I understand what you're saying - but it's really not true for network-based stuff like Skype. If the underlying server protocols change - then your "old and dusty" software eventually won't work anymore. Also, if security loopholes are discovered and exploits made, and your software didn't change - then it did "degrade" because now it's not as secure as it once was.
I don't get it...Ubuntu - minus the kernel - presumably minus device drivers - minus the windowing system. Isn't that pretty much just the shell, the various CLI tools...and apt-get...right? Pretty much all of the GUI-based tools are already ported to Windows - GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, browsers...I can't think of any 'big' gui-based tools that I don't already have in Windows. All of the CLI tools and shells are there in Cygwin already...so we're left with...what? apt-get? Cygwin's installer is 'setup' - not quite as handy as apt-get - but hardly a huge deal. There is already a project called 'cyg-get' that does what apt-get does in the Cygwin world.
Yet TFA says that this new thing isn't anything like Cygwin.
Seems to me, it's exactly like Cygwin.
Maybe it's a kind of reverse-WINE? So Linux binaries can run under Win10 without recompiling.
TFA could be a lot clearer about what's going on here.
The experiment works for me with one eye closed. I can concentrate on either the background behind the finger - or on the finger itself - one comes into focus, the other blurs out - I can decide which, even with one eye closed. Try bringing the finger closer to your eye - 12 inches maybe.
You can't do that because you don't know where the person is concentrating their gaze.
Try this experiment. Hold your finger 18 inches from your nose - notice that you can shift your attention from the tip of your finger to the world behind your finger without moving your eyeballs. When you concentrate on your finger, the background goes blurry - and when you concentrate on the background, your finger goes blurry. There is no possible way for the VR system to know which object you're concentrating on...so even if you had instantly variable focal length lenses, you can't make some of the scene be in focus, while the rest isn't - and the computer has literally no way to know what you want to have in focus and what you don't. Losing your ability to choose what to focus on is one of the major causes of nausea in maybe half of all users.
Short of reconstructing the light field with holographic techniques - there is no fixing this problem.
I've worked decades in the flight simulation business. We cut the latency down to the bearest minimum possible (running headsets with 120Hz video rates, etc, etc) - and that's NOT the problem. The inability of the headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another problem - physical body motion is another.
I'm not surprised that adding motion from a flight simulator wouldn't help the VR sickness effect. The flight sim only produces a very limited range of motion...I used to work on them and we called it "cartoon motion". It has as many of the real effects as is possible with a machine that can only move a few feet in each direction and only tilt by maybe 60 degrees in each axis - but it suffers from those limitations.
Besides, there are many causes of VR sickness - and lack of physical motion is only one of them.
The inability of the 3D objects in a VR headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another rather fundamental one.
There is a classic paper on this subject produced by the US Navy about 15 to 20 years ago - using VR helmets that were considerably better than the current generation of devices. They concluded that no only do a significant proportion of people get sick and disoriented after more than a few minutes of use - but also that this disorientation was still noticeable 24 hours after a session using them. US Navy pilots are not allowed to fly real aircraft for 24 hours after using one of these contraptions - and they are strongly advised not to drive cars either.
Honestly - I think the same rules should be applied to driving after VR use in civilians too.
I support nuclear energy in the short to medium term because it's the only realistic way to replace coal, oil and natural gas - and thereby save the planet from global climate change. That's a short-term emergency - and we're not likely to be able to either cut back our energy use, or replace CO2-producing energy with renewables in time.
So we're left with the lesser of three evils: No energy, Rising CO2 levels, Nuclear accidents.
I'd hope that modern reactors (ie not Chernobyl era junk), intelligently placed (like not in the middle of a city, and not near a Tsunami-prone coastline like Fukushima) and carefully run (like not Chernobyl and not 3 Mile Island) could reduce the risk of accidents considerably. But even with the rate of severe accidents we've seen so far, the damage we do is far less than with coal/oil/gas.
I'd hope that we'd get fusion power running - and add smarter solar/wind/tidal sources (hydroelectric dams are starting to look like a bad idea) before too long - but we need uranium/plutonium power sources until that happens.
* Who is going to buy a $500,000 house with cash - who is going to be stupid enough to hide that kind of money under the mattress? * Transporting large sums of cash around is great for criminals. * Physical money isn't secure - applying ink to paper is something that is going to get increasingly easy as technology improves and stamping out disks of metal isn't happening because it's hard to do it cheaply enough to profitably with =$1 coins. * Physical money is still backed by someone - it only works so long as there is widespread confidence in the stuff.
OK...so maybe gold...
* Who will actually want gold when the zombie apocalypse happens? * The value of gold versus the things you need (food/water/power/shelter) is horribly variable. * For most informal/low-quantity transactions, it's too easy to fake.
