All the pieces are there in robotics except for the one that this technology addresses: lightweight, high-density power. Oh, and let's not forget cheap.
As someone with a robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon, I feel to compelled to point out that you're ignoring just how abjectly stupid and incompetent robots still are. We do not have anywhere near the level of AI needed for robot farmers to deal with the messy, filthy, ever-changing world of a farm. Automatic tractors that can plow fields or spray crops, yes. Weeding and picking fruit, no. Power isn't the problem; intelligence is.
No, DRM cannot work. Even if you only deliver your content through glue-filled "trusted computing" black boxes, at some point you still have to play the music, show the movie, or print out the text. Even if it's just a matter of recording the analog signals passing through the air or something higher quality like reading out the digital signals from the individual pixels in the display, you fundamentally cannot prevent the recipient of a message from copying the message. You can make it really hard to do, but there's still the problem that only one person has to break your imperfect protection and then it gets much easier to copy the unprotected version they made. End of story.
The key is providing products that are convenient to use at a price point where most people would rather pay for them than go to the effort of finding the pirated version. Harsher DRM simply makes the legal version harder to use in the ways one wants to, and thus decreases its value relative to the pirated version which will always exist. Affordable watermarked content is the way to go, in that it's cheap, completely flexible, and discourages casual piracy through responsibility instead of restriction. It trusts the user by relying on post-infraction enforcement of rules instead of pre-infraction.
Exalted would make for a wretched MMO under the current state of the art. Exalted is all about being one of the thousand or so most powerful beings in the entire universe. Celestial Exalted can routinely topple kingdoms and take over the world. It completely doesn't fit into the current MMO model of "kill things and take their stuff". ("Dude, let's go whack the Ebon Dragon's fetich soul again and see if he drops a Daiklave of Conquest!") MMOs rely upon repeatable content, and Exalted doesn't lend itself to that at all. Exalted player characters are supposed to be the movers and shakers of the setting, the ones who shape the world by their every action--you *are* the meta-plot.
If you limit the players to the comparatively lower-powered Terrestrial Exalted, of which there at ten to twenty thousand in Creation, I guess that makes for a decent population for a single server, but there's still the problem that no current MMO has done anything approaching a good job of combining politics and manipulation of NPC factions and resources into open-ended game play. At best you wind up with a backstabbing cliquey little pseudo-LARP in which you can't even see the people you're betraying this week. The same problem really applies to the World of Darkness, too, so we'll see if they can solve that. If so, there might be hope for an Exalted MMO. However, I still think there's a fundamental disconnect between Exalted's ethos of "You matter and can make a difference" and the needs of the MMO business model of "You can't actually do anything because doing things requires expensive developer time".
That's the thing, though. Write-once-and-run-anywhere works pretty well for backend programs, where all that matters is correctness and performance (and with a well-designed framework, architecture's impact on the latter can be minimized). For user interface, however, it needs to operate in the context of the OS on which it is running. Interface metaphors, expected behavior, and available functionality always differ in small but important ways, and failure to take that into account will result in a mediocre program that feels crummy and wrong. The interface needs to be localized to each OS in order to not suck.
Does anyone have any good advice on what to do if you get junk faxes and don't even have a fax machine? Apparently my home phone number was once a business's fax line, and we periodically get what must be junk faxes at odd hours of the night. How do we deal with this crap if we don't own any fax machine (or even a modem) to waste time reading the messages and contacting the fake unsubscribe numbers that won't do any good anyways?
And how is this different from writing up an essay and getting busted for misdemeanor?
The difference is that in the US, this is still national news that gets people riled up, and it results in a series of lawsuits over people's rights being stepped on by overzealous law enforcement or not. In a place like China, you might just disappear or at least be put into a "mental health institution", and anybody who talked about it would risk the same.
Also, it would be nice if the Wiimote actually pointed on screen where you pointed -- this would require some level of calibration, I suppose, since television sizes vary. I imagine this is even more difficult to deal with since the Wiimote only has two reference points for its calculations -- not the three that are necessary to yield the three coordinates in space.
There does seem to be calibration, but it's strangely implemented by the game instead of a system-wide thing. In Twilight Princess, there's a series of calibration screens that involve adjusting the width of an on-screen bar to match the width of the infrared LED bar and some zooming in and out with circles to figure out how far your couch is from the screen. After going through that, the on-screen pointer appears pretty much precisely where my remote is pointing. Unfortunately, the calibration seems to only affect Twilight Princess itself, unless I'm missing something, though the pointing in Wii Play feels pretty good without being able to make any adjustments. (Perhaps it is a system-wide setting that's merely offered through the game itself; I guess I'll find out when I buy more games that need the pointer.)
