Bruce Willis and his pals didn't attempt to deflect the asteroid; they tried to break it up. How feasible would it be to break up a football stadium sized asteroid? Even if the remaining pieces are still going to hit earth, the damage would be considerable less (near zero, if the pieces are small enough).
I'll tell you what I really think is going to happen: I think in 10 or 15 years, we're going to look back on this time period, and be sort of aghast at how people behaved with regards to their phones. I don't accept that things are moving in a more-talk-is-OK direction, I think that there's the possibility that this is a manners-haven't-caught-up-to-tech blip.
15-10 years ago, cell phone etiquette was pretty good. I remember people turning their phones off in restaurants, or even at lunch in the office. A cell phone ringing during meal time was cause for mild embarrasment. If a phone rang during a movie screening, it was because the owner forgot to switch it off, and again, embarrasment ensued. Phones during meetings were turned off as well. Flash forward to today, and people do not think twice to answer the phone during meals. These days, good etiquette seems to mean stepping away from the dinner table to answer calls, not clicking them off or god forbid switching the phone to silent mode. In cinemas, phones do not just ring, they get answered.
I predict that manners are going to catch up with tech, just not in the way you might think. The behaviours will not change or only get worse; what will change is our perception of what is proper and what isn't. There's a generation growing up for whom carrying and using a cell phone is a natural act. They might look at us oldsters wondering why we're being so uptight about talking to friends on the phone in public.
Seriously, who the hell is in charge at Warner Home Video these days?
I suspect that their "washington" men may have had something to do with it. A fair few politicians support the idea of allowing private copies or format shifting of movies that one already owns on DVD/Bluray, and for good reason: it is an eminently reasonable notion that you can watch a movie any way you like if you've paid for it. The fact that these politicians don't openly support or vote for this has less to do with their actual convictions than with political expedience, and that might change.
This way, the movie studios can kill 2 birds with 1 stone. Not only format shifting is gaining political momentum, but some politicians (quite a few actually here in the Netherlands, for instance) even feel that they should not prosecute content pirates too harshly, if at all, as long as there is no viable legal alternative to obtain downloadable or streamed content. With this insane scheme, movie studios can claim that there now is a viable legal alternative to piracy, as well as a good legal way to format shift. Even if no actual consumer ever makes use of this service, they only have to convince the legislators that a legal alternative is now finally here, and they ought to outlaw all other options.
I'm surprised that the impact on climate change was emphasised; in the media here (NL) this is hardly ever mentioned, they usually mention Euro emission standards, and the impact of these emissions on health. In any case, the study claims that emission levels of black carbon may have been underestimated in certain cases, not the average/total measured concentration of carbon in the air.
By the way, the concentration of carbon in the air in densely populated areas has been dropping for over a century, and in many places continues to drop. The switch from coal to hydrocarbons for heating, energy and transportation is the main cause of this; the more recent reduction is caused by the increased efficiency of filters and engines.
Yup. Sucks if you paid $5 for it, but better to cut your losses than to support a sleazy racket like this. Oh, and be sure to leave some informative comment on the game in the app store.
Or it might be a step backwards. People might think the administration is taking steps to protect their privacy and lull them into a false sense of security, while in fact nothing really changes.
My thoughts exactly. I got exited at the prospect of practical AR glasses finally arriving on the market ("practical" meaning more or less affordable, and well designed so that you can actually wear them in public), but got disappointed when reading that it is Google releasing them. Remember that they will not just be looking, but analysing and interpreting as well.
Give them a few years to develop this further and combine it with their other data (face recognition for instance), and you get something like the following sitting in a Google server somewhere.
SUBJECT: John Doe (Google ID 1312.11.552.874.5)
EVENT: Observation of known person
OBJECT: Jane Doe (Google ID 7823.14.461.551.6)
Identified by tagged photo, 78 hits, average match 87%, confidence after cross-correlation 99.12%
DURATION: 14 seconds total, eye motion analysis breaks down as follows:
- face: 2 seconds
- chest: 5 seconds
- posterior: 4 seconds
- legs: 3 seconds
Actually, most Eurozone countries still have prices like €1.79 or €2.98. Only the total amount due gets rounded to the nearest 5 cents. I think most countries have stopped minting the 1 and 2 cent coins, but they remain legal tender.