OK...so maybe something people actually need?
* You can't "save" most kinds of food. * Water is bulky and heavy to exchange. * Power can't be transported in ANY convenient manner. * Shelter can't be traded in small quantities.
OK...so how about the "barter" system?
* Fine, so you have the ability to write a bunch of custom software, the farmer who has the food doesn't need custom software. You'd have to put together a chain of 20 to 30 people who want to barter simultaneously just to buy a loaf of bread.
All of this means that we need something that's very much like money - and it needs to be more abstract than physical coins and notes. If it's abstract then we have to trust the people who issue it and look after it. Those people don't work for nothing - so we end up needing to pay them in some manner. WIth bitcoin, for example, the miners administer the system - and we "pay" them by allowing them to increase the money supply - which in a large economy would mean that a gradual increase in money supply would increase inflation and result in us paying them in the decreasing value of our savings.
A *modest* credit card fee wouldn't be such a terrible thing - but all the time we fall for "Airline miles", "Cash-back" and crap-knows-what schemes that come along with them - we aren't getting a lower rate. If everyone picked their credit card strictly according to the lowest interest rate - then they'd be forced to compete on that criterion alone - and the rates would come down.
Clearly the price of the hardware is now irrelevant - there can't be many places in the world where a one-time $5 per-child expense is unattainable.
The only limiting factor now is whether kids have the course materials to learn - and whether they have access to a machine with display and keyboard to write their programs on. The coursework isn't going to be cheap - but if done right - and OpenSourced - then the cost can be amortised down to nearly $0. So the one remaining problem is whether these kids will have access to something to type, edit, compile and download their code on...and there's the problem.
If you already have access to that kind of hardware (an OLPC, at a minimum) - then why not learn to program on THAT? Why do you need to learn on an embedded system - which is harder to debug, more easily damaged, etc, etc? I think the answer is that there has to be a REASON to write programs - or programming classes will be as hard to get kids excited about as (say) Math classes. Programming a robotics project - or even just getting some push-buttons and LED's working - is quite compelling when compared to the dross that's taught in Java Programming 101 in US schools and colleges...I've helped two people through that kind of course - and you'd think they were teaching someone to write accounting software...urgh!
IMHO, teaching kids to write games would be a better approach - but embedded computing works too.
Where I think these things may really help is in teaching about electronics. Simple stuff like how to interface a switch, a potentiometer, an LED or an R/C servo to an I/O bit on a microprocessor is a useful introduction - and programming it to do something interesting is also useful.
If only that were true. Sadly, that's only going to happen if you buy them at the App-AppStore and pay for them with AppPay (which you'll need to download from the App-AppStore).
Cool! Now I'll be able to run Vulcan/Windows programs on my Linux machine before I'll be able to run them on my Windows computer! Way to get ahead of the curve wine-guys!
Now that "chip and pin" credit cards are becoming common, I don't see what these phone pay systems solve. Either way, I have to haul something out of my pocket, position it appropriately (stick it into a slot - wave it at a sensor) and perform some second-factor authentication (pin number, password or fingerprint).
While we're in the switch-over phase, I can use my credit card in old-fashioned magnetic stripe systems. Business owners only need to plug in the equipment (which they probably already have) and they're good to go.
I just don't need another system.
Siri (or "OK Google") is a marginal improvement - in some circumstances, it's easier to speak a request than to type it. I get that.
The definition I've always had in my head goes something like:
A robot is a computer that can interact with the world using sensors and moving parts.
Well...kinda...a radio controlled "Robot Wars" thing isn't a robot, it's a radio controlled toy - it needs autonomy...so I wouldn't call it a "Robot". On the other hand, my PC has "sensors" (the mouse and keyboard) - but it doesn't have hands, legs or wheels (unless you count the spinning hard drive) - so it's not a robot either. My home thermostat has a sensor and can open and close the ducting vents. It has a computer inside so it's a "Robot"....hmmm - not sure I like that - maybe the robot has to be able to move itself around. A robot-arm in (say) a car factory - can move the arm around, but not move bodily around the world...so it's a robot according to my original definition...but not if I change the definition to exclude my thermostat. My car isn't a robot - although it has a computer that handles a lot of the work (electronic throttle, ignition, brakes) - a 'driverless' car, however is clearly a robot in my mind. But a car is still a robot if I sit inside and tell it where to take me by typing "221B Baker Street, London" - but not if I have a steering wheel to tell it where to go, even if it has automatic lane-keeping and will stop me from rear-ending the car in front. OK - so that's fairly clear. But what about if I have to tell some hypothetical car: "Take the next left turn...go a bit faster than the speed limit please...go right at the fork in the road." - is it a robot now? Mmmmm - not sure. Maybe if I tell it to take the next turn by nudging a joystick, it's just a car with sophisticated lane-keeping and maybe if I have a speech interface to control the exact same software/behavior, it's a robot? We're in a very, very grey area there.
