Actually, the price of photovoltaics has dropped tremendously in the recent years, and with advances like these, it's not hard to predict that it will continue. The subsidies for solar power development have paid off tremendously in the way they were supposed to, by driving research that have cut prices.
For the photovoltaics industry, though, this hasn't been an unmixed blessing, since it has become so competitive, prices are now being driven so low by more efficient production that many struggle to get by.
It's completely wrong that "nothing has changed", you're just not paying attention.
I've always thought French science fiction had a peculiar visual aesthetic, but I'm not an expert on it. I mean, I may be basing that idea mainly on The Fifth Element and Another World, but... nice to see I'm not the only person to have thought so.
Bwa ha ha, I'll have fun quoting you back on this. Capturing the light field has wonderful implications, far more than just being able to tweak the focus afterwards.
The thing is, it captures a lot of depth information. It can be used to construct 3d models... or with the benefit of eye-tracking eyepieces, it could be used to fix the accomodation problem in stereoscopy. If the depth information in the light field is used efficiently enough, you could get a picture which will look pretty much undistinguishable from a hole in the wall, a portal to wherever the picture was taken.
Theoretically the Lytro could do that as well, automatically focusing wherever you look, though of course, it would need to know where you're looking, which isn't something normal computers know.
Actually, cameras have been pretty good at this for a while, with eye tracking and autofocus.
Why do we need "focus" at all? Why not have photographs where everything is in focus?
Because that would look awfully flat. Focus is one of the three main things your brain uses to interpret depth, along with stereoscopic vision and perspective. (There is also motion parallax and the effect of light scattering).
Perspective was mastered some time in the middle ages.
Stereoscopic images came not long after we could take pictures.
Accomodation, the depth perception we get from the work the muscles around our lens in the eye do, hasn't really been mastered yet. We can sort of fake it with focus, but you still get a flat image where something appears to be out of focus - once your eye tries to focus on the out-of-focus parts, it's immediately apparent to your brain that you're looking at something flat.
You can minimize the chances of a bad trip by conducting the test in a more comfortable environment and have a counselor guide the patient through the experience.
Yeah, that way you can also minimize (or more like obliterate) what little there is of blinding.
Today, at least, you would have to inform your test subjects that they could receive a dose of a hallucinogenic drug. It's not a trivial matter, bad trips can happen, and they are by all accounts terrifying.
Even if you didn't inform them, although the placebo group wouldn't know what they did, the non-placebo group would be acutely aware that they didn't get sugar. It's just not possible to bilnd such studies properly.
To me it sounds like LSD functions a lot like religion. The subjects have a pretty wild, magical interpretation of their experiences - "consciousness expansion", as if what they experience is more real than what the brain can perceive when it's working as intended.
However, unlike religion, these radical interpretations got a surprising deal of support from the extremely high status whitecoat scientific establishment. A religion-like experience with the full weight of that authority behind it, I would expect to have a pretty spectacular placebo effect.
> is clearly whistleblowing and should be protected. But when Manning released gun camera footage of an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters, is that whistleblowing?
Yes, absolutely. The official story of the US government was that "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force", and the 9 dead were spoken of as "insurgents". Actually, two of the dead were Reuters journalists, and two more were random passerbys who tried to help the wounded. Targetting people who are trying to save the wounded is a war crime. It unquestionably happened.
It's so routine that occupying armies lies about incidents like these, that you may think it isn't a big deal. It is. It was a coverup, and Manning was right to expose it.
Do you think making crude stereotypes like these is supposed to be funny? Speaking of social ineptitude...
Slashdot has been eclipsed by younger sites like reddit. Most of those of us who hang around here are pretty old, as a casual look at the registration numbers suggest.
The point isn't that he is a criminal, but that he made a big issue out of not caring much for anything in particular (being in it "for the lulz"). Someone like that doesn't resist pressure quite as well as someone from le communist resistance, if you get my point.