A faster computer, a higher res video, and better audio equipment all give you a better experience, but at a higher price. However there's two things to keep in mind:
1) The law of diminishing returns: at some point, throwing increasing amounts of money at whatever it is you're buying will result in ever smaller increases of benefit. The difference between a $100 and a $1000 speaker is huge, between $1000 and $5000 it is appreciable, between $5000 and $10000 it's noticable, but spending $50000 or more? Meh. Even spending more than 5k is pointless unless you a re a discerning listener with cash to burn.
2) Snake oil: plenty of it out there, especially in cable land. I am talking Monster cable, special "fast" HDMI cables, speaker wire of $1000 / meter, crap like that. In this case spending more will net you no benefit whatsoever. Unless you count bragging rights or hard-ons from shiny equipment. Perhaps that's what the parent meant by audiophiles using music to listen to their equipment.
They may be leading innovation, but a round design and using natural language in an interface shouldn't be counted among those innovation. For everything made by man, someone is going to be the first to apply a particular method or come up with a particular feature. That doesn't mean that being first always implies brilliant ideas and/or painstaking, long research.
On the other hand, what should Nest's strategy have been if they knew about these patents before they started? Give up and admit that no one is allowed to make round thermostats or leech power from other devices? Blow all of your seed capital on legal fees? Approach Honeywell, knowing full well that they are more likely to kill your idea than to license their crappy tech? And if you do any of the above, you will severely weaken your case if you decide to challenge these patents later on.
The problem isn't that we have patents. The problem is that crap patents like these get granted: obvious non-intellectual "property", or "we were here first" stuff that took no effort and should not be acknowledged as an invention in itself. Besides, the idea of patents is to foster the spread of ideas and to reward inventors for their efforts. In this case there are no "ideas worth spreading" since anyone can and would have come up with any of them, nor do I believe that any sizable effort was expended in coming up with these ideas. Honeywell is acting in their own interest and within the law, but I still say they are scumbags for doing this. However in the end it is the law that needs changing.
Yes, I was exaggerating of course. But you're not all that far from the Netherlands; come visit sometime, and put your ear to the ground around parliament. I think you'll find that the notion of these suggestions for healthy living being turned into laws or rules isn't all that far-fetched. The idea of a "socially engineered society", the idea that managing many aspects of people's behaviour and society as a whole through laws and taxes is not only possible but desirable, is deeply rooted in our country.
There are not many such restrictions as yet, but the pressure is on to somehow punish unhealthful behaviour, and it's not just coming from the crackpot politicians. Our government has traditionally been very active making suggestions for leading healthy and safe lives, and I think that's good, but with the economic squeeze and the looming long-term demographic issues around the corner, they are starting to sound less and less like suggestions. I don't think it will ever be nearly as bad as in my exaggerated example, but looking at the current economic situation and political landscape in my country, I think there's a good chance of at least some of these suggestions making it into the law books.
Socialised healthcare has similar issues as well, make no mistake. If we all pay for our collective well-being, it stands to reason that we all have a duty to avoid health issues that incur costs, right? That means no alcohol, chocolate, fatty foods: these are bad for your health. No more dangerous sports like skiing. And since we're already working towards mandatory helmets while riding a bicycle, why not wear a helmet while walking? Anything might happen and then society would be out of pocket again on account of your carelessness.
Insurers of private healthcare love to quantify risk factors and charge a premium according to risk; DNA sequencing would be a dangerous tool in their hands. Socialised medicine on the other hand equalises risk and cannot discriminate on genetic or behavioral health risks, but it does want to reduce factors that increase that risk, by modifying our behaviour. So you could end up with a government that literally tells you when to pee, for health reasons. With private healthcare at least you'll have the insurers vs. the government (at least if your government doesn't kowtow to those insurers); in socialised medicine you have insurers and government openly on the same side, with the same goals. That scares me, and it already resulted in a number of creepy and far-reaching ideas for health-related laws in my country. Thankfully most got shot down, but with the cost burden increasing in these crappy economic times, that might change.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's good that everyone has access to healthcare over here, but socialised healthcare is not without its problems, and those problems are not all about costs.