So this is a hard thing to define. I think there is a continuum from the car that knows from data from your toothbrush that your teeth need polishing and automatically takes you to the dentist's office when there is a two hour gap in your schedule...down to my current car...in which the computer decides that I'll over-rev the engine if I push harder on the gas pedal and it's not going to let me do that.
Legally, you may need to impose a hard distinction somewhere between those two extremes - but it's going to be completely arbitrary. In the end, a word like "robot" has to be consigned to the pile of words like "home" or "food" that have fuzzy definitions and shouldn't be used in a situation where a binary choice has to be made. It's not really like the word "adult" that has a specific meaning that takes effect precisely at midnight on the 18th anniversary of your birth.
Law-makers and judges need to pass more specific legislation about the specific attributes of robots that require legal decisions.
So, for example a ("robotic") car where the human has the ability to override the speed and direction, regardless of the road conditions, may need to be insured by the individual - but a car that decides the speed and direction for itself and always overrides the human if the conditions require it to might require to be covered under the manufacturers' insurance. Doesn't matter what you *call* it - it only matters what functions are automated.
The problem with expunging a particular web page from search is that this web page probably contains other information.
So suppose the document contains the name of the arresting officer - or of the judge who tried the offender - or of the town in which it occurred.
If I want to know whether some particular police officer made a career out of arresting sex offenders - or whether one judge is harsher on sex offenders than others, If I I can't find all of these kinds of records because they are hidden for other reasons then it causes an immense problem for freedom of information.
I might spend a lot of my time and effort in writing something that mentions this person in passing - and because of that, nobody will find my work. That's a clear invasion of my right to free speech.
And as for the victim - it doesn't really lock away the information because other web sites can make registries of past offenders and link to their arrest documents...and finding those registries with Google is still allowed...and should be protected under free speech laws.
So this measure is both oppressive to people unrelated to the case - and ineffective at preventing anyone who is even mildly determined from finding the documents.
So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?
The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.
Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.
Probably my best chance is to sell it to Walmart who use pressure pads to make sure that their "greeters" are actually doing something! (But that would be evil...so, no).
In my case, it didn't matter whether the firmware was opensourced or not...the cost of the certification made it impossible for a small business to do...the cost of liability insurance was insane. There are requirements to certify the manufacturing process (so no $6 Arduino clone) and a requirement to offer a repair service (Really? Just throw the old one away and buy a new one!)...it's crazy.
When you consider the cost of amputation (surgery - not being able to walk afterwards, loss of quality of life, etc) - even this device doesn't have to be anywhere near 100% reliable to do a lot of people a lot of good. But if just one person were to lose a foot because the gizmo failed to warn them - the resulting lawsuit would bankrupt any small business just like that.
So, 70,000 people per year suffer one of the worst things that can happen to anyone as a direct consequence of a broken system.
Yep...exactly. That's the reason simple electronic gadgets that are ridiculously easy to make cost an ungodly amount of money if they're used for medical purposes.
The FDA regulates "medical devices" in the same way it regulates drugs...you have to demonstrate efficacy, safety, do human trials...then there is liability insurance...it's ungodly expensive.
...medical devices have to be certified by the FDA (or someone big and scary like that)...and that costs an off-the-charts amount.
I built a gizmo for some sorts of diabetics who have to be careful about standing still for a long time because it can destroy their feet, There are a truly ghastly number of amputations each year because of this. So - pressure sensors in shoes, bluetooth gizmo, cellphone app that goes BEEEEP! If you're standing badly for too long. Cost to make - about $100...maybe $50 in quantity.
Sure - any idiot with an arduino and some old-school hacking skills could do that - right? Sure - I don't claim to be all that clever!
So I go to doctors who specialize in this stuff - they say that the current solution costs $12,000 and mine is just as good. In fact, I could trivially get it to log data, text or email it to the doctor, log it to the cloud...whatever...the $12k gizmo's don't do that.
Oh - but FDA approval is needed. Human trials. Yadda yadda yadda. Cost of doing that is $500,000. Add product liability insurance, you name it.
Estimated sales...oh darn. My $50 gizmo will have to sell for $15,000.
So - 70,000 people who we could EASILY help for very low $$$ are still getting their feet amputated for absolutely no good reason every single year.
What they ACTUALLY said was that in surveys conducted in the Western World - only 5% failed their test - but in developing countries - the number was 26% of faked surveys.