There's 2^32 IP addresses under IPv4. If Google is doing the hashing, then they know the hash function. How long do you think it would take them to brute-force break the hash by hashing every possible IP address and creating a map from the hashed values back to the originals? Express your answer in microseconds.
(If your solution is to increase the space of inputs by adding a variable salt value, please explain how this allows them to use the resulting hashes for aggregation.)
You are simply wrong. Even if you're making just minimum wage in the US, you likely have a place to live, a car, maybe some health care, definitely food on your table three times a day every day, and a reasonable expectation of not dying a violent death or having what little you do own stolen from you in the near future. You probably have a cell phone and a television and a computer with an internet connection. You've had access to free public education for at least thirteen years of your life. If you do manage to lose you job, the government will provide you with some tiny handouts for a little while so you don't starve to death.
Put together, this means you are insanely rich. You are better off than nearly every human who lived before you and well over 90% of the people alive today. If you actually have a high-paying job and a retirement plan and good health care and you own your house, then you are in the top 1% of wealthiest people on the planet. Just because some vapid idiot celebrity can afford diamond-studded cellphones, it does not mean that you are "poor".
Fluxx isn't a game. It's a random number generator that may be fun when you're drunk and/or stoned (though, not being one to partake of such levels of chemical enhancement, I wouldn't know), but certainly not when you're sober. Get some Treehouse / Icehouse sets and go play Zendo instead. That's actually a neat game from the same publishers, Looney Labs.
I could see devout Muslims having difficulty orienting themselves correctly at prayer time, particularly given that the times change each day, so it's not in a constant direction relative to your apartment at each appointed period.
When you click on an app in the application does not appear, only the menu bar get's focus. That's very confusing. Of course the application appears. The application is the menu bar. Individual windows are merely specific documents opened with the application or specific functionality within the application. Mac users understand this. It's a different paradigm (and in my opinion superior and more flexible).
So why not just switch to the Windows focus model that everyone is already familar with? Because to Mac users, that focus model sucks. The fact that I can't close all of an application's windows under Windows yet not be forced to quit it and waste time relaunching it later is a defect as far as I'm concerned. I should never have to open an application twice between reboots. That's what virtual memory is for.
Actually, it means that humans are so bad at predicting a system as complex as the stock market and trying to play catch up to past trends that a random selection of stocks typically outperforms even ostensible experts, so just go invest in some index funds already.
It's a mashup of some sort that interfaces with HotOrNot. Presumably, it picks out randomly selected images with very high and very low ratings, to get differentiable sets that most people will be able to agree on based on prevailing standards of attractiveness for countries with widespread internet access.
No, the fact these are infectious cells and not cancer-inducing viruses is precisely why this is important. It's like the distinction between viral and bacterial infections. They're completely different.
C++'s myThing.putzAbout("Bill", 28, "pepperoni and mushroom", "porter", "wingtip", 34) doesn't giving me a typing hernia like that Obj-C verbosity overload does.
I've yet to hear of anyone developing an hernia from typing, but people routinely have no idea what a function call does because the arguments are an indecipherable list of gibberish. Or, programmers introduce hard-to-find bugs because they get the order of parameters wrong. Labeling each arguments makes it clear to you as you write it what you intend each value to mean, and makes it clearer when you or someone else has to come back and work with that code in the future.
What ever happened to simple short code? C coding wasn't about duplicating a GUI at your fingertips. None of the better dynamic languages such as Python/Ruby has these syntactical crutches either.
At some point along the line, people realized that legible code was better than short code, because in a real-world environment, a line of code gets written once and read many times. Also, I love how Python lets me write:
myThing.putzAbout(name="Bill", age=28, pizza="pepperoni and mushroom", beer="porter", shoes="wingtip", inseam=34)
And furthermore, I can change the order of the arguments around without affecting the correctness of the code.
That's not the best attitude toward software designers, especially when the designers need the flexibility to deliver the best user experience.
No. The existence of standards is what makes an OS and its associated applications useable. Maybe your idea is better than the standard, but is it really so much better that doing it your way will make things easier for users even though your program doesn't behave the way they expect it to? The answer is almost certainly no. There is value in consistency of interface conventions and reusability of paradigms. The fact that everyone thinks they can do it better than everyone else is the reason why user interface in the Linux world is still wretched.