Not everyone should be generalists, sure. However, IT in the past decade or two has in fact shifted towards the idea that everyone should be specialists, and that's wrong as well. Not just for small outfits where people will fill several roles out of necessity; it's true even in large corporations that can afford to retain numerous specialists. Some of those large corporations now see an increasing need for generalists who are able to keep an overview of the tech landscape as well as the business landscape. You don't just need communication between the various specialists and between it and the business, you need coordination, and for that, neither a manager nor a specialist will suffice; you'll need a generalist techie with good business knowledge as well.
Being such a generalist can be a great deal of fun (it's what I currently do), but there is a snag. Good generalists are hard to find, perhaps because so many choose to specialise. It takes a good deal of searching to fill a generalist position, or one has to tailor the role slightly to the person that one finds, which goes directly against the idea of ever increasing specialisation, and the parameterisation and compartimentalisation of IT work. As a results, generalist roles are often poorly understood and perceived to be hard to manage. The work's great and if you do it well, everyone will wonder how they ever did without having someone like you. But in my own experience it is very hard to carve out an actual career for yourself this way. For the aforementioned reasons, not because there is no need for generalists.
By the way, the trend towards ever deeper specialisation does not only exist in tech work; I see it happening in many other fields as well. And it isn't just the result of the maturation of professions; I suspect that there is another important factor: our managers and the methods used for running our companies. These days it's all management-by-the-numbers, spreadsheets and dashboards. The managers behind those dashboards love managing resources, but in general they hate managing people, and there is a difference.
Funny you should mention that. Europeans grow up being exposed to nudie mags in news agents, and we don't really notice them anymore. As a result we don't blow our tops when some wardrobe malfunction causes a nipple to be shown on national television for a second. Same goes for other stuff, like actual sex, or smoking pot: freedom and education work so much better than repression and pretending these things don't exist. (In case you were wondering: the Netherlands has significantly less regular marihuana users than the US despite the fact that anyone can walk into a coffee shop and buy a few grams; people here try it a few times in high school or college, but most stop after a few years).
In addition, if you're a member or supporter of any national party in Europe, lean on your party's committee members as well. Often they have a large influence on their EU counterparts, and don't forget that your own governments still have to ratify the treaty.
Sadly, it looks like in many countries ACTA will sail through the ratification process: at that point most ruling parties will already have given it their implicit endorsement, and they might look silly nacking out now. Rebelious coalition members might vote in favour as well, out of political expedience. If the EU parliament does not kill this, I guess it'll be too late.
It is possible. There are some algorithms that do this (semi-)automatically. Not sure how they work (perhaps using parallax from moving objects), but they do work, and I have seen the results. I came across a 3D version of one of the Star Wars movies, and I was quite impressed with the results from what is after all an automated process. The 3D in space and landscape scenes was pretty good. However closeups of talking faces revealed the weakness; the moving face confused the algorithm and the result was something that looked a bit like the shimmering produced by rising hot air.
Impressive from a technical point of view, but I wouldn't call the results suitable for the cinema or even for home viewing. 3D movies require the director and cameramen knowing their 3D stuff, you have to shoot specifically for 3D, and it is not easy. However, Cameron has shown that it can be done, and that it can add something to the movie rather than just being a gimmick with spears / body parts being pointed / thrown at the audience.
What if your paper textbook could only be carried in a Dawsons Creek Ultra Futura 2000 rucksack, and nothing else? That's what we're talking about here. Want an education? Ipad required...
Apple are a business, and free to build in as much lock-in on their platforms as they please. I am hoping that we will see competing solutions, and open ones would be even better, but with Apple offering authors an easy way to publish with a bigger slice of the profits, I fear we may see the Apple platform established as a de facto standard in education before competing standards have emerged,
Odd, why didn't they add an option to charge from a standard 120V socket? At whatever the power rate is in the US for standard sockets (over here it's 3.6kW), charging would be slower but it's better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Willis and his pals didn't attempt to deflect the asteroid; they tried to break it up. How feasible would it be to break up a football stadium sized asteroid? Even if the remaining pieces are still going to hit earth, the damage would be considerable less (near zero, if the pieces are small enough).
