There's already a metric that basically defines video sharpness: bitrate.
The sharpness of H.264 and H.265 is very well known. Since commercial streaming services use commercial streaming video codecs, it's a pretty safe bet that you can almost directly correlate resolution to bitrate.
There's virtually no incentive for streaming companies to deliver lower resolutions at higher bitrates. It would be a technical challenge to deliver higher resolutions at higher bitrates.
Therefore, bitrate is most likely the simplest and most accurate measure of streaming video sharpness.
Frightening.
Jack just equated "meaningful conversation" with "what statements provoke the most responses".
Welcome to the future of Twiiter, where clickbait and trolling is considered "meaningful" simply because they provoke the most responses.
What is it with bizarrely negative anti-Google summaries lately? "Give into the Youtube Empire?" What did they give into? "Youtube Empire"? Very sly using the phrase "Empire" to give a negative slant against Youtube.
Consider the reality:
1. The Youtube channels previously managed by VEVO have returned to their respective artists (e.g. TaylorSwiftVEVO is now TaylorSwift)
2. The Youtube artists with VEVO-branded music videos are still with their respective VEVO-owned labels (using Taylor Swift as an example again - RCA, which in turn is Sony.)
3. Therefore, the status qo is maintained.
There are two real questions:
1. How much of the artists' videos were produced in part or in whole by VEVO money?
2. How much (if anything) will artists now be able to make off legacy and future video monetization?
My head hurts from the stupid, sensationalist, clickbaity trash that media has become.
The summary reads "MIT will terminate the research contract with Media Lab professor and neuroscientist Edward Boyden."
This statement is false. If you read the article, you will see the following statement: "Professor Boyden has no personal affiliation -- financial, operational, or contractual -- with the company Nectome."
Boyden's adviser, Deisseroth, developed CLARITY. One part of Boyden's ressearch, among many other things, involves using his adviser's CLARITY method to perform imaging of neurobiological samples (that is, expansion microscopy.)
What the article DOES say is "MIT is party to a subcontract under an NIMH small business grant awarded to Nectome, with the Boyden group working on an academic research project to combine aspects of Nectome's chemistry with the Boyden group's invention, expansion microscopy," What this means is that someone on Boyden's team was doing research with Nectome's chemistry along with Boyden's expansion microscopy method.
Therefore, the correct summary is, "MIT will terminate the research contract with Nectome." full stop.
These are respectable researchers and I feel we have to make a strong effort to make sure the correct story is told.
OTEC isn't a serious contender for green energy. It sounds good because it seems to combine romantic elements of green energy: limitless sea water, temperature gradients with huge thermal sinking ability, minimal environmental impact, etc. The truth of the matter is that OTEC has serious fundamental limitations, the worst of which is the fact that economically viable energy output requires enormous amounts of water flow - beyond what is capable with modern technology. Pulling an ultra-high flow water column from deep enough in the ocean to create a good thermal differential from surface water requires enormous pipes, which current materials technology can't deliver - because the tensile strength of even the strongest materials would buckle under the weight of the pipes themselves. Heat exchanges have to be very efficient, and sea life/creatures easily clog up the internals of the heat exchangers, so conformal coatings have to be developed to allow good thermal transfer while preventing the accumulation of bio. Finally, it just can't compete with simple proven solutions like hydro-electric.
Look at any company that bids on OTEC and you'll see that the real funding vessels are in conformal coatings, materials technology, and pump technology, among other things. I don't forsee anyone building a viable OTEC plant for the purpose of commercial energy production anytime soon.
Like most DARPA competitions, this is not for novel research into techniques. The solution is usually selected from available technologies. I'm assuming that the most likely candidate is MIMO and null steering.
To understand his phrase about "straight from hell" one must understand his theological viewpoint.
Unless he was the sole member on the committee, I don't see any of what he said as problematic. Dissent is healthy. This is a democracy, and he as well as anyone else has the ability to speak their mind.
As a scientist myself, I don't take offense at his viewpoint, though his choice of phrasing is very politically incorrect.
