In other words, blame Samsung either way you want to look at it - because they're too lazy / incompetent to do it, or because they preload so much proprietary bloatware on the device that it can't do much more than stock. HTC is just as bad, with background processes like Stock Updates using 20 MB of RAM (even if the widget isn't even being used) that can't be killed or disabled without rooting the device.
I wonder why the design is so conventional looking? They must have modified an existing light helicopter for remote control. Either that or the standard cockpit style helicopter design is already the most efficient aerodynamically. I was expecting to see what amounted to an engine and gas tank that can fly.
I'm not sure the status quo was exactly welcome either. This is an opportunity for a change for the better, and those types of changes are seldom easy or without turmoil. Is there any nation on earth whose people have less freedom and rights than the North Koreans? Are any other citizens as repressed and controlled as they are? Again, I don't see how any opportunity for positive change, even if incremental, can be considered unwelcome.
The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.
Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go: http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
I'd hate to work for and / or have a stake in Carrier IQ. Talk about going down in a massive ball of flames overnight! Simply put, that company, at least by name, will have to cease to exist. No one would dare want that name associated with their devices.
I'm the exact opposite. My game engine and various libraries (lua, box2d, etc) are all written in C++ / C, thus I have a single codebase that I build for both iOS and Android (and Windows and OSX). 99.9% of the code is shared - there are literally a few dozen lines of Javascript / Objective C that tie events at the app level into my game engine.
I greatly prefer to release for Android first, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to release for iOS version first. I can patch bugs and have a new Android build online and rolled out to my users within an hour or so. I can throw a new build straight to a user via a URL or email that they can upgrade to directly to check the fix (which is, for all intents and purposes, not an option with iOS having to deal with getting the user's device ID, generating a mobileprovision file, using one of my 100 device slots, etc, etc) With iOS my app has to go through the entire approval process again, adding at least a 1 week minimum delay before the bug fixes reach the users. It's far better allowing the Android users to give the game a thorough thrashing for several days to make sure there aren't any obscure or hard to trigger bugs, then roll out to the iOS folks.
“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”
This is about a new wave of companies trying to make inroads into the banking business. This BS story is just them peddling their wares and trying to raise some eyebrows and maybe get a bank or two to give them a serious look. You've got these companies already doing marketing for banks by digging into our social networks, and now they think they can make more money and become that much more important (legitimate?) by actually helping the banks make their credit decisions. 100% wishful thinking at this point. Let's hope it stays that way.
I'm suggesting that empathy is higher order than condition / response, and if you include something as high level as knowledge into that definition, I'm fine with that. To me, empathy is the knowledge that someone is suffering, which is to consider, imagine, or reflect on your own past experiences to glean some understanding of what someone else is enduring. That is quite different than a response to an annoying or disturbing stimuli.
I also suggest that at least to a significant extent, empathy is a choice. In order for it to be a choice it is not a condition / response. I see a cultural pattern where people are taught (likely in an indirect way, or due to some sort of caste system) to not show (or perhaps even not feel) empathy for others. A good example of this is the horrible story of Yue Yue, a 2 year old Chinese girl that was recently run over by two vehicles and literally stepped over and around by over a dozen people for several minutes before someone helped. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLde8f2zb1U (VERY disturbing video - watch at your own risk)
I've seen a strong pattern of this in other videos of trauma, car accidents, etc which leads me to believe the empathy is certainly something controllable, and likely affected by culture and society.
Regarding your third hand, it implies that human empathy is only an instantaneous response to something occurring at that moment (I find this stimulus to be bothering, thus I will help this other person to make the stimulus go away). To me empathy is nagging unease or sadness because I know (or can vaguely imagine) what someone else is going through, even if I don't have a direct interaction with that person at all (IE merely being told "This happened to so and so the other day"). So in that context empathy has absolutely nothing to do with selfishness, because the selfish thing to do in that case (being already removed from the person in distress) is to ignore them entirely. In fact, empathy can be downright debilitating, especially when there's nothing that can be done for the person in need.
This is just plain old photoshopping. The blurb makes it sound like she's a 3D computer model or something similarly advanced. I'm sure the originals were based off of a real person, and probably touched up a bit with photoshop like practically every social magazine and advertisement had has done for decades now. I'm not sure what all the uproar is about. Do people really think that amongst the billions of people on this planet that no-one has a body that looks as good as this "virtual" model? Sure it's not representative of your typical, average female, but it most certainly is not unrealistic. I just don't understand the evil / anti technology slant to this story. That's just a money saving / convenience type thing.