Then, they also say that the KIND of survey matters. Their approach is to say that if 85% of answers are identical between two or more respondents then the result is likely to be faked...but they recognize that (for example) in a health survey, all of the healthy people will answer identically to questions about how healthy they are. So that kind of survey is excluded.
So if the research is to be taken at face value, then in the Western world, one in twenty of *some* classes of survey are probably faked. But they looked at 1000 surveys to arrive at that number - we don't know what fraction of those came from the developing world. If all you're interested in is Western World surveys - then maybe the sample size is very small. Given that there are some classes of survey that are known to be excluded - is it possible that they included a few of "the wrong kind" in their sample.
All surveys have an error bar of a few percent - this is a survey about surveys.
I think the conclusion here is that you should ignore surveys carried out by dubious agencies in the developing world. I don't think you should conclude that surveys done by reputable agencies in the western world are unreliable.
The problem is that VR doesn't work for everyone...a very large percentage of people get nauseous when wearing a VR headset - especially for gaming.
Most VR companies claim (perpetually) that the next rev of their tech will fix this by means of lower latency, brighter or higher resolution screens, improved lenses, better field of view.
That's missing the problem. The problem is that we perceive distance by two mechanisms - focus and convergence. Everybody has fixed convergence - nobody has fixed the focussing issue.
Our brains get conflicting messages - the focus system says "The object is at X distance" and the convergence system says "No, it's at Y distance"...our higher brain functions see an impossible contradiction...and the caveman part of the brain says "Oh no! We're hallucinating! Maybe we ate a magic mushroom!" - and we try to vomit it out of our system.
Without fixing focus - a bunch of people will get sick - and that's going to prevent widespread acceptance of the tech.
3D movies largely fix this by having control of content - but in games, that's largely impossible.
The biggest problem is that people are reacting to the headline - not the back story.
1) This was the terrorist's WORK phone. He tried (and failed) to destroy his personal phone - and the FBI have all of the data from that. If he didn't destroy the work phone, there probably wasn't anything important on it. 2) The FBI already have his texts, IP address lookups, voicemails and phonecall meta-data from the telco's - so this is only stuff like photos and documents stored inside the phone. 3) The FBI already have an iCloud backup from 6 weeks before the attack. 4) If they hadn't screwed up and changed the iCloud account's apple id - they'd have a recent backup too - and this would be a moot point. They screwed up. 5) If this was so important - why didn't they demand it back in December when they first got the phone? Any information on it now will be horribly outdated. 6) We already know that this was not a big ISIS plot or anything like that. It was a 'lone gunman' kind of a thing...so it's unlikely that there is anything on the phone that would incriminate anyone else who isn't already incriminated. 7) If they succeed - you can bet that Apple's next phone will make it impossible to circumvent the security with an OS upgrade by putting more stuff in ROM.
Knowing those things makes it very clear that they are using a high-profile case to demonstrate a capability (both on behalf of Apple - and on the behalf of the legal system to compel Apple).
The reason to do this is to provoke a debate that they hope will produce either laws or a legal precedent that they can apply to future cases - there is no other reason to fight Apple and public opinion.
The reason MOST people are agreeing with the Fed is that they didn't take the time to look at the facts.
Cancers cause crazy replication of the victims own cells. The defenses we have against most diseases are of the form "Recognize something that isn't me and kill it!" - but cancer cells are pretty much identical to regular cells - which is why curing cancer is so hard.
But the idea of someone else's cancer cell getting into my body and running amok isn't such a big deal because their cells are not recognized as "me" - and my regular defenses should attack them just like a bacterial infection - and just like we reject organ transplants without anti-rejection drugs.
The case of the Tasmanian Devil face cancer is instructive - their problem is a drastic lack of genetic diversity that makes it harder for them to recognize "self" from "other" when "other" is genetically so close to "self". I could certainly imagine a cancer jumping between a pair of identical twins - and all tasmanian devils are alarmingly closely related.
The dog STD cancer may have similar roots. Pedigree dogs are well known to suffer from a lack of genetic diversity - and we inbreed them to a crazy degree.
What's more of a concern is that we know that some forms of cancer are caused by viral infections - clearly the original virus could get transmitted - and the net effect would be of a transmissible cancer. THAT is a major concern.
I'd have to use a "beating a dead horse" analogy here - except that the dead guy was a terrorist, not a horse. Either way though - no amount of whacking the corpse with a $5 wrench (or even one of those $5,000,000 NASA Space-wrenches) will have very much effect here.
OK - not *literally* a spinning cube...but anything that's not super-performance critical - or anything that runs easily at a decent frame rate without heavy software effort...should stick with OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand what you're saying - but it's really not true for network-based stuff like Skype. If the underlying server protocols change - then your "old and dusty" software eventually won't work anymore. Also, if security loopholes are discovered and exploits made, and your software didn't change - then it did "degrade" because now it's not as secure as it once was.