The Pre-Crime system operated under a fundamental assertion that any crime predicted by the pre-cogs was 100% - without a doubt - going to happen.
The Pre-Crime system didn't use an inference engine with an incomplete dataset to determine if crime was going to happen. It used grown-up crack babies to actually predict the future - a priori.
Without that fundamental assertion, you can't have a Pre-Crime system. You might have a "Potential Crime" system, but try flying that one in the courts.
The heavy press is essentially an enormous metalworking machine, the theoretical background of which is well understood. The basic machine is primitive. What makes it significant is that it provides unique utility simply because of its scale.
What would be comparable in modern terms are gigantic, high-speed rapid prototyping machines with work envelopes exceeding 50 x 50 x 50 feet. Preferably selective laser-sintering, with the ability to build the entire mechanical structure of a jet without a single weld or rivet.
First question: How do I work from home? Answer: Easy. Ask your manager. You need a job first.
Second question: How do I get a tech job? Answer: Difficult. Prove that you can do the work. Most people start with a traditional job search.
Lump the two questions together and you are asking for a long wait.
I've known competent tech guys who thought that they could levy their connections into early retirement and lucrative work-from-home contracts. Some of those guys keep jobs, but a lot of them end up losing them. Being a commercially employed person will sober you to the fact that contracts come and go rapidly (within years) and when a manager who can vouch for you goes away, and you're not around to defend yourself, you're typically the first on the chopping block.
The only people I've seen who succeeded in working from home for 10-20 years are wealthy people who made millions beforehand and have the financial temerity to take on potentially years of joblessness. Ironically, they all seem SO happy! But I guess having a few million dollars in the bank helps.
I would place his whole discussion under the topic of Academic Dishonesty in general, regardless of the means by which this dishonesty occurs. I see very little difference between using notes written on the palm of your hand vice a wifi connection and some electronic device except by virtue of complication. The conclusion is that regardless of how elaborately one performs Academic Dishonesty, it doesn't lose its unacceptability - and consequently its prosecution under any accredited university's Academic Dishonesty policy.
The fact that you have to ask this question means to me that your department either does not have, or has not communicated to you its Academic Dishonesty policy. For example, MIT's policy is fairly straightforward and designed to build relationships between the head of the department (i.e. your boss) and giving students the feeling that they are not being downtrodden (if they don't agree with you, they can talk to your boss.)
Before you attempt to ask Slashdot, I would use this as an opportunity to have a meaningful discussion with your department head. One, to let him/her know that you exist and care about larger issues than simply "doing your job" and two, to make sure you don't end up with the short end of the stick when some student reads your school's Academic Dishonesty policy before you do, and you find out that a very wrong time that you and your department head do not agree on this subject.
The second photo of the screen was edited, but it appears it was modified only to reduce the brightness/contrast of the image on the screen, which exceeded the contrast ratio of the medium. Note how the hair on the individuals is darker than the rest of their bodies.
If the editing wasn't done, the screen would have been an unreadable white, which would have made for a really crappy photo.
The "real" problem with the centrifuges that Costner invested in is that they can't possibly flow enough water to put a dent in the Gulf Oil Spill. The IEEE article's calculation of the centrifuge's capacity assumes they're basically sticking a hose right on top of the oil spill, which is hardly realistic.
Even assuming that the majority of the oil spilled is in the first 3 inches of water, a 1 mile by 1 mile area would need to have 50 million gallons filtered. 3 of the centrifuges could process 600,000 gallons per day, and so would take 83 days to complete a 1 mile x 1 mile x 3 inch deep volume of water. With an oil spill covering roughly 8,000 square miles, 700,000 days would be required.
So under ideal conditions (all the oil was concentrated in one spot and easy to collect), it would take over 6000 centrifuges to process the "ideal spill" in one year.
I think the centrifuges could be quite useful for filtering small, localized areas (protected wetlands, beaches, coves, etc), but the open ocean is just so massive that no device could effectively take care of it. In my opinion, a solution leveraging nature itself would be ideal.
