if the panels have a chemical coating or break down over time releasing chemicals into the groundwater. A possibly more legitimate concern would be transformers and batteries, which are chemical based and indeed contain (especially the transformers) known carcinogens.
Also, we're talking about NC here. It is likely these agricultural areas they are trying to rezone were used in the past for growing tobacco. So they used to make a lot of money for the community, and now they're asked to give away the land forever to an industry that will not share in the profits at all. So there is that mindset as well.
The Last Starfighter wasn't a bad movie. Technologically, it was incredibly groundbreaking. Pretty much any movie incorporating CGI is simply following in the footsteps of TLS. The Rotten Tomato and IMDB scores are all pretty good as well. The movie made a profit of several million dollars.
The huge problem with ANY video game version of TLS back then is that it could never, ever hold a candle to the game as shown in the movie. It would suck in comparison no matter what, thus it was wise to not try and market a game under that name. The game as shown then was absolutely amazing, and was rendered frame by frame on a Cray in the same way the CGI for the "realistic" scenes was created. The technology didn't exist then to create the game as depicted in the movie.
BTW, there is a freeware version of the game available, which appears to be incredibly true to the game as depicted in the film.
The potential mining aspect doesn't make much sense. Why would you go to great expense to try and mine bitcoins if you already have over a million of them? Or is anonymity that important to him that he doesn't dare spend the bitcoins associated with Satoshi Nakamoto?
Good point. How any business can have 1/7 of the entire population of the planet as users and be considered "struggling" is a bit strange. Unless they are bleeding money giving it all away for free in order to have that many users.
really... what does it matter who "invented" bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a bit like a pyramid scheme, in that blocks become progressively more computationally expensive to calculate over time. Thus the first blocks were very low-hanging fruit that were quick and easy to calculate. Of course those easy blocks were calculated by the creator of Bitcoin, and it is estimated Satoshi has at least 1 million bitcoins (the current value of which is over $400 million dollars). So I think many people are curious as to who holds this wealth, which is an unduly massive reward for having created a crpytocurrency. It also raises the question of whether bitcoin was created merely to enrich the creator, or if it really was for some larger purpose. The only person who knows the answer to that is Satoshi.
This, my friends, is the geekiest thing you will see today. Trekkie plays Star Trek theme on Theremin.
That was always one of my favorite things about hamfests - not the commercial vendors with their shiny new rigs I couldn't afford - but the flea market out back full of every kind of electronic gadget you could think of.