I don't get it...Ubuntu - minus the kernel - presumably minus device drivers - minus the windowing system. Isn't that pretty much just the shell, the various CLI tools...and apt-get...right? Pretty much all of the GUI-based tools are already ported to Windows - GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, browsers...I can't think of any 'big' gui-based tools that I don't already have in Windows. All of the CLI tools and shells are there in Cygwin already...so we're left with...what? apt-get? Cygwin's installer is 'setup' - not quite as handy as apt-get - but hardly a huge deal. There is already a project called 'cyg-get' that does what apt-get does in the Cygwin world.
Yet TFA says that this new thing isn't anything like Cygwin.
Seems to me, it's exactly like Cygwin.
Maybe it's a kind of reverse-WINE? So Linux binaries can run under Win10 without recompiling.
TFA could be a lot clearer about what's going on here.
The experiment works for me with one eye closed. I can concentrate on either the background behind the finger - or on the finger itself - one comes into focus, the other blurs out - I can decide which, even with one eye closed. Try bringing the finger closer to your eye - 12 inches maybe.
You can't do that because you don't know where the person is concentrating their gaze.
Try this experiment. Hold your finger 18 inches from your nose - notice that you can shift your attention from the tip of your finger to the world behind your finger without moving your eyeballs. When you concentrate on your finger, the background goes blurry - and when you concentrate on the background, your finger goes blurry. There is no possible way for the VR system to know which object you're concentrating on...so even if you had instantly variable focal length lenses, you can't make some of the scene be in focus, while the rest isn't - and the computer has literally no way to know what you want to have in focus and what you don't. Losing your ability to choose what to focus on is one of the major causes of nausea in maybe half of all users.
Short of reconstructing the light field with holographic techniques - there is no fixing this problem.
I've worked decades in the flight simulation business. We cut the latency down to the bearest minimum possible (running headsets with 120Hz video rates, etc, etc) - and that's NOT the problem. The inability of the headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another problem - physical body motion is another.
I'm not surprised that adding motion from a flight simulator wouldn't help the VR sickness effect. The flight sim only produces a very limited range of motion...I used to work on them and we called it "cartoon motion". It has as many of the real effects as is possible with a machine that can only move a few feet in each direction and only tilt by maybe 60 degrees in each axis - but it suffers from those limitations.
Besides, there are many causes of VR sickness - and lack of physical motion is only one of them.
The inability of the 3D objects in a VR headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another rather fundamental one.
There is a classic paper on this subject produced by the US Navy about 15 to 20 years ago - using VR helmets that were considerably better than the current generation of devices. They concluded that no only do a significant proportion of people get sick and disoriented after more than a few minutes of use - but also that this disorientation was still noticeable 24 hours after a session using them. US Navy pilots are not allowed to fly real aircraft for 24 hours after using one of these contraptions - and they are strongly advised not to drive cars either.
Honestly - I think the same rules should be applied to driving after VR use in civilians too.
I support nuclear energy in the short to medium term because it's the only realistic way to replace coal, oil and natural gas - and thereby save the planet from global climate change. That's a short-term emergency - and we're not likely to be able to either cut back our energy use, or replace CO2-producing energy with renewables in time.
So we're left with the lesser of three evils: No energy, Rising CO2 levels, Nuclear accidents.
I'd hope that modern reactors (ie not Chernobyl era junk), intelligently placed (like not in the middle of a city, and not near a Tsunami-prone coastline like Fukushima) and carefully run (like not Chernobyl and not 3 Mile Island) could reduce the risk of accidents considerably. But even with the rate of severe accidents we've seen so far, the damage we do is far less than with coal/oil/gas.
I'd hope that we'd get fusion power running - and add smarter solar/wind/tidal sources (hydroelectric dams are starting to look like a bad idea) before too long - but we need uranium/plutonium power sources until that happens.
-- Steve
The trouble is...
* Who is going to buy a $500,000 house with cash - who is going to be stupid enough to hide that kind of money under the mattress?
* Transporting large sums of cash around is great for criminals.
* Physical money isn't secure - applying ink to paper is something that is going to get increasingly easy as technology improves and stamping out disks of metal isn't happening because it's hard to do it cheaply enough to profitably with =$1 coins.
* Physical money is still backed by someone - it only works so long as there is widespread confidence in the stuff.
OK...so maybe gold...
* Who will actually want gold when the zombie apocalypse happens?
* The value of gold versus the things you need (food/water/power/shelter) is horribly variable.
* For most informal/low-quantity transactions, it's too easy to fake.