Problem is, there are a thousand and one different schemes like these, from freenet to gnunet to oneswarm to - whatever this thing was called. And you need to know a good deal about cryptography to figure out which ones are safe, and a good deal about social dynamics on the net to know which one is actually going to get used for anything you're interested in. And you need friends who use it (in most cases).
The fragmentation is killing these efforts. The "connect only to friends"-model is hard enough to get to work in practice, without umpteen different incompatible implementations trying it.
"Fuel" is taking it too far. "Used very effectively as an excuse" is better.
Most heroin addicts where I live (Oslo, Norway) had a criminal record before beginning to shoot heroin. Sure, drugs (and the emotional excuse they provide) causes a feedback effect, but the initiating factor is growing up in social misery: with child abuse, fatherlessness (more generally messed up families), parents with mental illness, CPS and foster homes, poor social environments etc. These people would certainly be better off without drugs in some objective ways, but they would still be quite miserable - and they wouldn't have a convenient chemical explanation for their misery.
The dramatic difference a substance can have when used for intoxication, as opposed to e.g. vote counters being given amphetamine in the sixties, shows that drug abuse must be understood first and foremost as a social problem, not a chemical one. That is a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because we can get a more rational and less fearful approach to drugs. Bad, because we have to admit drug use can't be individualized: It is not an individual problem, but a social problem, which has to be faced on the societal level somehow.
Treating individual drug users one by one can never be more than emergency medicine: something we have to do for moral reasons, but which is horribly expensive and cost-ineffective, and can never be a replacement for regular, preventative medicine.
Well then, I'd like to call in a mob on Booyah games' "Early Bird" for Android. It hasn't happened so far, it ought to.
They had a paid version, then they made it free - and added advertising. I wouldn't mind if they made a free version with ads (or even a free version without ads), but they effectively force-downgraded the version I paid for.
You've messed up the quoting, so it's not easy to figure out what you actually mean, but if you doubt the deniers are capable of legal harassement, look up what S. Fred Singer did to Justin Lancaster, the grad student of the late Roger Revelle who dared to cast doubt on Singer's Lady Hope story.
Rest assured that if the project creator didn't promote this in some other way than creating this page, he would not have received a dime. You can get on even Kickstarter's frontpage, but if you don't do promotion in other channels, your chance of funding is near zero.
What is possible is that this collection is a result of a mass email to Hagan's friends (or the project starter's friends).
At that point, a bad reputation would be the least of LibertarianCrowdfunding.com's problems. You can very easily end up economically liable for facilitating scams, no matter how many rights you technically get customers to sign away.
Also, scammers won't give a dime for biting the hand that feeds it. That's what happened to fundable.org, the first treshold pledge crowdfunding system (see my post above).
To see what other models are like, go check out...
No, please don't. Those sites have worked VERY hard at advertising, so they would be named in the same breath as Kickstarter, but many of them have seriously not done their homework. The top two on your list don't even feature treshold pledge (the project creator can take any money raised), which shows they have zero understanding of the concept.
Crowdtilt at least gets that right, but they haven't learned the lesson from fundable.org, the pioneer of this business model. It was totally drowned in "My cute little labrador puppy needs expensive surgery, HELP!" begging.
It should not come as a surprise that most of these were scams. Worse, they weren't just trying to scam random sympathetic individuals who happened upon the fundable.org frontpage... criminals would use stolen credit cards to make pledges to their own projects. Once the cards were blocked and chargebacks enforced, they had already taken the money as project owners (with plausible deniability) leaving fundable with the chargeback bill. It was a major factor in killing the site.
Crowdfunding is NOT an easy thing to get right. Kickstarter should have credit for breaking the main barrier, wrapping people's mind around a new concept, getting project starters and backers to see the potential for use for creative works (something fundable.org failed miserably at due to the lab puppy spam).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the price of photovoltaics has dropped tremendously in the recent years, and with advances like these, it's not hard to predict that it will continue. The subsidies for solar power development have paid off tremendously in the way they were supposed to, by driving research that have cut prices.
For the photovoltaics industry, though, this hasn't been an unmixed blessing, since it has become so competitive, prices are now being driven so low by more efficient production that many struggle to get by.
