So the part of your brain that should allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes is not working.
It's working perfectly fine. Right now, it's set on "empathize with all the people who are distraught over terrorist attacks".
My determination of what they are feeling is *not* "well, those terrorists must feel terrible about something; perhaps we can help them feel less terrible; maybe we can educate them into not being terrorists, in the same way that education has solved the HIV problem by causing it to not be transmitted to new victims".
My determination of what they are feeling is somewhere on the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross stages between "I can't believe this happened!" (denial) and "Let's hunt down *ALL* these f*ckers, and kill them!" (anger).
I'd say that with regard to the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is somewhere between "Let's hunt down *ALL* these f*ckers, and kill them!" (anger) and "let's take in these poor refugees, and show them we are not bad people they need to try to kill!" (bargaining).
Not sure if anyone ever gets to hit stage 4 (depression) or stage 5 (acceptance), because they keep triggering us back to stage 1 by repeatedly continuing the attacks.
well. And when that virus mutates and kills your family and everyone else, then everything will be fixed. That sounds like a very typical conservative mindset.
Yes, yes, we've all read Frank Herbert's novel "The White Plague". One of the reasons for specifically attacking the matrilineal DNA would be to ensure that mutations would only become more (or less) deadly to the target population.
In addition to that, you'd design it as a binary weapon, meaning that you'd attach an incredibly distinct target as a "primer"; most likely, you would utilize the "unnatural base pairs" d5SICS–dNaM, which do not occur in Earth-based life naturally, and use them to target.
This gives you the opportunity to suborn the attach points with a "neutered" primer in order to immunize "desirable" populations with the same matrilineal sequences. This includes people you deem desirable within your own population, and others working for you, but in the target area for the deployment.
The other part of the weapon would use the target sequence attach point to trigger. In other words, you could simply give the virus to everyone -- and it would make everywhere it is a "no go" area for ISIS operatives, lest they fall victim themselves. It also gives you the opportunity to trigger increasing escalation of payloads, should it become necessary.
By the way, making people in ISIS sterile will not prevent them from recruiting more people to their cause, or didn't you think of that?
Yes, of course I did. And then I looked to historical examples of voluntary celibacy in religion as a model of religions with an inability (self imposed) to not reproduce as an example of the consequences of a religion with active recruitment into a non-reproductive population, and the long term outcomes.
The ideal example in this case is the "Shaker" religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... of which there are currently (as of 2010) has 3 full members, and 1 novitiate (someone wanting to become a member), at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine.
It takes a while, but non-reproductive religions, even with active recruitment, die out.
Let me emphasize, I'm not talking about targeting Islam specifically. There's literally no gene for that, and so it's not a useful criteria for establishing a targeting system for a biological weapon. I'm talking about targeting a specific gene in a population that's self-selecting into radical Islam and thus to organization like ISIS. The primer would not even be person-to-person transmissible.
It wouldn't even necessarily have to do anything greater than, say, DVD region encoding, which means you could drop it pretty indiscriminately, an
What's your point? The moon is not a planet and we have visited its surface. And I'm sure we could visit many other moons with a surface. Just drop that hate against "Pluto not being a planet".
It contradicts the part of his statement that I quoted, claiming that "all the remaining planets are gas giants", and it contradicts the implied premise that because there are no planets, there's nothing out there resembling a planetary surface to visit.
Do you even *read* the contents of threads to which you are replying, or is that on;y something non-AC's do?
And your point is? You didn't make one, so that is why I am asking.
Just because you are unwilling to apply your skills in your field in order to solve a problem, doesn't mean that you should be allowed to prevent me from applying my skills in my field to solve the same problem in a different fashion.
Your inability to perceive a solution to the problem is not the same thing as my inability to actually solve it in a useful way, or a "useful enough" way, and your lack of vision shouldn't hamper me from implementing a solution.
What an incredibly useful suggestion. So when robots go to other planets, how is that any different from exploring the solar system. And by the way, do you always talk about killing people who disagree with you? Oh, that was supposed to be funny?
No. It was an engineering solution to an engineering problem.
Problem: Some people like to blow people up more than they like to explore the solar system.
Problem': Some people like to blow people up more than they like to explore the solar system, only they aren't good enough at it that all the people who like to blow up people are not blown up at a rate faster than they can reproduce.