In actuality, the correct term is "exaflop." This is widely accepted vocabulary in academia - especially in Computer Science. I've never read a single paper with the kind of terminology you are ascribing to "haste". "Quintillion FLOPs" doesn't even make sense, as FLOPs are an abstract unit, not physical objects. The only flops that number in the Quintillions are those directed by Uwe Boll.
Perhaps next you'd like to inform me that only the "really smart people" use the term Billihertz instead of Gigahertz? If that's the case, then us "dumb" people will let you continue on your genius-like way.
Let's think about this for a second. For the most part, it's trivial to find someone responsible for content on the internet - in any country.
The anon.penet.fi remailer was an early attempt at true email privacy, but even that experiment was terribly flawed because, among other things, it was beholden to the legal system of the Finnish government (and most famously attacked by the Church of Scientology. Weird, but true.) But why was anon.penet.fi required? It certainly wasn't because the internet was anonymous. In short - the very fact that anonymizers exist at all is basic - users are easy to identify on the internet without some fairly complex systems to allow anonymity.
Given that the internet isn't anonymous in the first place, it makes very little sense to force a lack of anonymity on the internet. It's inherently wasteful and doesn't solve any of the real problems (lack of internet access to the world's poor/rural people, running out of namespace, lack of bandwidth, last mile)
Here's an idea for you Kaspersky, go sell your worthless crap in China. They'd love it.
Call me a skeptic, but I find it hard to believe that surface etching can cause the photon absorption characteristics of the material to change, a property which has more to do with the atomic structure of the material than its gross features.
This leads me to believe that the color properties of the material are probably due to anisotropic reflection - meaning that the difference between "light" and "dark" between frequencies is the difference between "reflective" and "matte". Therefore, the intensity of the color produced by this method is limited by some mean function of available light, viewing angle, and the minimum feature size - which is limited by the material and not by the laser being used. Therefore, I would expect a material like gold, which exceptional stability to have the most intense colors providable by this method, which is a bit ironic, considering the subject of the article.
I don't see General Lee Orange "painted by laser" onto a 1969 Dodge Charger any time soon.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will smell my fear. I will permit it to pass through my nostrils over my nose-hairs. And when the smell of fear is gone I will turn and face the source of fear-scent, and only I will remain.
A Metal Enclosure is not a catch-all electromagnetic shield. In fact, a Faraday cage is only perfect for an electrostatic field - but due to the resistance of the cage material, the faraday cage can be penetrated by high frequency electromagnetic radiation.
Second, electromagnetic radiation can be steered electronically with multiple antennas acting as a phased array. In short, the disabling beam can "focused" and "directed" to an arbitrary accuracy dependent only on the radiation frequency and the processing circuitry. In short, the beam does not "only go straight." It could quite easily have a beamwidth of 1 meter at 100 meters and "follow" targets.
Third, all reflections of the device would be diffuse (d^2 attentuation in air) - even if the surface is "mirrored". You do understand that "mirrored" surfaces are only mirrors for visible frequencies?
In short, tight-fitting body panels, firewalls, hoods, ECU enclosures, can be penetrated. The radiation can be steered. The radiation can be focused. And no, it isn't going to reflect in a dangerous way.
One of the conclusions drawn from this article is that the "Uncanny Valley" is a culturally dependant phenomenon. Then is the "Uncanny Valley" similar to the characteristics of beauty, which are known to differ by culture? If so, then can it be considered a matter of aesthetics? Is it purely individual? Are there certain robot characteristics that are "universally" uncanny or...canny?
One of these days, someone is going to start a web site called, "RobotOrNot", allowing people to rate robots from 1 to 10, with 1 being obviously machine (like a toaster) and 10 being a picture of Kristanna Loken.
That's why disturbing the peace is a notion we all understand. But the law works FOR this clown, too. This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, this is only true in certain circumstances. The right to assembly is actually writ in law as the "Right to Assemble peaceably". If the assembly becomes, or poses what is deemed to be a physical threat, then it's tasertime, or worse.
