These things better be really reliable, because a tablet is going to get used in all sorts of angles, is likely to be jostled around a lot more, and might find itself in a case where the accelerometer of the device is being used to control a game.
SSD has the benefit of not having moving parts... a tablet or a phone sounds like the last place you'd want a spinning platter to be used.
And 3oz is, what, just shy of a quarter pound? What does the 64GB of flash memory we're comparing this to weigh?
Sounds like trying to turn a tablet into a laptop or something.
And if it's a kid running out into the road, too bad for it too? Or was it just that you didn't want the hassle of being rear-ended to save a kitty?
No, for a kid I'm slamming my brakes on and doing everything possible. This is kind of my point, there's human judgement involved here that I'm not sure these systems are anywhere near close to having.
I was told by my the guy who taught my defensive driving course that getting into an accident to save a cat is a stupid idea, and could shift liability onto you. He flat out said "if you can do it safely, fine, otherwise the cat is a gonner".
So, if I can safely avoid running over your cat, I will try. However, I will go to much greater lengths to avoid running over a kid.
I'm not getting rear-ended to save the cat or a squirrel. A panic stop for a human is one thing, but that cat is on its own, and if I determine I can't safely avoid that cat -- then too damned bad for the cat.
Even now these things are better that the average driver (in google's tests)
See, when Google says that according to Google's test Google's self-driving cars are better than the average driver... my first thought is "bullshit", just like all vendor claims you haven't verified yourself.
Send one of these things into rush hour traffic in a major city right now, and I'll bet those claims get proven untrue in less than 30 minutes.
Other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, children, pot holes and animals running into traffic... all of these are going to serve to undermine this is a huge way.
If I'm in traffic and a cat runs into the road, well, the cat is screwed because I'm not getting rear-ended over some kitty. I have no idea what Google's car would do, but if it slammed on the brakes and caused a big pileup then it's made a bad choice.
I've been around software far too long to put implicit trust in any of it. I have no doubt they've made great strides, but there's no way I'd put my life in its hands just yet.
You assume that people could trust the technology. My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
What you're describing is better served with public transit or something.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
I'd love to see these systems handle someone in the right turn lane with their signal on swooping over 3 lanes and turning left. And the cost involved in changing every car over to this would be so high as to make it a pipe dream.
My guess is that, at least initially, a driver will be required to be in the drivers seat at all times ready to override any actions taken by the car
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
If I need to be paying attention every second in case the computer does something stupid (and need to be able to anticipate every point at which it could do something stupid), it will require as much or more attention as if I was driving anyway.
I have no interest in a self driving car, and I certainly wouldn't pay for the privilege. If I wanted that, I could take the bus or the train.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system, it means at best a fraction of your cars are self driving and playing by one set of rules -- while the rest of your drivers are doing the same random shit they do now.
This has always struck me as a technology which nobody actually wants.
It's like so many of these 'futurist' things which are impractical, will be too expensive, and which will never happen. This is a research project which might have some applications... but which will never be practical for widespread use.
And I have little reason to believe Google is looking at doing anything but encrypting the traffic, not preventing themselves from being able to see the content.
This could prevent some snooping, but it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the NSA would just come in and say "OK, put us where it isn't encrypted".
Google said it has accelerated efforts to build new encryption software that is impenetrable to the government agencies
Unless Google is going to devise a crypto system they don't have any access to the keys, this is meaningless.
Because when those government agencies can walk in the door with a secret warrant and demand the keys, there is nothing Google can do.
The US lawmakers have essentially made crypto in America irrelevant when any party knows the keys.
The rest of the world needs to be stepping up their game, but all of their governments want the same ability to spy.
I fear the US has more or less decided that the entire world should be operating on less security to protect their interests. And I'm not sure why everybody is playing along with that.
I'd say including an active digitiser in the original Surface Pro was pretty innovative. It's the first tablet to do so.
Given that I had to google to figure out WTF that is, and given that you can already buy a stylus for about $15 which allows you to do the same thing on a 'normal' touchscreen... what fraction of the market actually knows or cares about that?