Solution: Slow their rate of reproduction.
Solution': Slow their rate of reproduction by removing them from the gene pool.
Engineering cuts to the heart of matters, in the same way an engineer would not angst themselves to death over how to untie the Gordian Knot, and would instead just cut the damn thing, if the perceived future value of the rope of which it was made was lower than the value of getting the thing out of the way.
For example, in light of past and recent events, I would not be entirely averse to engineering a deadly virus keyed to target matrilineal mitochondrial DNA of the ISIS participants, and render them sterile.
This is probably the most humane way of wiping them from the face of the planet without outright killing them. Of course, that means that they will be robbed of the ability to enjoy the quality of life they consider worthwhile, meaning the killing of other people, genital mutilation, oppression of women to the point of stoning rape victims to death, and raising their sons to be good little jihadis who are willing to wear explosive vests into rock concerts and push the little red button, but I think I can maybe live with that. I'm actually *not* so sure that the rest of us can live *without* it.
A large part of space exploration can be done with telescopes and spectral analysis. Going to space is not only about exploration, its about the building of reliable habitat technology that can ensure the long-term survival of mankind.
Unless you're a roboticist; then it's all about getting funding for robots to go to space.
Unless you're a human; then it's all about getting funding for humans to go to space.
I personally believe we'll "solve" aging by then, and it will likely drive a discussion of whether or not we should and not whether or not we can.
I'll make you a deal... let's "solve" aging.
I'll be in the experimental group, and you can remain in the control group, and then I'll happily discuss "whether or not we should" with you until you are dead, and then I'll go ahead and do it generally anyway.
Everything that needs to be done can be done by robots, once you engineers get them up to speed.
This sounds like a cop-out by a biologist/psychologist who wants to make it an engineering problem someone else has to solve, rather than a biology/psychology problem that they'd have to solve instead. Stop being a lazy ass and moving your trash to the office next door so that it's their problem to take it out to the dumpster, instead of yours.
The real problem is to create a movable habitat which would actually work. We failed with Biosphere Two, but maybe we will get that thing working once.
Biosphere 2 was an exercise in mental masturbation; what real science could have been accomplished was overwhelmed by commercial interests, or someone would have noted ahead of time that concrete takes centuries to cure, and sequesters CO2 to the point that the plants in the biome inside started dying out, and with them, the people.
It was always intended as a spectacle, which would then morph into a tourist attraction, which would then make money for its investors.
I have no doubt that it would be possible to get 95% of the way there with what we know now, and then fix the remaining 5% by tweaking when things go wrong. One of the big parts of the "spectacle" in Biosphere 2 was "no tweaking allowed, sealed environment". That's no way to do engineering, and it's not even the correct way to do an ongoing science project involving an iterated series of experiments, unless your interest is a scientific interest in perturbation of a system out of homeostasis. In which case, it's *still* necessary to get the damn thing into homeostasis in the first place, so that you can so that.
Even then, you want to make the system design more resilient over time, not just shoot it in the head, unless you are trying to make a strawman argument about the fragility of Earth's ecosystem ("See, Frank! I was able to push this artificial ecosystem over!").
Like when the engineers at Boston Dynamics kicked the robot "Spot" on its side to demonstrate its ability to recover to stability, the point was *not* just to knock the thing over.
they would sign up for the military and go bust some rear
Joining the military incurs certain obligations, such as obeying chain of command, and following rules of engagement.
Both of these hamper military efforts against terrorists, who tend to jump to the far side of the line a military unit can not cross, and then yell "Neener, neener!".
Not having these restrictions is sometimes useful.
They're not saying that the offenders shouldn't be insulted. They're saying that calling someone a terriost is generally considerd an insult and that by insulting you cannot determine motive/goals/strategy. Learn to read folks.
Motive, goals, and strategy are things for the debrief, and for the historians, after the fact of stopping them from acting out. All that really matters right now is stopping them from acting out. We can get into the psychology of why they acted out, and what they hoped to accomplish by doing so by examining whatever papers are left over after the fact.
by way of an analogy "bad black and white film in the camera can not be made in to hi-res color with better lenses"
Avalanche Biotechnologies in Menlo Park and the University of Washington in Seattle have cooperative agreements, and have successfully used gene therapy to treat a number of retinal issues.
You have no clue. OP obviously has a vision problem that cannot be corrected with glasses.