15-10 years ago, cell phone etiquette was pretty good. I remember people turning their phones off in restaurants, or even at lunch in the office. A cell phone ringing during meal time was cause for mild embarrasment. If a phone rang during a movie screening, it was because the owner forgot to switch it off, and again, embarrasment ensued. Phones during meetings were turned off as well.
Flash forward to today, and people do not think twice to answer the phone during meals. These days, good etiquette seems to mean stepping away from the dinner table to answer calls, not clicking them off or god forbid switching the phone to silent mode. In cinemas, phones do not just ring, they get answered.
I predict that manners are going to catch up with tech, just not in the way you might think. The behaviours will not change or only get worse; what will change is our perception of what is proper and what isn't. There's a generation growing up for whom carrying and using a cell phone is a natural act. They might look at us oldsters wondering why we're being so uptight about talking to friends on the phone in public.
I suspect that their "washington" men may have had something to do with it. A fair few politicians support the idea of allowing private copies or format shifting of movies that one already owns on DVD/Bluray, and for good reason: it is an eminently reasonable notion that you can watch a movie any way you like if you've paid for it. The fact that these politicians don't openly support or vote for this has less to do with their actual convictions than with political expedience, and that might change.
This way, the movie studios can kill 2 birds with 1 stone. Not only format shifting is gaining political momentum, but some politicians (quite a few actually here in the Netherlands, for instance) even feel that they should not prosecute content pirates too harshly, if at all, as long as there is no viable legal alternative to obtain downloadable or streamed content. With this insane scheme, movie studios can claim that there now is a viable legal alternative to piracy, as well as a good legal way to format shift. Even if no actual consumer ever makes use of this service, they only have to convince the legislators that a legal alternative is now finally here, and they ought to outlaw all other options.
I'm surprised that the impact on climate change was emphasised; in the media here (NL) this is hardly ever mentioned, they usually mention Euro emission standards, and the impact of these emissions on health. In any case, the study claims that emission levels of black carbon may have been underestimated in certain cases, not the average/total measured concentration of carbon in the air.
By the way, the concentration of carbon in the air in densely populated areas has been dropping for over a century, and in many places continues to drop. The switch from coal to hydrocarbons for heating, energy and transportation is the main cause of this; the more recent reduction is caused by the increased efficiency of filters and engines.
Yup. Sucks if you paid $5 for it, but better to cut your losses than to support a sleazy racket like this. Oh, and be sure to leave some informative comment on the game in the app store.
Or it might be a step backwards. People might think the administration is taking steps to protect their privacy and lull them into a false sense of security, while in fact nothing really changes.
My thoughts exactly. I got exited at the prospect of practical AR glasses finally arriving on the market ("practical" meaning more or less affordable, and well designed so that you can actually wear them in public), but got disappointed when reading that it is Google releasing them. Remember that they will not just be looking, but analysing and interpreting as well.
Give them a few years to develop this further and combine it with their other data (face recognition for instance), and you get something like the following sitting in a Google server somewhere.
SUBJECT: John Doe (Google ID 1312.11.552.874.5)
EVENT: Observation of known person
OBJECT: Jane Doe (Google ID 7823.14.461.551.6)
Identified by tagged photo, 78 hits, average match 87%, confidence after cross-correlation 99.12%
DURATION: 14 seconds total, eye motion analysis breaks down as follows:
- face: 2 seconds
- chest: 5 seconds
- posterior: 4 seconds
- legs: 3 seconds
Actually, most Eurozone countries still have prices like €1.79 or €2.98. Only the total amount due gets rounded to the nearest 5 cents. I think most countries have stopped minting the 1 and 2 cent coins, but they remain legal tender.
It reminded me first of Ira Levin's 'This perfect day'. Poor Chip won't get away with fooling the treatment unit anymore to avoid his mandatory dose.
I give it about 10 minutes before your excavation project is turned into Robot Wars.
So you caught them all. Gee, thanks...