It sounds like niche functionality which is just increasing the cost of these tablets for little benefit to most people.
But, hey, if that's a feature you need for what you're doing, run wild with it. That neither my iPad nor my Nexus 7 have it and I've never missed it (or known what it is) means that for me it's not differentiating technology for most people.
the bad news is, PayPal froze MailPile's account, along with $45k that was on it, and will not un-freeze it until MailPile team provides 'an itemized budget and your development goal dates for your project.'
Since when is it any of PayPals business what people use their accounts for?
Oh, right, because PayPal likes to act like a bank when it's convenient, and then loudly say "we're not a bank" when they don't want to do something a bank couldn't do.
Yet another reason why I think PayPal are assholes and would never deal with them. Arbitrarily deciding to withhold someone's money for no legitimate reason pretty much confirms that.
PayPal isn't a trustworthy entity. They're not a bank, and they're not regulated like a bank. So why do people continue to trust them?
Google wasn't the first by a long shot. By several years in fact.
But, they were one of the first ones to solve the problem of all of those web sites which had polluted every search by adding random words to meta tags or whatever they did.
When I first discovered Google, Yahoo had devolved into pretty much nothing but spam and irrelevant search results. It had become somewhat useless to use most search engines, because they never actually retrieved anything relevant to the search, just stuff which showed up due to those SEO idiots.
Google's page ranking managed to discard a lot of unrelated crap and actually get you something useful, and I never used Yahoo as a search engine again.
Of course, since then, Google's adherence to their own "do no evil" mantra has become a bit of a joke, and they've become really annoying about trying to force you to use more of their services even when you don't want to.
So much so that if I was ever within a few feet of Sergiy Brin he might get a kick in the nuts just for the fun of it. You know, just to show him what it's like and to show we care.
Well, it's one thing to say lack of sleep makes you sleepy and ineffective.
To me it sounds like something else entirely to say the myelin isn't getting replenished -- especially since myelin breakdown has been linked with Alzheimer's and dementia.
So (based on my complete lack of attending med school)... doesn't this potentially make more longer term problems in the brain?
My read on this is this has much broader implications than how you're going to be ineffective the next day. As in, in the long run, your brain may simply be degrading more than it can keep up with than if you'd had enough sleep over that time.
Next time the wife complains when I go take a nap, I'll remind her that I'm re-building my myelin and I need to do that so I don't get any dumber.:-P
and after we bought the RAM we worked 27 hours a day at the mill to pay for it, ate broken glass for breakfast and lived in a hole in the middle of the lane, but it was a good life...
Luxury! We used to dream of working in the mill...
Anybody who bought memory in 1994/1995 knows about this kind of thing.
I remember spending $600+ dollars to get 16MB of RAM back in the day, and that was considered a good price back then.
Of course, cynically I believe companies will latch onto anything which allows them to claim increased scarcity and jack up prices.
And that there is a spot market for DRAM tells me that, once again, speculative investors are fucking it up for everybody -- kinda like oil, where the price goes up because people believe that other people believe the price will go up, and not for any actual market factors.
But, there's always the possibility that Yahoo rolled out a shitty, ugly, and useless update and people are genuinely pissed off.
Based on what they did with email a few months ago (stuck with them since they host the webmail for my ISP), Yahoo is certainly capable of rolling out something pretty awful.
Yes, someone will always bitch about change. But sometimes, change isn't for the better. It's amazing how often web sites update their site and produce something which is utter crap. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Yahoo has done that in this case.
Companies don't usually take that as a cue to say "gee, that was a bad idea". They usually just try to figure out how to foist it on you eventually.
So I'm saying I have very little confidence they won't just eventually do this as an update and tell people to eat shit once they've bought the console. I plan on skipping that step, and simply not buy the console. They can eat their own shit.
How do I protect my recipe? A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See FL 122, Recipes.
Which to me says that a grocery list isn't copyrightable, for the same reason the listing of ingredients in a recipe is different from the actual techniques and steps involved.
And, really, to carry this metaphor a little further to the absurd -- if I'm skilled cook, and I eat your food, there's a good chance I can reverse engineer your recipe pretty closely, and you have zero chance of protecting yourself from that.