Ironically, one of the contestants on the most recent season of "America's Got Talent" used a technological workaround of wearing Google Glass, with a specialized application that worked around his macular degeneration by distorting the visual field into the "halo". Generally speaking, the brain can "correct" processing, including an image which is flipped upside down, in order to compensate for the image distortion in this particular case.
go straight to a 32" 1080P TV as it's cheaper than a 25" monitor
A lot of televisions will only correctly negotiate EDID on the active input, and won't activate an input other than the primary, without first having a signal.
This tends to be a problem for laptops which are not persistent about negotiating EDID. This tends not to be a problem on Mac OS X, but in general, it's a problem for Windows, which is what the original poster said they had.
Toshiba or Samsung laptops, in particular, have a hard time driving some Samsung televisions, Dell HD monitors, and LG televisions. Mostly these screens tend to not be multithreaded in their electronics, meaning that they won't negotiate the EDID on an inactive (unselected) input when the computer is coming up, and those laptops, and many desktops, aren't very persistent in their attempts to renegotiate until they get an answer.
You're typically better off with a monitor than a television, if you plan to hook it up to a computer, even though there's a tendency towards higher expense compared to the televisions.
I agree that they are pretty aimless. But I'll disagree that it's because of anything inimical, so I'm not going to attach this post as a reply to the other person's.
Google has a problem with productization. Rubin is historically OK with it; he was better at it before Android, but that may have been in part a problem of Android having been acquired, rather than a change in his personal character/charter.
The problem is that you can't make a Google employee work on stuff they don't find interesting, and the last 20%-10% of turning any project into a real product is really a bunch of mundane t-crossing and i-dotting that's not a lot of fun to do, for most people.
Personally, I enjoy owning the "it works" bit, and setting that bit on a product, and I find the milestones "release to manufacturing" and "first ship" and "reorder to stores", really rewarding. I like seeing a product come together. But... in many ways, the journey to get there requires a lot of "not fun".
The only way to get people to work on things that aren't fun, instead of going to work on the next, new thing -- which is always fun, until you get bored with the new toy, it becomes an old toy, and you want the next new toy -- is to be awesomely inspiring about what you are trying to achieve. It also doesn't hurt, if you happen to be working on something with high visibility that other people have not done before. The self driving car is such a project. So are the "Google vans" for StreetView, if you are into cameras and image stabilization, and space mapping giving limited lanes, and stitching images, and so on.
Without an inspiring leader, they're just working on "hey, we have these neat technologies, and the groups we bought who developed them think that all othe other groups works can be trivially reproduced, and no one is interested on integrating systems (because, hey, let face it, that would be the un fun stuff).
I don't see this problem getting resolved any time soon; they certainly haven't been able to do it with Android (and the recent "let's out Samsung Android bugs to blackmail Samsung and the carriers into rolling out software updates to devices that were supposed to be one trick ponies" is a perfect example of fixing the product at the wrong patch point). There's nothing organizationally that would lead one to believe that they could suddenly "get religion" on this issue.
I'm probably not the person to fix this for them; I'm definitely not an executive type. In the context of Google as it is, it's going to take a project with an extraordinary vision to inspire people to stick out the un fun parts, and then work forward, without people "voting with their feet" to work elsewhere (as happened with Google Reader; once it was a solved problem, it was no longer interesting enough to port onto the new back end infrastructure, and all the principals were off on other more fun stuff).
Personally? If I were Google, I'd start a "Google Products Unit", and make it an elite place to be, and pre-populate it with people who get their rocks of shipping product to millions or billions of people, and touching people's lives in a positive way on a daily basis, rather than living in the worlds largest toy box. And then give them free reign over integrating Google technologies, like all the robotics companies they've bought, or various other things.
It'd be a hard row to hoe, but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people in Google who are just as unhappy with not shipping stuff to large numbers of people as I was during my tenure there, who would jump at the opportunity, even if they were a small percentage of all Googlers.
SpaceX started in 2002; Reaction Engines Ltd started in 1989; SpaceX reached the ISS in 1012. Looks like Reaction Engines Ltd is 21 years behind, unless you count only their Skylon project, in which case it's almost 2 years behind.
The Federal Trade Commission regulates things like this -- business interactions with customers -- in the same way it regulates the federal Do Not Call list.
