I doubt Nokia wants to be involved in a clone of the iPhone's GUI for their devices. China however, that's another story. You should call up one of those device knockoff companies; they'd love to be involved with your software project (no sarcasm intended).
The eyes seem better than his last effort, but the mouth area is really where it falls short. There isn't enough subtlety in mimicking muscle movements around the lip area, and the mouth opening and closing is a real giveaway. Although the jaw hinge seems a bit off, I think what's really going on is the lack of skin movement during articulation. The "skin" not visibly stretching creates a plastic, robotic appearance. Still, it's interesting work.
I don't agree that we should be making robots that look like people though. It seems like a conscious attempt at anthropomorphism, and even if the physical appearance eventually becomes flawless, there will always be an uncanny valley in the way the robot fails to act with human subtlety.
Yes, yes. Imply. My brain virus was typing for me.
The following quote is what I based my comment on. Anyway, this is a ridiculous thread to spend time on.
"One thing that does bug me about Yelp is the way people suddenly develop enthusiasms for businesses of limited merit. Three or four times I've gone out for lunch based on Yelp reviews and been a little puzzled as to what all the fuss was about."
No. Yelp's level is corruption resides from 0 to 1. I know not the level, and didn't mean to imply as such. My point was, regardless of alleged corruption it has been pretty useful to me, while you seemed to infer it is not.
Yelp is a bit like government. It may be corrupt to a lesser or greater degree, but occasionally it's quite useful. I was just in NYC, and being vegan it was quite helpful in finding good restaurants in short order.
Speaking of the military-industrial complex, I'd love to see a comparison of cost overruns between the DoD and NASA. I'd wager that NASA has a much better track record at shipping product, and at a substantially less cost excess.
I've had my beloved DirecTiVo since 2002. Sadly, it finally kicked the bucket last night. About a month ago it started having problems connecting, would forget to record shows, then one of the sat inputs stopped working, and then finally just wouldn't boot anymore.
The saddest part to this story is, TiVo has no replacement unit waiting for me after all this time. I'd love to have an HD TiVo that works with DirecTV, but it's still not out (been in dev over two years). So now I can't even watch TV since it was also my DirecTV tuner.. I don't know whether to wait, or switch to DISH (since I'm not going to get into the DirecTV scam of "leasing" their DVR for $250 and then paying a "lease charge" every month on top of that). It's a real business failure. It's always disappointing to see a company with so much potential squander it or succumb to market forces.
Where did the $800,000 go? Are we to assume that this money simply vanished? If not, then this person sounds pretty successful to me, and "staring down the barrel of a gun" seems just a tad over the top. It seems like they've either left out details or spun them for the sake of a sensational, contrarian narrative. I know - the media never does that, right?
Obviously he spent it partying in Las Vegas and NY on the weekends.
At my company, we had a iPhone games company, which develops many of the top-25 games in the store, come in and give their pitch. The story for them was a little different. They agreed that you aren't going to make a lot of money on the *sale* of iPhone apps. But where they make their money is in-game advertisements. They make much more money on the "free" versions of the app. In this way, it is not much different than the story of the web.
I just saw an Iranian reporter tweet "I am accessing twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port:80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here.pls RT"
Don't know if that will help anyone in the area, but thought I'd spread the word.
I think these findings start to beg the questions, is a colossal black hole at the center of every galaxy, and are galaxies created *because* of colossal black holes?
Honestly, it is leaps and bounds faster and more stable than 2.x. I too felt a malaise setting in with Firefox 2. Terrible memory leaks on OS X, sluggish performance, and a slowdown of innovative features. All that has been rectified. On top of that, 3 adds some real innovation to the browser space, such as the location bar "search-as-you-type" feature.
Beta 3 has one new feature that I've been waiting years for - you can now type shortcuts in the location bar to reference installed search engines. For instance, if you've set up "g" as the shortcut for google, then type "g vegan restaurants" and you'll get the results immediately. Mozilla had this, but it never made it over to Firefox until now. Thanks to the dev who implemented this feature; I owe you a beer.