Which is part of my problem with software patents, because if the simple act of seeing it and knowing it exists means I could build my own, the 'novelty' of this 'invention' is probably over-stated.
This ability has existed since the 1960s. What is a bit novel is that Apple is using gestures for entering passcodes
Of course, my problem with that is we're treating gestures like they're different from a password or any authentication token.
I'm of the opinion that password, fingerprint, security token, gesture are all substantively reduced to "sequence of bits which can be used to verify access".
So if the USPTO gave a patent to do this with each of these approaches as a separate patent, we'd end up with a bunch of identical patents in which the "authentication token" becomes the patentable part of the 'invention'. I don't think the specific authentication token is relevant to the patent.
To me, it's the functionality of granting granular access, which we've had for a very long time. It doesn't become a different mechanism because you use a fingerprint, a picture of your face, a gesture or whatever.
To me if I could already do this with a password, WTF difference does it make if it's suddenly using a gesture?
So if Amazon lists the songs which are on a CD they offer, are they also violating the producer's copyright?
Well, you could make the argument that when Amazon does it, it's a product description for purposes of promotion and sale of the producer's work.
When Spotify does it, it's reproducing a copyrighted work.
Of course, I think copyright has become so horribly misused as to be a joke, and copyright tends to be used in places where I think it shouldn't.
Honestly, I have no idea of the bounds on how copyright gets used and abused. You can make a lot of abstract arguments, but so much of this is decided by case law that I'm not sure the average person has a good grasp of this.
But short of a bunch of lawyers, and an extensive reading of the case law in the relevant jurisdiction -- it's not like you can just figure out when/how copyright law gets applied. Content owners like to believe they copyright everything forever, and people keep giving them laws for it. But in a lot of cases it seems like it's been applied in a very over-reaching way.
Slashdot Mirror
These things better be really reliable, because a tablet is going to get used in all sorts of angles, is likely to be jostled around a lot more, and might find itself in a case where the accelerometer of the device is being used to control a game.
SSD has the benefit of not having moving parts ... a tablet or a phone sounds like the last place you'd want a spinning platter to be used.
And 3oz is, what, just shy of a quarter pound? What does the 64GB of flash memory we're comparing this to weigh?
Sounds like trying to turn a tablet into a laptop or something.
No, for a kid I'm slamming my brakes on and doing everything possible. This is kind of my point, there's human judgement involved here that I'm not sure these systems are anywhere near close to having.
I was told by my the guy who taught my defensive driving course that getting into an accident to save a cat is a stupid idea, and could shift liability onto you. He flat out said "if you can do it safely, fine, otherwise the cat is a gonner".
So, if I can safely avoid running over your cat, I will try. However, I will go to much greater lengths to avoid running over a kid.
I'm not getting rear-ended to save the cat or a squirrel. A panic stop for a human is one thing, but that cat is on its own, and if I determine I can't safely avoid that cat -- then too damned bad for the cat.
WTF does that even mean?
Purple used to be reserved for Royalty I think, but I'm not sure I follow what 'cheaper-looking colors' is supposed to even mean.
Do we have some sort of chart which shows which color looks more expensive than another? Because I've never heard of this.
See, when Google says that according to Google's test Google's self-driving cars are better than the average driver ... my first thought is "bullshit", just like all vendor claims you haven't verified yourself.
Send one of these things into rush hour traffic in a major city right now, and I'll bet those claims get proven untrue in less than 30 minutes.
Other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, children, pot holes and animals running into traffic ... all of these are going to serve to undermine this is a huge way.
If I'm in traffic and a cat runs into the road, well, the cat is screwed because I'm not getting rear-ended over some kitty. I have no idea what Google's car would do, but if it slammed on the brakes and caused a big pileup then it's made a bad choice.
I've been around software far too long to put implicit trust in any of it. I have no doubt they've made great strides, but there's no way I'd put my life in its hands just yet.
You assume that people could trust the technology. My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
What you're describing is better served with public transit or something.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
I'd love to see these systems handle someone in the right turn lane with their signal on swooping over 3 lanes and turning left. And the cost involved in changing every car over to this would be so high as to make it a pipe dream.