If you are asking the FCC to regulate this, you are asking the wrong regulatory body; you might as well be asking the FDA to regulate it, because you think that being tracked all the time is injurious to people's mental health.
AND, because we now cant use the pipeline to transport the oil, there remains the trucking and rail industries moving it instead causing greater on-going wear and tear on the US transportation infrastructure, degrading the roads and bridges more quickly, and causing the price tag to repair that infrastructure to rise on a daily basis.
Pretty sure that's supposed to be covered by the at the pump gas tax. That is what my politicians tell me, each time they raise the at the pump gas tax.
Previously, they did not permit the use of third party libraries in your application; everything had to be built or sourced by you, because there's no intermediate library signing and vetting process that Apple can do on your behalf. They relaxed this when developers screamed like a stuck pig.
They are looking a lot less paranoid in their prior restriction, now.
I'm happy that Apple was clever enough to reject the App, and somewhat disappointed that the developers had such a hard time reading the rejection notice that they were left scratching their heads.
The actual big news here: The company doing the indiegogo is located in Shenzhen, China.
This is the first one of these I've seen. It struck me as very odd that the video narrator was an almost perfect midwest accent, but had terrible grammar and word choice, but when looking at the location of the startup, it became more obvious that this was actually an Indiegogo out of China.
Anyway, good on them; I expect that we will be seeing a lot more people doing crowd-sourcing from non-U.S. locations, given that VC thends to be pretty tight outside of specific regions of the U.S. (which is, in turn, why most startups that go anywhere are U.S. based, rather than being in Europe, or elsewhere, where the funding climate is pretty terrible).
Slashdot Mirror
So the part of your brain that should allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes is not working.
It's working perfectly fine. Right now, it's set on "empathize with all the people who are distraught over terrorist attacks".
My determination of what they are feeling is *not* "well, those terrorists must feel terrible about something; perhaps we can help them feel less terrible; maybe we can educate them into not being terrorists, in the same way that education has solved the HIV problem by causing it to not be transmitted to new victims".
My determination of what they are feeling is somewhere on the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross stages between "I can't believe this happened!" (denial) and "Let's hunt down *ALL* these f*ckers, and kill them!" (anger).
I'd say that with regard to the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is somewhere between "Let's hunt down *ALL* these f*ckers, and kill them!" (anger) and "let's take in these poor refugees, and show them we are not bad people they need to try to kill!" (bargaining).
Not sure if anyone ever gets to hit stage 4 (depression) or stage 5 (acceptance), because they keep triggering us back to stage 1 by repeatedly continuing the attacks.
well. And when that virus mutates and kills your family and everyone else, then everything will be fixed. That sounds like a very typical conservative mindset.
Yes, yes, we've all read Frank Herbert's novel "The White Plague". One of the reasons for specifically attacking the matrilineal DNA would be to ensure that mutations would only become more (or less) deadly to the target population.
In addition to that, you'd design it as a binary weapon, meaning that you'd attach an incredibly distinct target as a "primer"; most likely, you would utilize the "unnatural base pairs" d5SICS–dNaM, which do not occur in Earth-based life naturally, and use them to target.
This gives you the opportunity to suborn the attach points with a "neutered" primer in order to immunize "desirable" populations with the same matrilineal sequences. This includes people you deem desirable within your own population, and others working for you, but in the target area for the deployment.
The other part of the weapon would use the target sequence attach point to trigger. In other words, you could simply give the virus to everyone -- and it would make everywhere it is a "no go" area for ISIS operatives, lest they fall victim themselves. It also gives you the opportunity to trigger increasing escalation of payloads, should it become necessary.
By the way, making people in ISIS sterile will not prevent them from recruiting more people to their cause, or didn't you think of that?
Yes, of course I did. And then I looked to historical examples of voluntary celibacy in religion as a model of religions with an inability (self imposed) to not reproduce as an example of the consequences of a religion with active recruitment into a non-reproductive population, and the long term outcomes.
The ideal example in this case is the "Shaker" religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... of which there are currently (as of 2010) has 3 full members, and 1 novitiate (someone wanting to become a member), at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine.
It takes a while, but non-reproductive religions, even with active recruitment, die out.