So please, definitely try out the Firefox 3 beta. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I agree that giving children implants is a little suspect. I liken the implants to Wii Sports. It's easy to pick up and play that game if you are already familiar with the motions of the real sports, but otherwise you may have trouble understanding what to do. The same holds for the cochlear implants - if you don't know what a bird sounds like, it'll be much harder to train your brain to interpret the digital interface as such.
On top of that, I'm not sure that most children have the maturity and patience to go through the arduous process of this training period. Even for adults it can be very frustrating. I met a woman who had one, and she wasn't much better than she was before the operation a year prior because she didn't have much support from her husband and didn't have a proactive, DIY attitude.
My mother-in-law just recently had surgery to implant a cochlear implant in her other ear. It is the most amazing piece of technology I've seen.
Before she had the implants, she was pretty close to being deaf. She got by mostly from lip-reading, and could only discern loud sounds with a hearing aid. Once her brain became "trained" to the digital interface (which took a few months, though everyone is different and some only receive modest success), she could hear birds chirping, cola fizzing, and other assorted sounds we take for granted. She can listen to music now, whereas before it was a headache-inducing mess. And get this, she can plug her iPod directly into the implant. No headphones needed. But most importantly, she can hear her granddaughter's voice. She now feels confidence to interact with society, whereas before she had to struggle to succeed in it. The side-benefit of the implant and her hearing condition is that she can turn them off at will when she hears something that annoys her. I'm sure there's occasions in which all of us could use that feature.;)
So, I'm sorry for your friend's experience with theirs - it could be a different brand than what my mother-in-law has (there are about three companies producing them), but she has had a life-changing experience with hers.
It seems like most of you are acting as blindly as the people you seem to disdain. To really break new ground in science, one must have an open mind to the possibility that we don't quite understand all of the biologic and physical properties of this planet.
What I am seeing from this thread are a bunch of people who are falling into groupthink because they don't want to be seen as foolish, which is sort of a microcosm for how the science community treats any investigation into the paranormal unknown. The fact that there are charlatans in this field of study polarizes things even more, but did we stop research into fusion because two guys claimed a free energy source out of their kitchen sink?
I was always quite the skeptic myself, but my wife and I have both had personal experiences that defy logical explanation. In one apartment we lived in, we were talking on the sofa and a glass bowl in front of us suddenly gained horizontal velocity and flew off the shelf it rested on, landing about a foot away. This bowl had enough mass that it would not be blown by a draft or toppled by vibrations, and its center of gravity low enough to make those events unlikely. This was just one of several incidents at that apartment.
If you have never had a personal experience like that one, it is hard to put any stock in such wild claims. But when you do, you begin to realize that there are strange phenomena happening all over our planet being completely overlooked by mainstream scientists. Am I going to necessarily attribute the experiences I've had to spirits? Maybe, maybe not. But I recognize that they represent phenomena that are totally at odds with our present understanding of the physical universe, and they should be investigated seriously as such.
It's not completely computer-controlled. The firing control is still overseen by operators. The actual "story" here, aside from the sad loss of life, is that the equipment malfunctioned. There is no advanced AI here and its not autonomous, and that is required in the commonly-accepted definition of robots.
This entire story is inaccurate. The Oerlikon weapons system they were using is a variant of a towed anti-air gun first made in 1955. This version has a computer-based, laser-guided targeting system. But it was made in 1985. This is not robots gone crazy. This is just a software glitch (or perhaps hardware failure) from an outdated system. This is not a fracking robot.
This is typical of recent slashdot who is trying to compete more with the sensationalism of digg and other tech blogs. No fact-checking, just throw it up and wait for the ad impressions to roll in.
But isn't the worst kind of oppression one in which the common person is enlisted to turn on their neighbors? It's much harder to stand against people who are only in it for economic profit, and have no moral compass to guide them, than to fight against radicalized factions. In fact, this is mostly why we saw the Burmese uprising go nowhere -- the army was too used to being well-fed compared to the rest of the population.
What do you mean? We are besieged by them every day! They have infiltrated the highest levels of our government and the lowest levels of bureaucracy. We live in dangerous times, my friend.