1. That screenshot is several months old. Things can change for unreleased products that are still in development. 2. Blizzard has not said that Draenei don't have the option of being paladins in addition to being shamans, only that they do have the option of being shamans.
This is a recent adaptation of the 1946 article "Meihem in ce Klasrum" by Dolton Edwards published in Astounding Science Fiction (and, on the internet, usually incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, like a great many other humorous things whose origin most people are uncertain of).
We hand the shredded paper to our pet rats to use as bedding. This imparts it with a certain ambience that discourages any further perusal, while simultaneously providing the little ones with nest-building fun.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone with a robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon, I feel to compelled to point out that you're ignoring just how abjectly stupid and incompetent robots still are. We do not have anywhere near the level of AI needed for robot farmers to deal with the messy, filthy, ever-changing world of a farm. Automatic tractors that can plow fields or spray crops, yes. Weeding and picking fruit, no. Power isn't the problem; intelligence is.
No, DRM cannot work. Even if you only deliver your content through glue-filled "trusted computing" black boxes, at some point you still have to play the music, show the movie, or print out the text. Even if it's just a matter of recording the analog signals passing through the air or something higher quality like reading out the digital signals from the individual pixels in the display, you fundamentally cannot prevent the recipient of a message from copying the message. You can make it really hard to do, but there's still the problem that only one person has to break your imperfect protection and then it gets much easier to copy the unprotected version they made. End of story.
The key is providing products that are convenient to use at a price point where most people would rather pay for them than go to the effort of finding the pirated version. Harsher DRM simply makes the legal version harder to use in the ways one wants to, and thus decreases its value relative to the pirated version which will always exist. Affordable watermarked content is the way to go, in that it's cheap, completely flexible, and discourages casual piracy through responsibility instead of restriction. It trusts the user by relying on post-infraction enforcement of rules instead of pre-infraction.
Exalted would make for a wretched MMO under the current state of the art. Exalted is all about being one of the thousand or so most powerful beings in the entire universe. Celestial Exalted can routinely topple kingdoms and take over the world. It completely doesn't fit into the current MMO model of "kill things and take their stuff". ("Dude, let's go whack the Ebon Dragon's fetich soul again and see if he drops a Daiklave of Conquest!") MMOs rely upon repeatable content, and Exalted doesn't lend itself to that at all. Exalted player characters are supposed to be the movers and shakers of the setting, the ones who shape the world by their every action--you *are* the meta-plot.
If you limit the players to the comparatively lower-powered Terrestrial Exalted, of which there at ten to twenty thousand in Creation, I guess that makes for a decent population for a single server, but there's still the problem that no current MMO has done anything approaching a good job of combining politics and manipulation of NPC factions and resources into open-ended game play. At best you wind up with a backstabbing cliquey little pseudo-LARP in which you can't even see the people you're betraying this week. The same problem really applies to the World of Darkness, too, so we'll see if they can solve that. If so, there might be hope for an Exalted MMO. However, I still think there's a fundamental disconnect between Exalted's ethos of "You matter and can make a difference" and the needs of the MMO business model of "You can't actually do anything because doing things requires expensive developer time".
That's the thing, though. Write-once-and-run-anywhere works pretty well for backend programs, where all that matters is correctness and performance (and with a well-designed framework, architecture's impact on the latter can be minimized). For user interface, however, it needs to operate in the context of the OS on which it is running. Interface metaphors, expected behavior, and available functionality always differ in small but important ways, and failure to take that into account will result in a mediocre program that feels crummy and wrong. The interface needs to be localized to each OS in order to not suck.
Bah, that's nothing. All my text files are encrypted with 26 rounds of ROT-N, with the value of N randomly chosen for each file!
Does anyone have any good advice on what to do if you get junk faxes and don't even have a fax machine? Apparently my home phone number was once a business's fax line, and we periodically get what must be junk faxes at odd hours of the night. How do we deal with this crap if we don't own any fax machine (or even a modem) to waste time reading the messages and contacting the fake unsubscribe numbers that won't do any good anyways?
The difference is that in the US, this is still national news that gets people riled up, and it results in a series of lawsuits over people's rights being stepped on by overzealous law enforcement or not. In a place like China, you might just disappear or at least be put into a "mental health institution", and anybody who talked about it would risk the same.
Ah, I see you understand the basic premise of polyamory.