A faster computer, a higher res video, and better audio equipment all give you a better experience, but at a higher price. However there's two things to keep in mind:
1) The law of diminishing returns: at some point, throwing increasing amounts of money at whatever it is you're buying will result in ever smaller increases of benefit. The difference between a $100 and a $1000 speaker is huge, between $1000 and $5000 it is appreciable, between $5000 and $10000 it's noticable, but spending $50000 or more? Meh. Even spending more than 5k is pointless unless you a re a discerning listener with cash to burn.
2) Snake oil: plenty of it out there, especially in cable land. I am talking Monster cable, special "fast" HDMI cables, speaker wire of $1000 / meter, crap like that. In this case spending more will net you no benefit whatsoever. Unless you count bragging rights or hard-ons from shiny equipment. Perhaps that's what the parent meant by audiophiles using music to listen to their equipment.
They may be leading innovation, but a round design and using natural language in an interface shouldn't be counted among those innovation. For everything made by man, someone is going to be the first to apply a particular method or come up with a particular feature. That doesn't mean that being first always implies brilliant ideas and/or painstaking, long research.
On the other hand, what should Nest's strategy have been if they knew about these patents before they started? Give up and admit that no one is allowed to make round thermostats or leech power from other devices? Blow all of your seed capital on legal fees? Approach Honeywell, knowing full well that they are more likely to kill your idea than to license their crappy tech? And if you do any of the above, you will severely weaken your case if you decide to challenge these patents later on.
The problem isn't that we have patents. The problem is that crap patents like these get granted: obvious non-intellectual "property", or "we were here first" stuff that took no effort and should not be acknowledged as an invention in itself. Besides, the idea of patents is to foster the spread of ideas and to reward inventors for their efforts. In this case there are no "ideas worth spreading" since anyone can and would have come up with any of them, nor do I believe that any sizable effort was expended in coming up with these ideas. Honeywell is acting in their own interest and within the law, but I still say they are scumbags for doing this. However in the end it is the law that needs changing.
Yes, I was exaggerating of course. But you're not all that far from the Netherlands; come visit sometime, and put your ear to the ground around parliament. I think you'll find that the notion of these suggestions for healthy living being turned into laws or rules isn't all that far-fetched. The idea of a "socially engineered society", the idea that managing many aspects of people's behaviour and society as a whole through laws and taxes is not only possible but desirable, is deeply rooted in our country.
There are not many such restrictions as yet, but the pressure is on to somehow punish unhealthful behaviour, and it's not just coming from the crackpot politicians. Our government has traditionally been very active making suggestions for leading healthy and safe lives, and I think that's good, but with the economic squeeze and the looming long-term demographic issues around the corner, they are starting to sound less and less like suggestions. I don't think it will ever be nearly as bad as in my exaggerated example, but looking at the current economic situation and political landscape in my country, I think there's a good chance of at least some of these suggestions making it into the law books.
Socialised healthcare has similar issues as well, make no mistake. If we all pay for our collective well-being, it stands to reason that we all have a duty to avoid health issues that incur costs, right? That means no alcohol, chocolate, fatty foods: these are bad for your health. No more dangerous sports like skiing. And since we're already working towards mandatory helmets while riding a bicycle, why not wear a helmet while walking? Anything might happen and then society would be out of pocket again on account of your carelessness.
Insurers of private healthcare love to quantify risk factors and charge a premium according to risk; DNA sequencing would be a dangerous tool in their hands. Socialised medicine on the other hand equalises risk and cannot discriminate on genetic or behavioral health risks, but it does want to reduce factors that increase that risk, by modifying our behaviour. So you could end up with a government that literally tells you when to pee, for health reasons. With private healthcare at least you'll have the insurers vs. the government (at least if your government doesn't kowtow to those insurers); in socialised medicine you have insurers and government openly on the same side, with the same goals. That scares me, and it already resulted in a number of creepy and far-reaching ideas for health-related laws in my country. Thankfully most got shot down, but with the cost burden increasing in these crappy economic times, that might change.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's good that everyone has access to healthcare over here, but socialised healthcare is not without its problems, and those problems are not all about costs.