It's completely wrong that "nothing has changed", you're just not paying attention.
I've always thought French science fiction had a peculiar visual aesthetic, but I'm not an expert on it. I mean, I may be basing that idea mainly on The Fifth Element and Another World, but... nice to see I'm not the only person to have thought so.
Thing is, you can make an "enhance" button with this thing, as long as you could get a clearer image of the target with better focus.
Bwa ha ha, I'll have fun quoting you back on this. Capturing the light field has wonderful implications, far more than just being able to tweak the focus afterwards.
The thing is, it captures a lot of depth information. It can be used to construct 3d models... or with the benefit of eye-tracking eyepieces, it could be used to fix the accomodation problem in stereoscopy. If the depth information in the light field is used efficiently enough, you could get a picture which will look pretty much undistinguishable from a hole in the wall, a portal to wherever the picture was taken.
Actually, cameras have been pretty good at this for a while, with eye tracking and autofocus.
Because that would look awfully flat. Focus is one of the three main things your brain uses to interpret depth, along with stereoscopic vision and perspective. (There is also motion parallax and the effect of light scattering).
Perspective was mastered some time in the middle ages.
Stereoscopic images came not long after we could take pictures.
Accomodation, the depth perception we get from the work the muscles around our lens in the eye do, hasn't really been mastered yet. We can sort of fake it with focus, but you still get a flat image where something appears to be out of focus - once your eye tries to focus on the out-of-focus parts, it's immediately apparent to your brain that you're looking at something flat.
What's really needed to take advantage of this technology is a light field screen. So that what your eye focuses on is actually in focus.
I'm not sure if that can be made, but it would be a huge improvement on stereoscopic-type 3d effects.
The conclusion that a change of environment is often crucial to let someone stay sober, wasn't discovered through studies of neurobiology.
You can minimize the chances of a bad trip by conducting the test in a more comfortable environment and have a counselor guide the patient through the experience.
Yeah, that way you can also minimize (or more like obliterate) what little there is of blinding.
Oh come on, regular expressions aren't like LSD. You don't get long term damage from an LSD experience.
Today, at least, you would have to inform your test subjects that they could receive a dose of a hallucinogenic drug. It's not a trivial matter, bad trips can happen, and they are by all accounts terrifying.
Even if you didn't inform them, although the placebo group wouldn't know what they did, the non-placebo group would be acutely aware that they didn't get sugar. It's just not possible to bilnd such studies properly.
To me it sounds like LSD functions a lot like religion. The subjects have a pretty wild, magical interpretation of their experiences - "consciousness expansion", as if what they experience is more real than what the brain can perceive when it's working as intended.
However, unlike religion, these radical interpretations got a surprising deal of support from the extremely high status whitecoat scientific establishment. A religion-like experience with the full weight of that authority behind it, I would expect to have a pretty spectacular placebo effect.
> is clearly whistleblowing and should be protected. But when Manning released gun camera footage of an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters, is that whistleblowing?
Yes, absolutely. The official story of the US government was that "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force", and the 9 dead were spoken of as "insurgents". Actually, two of the dead were Reuters journalists, and two more were random passerbys who tried to help the wounded. Targetting people who are trying to save the wounded is a war crime. It unquestionably happened.
It's so routine that occupying armies lies about incidents like these, that you may think it isn't a big deal. It is. It was a coverup, and Manning was right to expose it.
Do you think making crude stereotypes like these is supposed to be funny? Speaking of social ineptitude...
Slashdot has been eclipsed by younger sites like reddit. Most of those of us who hang around here are pretty old, as a casual look at the registration numbers suggest.
The point isn't that he is a criminal, but that he made a big issue out of not caring much for anything in particular (being in it "for the lulz"). Someone like that doesn't resist pressure quite as well as someone from le communist resistance, if you get my point.