Although rice rockets are the modern equivalent, this kind of looks-over-performance started back in the '50s during the custom car craze. The Beach Boys wrote a song about it called "No-Go Showboat":
"Well the engine compartment's filled with all chrome goodies
In my no-go showboat (no-go showboat)
Yeah but everybody takes me even old Ford woodies
In my no-go showboat (no-go showboat)
When it comes to speed, man, I'm just outa luck
I'm even shut down by the ice cream truck
'Cause it's a no-go showboat (no-go showboat)"
Of course, at least back then the posers cared enough to use nice-looking parts. Rice rockets these days just use whatever $2 part looks like it might fit.
You should definitely check out Gatchaman, then. It has a more compelling storyline and "adult" tone. The series is available on DVD, and they include the G-Force episodes as bonus features.
It is sad that China cannot learn from the mistakes of the west. Your China is like America in the 1950s. All properity, all industry, no ecology. In 40 years, China and the world will be weeping at the ecological damage you have wrought upon the earth. Already you are poisoning your own people with smog.
The Three Gorges Dam is an environmental, archaeological, and socioeconomic disaster. Important archaeological sites have been submerged, whole towns have been moved, and the Yangtze ecosystem will be forever altered. The Chinese government is ignorant, foolish, and power-hungry. This isn't much different than many western governments, but they have the benefit of some amount of public accountability due to their democratic leanings. China is being led down a dark path by people who are sacrificing China's natural resources in exchange for short-term benefits.
Actually, no. Voltron took a huge influence from the anime series Gatchaman which ran in the early 1970s. It was the first anime to feature team dynamics, and set up many standard elements of later anime shows. It was produced by Tatsunoko Studios, who also did such early series as Speed Racer and Astro Boy. It was (and still is) a hugely loved series by the Japanese. Gatchaman was later brought to the States in Americanized, no-violence form as "G-Force: Battle of the Planets." Incidentally, Gatchaman is also in production as a movie, although it is being done in CG.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt Nokia wants to be involved in a clone of the iPhone's GUI for their devices. China however, that's another story. You should call up one of those device knockoff companies; they'd love to be involved with your software project (no sarcasm intended).
The eyes seem better than his last effort, but the mouth area is really where it falls short. There isn't enough subtlety in mimicking muscle movements around the lip area, and the mouth opening and closing is a real giveaway. Although the jaw hinge seems a bit off, I think what's really going on is the lack of skin movement during articulation. The "skin" not visibly stretching creates a plastic, robotic appearance. Still, it's interesting work. I don't agree that we should be making robots that look like people though. It seems like a conscious attempt at anthropomorphism, and even if the physical appearance eventually becomes flawless, there will always be an uncanny valley in the way the robot fails to act with human subtlety.
I just read that again. Nevermind. As I said, brain virus.
Yes, yes. Imply. My brain virus was typing for me. The following quote is what I based my comment on. Anyway, this is a ridiculous thread to spend time on. "One thing that does bug me about Yelp is the way people suddenly develop enthusiasms for businesses of limited merit. Three or four times I've gone out for lunch based on Yelp reviews and been a little puzzled as to what all the fuss was about."
No. Yelp's level is corruption resides from 0 to 1. I know not the level, and didn't mean to imply as such. My point was, regardless of alleged corruption it has been pretty useful to me, while you seemed to infer it is not.
Yelp is a bit like government. It may be corrupt to a lesser or greater degree, but occasionally it's quite useful. I was just in NYC, and being vegan it was quite helpful in finding good restaurants in short order.
Speaking of the military-industrial complex, I'd love to see a comparison of cost overruns between the DoD and NASA. I'd wager that NASA has a much better track record at shipping product, and at a substantially less cost excess.
I've had my beloved DirecTiVo since 2002. Sadly, it finally kicked the bucket last night. About a month ago it started having problems connecting, would forget to record shows, then one of the sat inputs stopped working, and then finally just wouldn't boot anymore. The saddest part to this story is, TiVo has no replacement unit waiting for me after all this time. I'd love to have an HD TiVo that works with DirecTV, but it's still not out (been in dev over two years). So now I can't even watch TV since it was also my DirecTV tuner.. I don't know whether to wait, or switch to DISH (since I'm not going to get into the DirecTV scam of "leasing" their DVR for $250 and then paying a "lease charge" every month on top of that). It's a real business failure. It's always disappointing to see a company with so much potential squander it or succumb to market forces.