While the term "police state" may be hyperbole, there is still a valid point being made - who determines when the assembly is no longer "peaceable"? Well, actually, that is the executive branch's decision, AKA the Law Enforcement. Hopefully you understand that.
It seems to me that the idea here is that vocal, unruly, rebellious or obstinate students are the ones that pose the most threat to the student body, teachers, staff, and property. From an administrative perspective, I'm guessing that the Campus Police are being told to enforce and project an image of authority, mostly to prevent strange things from happening or people from disturbing the peace. I'm not sure if I'm willing to debate that issue, since oftentimes it's an incident-by-incident judgement call and ultimately the UFL will reap what it sows.
What I find really sad about this incident, however, is that it shows how ineffective the established campus protection system is at preventing real violence from happening. In the latest string of school shootings - Columbine, Heritage, Santana, Rocori, Red Lake, Platte Canyon, Weston, Henry Foss, and most recently VT - the simple fact of the matter is that violent crime was perpetrated suddenly and without warning. There was no "angry rant" before pulling out a weapon and killing someone. The violent confrontations are premeditated - these aren't "crimes of passion", so to speak.
It reminds of David Owen's New Yorker Article which talks about how large floodlights installed in unmonitored locations, designed originally to prevent crime, actually do nothing at night but making it easier for real criminals to see what they are doing. One arguably positive effect is that you prevent a lot of dorked-up but probably harmless people from loitering in an open parking lot. One big problem is that you also provide plenty of light for a gang of hardened criminals to bash a door lock, open a loading door, and steal as much as they can in as short an amount of time as possible.
The idea is that creating generic enforcement policies doesn't really prevent people who are truly intent on committing a crime from doing nefarious things. Tasering a protestor might be textbook law enforcement, but it still doesn't make me feel safer when I walk onto a college campus. In some ways, it makes me feel more unsettled.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, correction to the above: It would be a technical challenge to deliver higher resolutions at LOWER bitrates.
There's already a metric that basically defines video sharpness: bitrate.
The sharpness of H.264 and H.265 is very well known. Since commercial streaming services use commercial streaming video codecs, it's a pretty safe bet that you can almost directly correlate resolution to bitrate.
There's virtually no incentive for streaming companies to deliver lower resolutions at higher bitrates. It would be a technical challenge to deliver higher resolutions at higher bitrates.
Therefore, bitrate is most likely the simplest and most accurate measure of streaming video sharpness.
Frightening. Jack just equated "meaningful conversation" with "what statements provoke the most responses". Welcome to the future of Twiiter, where clickbait and trolling is considered "meaningful" simply because they provoke the most responses.
What is it with bizarrely negative anti-Google summaries lately? "Give into the Youtube Empire?" What did they give into? "Youtube Empire"? Very sly using the phrase "Empire" to give a negative slant against Youtube. Consider the reality: 1. The Youtube channels previously managed by VEVO have returned to their respective artists (e.g. TaylorSwiftVEVO is now TaylorSwift) 2. The Youtube artists with VEVO-branded music videos are still with their respective VEVO-owned labels (using Taylor Swift as an example again - RCA, which in turn is Sony.) 3. Therefore, the status qo is maintained. There are two real questions: 1. How much of the artists' videos were produced in part or in whole by VEVO money? 2. How much (if anything) will artists now be able to make off legacy and future video monetization? My head hurts from the stupid, sensationalist, clickbaity trash that media has become.
The summary reads "MIT will terminate the research contract with Media Lab professor and neuroscientist Edward Boyden."
This statement is false. If you read the article, you will see the following statement: "Professor Boyden has no personal affiliation -- financial, operational, or contractual -- with the company Nectome."
Boyden's adviser, Deisseroth, developed CLARITY. One part of Boyden's ressearch, among many other things, involves using his adviser's CLARITY method to perform imaging of neurobiological samples (that is, expansion microscopy.)
What the article DOES say is "MIT is party to a subcontract under an NIMH small business grant awarded to Nectome, with the Boyden group working on an academic research project to combine aspects of Nectome's chemistry with the Boyden group's invention, expansion microscopy," What this means is that someone on Boyden's team was doing research with Nectome's chemistry along with Boyden's expansion microscopy method.