Problem is, there are a thousand and one different schemes like these, from freenet to gnunet to oneswarm to - whatever this thing was called. And you need to know a good deal about cryptography to figure out which ones are safe, and a good deal about social dynamics on the net to know which one is actually going to get used for anything you're interested in. And you need friends who use it (in most cases).
The fragmentation is killing these efforts. The "connect only to friends"-model is hard enough to get to work in practice, without umpteen different incompatible implementations trying it.
"Fuel" is taking it too far. "Used very effectively as an excuse" is better.
Most heroin addicts where I live (Oslo, Norway) had a criminal record before beginning to shoot heroin. Sure, drugs (and the emotional excuse they provide) causes a feedback effect, but the initiating factor is growing up in social misery: with child abuse, fatherlessness (more generally messed up families), parents with mental illness, CPS and foster homes, poor social environments etc. These people would certainly be better off without drugs in some objective ways, but they would still be quite miserable - and they wouldn't have a convenient chemical explanation for their misery.
The dramatic difference a substance can have when used for intoxication, as opposed to e.g. vote counters being given amphetamine in the sixties, shows that drug abuse must be understood first and foremost as a social problem, not a chemical one. That is a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because we can get a more rational and less fearful approach to drugs. Bad, because we have to admit drug use can't be individualized: It is not an individual problem, but a social problem, which has to be faced on the societal level somehow.
Treating individual drug users one by one can never be more than emergency medicine: something we have to do for moral reasons, but which is horribly expensive and cost-ineffective, and can never be a replacement for regular, preventative medicine.
Well then, I'd like to call in a mob on Booyah games' "Early Bird" for Android. It hasn't happened so far, it ought to.
They had a paid version, then they made it free - and added advertising. I wouldn't mind if they made a free version with ads (or even a free version without ads), but they effectively force-downgraded the version I paid for.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.booyah.birds
You've messed up the quoting, so it's not easy to figure out what you actually mean, but if you doubt the deniers are capable of legal harassement, look up what S. Fred Singer did to Justin Lancaster, the grad student of the late Roger Revelle who dared to cast doubt on Singer's Lady Hope story.
Good thing you did, we wouldn't want to think you were new to this social website business.
Slashdot should do an interview with you.
Rest assured that if the project creator didn't promote this in some other way than creating this page, he would not have received a dime. You can get on even Kickstarter's frontpage, but if you don't do promotion in other channels, your chance of funding is near zero.
What is possible is that this collection is a result of a mass email to Hagan's friends (or the project starter's friends).
It would become a recursive mess that doesn't really help.
Yes, it does help. It's far from perfect, but even a poorly thought-out moderation system beats nothing.
Step 3 is why funding your own project is strictly illegal on Kickstarter. It's one of the many things they got right over fundable.org.
At that point, a bad reputation would be the least of LibertarianCrowdfunding.com's problems. You can very easily end up economically liable for facilitating scams, no matter how many rights you technically get customers to sign away.
Also, scammers won't give a dime for biting the hand that feeds it. That's what happened to fundable.org, the first treshold pledge crowdfunding system (see my post above).
No, please don't. Those sites have worked VERY hard at advertising, so they would be named in the same breath as Kickstarter, but many of them have seriously not done their homework. The top two on your list don't even feature treshold pledge (the project creator can take any money raised), which shows they have zero understanding of the concept.
Crowdtilt at least gets that right, but they haven't learned the lesson from fundable.org, the pioneer of this business model. It was totally drowned in "My cute little labrador puppy needs expensive surgery, HELP!" begging.
It should not come as a surprise that most of these were scams. Worse, they weren't just trying to scam random sympathetic individuals who happened upon the fundable.org frontpage... criminals would use stolen credit cards to make pledges to their own projects. Once the cards were blocked and chargebacks enforced, they had already taken the money as project owners (with plausible deniability) leaving fundable with the chargeback bill. It was a major factor in killing the site.
Crowdfunding is NOT an easy thing to get right. Kickstarter should have credit for breaking the main barrier, wrapping people's mind around a new concept, getting project starters and backers to see the potential for use for creative works (something fundable.org failed miserably at due to the lab puppy spam).