Well, this pretty much indicates that, at least when it comes to tablets, you cannot make money off of the hardware alone. iPad is still the exception, because it literally defined the market. However, Apple makes so much money off of the App store that they could undoubtedly sell the hardware at a loss and still profit overall. They just don't need to - at least not at this point.
Amazon's Kindle Fire is the only real competition, the reason being that Amazon is an established content provider, and just like Apple, they have their own closed App marketplace that they also profit off of. How can Dell, HP, Motorola, HTC compete in this scenario, when the only thing they can make money off of is the hardware? Their only chance is to partner with someone who does have the content distribution infrastructure, but it seems that chance has already passed.
Well, I can see where this is headed. Once augmented reality becomes commonplace, and everyone is wearing glasses / contacts / implants that enhance and augment vision with information and metadata, people will be able to pay a (probably hefty) sum to the providers, and have their perceived appearance digitally enhanced. Removing wrinkles, coloring hair, shaving off a few pounds, etc.
At Epcot there is a "ride" / exhibit called The Living Seas. To enter you ride an elevator down a distance that seems a couple hundred feet, then it opens up and you're surrounded by huge aquariums. The elevator is the kind with two sets of doors - one on each side of the elevator. You enter one side and go out the other. I could tell that it was fake - I think maybe I could see sunlight under the outside doors. I tried to convince my friend that it was just an illusion - bubbles would go up the glass sides of the elevator making it appear you were descending, it would shake and shimmy and come to an abrupt stop at the bottom, etc. However they just couldn't believe it was fake, even though to exit you just walked straight back outside another normal set of doors. Finally I proved it to them by slipping on the elevator to ride it back up (you were not supposed to exit that way). As soon as the doors leading inside the building closed, the doors leading outside opened to allow the next batch of people in.
My point is that even in-person a fake elevator can be an very convincing illusion. It is even more so in a movie, where they have total control over the camera angles, the actors are trained to enhance the illusion further, etc.
On first inspection, the majority of the sites offered access to downloads of the latest Hollywood blockbusters for a small charge.
Okay, so they were selling and profiting off of someone else's IP. Doesn't matter who they were "marketing" it to, if the copyright violation crosses into the jurisdiction of the US government then of course they will act.
I would think that the worst possible thing (or best possible thing, from Invader Zim's viewpoint) that could happen with a fire in zero G is air flow / turbulence. If there isn't any movement of air, then the oxygen surrounding the fire is consumed and the fire burns very slowly. Since convection currents are a product of gravity, they don't occur in zero G so no fresh O2 is sucked into the fire for combustion as it does here on earth. So I would think anywhere there is an air vent blowing air, or even people just moving around in the environment, you'd have blowtorch like fire forming where the air is disturbed. I bet you could literally see the turbulence in the air as wisps of flame. Kind of disturbing to think of. An example of this is in a swimming pool. Have you noticed that if you hold very still in motionless, cold water, that you will begin to feel warmer, but as soon as you move it feels cold again (and no, I'm not talking about heating the pool with your pee). That is because the molecules closest to your body heat up, and since they aren't flowing and being replaced by colder molecules, only conduction takes heat away. It's sort of the same principle with fire in zero-g, where the fuel has consumed the oxygen near it (and it is also surrounded by combustion byproducts as well), so as long as fresh air isn't wafted into it, combustion almost grinds to a halt.
So, if congress has been able to withstand the lobbying for indefinite patents, given the massive amount of money on the line as indicated by this single drug patent, how come they fold to the likes of Disney when it comes to copyright? Maybe it's the cuteness of the cartoon characters.
And therein lies the solution to this problem. As soon as someone hacks into their database and steals a ton of credit card info, personal data, etc, there will be enough uproar and backlash to kill off CarrerIQ, and bite carriers like AT&T that preinstalled it.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, blame Samsung either way you want to look at it - because they're too lazy / incompetent to do it, or because they preload so much proprietary bloatware on the device that it can't do much more than stock. HTC is just as bad, with background processes like Stock Updates using 20 MB of RAM (even if the widget isn't even being used) that can't be killed or disabled without rooting the device.
It's not the submitter's fault. The phrasing is verbatim from the Discovery News story.
Actually that's the tone of the Discovery News story. I was somewhat surprised at the tone too when I read the story earlier.