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
If I need to be paying attention every second in case the computer does something stupid (and need to be able to anticipate every point at which it could do something stupid), it will require as much or more attention as if I was driving anyway.
I have no interest in a self driving car, and I certainly wouldn't pay for the privilege. If I wanted that, I could take the bus or the train.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system, it means at best a fraction of your cars are self driving and playing by one set of rules -- while the rest of your drivers are doing the same random shit they do now.
This has always struck me as a technology which nobody actually wants.
It's like so many of these 'futurist' things which are impractical, will be too expensive, and which will never happen. This is a research project which might have some applications ... but which will never be practical for widespread use.
And I have little reason to believe Google is looking at doing anything but encrypting the traffic, not preventing themselves from being able to see the content.
This could prevent some snooping, but it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the NSA would just come in and say "OK, put us where it isn't encrypted".
Unless Google is going to devise a crypto system they don't have any access to the keys, this is meaningless.
Because when those government agencies can walk in the door with a secret warrant and demand the keys, there is nothing Google can do.
The US lawmakers have essentially made crypto in America irrelevant when any party knows the keys.
The rest of the world needs to be stepping up their game, but all of their governments want the same ability to spy.
I fear the US has more or less decided that the entire world should be operating on less security to protect their interests. And I'm not sure why everybody is playing along with that.
And if you need more precision, then by all means use that to determine what to buy.
For me, finger-painting seems to have covered most of my needs thus far.
Given that I had to google to figure out WTF that is, and given that you can already buy a stylus for about $15 which allows you to do the same thing on a 'normal' touchscreen ... what fraction of the market actually knows or cares about that?
It sounds like niche functionality which is just increasing the cost of these tablets for little benefit to most people.
But, hey, if that's a feature you need for what you're doing, run wild with it. That neither my iPad nor my Nexus 7 have it and I've never missed it (or known what it is) means that for me it's not differentiating technology for most people.
Holy crap ... a kickstand with 2 positions.
Now that is innovation and market leadership.
Google wanted lots of money, Microsoft disagreed.
Since the patents were part of a a standard, the jury agreed that Google was asking for too much money.
And we all lose.
Microsoft makes money off Android, for what I suspect is patents they've never disclosed. Google was trying to make money from Microsoft.
In the end, we all pay more, and the market is locked up by large incumbents who won't let anybody else play in the sandbox.
If the intent of the patent system was to 'foster innovation', we're not seeing that actually happen.
Seriously WTF?
Since when is it any of PayPals business what people use their accounts for?
Oh, right, because PayPal likes to act like a bank when it's convenient, and then loudly say "we're not a bank" when they don't want to do something a bank couldn't do.
Yet another reason why I think PayPal are assholes and would never deal with them. Arbitrarily deciding to withhold someone's money for no legitimate reason pretty much confirms that.
PayPal isn't a trustworthy entity. They're not a bank, and they're not regulated like a bank. So why do people continue to trust them?
Google wasn't the first by a long shot. By several years in fact.
But, they were one of the first ones to solve the problem of all of those web sites which had polluted every search by adding random words to meta tags or whatever they did.
When I first discovered Google, Yahoo had devolved into pretty much nothing but spam and irrelevant search results. It had become somewhat useless to use most search engines, because they never actually retrieved anything relevant to the search, just stuff which showed up due to those SEO idiots.
Google's page ranking managed to discard a lot of unrelated crap and actually get you something useful, and I never used Yahoo as a search engine again.
Of course, since then, Google's adherence to their own "do no evil" mantra has become a bit of a joke, and they've become really annoying about trying to force you to use more of their services even when you don't want to.
So much so that if I was ever within a few feet of Sergiy Brin he might get a kick in the nuts just for the fun of it. You know, just to show him what it's like and to show we care.
Well, it's one thing to say lack of sleep makes you sleepy and ineffective.
To me it sounds like something else entirely to say the myelin isn't getting replenished -- especially since myelin breakdown has been linked with Alzheimer's and dementia.