OK...so maybe something people actually need?
* You can't "save" most kinds of food.
* Water is bulky and heavy to exchange.
* Power can't be transported in ANY convenient manner.
* Shelter can't be traded in small quantities.
OK...so how about the "barter" system?
* Fine, so you have the ability to write a bunch of custom software, the farmer who has the food doesn't need custom software. You'd have to put together a chain of 20 to 30 people who want to barter simultaneously just to buy a loaf of bread.
All of this means that we need something that's very much like money - and it needs to be more abstract than physical coins and notes. If it's abstract then we have to trust the people who issue it and look after it. Those people don't work for nothing - so we end up needing to pay them in some manner. WIth bitcoin, for example, the miners administer the system - and we "pay" them by allowing them to increase the money supply - which in a large economy would mean that a gradual increase in money supply would increase inflation and result in us paying them in the decreasing value of our savings.
A *modest* credit card fee wouldn't be such a terrible thing - but all the time we fall for "Airline miles", "Cash-back" and crap-knows-what schemes that come along with them - we aren't getting a lower rate. If everyone picked their credit card strictly according to the lowest interest rate - then they'd be forced to compete on that criterion alone - and the rates would come down.
Clearly the price of the hardware is now irrelevant - there can't be many places in the world where a one-time $5 per-child expense is unattainable.
The only limiting factor now is whether kids have the course materials to learn - and whether they have access to a machine with display and keyboard to write their programs on. The coursework isn't going to be cheap - but if done right - and OpenSourced - then the cost can be amortised down to nearly $0. So the one remaining problem is whether these kids will have access to something to type, edit, compile and download their code on...and there's the problem.
If you already have access to that kind of hardware (an OLPC, at a minimum) - then why not learn to program on THAT? Why do you need to learn on an embedded system - which is harder to debug, more easily damaged, etc, etc? I think the answer is that there has to be a REASON to write programs - or programming classes will be as hard to get kids excited about as (say) Math classes. Programming a robotics project - or even just getting some push-buttons and LED's working - is quite compelling when compared to the dross that's taught in Java Programming 101 in US schools and colleges...I've helped two people through that kind of course - and you'd think they were teaching someone to write accounting software...urgh!
IMHO, teaching kids to write games would be a better approach - but embedded computing works too.
Where I think these things may really help is in teaching about electronics. Simple stuff like how to interface a switch, a potentiometer, an LED or an R/C servo to an I/O bit on a microprocessor is a useful introduction - and programming it to do something interesting is also useful.
It's all going to be down to the courseware.
If only that were true. Sadly, that's only going to happen if you buy them at the App-AppStore and pay for them with AppPay (which you'll need to download from the App-AppStore).
Cool! Now I'll be able to run Vulcan/Windows programs on my Linux machine before I'll be able to run them on my Windows computer! Way to get ahead of the curve wine-guys!
Now that "chip and pin" credit cards are becoming common, I don't see what these phone pay systems solve. Either way, I have to haul something out of my pocket, position it appropriately (stick it into a slot - wave it at a sensor) and perform some second-factor authentication (pin number, password or fingerprint).
While we're in the switch-over phase, I can use my credit card in old-fashioned magnetic stripe systems. Business owners only need to plug in the equipment (which they probably already have) and they're good to go.
I just don't need another system.
Siri (or "OK Google") is a marginal improvement - in some circumstances, it's easier to speak a request than to type it. I get that.
The definition I've always had in my head goes something like:
A robot is a computer that can interact with the world using sensors and moving parts.
Well...kinda...a radio controlled "Robot Wars" thing isn't a robot, it's a radio controlled toy - it needs autonomy...so I wouldn't call it a "Robot". On the other hand, my PC has "sensors" (the mouse and keyboard) - but it doesn't have hands, legs or wheels (unless you count the spinning hard drive) - so it's not a robot either. My home thermostat has a sensor and can open and close the ducting vents. It has a computer inside so it's a "Robot"....hmmm - not sure I like that - maybe the robot has to be able to move itself around. A robot-arm in (say) a car factory - can move the arm around, but not move bodily around the world...so it's a robot according to my original definition...but not if I change the definition to exclude my thermostat. My car isn't a robot - although it has a computer that handles a lot of the work (electronic throttle, ignition, brakes) - a 'driverless' car, however is clearly a robot in my mind. But a car is still a robot if I sit inside and tell it where to take me by typing "221B Baker Street, London" - but not if I have a steering wheel to tell it where to go, even if it has automatic lane-keeping and will stop me from rear-ending the car in front. OK - so that's fairly clear. But what about if I have to tell some hypothetical car: "Take the next left turn...go a bit faster than the speed limit please...go right at the fork in the road." - is it a robot now? Mmmmm - not sure. Maybe if I tell it to take the next turn by nudging a joystick, it's just a car with sophisticated lane-keeping and maybe if I have a speech interface to control the exact same software/behavior, it's a robot? We're in a very, very grey area there.