I wonder why the design is so conventional looking? They must have modified an existing light helicopter for remote control. Either that or the standard cockpit style helicopter design is already the most efficient aerodynamically. I was expecting to see what amounted to an engine and gas tank that can fly.
In that case, who holds the patent for using apps not during phone calls? What about a patent for using apps when Wifi is on? Or Bluetooth?
I'm not sure the status quo was exactly welcome either. This is an opportunity for a change for the better, and those types of changes are seldom easy or without turmoil. Is there any nation on earth whose people have less freedom and rights than the North Koreans? Are any other citizens as repressed and controlled as they are? Again, I don't see how any opportunity for positive change, even if incremental, can be considered unwelcome.
No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.
The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.
Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
I am currently on the fence trying to decide between Sprint and Verizon. I think Sprint just tipped me to their side with this.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of Sprint, a marketing exec is getting a nice Christmas bonus.
I'd hate to work for and / or have a stake in Carrier IQ. Talk about going down in a massive ball of flames overnight! Simply put, that company, at least by name, will have to cease to exist. No one would dare want that name associated with their devices.
I'm the exact opposite. My game engine and various libraries (lua, box2d, etc) are all written in C++ / C, thus I have a single codebase that I build for both iOS and Android (and Windows and OSX). 99.9% of the code is shared - there are literally a few dozen lines of Javascript / Objective C that tie events at the app level into my game engine.
I greatly prefer to release for Android first, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to release for iOS version first. I can patch bugs and have a new Android build online and rolled out to my users within an hour or so. I can throw a new build straight to a user via a URL or email that they can upgrade to directly to check the fix (which is, for all intents and purposes, not an option with iOS having to deal with getting the user's device ID, generating a mobileprovision file, using one of my 100 device slots, etc, etc) With iOS my app has to go through the entire approval process again, adding at least a 1 week minimum delay before the bug fixes reach the users. It's far better allowing the Android users to give the game a thorough thrashing for several days to make sure there aren't any obscure or hard to trigger bugs, then roll out to the iOS folks.
“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”
This is about a new wave of companies trying to make inroads into the banking business. This BS story is just them peddling their wares and trying to raise some eyebrows and maybe get a bank or two to give them a serious look. You've got these companies already doing marketing for banks by digging into our social networks, and now they think they can make more money and become that much more important (legitimate?) by actually helping the banks make their credit decisions. 100% wishful thinking at this point. Let's hope it stays that way.
I'm suggesting that empathy is higher order than condition / response, and if you include something as high level as knowledge into that definition, I'm fine with that. To me, empathy is the knowledge that someone is suffering, which is to consider, imagine, or reflect on your own past experiences to glean some understanding of what someone else is enduring. That is quite different than a response to an annoying or disturbing stimuli.
I also suggest that at least to a significant extent, empathy is a choice. In order for it to be a choice it is not a condition / response. I see a cultural pattern where people are taught (likely in an indirect way, or due to some sort of caste system) to not show (or perhaps even not feel) empathy for others. A good example of this is the horrible story of Yue Yue, a 2 year old Chinese girl that was recently run over by two vehicles and literally stepped over and around by over a dozen people for several minutes before someone helped. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLde8f2zb1U (VERY disturbing video - watch at your own risk)
I've seen a strong pattern of this in other videos of trauma, car accidents, etc which leads me to believe the empathy is certainly something controllable, and likely affected by culture and society.
Regarding your third hand, it implies that human empathy is only an instantaneous response to something occurring at that moment (I find this stimulus to be bothering, thus I will help this other person to make the stimulus go away). To me empathy is nagging unease or sadness because I know (or can vaguely imagine) what someone else is going through, even if I don't have a direct interaction with that person at all (IE merely being told "This happened to so and so the other day"). So in that context empathy has absolutely nothing to do with selfishness, because the selfish thing to do in that case (being already removed from the person in distress) is to ignore them entirely. In fact, empathy can be downright debilitating, especially when there's nothing that can be done for the person in need.
Rats engage in cannibalism. Perhaps rats seek out other rats in distress for this reason.
This is just plain old photoshopping. The blurb makes it sound like she's a 3D computer model or something similarly advanced. I'm sure the originals were based off of a real person, and probably touched up a bit with photoshop like practically every social magazine and advertisement had has done for decades now. I'm not sure what all the uproar is about. Do people really think that amongst the billions of people on this planet that no-one has a body that looks as good as this "virtual" model? Sure it's not representative of your typical, average female, but it most certainly is not unrealistic. I just don't understand the evil / anti technology slant to this story. That's just a money saving / convenience type thing.