So (based on my complete lack of attending med school) ... doesn't this potentially make more longer term problems in the brain?
My read on this is this has much broader implications than how you're going to be ineffective the next day. As in, in the long run, your brain may simply be degrading more than it can keep up with than if you'd had enough sleep over that time.
Next time the wife complains when I go take a nap, I'll remind her that I'm re-building my myelin and I need to do that so I don't get any dumber. :-P
Does IP law really mean that if I invent something my greedy bastard children get to lay claim on it for decades???
Can you will it to a charity?
This just sounds like the family cash cow as everybody tries to make bank on what daddy did.
Luxury! We used to dream of working in the mill ...
Anybody who bought memory in 1994/1995 knows about this kind of thing.
I remember spending $600+ dollars to get 16MB of RAM back in the day, and that was considered a good price back then.
Of course, cynically I believe companies will latch onto anything which allows them to claim increased scarcity and jack up prices.
And that there is a spot market for DRAM tells me that, once again, speculative investors are fucking it up for everybody -- kinda like oil, where the price goes up because people believe that other people believe the price will go up, and not for any actual market factors.
This is why we can't have nice things.
This is just a fashion statement among galaxies ... like slouchy pants or sideways hats.
A couple of million years, and they'll all be wearing their bipolar planetary nebula crossways.
This is essentially just like bell-bottom pants. :-P
But, there's always the possibility that Yahoo rolled out a shitty, ugly, and useless update and people are genuinely pissed off.
Based on what they did with email a few months ago (stuck with them since they host the webmail for my ISP), Yahoo is certainly capable of rolling out something pretty awful.
Yes, someone will always bitch about change. But sometimes, change isn't for the better. It's amazing how often web sites update their site and produce something which is utter crap. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Yahoo has done that in this case.
They tried it once, and got shouted down.
Companies don't usually take that as a cue to say "gee, that was a bad idea". They usually just try to figure out how to foist it on you eventually.
So I'm saying I have very little confidence they won't just eventually do this as an update and tell people to eat shit once they've bought the console. I plan on skipping that step, and simply not buy the console. They can eat their own shit.
Assuming you meant recipe, from the same link:
Which to me says that a grocery list isn't copyrightable, for the same reason the listing of ingredients in a recipe is different from the actual techniques and steps involved.
And, really, to carry this metaphor a little further to the absurd -- if I'm skilled cook, and I eat your food, there's a good chance I can reverse engineer your recipe pretty closely, and you have zero chance of protecting yourself from that.
Which is part of my problem with software patents, because if the simple act of seeing it and knowing it exists means I could build my own, the 'novelty' of this 'invention' is probably over-stated.
Of course, my problem with that is we're treating gestures like they're different from a password or any authentication token.
I'm of the opinion that password, fingerprint, security token, gesture are all substantively reduced to "sequence of bits which can be used to verify access".
So if the USPTO gave a patent to do this with each of these approaches as a separate patent, we'd end up with a bunch of identical patents in which the "authentication token" becomes the patentable part of the 'invention'. I don't think the specific authentication token is relevant to the patent.
To me, it's the functionality of granting granular access, which we've had for a very long time. It doesn't become a different mechanism because you use a fingerprint, a picture of your face, a gesture or whatever.
To me if I could already do this with a password, WTF difference does it make if it's suddenly using a gesture?
Well, you could make the argument that when Amazon does it, it's a product description for purposes of promotion and sale of the producer's work.
When Spotify does it, it's reproducing a copyrighted work.
Of course, I think copyright has become so horribly misused as to be a joke, and copyright tends to be used in places where I think it shouldn't.
Honestly, I have no idea of the bounds on how copyright gets used and abused. You can make a lot of abstract arguments, but so much of this is decided by case law that I'm not sure the average person has a good grasp of this.
But short of a bunch of lawyers, and an extensive reading of the case law in the relevant jurisdiction -- it's not like you can just figure out when/how copyright law gets applied. Content owners like to believe they copyright everything forever, and people keep giving them laws for it. But in a lot of cases it seems like it's been applied in a very over-reaching way.