So this is a hard thing to define. I think there is a continuum from the car that knows from data from your toothbrush that your teeth need polishing and automatically takes you to the dentist's office when there is a two hour gap in your schedule...down to my current car...in which the computer decides that I'll over-rev the engine if I push harder on the gas pedal and it's not going to let me do that.
Legally, you may need to impose a hard distinction somewhere between those two extremes - but it's going to be completely arbitrary. In the end, a word like "robot" has to be consigned to the pile of words like "home" or "food" that have fuzzy definitions and shouldn't be used in a situation where a binary choice has to be made. It's not really like the word "adult" that has a specific meaning that takes effect precisely at midnight on the 18th anniversary of your birth.
Law-makers and judges need to pass more specific legislation about the specific attributes of robots that require legal decisions.
So, for example a ("robotic") car where the human has the ability to override the speed and direction, regardless of the road conditions, may need to be insured by the individual - but a car that decides the speed and direction for itself and always overrides the human if the conditions require it to might require to be covered under the manufacturers' insurance. Doesn't matter what you *call* it - it only matters what functions are automated.
The problem with expunging a particular web page from search is that this web page probably contains other information.
So suppose the document contains the name of the arresting officer - or of the judge who tried the offender - or of the town in which it occurred.
If I want to know whether some particular police officer made a career out of arresting sex offenders - or whether one judge is harsher on sex offenders than others, If I I can't find all of these kinds of records because they are hidden for other reasons then it causes an immense problem for freedom of information.
I might spend a lot of my time and effort in writing something that mentions this person in passing - and because of that, nobody will find my work. That's a clear invasion of my right to free speech.
And as for the victim - it doesn't really lock away the information because other web sites can make registries of past offenders and link to their arrest documents...and finding those registries with Google is still allowed...and should be protected under free speech laws.
So this measure is both oppressive to people unrelated to the case - and ineffective at preventing anyone who is even mildly determined from finding the documents.
-- Steve
So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?
The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.
Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.
Probably my best chance is to sell it to Walmart who use pressure pads to make sure that their "greeters" are actually doing something! (But that would be evil...so, no).
In my case, it didn't matter whether the firmware was opensourced or not...the cost of the certification made it impossible for a small business to do...the cost of liability insurance was insane. There are requirements to certify the manufacturing process (so no $6 Arduino clone) and a requirement to offer a repair service (Really? Just throw the old one away and buy a new one!)...it's crazy.
When you consider the cost of amputation (surgery - not being able to walk afterwards, loss of quality of life, etc) - even this device doesn't have to be anywhere near 100% reliable to do a lot of people a lot of good. But if just one person were to lose a foot because the gizmo failed to warn them - the resulting lawsuit would bankrupt any small business just like that.
So, 70,000 people per year suffer one of the worst things that can happen to anyone as a direct consequence of a broken system.
Yep...exactly. That's the reason simple electronic gadgets that are ridiculously easy to make cost an ungodly amount of money if they're used for medical purposes.
The FDA regulates "medical devices" in the same way it regulates drugs...you have to demonstrate efficacy, safety, do human trials...then there is liability insurance...it's ungodly expensive.
...medical devices have to be certified by the FDA (or someone big and scary like that)...and that costs an off-the-charts amount.
I built a gizmo for some sorts of diabetics who have to be careful about standing still for a long time because it can destroy their feet, There are a truly ghastly number of amputations each year because of this. So - pressure sensors in shoes, bluetooth gizmo, cellphone app that goes BEEEEP! If you're standing badly for too long. Cost to make - about $100...maybe $50 in quantity.
Sure - any idiot with an arduino and some old-school hacking skills could do that - right? Sure - I don't claim to be all that clever!
So I go to doctors who specialize in this stuff - they say that the current solution costs $12,000 and mine is just as good. In fact, I could trivially get it to log data, text or email it to the doctor, log it to the cloud...whatever...the $12k gizmo's don't do that.
Oh - but FDA approval is needed. Human trials. Yadda yadda yadda. Cost of doing that is $500,000. Add product liability insurance, you name it.
Estimated sales...oh darn. My $50 gizmo will have to sell for $15,000.
So - 70,000 people who we could EASILY help for very low $$$ are still getting their feet amputated for absolutely no good reason every single year.
Go figure.
What they ACTUALLY said was that in surveys conducted in the Western World - only 5% failed their test - but in developing countries - the number was 26% of faked surveys.