Get a firm grip on your steering wheel, and keep your car pointed away from that company.
Well, this pretty much indicates that, at least when it comes to tablets, you cannot make money off of the hardware alone. iPad is still the exception, because it literally defined the market. However, Apple makes so much money off of the App store that they could undoubtedly sell the hardware at a loss and still profit overall. They just don't need to - at least not at this point.
Amazon's Kindle Fire is the only real competition, the reason being that Amazon is an established content provider, and just like Apple, they have their own closed App marketplace that they also profit off of. How can Dell, HP, Motorola, HTC compete in this scenario, when the only thing they can make money off of is the hardware? Their only chance is to partner with someone who does have the content distribution infrastructure, but it seems that chance has already passed.
Well, I can see where this is headed. Once augmented reality becomes commonplace, and everyone is wearing glasses / contacts / implants that enhance and augment vision with information and metadata, people will be able to pay a (probably hefty) sum to the providers, and have their perceived appearance digitally enhanced. Removing wrinkles, coloring hair, shaving off a few pounds, etc.
At Epcot there is a "ride" / exhibit called The Living Seas. To enter you ride an elevator down a distance that seems a couple hundred feet, then it opens up and you're surrounded by huge aquariums. The elevator is the kind with two sets of doors - one on each side of the elevator. You enter one side and go out the other. I could tell that it was fake - I think maybe I could see sunlight under the outside doors. I tried to convince my friend that it was just an illusion - bubbles would go up the glass sides of the elevator making it appear you were descending, it would shake and shimmy and come to an abrupt stop at the bottom, etc. However they just couldn't believe it was fake, even though to exit you just walked straight back outside another normal set of doors. Finally I proved it to them by slipping on the elevator to ride it back up (you were not supposed to exit that way). As soon as the doors leading inside the building closed, the doors leading outside opened to allow the next batch of people in.
My point is that even in-person a fake elevator can be an very convincing illusion. It is even more so in a movie, where they have total control over the camera angles, the actors are trained to enhance the illusion further, etc.
On first inspection, the majority of the sites offered access to downloads of the latest Hollywood blockbusters for a small charge.
Okay, so they were selling and profiting off of someone else's IP. Doesn't matter who they were "marketing" it to, if the copyright violation crosses into the jurisdiction of the US government then of course they will act.
What did the Jedi ever do to your DHCP server? That seems a bit harsh.
Furthermore, everyone knows Flash is on the way out. I'd skip the Flash-Friendly routers and go straight to an HTML5-Friendly router.
I would think that the worst possible thing (or best possible thing, from Invader Zim's viewpoint) that could happen with a fire in zero G is air flow / turbulence. If there isn't any movement of air, then the oxygen surrounding the fire is consumed and the fire burns very slowly. Since convection currents are a product of gravity, they don't occur in zero G so no fresh O2 is sucked into the fire for combustion as it does here on earth. So I would think anywhere there is an air vent blowing air, or even people just moving around in the environment, you'd have blowtorch like fire forming where the air is disturbed. I bet you could literally see the turbulence in the air as wisps of flame. Kind of disturbing to think of.
An example of this is in a swimming pool. Have you noticed that if you hold very still in motionless, cold water, that you will begin to feel warmer, but as soon as you move it feels cold again (and no, I'm not talking about heating the pool with your pee). That is because the molecules closest to your body heat up, and since they aren't flowing and being replaced by colder molecules, only conduction takes heat away. It's sort of the same principle with fire in zero-g, where the fuel has consumed the oxygen near it (and it is also surrounded by combustion byproducts as well), so as long as fresh air isn't wafted into it, combustion almost grinds to a halt.
So, if congress has been able to withstand the lobbying for indefinite patents, given the massive amount of money on the line as indicated by this single drug patent, how come they fold to the likes of Disney when it comes to copyright? Maybe it's the cuteness of the cartoon characters.
And therein lies the solution to this problem. As soon as someone hacks into their database and steals a ton of credit card info, personal data, etc, there will be enough uproar and backlash to kill off CarrerIQ, and bite carriers like AT&T that preinstalled it.
At the rate things are going, that might be cheaper and easier than procuring it from Russia.