There does seem to be calibration, but it's strangely implemented by the game instead of a system-wide thing. In Twilight Princess, there's a series of calibration screens that involve adjusting the width of an on-screen bar to match the width of the infrared LED bar and some zooming in and out with circles to figure out how far your couch is from the screen. After going through that, the on-screen pointer appears pretty much precisely where my remote is pointing. Unfortunately, the calibration seems to only affect Twilight Princess itself, unless I'm missing something, though the pointing in Wii Play feels pretty good without being able to make any adjustments. (Perhaps it is a system-wide setting that's merely offered through the game itself; I guess I'll find out when I buy more games that need the pointer.)
There's 2^32 IP addresses under IPv4. If Google is doing the hashing, then they know the hash function. How long do you think it would take them to brute-force break the hash by hashing every possible IP address and creating a map from the hashed values back to the originals? Express your answer in microseconds.
(If your solution is to increase the space of inputs by adding a variable salt value, please explain how this allows them to use the resulting hashes for aggregation.)
You are simply wrong. Even if you're making just minimum wage in the US, you likely have a place to live, a car, maybe some health care, definitely food on your table three times a day every day, and a reasonable expectation of not dying a violent death or having what little you do own stolen from you in the near future. You probably have a cell phone and a television and a computer with an internet connection. You've had access to free public education for at least thirteen years of your life. If you do manage to lose you job, the government will provide you with some tiny handouts for a little while so you don't starve to death.
Put together, this means you are insanely rich. You are better off than nearly every human who lived before you and well over 90% of the people alive today. If you actually have a high-paying job and a retirement plan and good health care and you own your house, then you are in the top 1% of wealthiest people on the planet. Just because some vapid idiot celebrity can afford diamond-studded cellphones, it does not mean that you are "poor".
Fluxx isn't a game. It's a random number generator that may be fun when you're drunk and/or stoned (though, not being one to partake of such levels of chemical enhancement, I wouldn't know), but certainly not when you're sober. Get some Treehouse / Icehouse sets and go play Zendo instead. That's actually a neat game from the same publishers, Looney Labs.
I could see devout Muslims having difficulty orienting themselves correctly at prayer time, particularly given that the times change each day, so it's not in a constant direction relative to your apartment at each appointed period.
Actually, it means that humans are so bad at predicting a system as complex as the stock market and trying to play catch up to past trends that a random selection of stocks typically outperforms even ostensible experts, so just go invest in some index funds already.
It's a mashup of some sort that interfaces with HotOrNot. Presumably, it picks out randomly selected images with very high and very low ratings, to get differentiable sets that most people will be able to agree on based on prevailing standards of attractiveness for countries with widespread internet access.
No, the fact these are infectious cells and not cancer-inducing viruses is precisely why this is important. It's like the distinction between viral and bacterial infections. They're completely different.
I've yet to hear of anyone developing an hernia from typing, but people routinely have no idea what a function call does because the arguments are an indecipherable list of gibberish. Or, programmers introduce hard-to-find bugs because they get the order of parameters wrong. Labeling each arguments makes it clear to you as you write it what you intend each value to mean, and makes it clearer when you or someone else has to come back and work with that code in the future.
At some point along the line, people realized that legible code was better than short code, because in a real-world environment, a line of code gets written once and read many times. Also, I love how Python lets me write:
myThing.putzAbout(name="Bill", age=28, pizza="pepperoni and mushroom", beer="porter", shoes="wingtip", inseam=34)
And furthermore, I can change the order of the arguments around without affecting the correctness of the code.
No. The existence of standards is what makes an OS and its associated applications useable. Maybe your idea is better than the standard, but is it really so much better that doing it your way will make things easier for users even though your program doesn't behave the way they expect it to? The answer is almost certainly no. There is value in consistency of interface conventions and reusability of paradigms. The fact that everyone thinks they can do it better than everyone else is the reason why user interface in the Linux world is still wretched.
1. That screenshot is several months old. Things can change for unreleased products that are still in development.
2. Blizzard has not said that Draenei don't have the option of being paladins in addition to being shamans, only that they do have the option of being shamans.
Not without introducing causality violations to the time stream.
The solution to these gamma ray burts is to land the Master Chief on the Halo before it's triggered. He can disable it within a matter of hours.
This is a recent adaptation of the 1946 article "Meihem in ce Klasrum" by Dolton Edwards published in Astounding Science Fiction (and, on the internet, usually incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, like a great many other humorous things whose origin most people are uncertain of).
p hp#meihem for some historical versions.
See http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/spoofs.
It is, in fact, "Don't be evil." See the very beginning of http://investor.google.com/conduct.html
We hand the shredded paper to our pet rats to use as bedding. This imparts it with a certain ambience that discourages any further perusal, while simultaneously providing the little ones with nest-building fun.