Let me emphasize, I'm not talking about targeting Islam specifically. There's literally no gene for that, and so it's not a useful criteria for establishing a targeting system for a biological weapon. I'm talking about targeting a specific gene in a population that's self-selecting into radical Islam and thus to organization like ISIS. The primer would not even be person-to-person transmissible.
It wouldn't even necessarily have to do anything greater than, say, DVD region encoding, which means you could drop it pretty indiscriminately, an
What's your point? The moon is not a planet and we have visited its surface. And I'm sure we could visit many other moons with a surface. Just drop that hate against "Pluto not being a planet".
It contradicts the part of his statement that I quoted, claiming that "all the remaining planets are gas giants", and it contradicts the implied premise that because there are no planets, there's nothing out there resembling a planetary surface to visit.
Do you even *read* the contents of threads to which you are replying, or is that on;y something non-AC's do?
And your point is? You didn't make one, so that is why I am asking.
Just because you are unwilling to apply your skills in your field in order to solve a problem, doesn't mean that you should be allowed to prevent me from applying my skills in my field to solve the same problem in a different fashion.
Your inability to perceive a solution to the problem is not the same thing as my inability to actually solve it in a useful way, or a "useful enough" way, and your lack of vision shouldn't hamper me from implementing a solution.
What an incredibly useful suggestion. So when robots go to other planets, how is that any different from exploring the solar system. And by the way, do you always talk about killing people who disagree with you? Oh, that was supposed to be funny?
No. It was an engineering solution to an engineering problem.
Problem: Some people like to blow people up more than they like to explore the solar system.
Problem': Some people like to blow people up more than they like to explore the solar system, only they aren't good enough at it that all the people who like to blow up people are not blown up at a rate faster than they can reproduce.
Solution: Slow their rate of reproduction.
Solution': Slow their rate of reproduction by removing them from the gene pool.
Engineering cuts to the heart of matters, in the same way an engineer would not angst themselves to death over how to untie the Gordian Knot, and would instead just cut the damn thing, if the perceived future value of the rope of which it was made was lower than the value of getting the thing out of the way.
For example, in light of past and recent events, I would not be entirely averse to engineering a deadly virus keyed to target matrilineal mitochondrial DNA of the ISIS participants, and render them sterile.
This is probably the most humane way of wiping them from the face of the planet without outright killing them. Of course, that means that they will be robbed of the ability to enjoy the quality of life they consider worthwhile, meaning the killing of other people, genital mutilation, oppression of women to the point of stoning rape victims to death, and raising their sons to be good little jihadis who are willing to wear explosive vests into rock concerts and push the little red button, but I think I can maybe live with that. I'm actually *not* so sure that the rest of us can live *without* it.
A large part of space exploration can be done with telescopes and spectral analysis. Going to space is not only about exploration, its about the building of reliable habitat technology that can ensure the long-term survival of mankind.
Unless you're a roboticist; then it's all about getting funding for robots to go to space.
Unless you're a human; then it's all about getting funding for humans to go to space.
I personally believe we'll "solve" aging by then, and it will likely drive a discussion of whether or not we should and not whether or not we can.
I'll make you a deal... let's "solve" aging.
I'll be in the experimental group, and you can remain in the control group, and then I'll happily discuss "whether or not we should" with you until you are dead, and then I'll go ahead and do it generally anyway.
If people do stop blowing each other up, and star exploring the solar system more, robots can do all of the outer planet mining.
How about we blow up all the people who aren't interested in exploring the solar system more?
Everything that needs to be done can be done by robots, once you engineers get them up to speed.
This sounds like a cop-out by a biologist/psychologist who wants to make it an engineering problem someone else has to solve, rather than a biology/psychology problem that they'd have to solve instead. Stop being a lazy ass and moving your trash to the office next door so that it's their problem to take it out to the dumpster, instead of yours.
The real problem is to create a movable habitat which would actually work. We failed with Biosphere Two, but maybe we will get that thing working once.
Biosphere 2 was an exercise in mental masturbation; what real science could have been accomplished was overwhelmed by commercial interests, or someone would have noted ahead of time that concrete takes centuries to cure, and sequesters CO2 to the point that the plants in the biome inside started dying out, and with them, the people.
It was always intended as a spectacle, which would then morph into a tourist attraction, which would then make money for its investors.