Not everyone should be generalists, sure. However, IT in the past decade or two has in fact shifted towards the idea that everyone should be specialists, and that's wrong as well. Not just for small outfits where people will fill several roles out of necessity; it's true even in large corporations that can afford to retain numerous specialists. Some of those large corporations now see an increasing need for generalists who are able to keep an overview of the tech landscape as well as the business landscape. You don't just need communication between the various specialists and between it and the business, you need coordination, and for that, neither a manager nor a specialist will suffice; you'll need a generalist techie with good business knowledge as well.
Being such a generalist can be a great deal of fun (it's what I currently do), but there is a snag. Good generalists are hard to find, perhaps because so many choose to specialise. It takes a good deal of searching to fill a generalist position, or one has to tailor the role slightly to the person that one finds, which goes directly against the idea of ever increasing specialisation, and the parameterisation and compartimentalisation of IT work. As a results, generalist roles are often poorly understood and perceived to be hard to manage. The work's great and if you do it well, everyone will wonder how they ever did without having someone like you. But in my own experience it is very hard to carve out an actual career for yourself this way. For the aforementioned reasons, not because there is no need for generalists.
By the way, the trend towards ever deeper specialisation does not only exist in tech work; I see it happening in many other fields as well. And it isn't just the result of the maturation of professions; I suspect that there is another important factor: our managers and the methods used for running our companies. These days it's all management-by-the-numbers, spreadsheets and dashboards. The managers behind those dashboards love managing resources, but in general they hate managing people, and there is a difference.
Don't they say 'croreopati' or some such? (10-millionaire)
Funny you should mention that. Europeans grow up being exposed to nudie mags in news agents, and we don't really notice them anymore. As a result we don't blow our tops when some wardrobe malfunction causes a nipple to be shown on national television for a second. Same goes for other stuff, like actual sex, or smoking pot: freedom and education work so much better than repression and pretending these things don't exist. (In case you were wondering: the Netherlands has significantly less regular marihuana users than the US despite the fact that anyone can walk into a coffee shop and buy a few grams; people here try it a few times in high school or college, but most stop after a few years).
Once again the French come through:How to act against ACTA.
In addition, if you're a member or supporter of any national party in Europe, lean on your party's committee members as well. Often they have a large influence on their EU counterparts, and don't forget that your own governments still have to ratify the treaty.
Sadly, it looks like in many countries ACTA will sail through the ratification process: at that point most ruling parties will already have given it their implicit endorsement, and they might look silly nacking out now. Rebelious coalition members might vote in favour as well, out of political expedience. If the EU parliament does not kill this, I guess it'll be too late.
It is possible. There are some algorithms that do this (semi-)automatically. Not sure how they work (perhaps using parallax from moving objects), but they do work, and I have seen the results. I came across a 3D version of one of the Star Wars movies, and I was quite impressed with the results from what is after all an automated process. The 3D in space and landscape scenes was pretty good. However closeups of talking faces revealed the weakness; the moving face confused the algorithm and the result was something that looked a bit like the shimmering produced by rising hot air.
Impressive from a technical point of view, but I wouldn't call the results suitable for the cinema or even for home viewing. 3D movies require the director and cameramen knowing their 3D stuff, you have to shoot specifically for 3D, and it is not easy. However, Cameron has shown that it can be done, and that it can add something to the movie rather than just being a gimmick with spears / body parts being pointed / thrown at the audience.
What if your paper textbook could only be carried in a Dawsons Creek Ultra Futura 2000 rucksack, and nothing else? That's what we're talking about here. Want an education? Ipad required...
Apple are a business, and free to build in as much lock-in on their platforms as they please. I am hoping that we will see competing solutions, and open ones would be even better, but with Apple offering authors an easy way to publish with a bigger slice of the profits, I fear we may see the Apple platform established as a de facto standard in education before competing standards have emerged,
Odd, why didn't they add an option to charge from a standard 120V socket? At whatever the power rate is in the US for standard sockets (over here it's 3.6kW), charging would be slower but it's better than nothing.
Why are you aggravating the fact that the Iranians now have this secret technology, disclosing parts of the super secret manual?!