All they had to do was play Moon Patrol to figure that out.
Where did the $800,000 go? Are we to assume that this money simply vanished? If not, then this person sounds pretty successful to me, and "staring down the barrel of a gun" seems just a tad over the top. It seems like they've either left out details or spun them for the sake of a sensational, contrarian narrative. I know - the media never does that, right?
Obviously he spent it partying in Las Vegas and NY on the weekends.
At my company, we had a iPhone games company, which develops many of the top-25 games in the store, come in and give their pitch. The story for them was a little different. They agreed that you aren't going to make a lot of money on the *sale* of iPhone apps. But where they make their money is in-game advertisements. They make much more money on the "free" versions of the app. In this way, it is not much different than the story of the web.
I just saw an Iranian reporter tweet "I am accessing twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port:80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here.pls RT" Don't know if that will help anyone in the area, but thought I'd spread the word.
I think these findings start to beg the questions, is a colossal black hole at the center of every galaxy, and are galaxies created *because* of colossal black holes?
I'm afraid that believing you would put my entire world-view into a tailspin. All that time wasted...
Thanks for the amusing anecdote.
Honestly, it is leaps and bounds faster and more stable than 2.x. I too felt a malaise setting in with Firefox 2. Terrible memory leaks on OS X, sluggish performance, and a slowdown of innovative features. All that has been rectified. On top of that, 3 adds some real innovation to the browser space, such as the location bar "search-as-you-type" feature.
Beta 3 has one new feature that I've been waiting years for - you can now type shortcuts in the location bar to reference installed search engines. For instance, if you've set up "g" as the shortcut for google, then type "g vegan restaurants" and you'll get the results immediately. Mozilla had this, but it never made it over to Firefox until now. Thanks to the dev who implemented this feature; I owe you a beer.
So please, definitely try out the Firefox 3 beta. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I agree that giving children implants is a little suspect. I liken the implants to Wii Sports. It's easy to pick up and play that game if you are already familiar with the motions of the real sports, but otherwise you may have trouble understanding what to do. The same holds for the cochlear implants - if you don't know what a bird sounds like, it'll be much harder to train your brain to interpret the digital interface as such.
On top of that, I'm not sure that most children have the maturity and patience to go through the arduous process of this training period. Even for adults it can be very frustrating. I met a woman who had one, and she wasn't much better than she was before the operation a year prior because she didn't have much support from her husband and didn't have a proactive, DIY attitude.
My mother-in-law just recently had surgery to implant a cochlear implant in her other ear. It is the most amazing piece of technology I've seen.
;)
Before she had the implants, she was pretty close to being deaf. She got by mostly from lip-reading, and could only discern loud sounds with a hearing aid. Once her brain became "trained" to the digital interface (which took a few months, though everyone is different and some only receive modest success), she could hear birds chirping, cola fizzing, and other assorted sounds we take for granted. She can listen to music now, whereas before it was a headache-inducing mess. And get this, she can plug her iPod directly into the implant. No headphones needed. But most importantly, she can hear her granddaughter's voice. She now feels confidence to interact with society, whereas before she had to struggle to succeed in it. The side-benefit of the implant and her hearing condition is that she can turn them off at will when she hears something that annoys her. I'm sure there's occasions in which all of us could use that feature.
So, I'm sorry for your friend's experience with theirs - it could be a different brand than what my mother-in-law has (there are about three companies producing them), but she has had a life-changing experience with hers.
It seems like most of you are acting as blindly as the people you seem to disdain. To really break new ground in science, one must have an open mind to the possibility that we don't quite understand all of the biologic and physical properties of this planet.
What I am seeing from this thread are a bunch of people who are falling into groupthink because they don't want to be seen as foolish, which is sort of a microcosm for how the science community treats any investigation into the paranormal unknown. The fact that there are charlatans in this field of study polarizes things even more, but did we stop research into fusion because two guys claimed a free energy source out of their kitchen sink?