I have no doubt that it would be possible to get 95% of the way there with what we know now, and then fix the remaining 5% by tweaking when things go wrong. One of the big parts of the "spectacle" in Biosphere 2 was "no tweaking allowed, sealed environment". That's no way to do engineering, and it's not even the correct way to do an ongoing science project involving an iterated series of experiments, unless your interest is a scientific interest in perturbation of a system out of homeostasis. In which case, it's *still* necessary to get the damn thing into homeostasis in the first place, so that you can so that.
Even then, you want to make the system design more resilient over time, not just shoot it in the head, unless you are trying to make a strawman argument about the fragility of Earth's ecosystem ("See, Frank! I was able to push this artificial ecosystem over!").
Like when the engineers at Boston Dynamics kicked the robot "Spot" on its side to demonstrate its ability to recover to stability, the point was *not* just to knock the thing over.
Enough. People cannot live in such gravity.
So spin the SOB up and turn it into an O'Neill colony. Problem solved.
The remaining planets are all gas giants and completely impossible for humans to even visit the surface
Only because assholes have reclassified Pluto as "not a planet". Perfectly possible to visit the surface of Pluto.
they would sign up for the military and go bust some rear
Joining the military incurs certain obligations, such as obeying chain of command, and following rules of engagement.
Both of these hamper military efforts against terrorists, who tend to jump to the far side of the line a military unit can not cross, and then yell "Neener, neener!".
Not having these restrictions is sometimes useful.
They're not saying that the offenders shouldn't be insulted. They're saying that calling someone a terriost is generally considerd an insult and that by insulting you cannot determine motive/goals/strategy. Learn to read folks.
Motive, goals, and strategy are things for the debrief, and for the historians, after the fact of stopping them from acting out. All that really matters right now is stopping them from acting out. We can get into the psychology of why they acted out, and what they hoped to accomplish by doing so by examining whatever papers are left over after the fact.
by way of an analogy
"bad black and white film in the camera can not be made in to hi-res color with better lenses"
Avalanche Biotechnologies in Menlo Park and the University of Washington in Seattle have cooperative agreements, and have successfully used gene therapy to treat a number of retinal issues.
Including curing color blindness: http://www.neitzvision.com/con...
You have no clue. OP obviously has a vision problem that cannot be corrected with glasses.
Ironically, one of the contestants on the most recent season of "America's Got Talent" used a technological workaround of wearing Google Glass, with a specialized application that worked around his macular degeneration by distorting the visual field into the "halo". Generally speaking, the brain can "correct" processing, including an image which is flipped upside down, in order to compensate for the image distortion in this particular case.
More on similar applications, here: http://www.visionaware.org/blo...
go straight to a 32" 1080P TV as it's cheaper than a 25" monitor
A lot of televisions will only correctly negotiate EDID on the active input, and won't activate an input other than the primary, without first having a signal.
This tends to be a problem for laptops which are not persistent about negotiating EDID. This tends not to be a problem on Mac OS X, but in general, it's a problem for Windows, which is what the original poster said they had.
Toshiba or Samsung laptops, in particular, have a hard time driving some Samsung televisions, Dell HD monitors, and LG televisions. Mostly these screens tend to not be multithreaded in their electronics, meaning that they won't negotiate the EDID on an inactive (unselected) input when the computer is coming up, and those laptops, and many desktops, aren't very persistent in their attempts to renegotiate until they get an answer.
You're typically better off with a monitor than a television, if you plan to hook it up to a computer, even though there's a tendency towards higher expense compared to the televisions.
I agree that they are pretty aimless. But I'll disagree that it's because of anything inimical, so I'm not going to attach this post as a reply to the other person's.
Google has a problem with productization. Rubin is historically OK with it; he was better at it before Android, but that may have been in part a problem of Android having been acquired, rather than a change in his personal character/charter.
The problem is that you can't make a Google employee work on stuff they don't find interesting, and the last 20%-10% of turning any project into a real product is really a bunch of mundane t-crossing and i-dotting that's not a lot of fun to do, for most people.
Personally, I enjoy owning the "it works" bit, and setting that bit on a product, and I find the milestones "release to manufacturing" and "first ship" and "reorder to stores", really rewarding. I like seeing a product come together. But ... in many ways, the journey to get there requires a lot of "not fun".