Then, they also say that the KIND of survey matters. Their approach is to say that if 85% of answers are identical between two or more respondents then the result is likely to be faked...but they recognize that (for example) in a health survey, all of the healthy people will answer identically to questions about how healthy they are. So that kind of survey is excluded.
So if the research is to be taken at face value, then in the Western world, one in twenty of *some* classes of survey are probably faked. But they looked at 1000 surveys to arrive at that number - we don't know what fraction of those came from the developing world. If all you're interested in is Western World surveys - then maybe the sample size is very small. Given that there are some classes of survey that are known to be excluded - is it possible that they included a few of "the wrong kind" in their sample.
All surveys have an error bar of a few percent - this is a survey about surveys.
I think the conclusion here is that you should ignore surveys carried out by dubious agencies in the developing world. I don't think you should conclude that surveys done by reputable agencies in the western world are unreliable.
The problem is that VR doesn't work for everyone...a very large percentage of people get nauseous when wearing a VR headset - especially for gaming.
Most VR companies claim (perpetually) that the next rev of their tech will fix this by means of lower latency, brighter or higher resolution screens, improved lenses, better field of view.
That's missing the problem. The problem is that we perceive distance by two mechanisms - focus and convergence. Everybody has fixed convergence - nobody has fixed the focussing issue.
Our brains get conflicting messages - the focus system says "The object is at X distance" and the convergence system says "No, it's at Y distance"...our higher brain functions see an impossible contradiction...and the caveman part of the brain says "Oh no! We're hallucinating! Maybe we ate a magic mushroom!" - and we try to vomit it out of our system.
Without fixing focus - a bunch of people will get sick - and that's going to prevent widespread acceptance of the tech.
3D movies largely fix this by having control of content - but in games, that's largely impossible.
-- Steve
The biggest problem is that people are reacting to the headline - not the back story.
1) This was the terrorist's WORK phone. He tried (and failed) to destroy his personal phone - and the FBI have all of the data from that. If he didn't destroy the work phone, there probably wasn't anything important on it.
2) The FBI already have his texts, IP address lookups, voicemails and phonecall meta-data from the telco's - so this is only stuff like photos and documents stored inside the phone.
3) The FBI already have an iCloud backup from 6 weeks before the attack.
4) If they hadn't screwed up and changed the iCloud account's apple id - they'd have a recent backup too - and this would be a moot point. They screwed up.
5) If this was so important - why didn't they demand it back in December when they first got the phone? Any information on it now will be horribly outdated.
6) We already know that this was not a big ISIS plot or anything like that. It was a 'lone gunman' kind of a thing...so it's unlikely that there is anything on the phone that would incriminate anyone else who isn't already incriminated.
7) If they succeed - you can bet that Apple's next phone will make it impossible to circumvent the security with an OS upgrade by putting more stuff in ROM.
Knowing those things makes it very clear that they are using a high-profile case to demonstrate a capability (both on behalf of Apple - and on the behalf of the legal system to compel Apple).
The reason to do this is to provoke a debate that they hope will produce either laws or a legal precedent that they can apply to future cases - there is no other reason to fight Apple and public opinion.
The reason MOST people are agreeing with the Fed is that they didn't take the time to look at the facts.
Cancers cause crazy replication of the victims own cells. The defenses we have against most diseases are of the form "Recognize something that isn't me and kill it!" - but cancer cells are pretty much identical to regular cells - which is why curing cancer is so hard.
But the idea of someone else's cancer cell getting into my body and running amok isn't such a big deal because their cells are not recognized as "me" - and my regular defenses should attack them just like a bacterial infection - and just like we reject organ transplants without anti-rejection drugs.
The case of the Tasmanian Devil face cancer is instructive - their problem is a drastic lack of genetic diversity that makes it harder for them to recognize "self" from "other" when "other" is genetically so close to "self". I could certainly imagine a cancer jumping between a pair of identical twins - and all tasmanian devils are alarmingly closely related.
The dog STD cancer may have similar roots. Pedigree dogs are well known to suffer from a lack of genetic diversity - and we inbreed them to a crazy degree.
What's more of a concern is that we know that some forms of cancer are caused by viral infections - clearly the original virus could get transmitted - and the net effect would be of a transmissible cancer. THAT is a major concern.
-- Steve
I'd have to use a "beating a dead horse" analogy here - except that the dead guy was a terrorist, not a horse. Either way though - no amount of whacking the corpse with a $5 wrench (or even one of those $5,000,000 NASA Space-wrenches) will have very much effect here.
OK - not *literally* a spinning cube...but anything that's not super-performance critical - or anything that runs easily at a decent frame rate without heavy software effort...should stick with OpenGL.