I was always quite the skeptic myself, but my wife and I have both had personal experiences that defy logical explanation. In one apartment we lived in, we were talking on the sofa and a glass bowl in front of us suddenly gained horizontal velocity and flew off the shelf it rested on, landing about a foot away. This bowl had enough mass that it would not be blown by a draft or toppled by vibrations, and its center of gravity low enough to make those events unlikely. This was just one of several incidents at that apartment.
If you have never had a personal experience like that one, it is hard to put any stock in such wild claims. But when you do, you begin to realize that there are strange phenomena happening all over our planet being completely overlooked by mainstream scientists. Am I going to necessarily attribute the experiences I've had to spirits? Maybe, maybe not. But I recognize that they represent phenomena that are totally at odds with our present understanding of the physical universe, and they should be investigated seriously as such.
It's not completely computer-controlled. The firing control is still overseen by operators. The actual "story" here, aside from the sad loss of life, is that the equipment malfunctioned. There is no advanced AI here and its not autonomous, and that is required in the commonly-accepted definition of robots.
This entire story is inaccurate. The Oerlikon weapons system they were using is a variant of a towed anti-air gun first made in 1955. This version has a computer-based, laser-guided targeting system. But it was made in 1985. This is not robots gone crazy. This is just a software glitch (or perhaps hardware failure) from an outdated system. This is not a fracking robot.
This is typical of recent slashdot who is trying to compete more with the sensationalism of digg and other tech blogs. No fact-checking, just throw it up and wait for the ad impressions to roll in.
But isn't the worst kind of oppression one in which the common person is enlisted to turn on their neighbors? It's much harder to stand against people who are only in it for economic profit, and have no moral compass to guide them, than to fight against radicalized factions. In fact, this is mostly why we saw the Burmese uprising go nowhere -- the army was too used to being well-fed compared to the rest of the population.
What do you mean? We are besieged by them every day! They have infiltrated the highest levels of our government and the lowest levels of bureaucracy. We live in dangerous times, my friend.
Although rice rockets are the modern equivalent, this kind of looks-over-performance started back in the '50s during the custom car craze. The Beach Boys wrote a song about it called "No-Go Showboat":
"Well the engine compartment's filled with all chrome goodies
In my no-go showboat (no-go showboat)
Yeah but everybody takes me even old Ford woodies
In my no-go showboat (no-go showboat)
When it comes to speed, man, I'm just outa luck
I'm even shut down by the ice cream truck
'Cause it's a no-go showboat (no-go showboat)"
Of course, at least back then the posers cared enough to use nice-looking parts. Rice rockets these days just use whatever $2 part looks like it might fit.
You should definitely check out Gatchaman, then. It has a more compelling storyline and "adult" tone. The series is available on DVD, and they include the G-Force episodes as bonus features.
It is sad that China cannot learn from the mistakes of the west. Your China is like America in the 1950s. All properity, all industry, no ecology. In 40 years, China and the world will be weeping at the ecological damage you have wrought upon the earth. Already you are poisoning your own people with smog. The Three Gorges Dam is an environmental, archaeological, and socioeconomic disaster. Important archaeological sites have been submerged, whole towns have been moved, and the Yangtze ecosystem will be forever altered. The Chinese government is ignorant, foolish, and power-hungry. This isn't much different than many western governments, but they have the benefit of some amount of public accountability due to their democratic leanings. China is being led down a dark path by people who are sacrificing China's natural resources in exchange for short-term benefits.
Actually, no. Voltron took a huge influence from the anime series Gatchaman which ran in the early 1970s. It was the first anime to feature team dynamics, and set up many standard elements of later anime shows. It was produced by Tatsunoko Studios, who also did such early series as Speed Racer and Astro Boy. It was (and still is) a hugely loved series by the Japanese. Gatchaman was later brought to the States in Americanized, no-violence form as "G-Force: Battle of the Planets." Incidentally, Gatchaman is also in production as a movie, although it is being done in CG.