The only way to get people to work on things that aren't fun, instead of going to work on the next, new thing -- which is always fun, until you get bored with the new toy, it becomes an old toy, and you want the next new toy -- is to be awesomely inspiring about what you are trying to achieve. It also doesn't hurt, if you happen to be working on something with high visibility that other people have not done before. The self driving car is such a project. So are the "Google vans" for StreetView, if you are into cameras and image stabilization, and space mapping giving limited lanes, and stitching images, and so on.
Without an inspiring leader, they're just working on "hey, we have these neat technologies, and the groups we bought who developed them think that all othe other groups works can be trivially reproduced, and no one is interested on integrating systems (because, hey, let face it, that would be the un fun stuff).
I don't see this problem getting resolved any time soon; they certainly haven't been able to do it with Android (and the recent "let's out Samsung Android bugs to blackmail Samsung and the carriers into rolling out software updates to devices that were supposed to be one trick ponies" is a perfect example of fixing the product at the wrong patch point). There's nothing organizationally that would lead one to believe that they could suddenly "get religion" on this issue.
I'm probably not the person to fix this for them; I'm definitely not an executive type. In the context of Google as it is, it's going to take a project with an extraordinary vision to inspire people to stick out the un fun parts, and then work forward, without people "voting with their feet" to work elsewhere (as happened with Google Reader; once it was a solved problem, it was no longer interesting enough to port onto the new back end infrastructure, and all the principals were off on other more fun stuff).
Personally? If I were Google, I'd start a "Google Products Unit", and make it an elite place to be, and pre-populate it with people who get their rocks of shipping product to millions or billions of people, and touching people's lives in a positive way on a daily basis, rather than living in the worlds largest toy box. And then give them free reign over integrating Google technologies, like all the robotics companies they've bought, or various other things.
It'd be a hard row to hoe, but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people in Google who are just as unhappy with not shipping stuff to large numbers of people as I was during my tenure there, who would jump at the opportunity, even if they were a small percentage of all Googlers.
"WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.”
58.7% of the 25% the know the CMS on is 14.675% of all web sites.
SpaceX started in 2002; Reaction Engines Ltd started in 1989; SpaceX reached the ISS in 1012. Looks like Reaction Engines Ltd is 21 years behind, unless you count only their Skylon project, in which case it's almost 2 years behind.
Sorry. I'm massively unimpressed. Build something, already.
"haven't been able to resolve issues with the drone falling apart "
It doesn't sound like they need more funding; it sounds like they need better engineers.
Because it's the FTC's job, not the FCC's.
The Federal Trade Commission regulates things like this -- business interactions with customers -- in the same way it regulates the federal Do Not Call list.
If you are asking the FCC to regulate this, you are asking the wrong regulatory body; you might as well be asking the FDA to regulate it, because you think that being tracked all the time is injurious to people's mental health.
"Thanks for the TPP fast track power... about that whole pipeline thing you were supposed to get in exchange for that? April fools!"
AND, because we now cant use the pipeline to transport the oil, there remains the trucking and rail industries moving it instead causing greater on-going wear and tear on the US transportation infrastructure, degrading the roads and bridges more quickly, and causing the price tag to repair that infrastructure to rise on a daily basis.
Pretty sure that's supposed to be covered by the at the pump gas tax. That is what my politicians tell me, each time they raise the at the pump gas tax.
Apple no longer looks as paranoid as it did.
Previously, they did not permit the use of third party libraries in your application; everything had to be built or sourced by you, because there's no intermediate library signing and vetting process that Apple can do on your behalf. They relaxed this when developers screamed like a stuck pig.
They are looking a lot less paranoid in their prior restriction, now.
I'm happy that Apple was clever enough to reject the App, and somewhat disappointed that the developers had such a hard time reading the rejection notice that they were left scratching their heads.
The actual big news here: The company doing the indiegogo is located in Shenzhen, China.
This is the first one of these I've seen. It struck me as very odd that the video narrator was an almost perfect midwest accent, but had terrible grammar and word choice, but when looking at the location of the startup, it became more obvious that this was actually an Indiegogo out of China.
Anyway, good on them; I expect that we will be seeing a lot more people doing crowd-sourcing from non-U.S. locations, given that VC thends to be pretty tight outside of specific regions of the U.S. (which is, in turn, why most startups that go anywhere are U.S. based, rather than being in Europe, or elsewhere, where the funding climate is pretty terrible).