Therefore, the correct summary is, "MIT will terminate the research contract with Nectome." full stop.
These are respectable researchers and I feel we have to make a strong effort to make sure the correct story is told.
OTEC isn't a serious contender for green energy. It sounds good because it seems to combine romantic elements of green energy: limitless sea water, temperature gradients with huge thermal sinking ability, minimal environmental impact, etc. The truth of the matter is that OTEC has serious fundamental limitations, the worst of which is the fact that economically viable energy output requires enormous amounts of water flow - beyond what is capable with modern technology. Pulling an ultra-high flow water column from deep enough in the ocean to create a good thermal differential from surface water requires enormous pipes, which current materials technology can't deliver - because the tensile strength of even the strongest materials would buckle under the weight of the pipes themselves. Heat exchanges have to be very efficient, and sea life/creatures easily clog up the internals of the heat exchangers, so conformal coatings have to be developed to allow good thermal transfer while preventing the accumulation of bio. Finally, it just can't compete with simple proven solutions like hydro-electric. Look at any company that bids on OTEC and you'll see that the real funding vessels are in conformal coatings, materials technology, and pump technology, among other things. I don't forsee anyone building a viable OTEC plant for the purpose of commercial energy production anytime soon.
Like most DARPA competitions, this is not for novel research into techniques. The solution is usually selected from available technologies. I'm assuming that the most likely candidate is MIMO and null steering.
To understand his phrase about "straight from hell" one must understand his theological viewpoint.
Unless he was the sole member on the committee, I don't see any of what he said as problematic. Dissent is healthy. This is a democracy, and he as well as anyone else has the ability to speak their mind.
As a scientist myself, I don't take offense at his viewpoint, though his choice of phrasing is very politically incorrect.
The Pre-Crime system operated under a fundamental assertion that any crime predicted by the pre-cogs was 100% - without a doubt - going to happen.
The Pre-Crime system didn't use an inference engine with an incomplete dataset to determine if crime was going to happen. It used grown-up crack babies to actually predict the future - a priori.
Without that fundamental assertion, you can't have a Pre-Crime system. You might have a "Potential Crime" system, but try flying that one in the courts.
The heavy press is essentially an enormous metalworking machine, the theoretical background of which is well understood. The basic machine is primitive. What makes it significant is that it provides unique utility simply because of its scale.
What would be comparable in modern terms are gigantic, high-speed rapid prototyping machines with work envelopes exceeding 50 x 50 x 50 feet. Preferably selective laser-sintering, with the ability to build the entire mechanical structure of a jet without a single weld or rivet.
First question: How do I work from home?
Answer: Easy. Ask your manager. You need a job first.
Second question: How do I get a tech job?
Answer: Difficult. Prove that you can do the work. Most people start with a traditional job search.
Lump the two questions together and you are asking for a long wait.
I've known competent tech guys who thought that they could levy their connections into early retirement and lucrative work-from-home contracts. Some of those guys keep jobs, but a lot of them end up losing them. Being a commercially employed person will sober you to the fact that contracts come and go rapidly (within years) and when a manager who can vouch for you goes away, and you're not around to defend yourself, you're typically the first on the chopping block.
The only people I've seen who succeeded in working from home for 10-20 years are wealthy people who made millions beforehand and have the financial temerity to take on potentially years of joblessness. Ironically, they all seem SO happy! But I guess having a few million dollars in the bank helps.
An enormous ditch does not a supercomputer make.
I would place his whole discussion under the topic of Academic Dishonesty in general, regardless of the means by which this dishonesty occurs. I see very little difference between using notes written on the palm of your hand vice a wifi connection and some electronic device except by virtue of complication. The conclusion is that regardless of how elaborately one performs Academic Dishonesty, it doesn't lose its unacceptability - and consequently its prosecution under any accredited university's Academic Dishonesty policy. The fact that you have to ask this question means to me that your department either does not have, or has not communicated to you its Academic Dishonesty policy. For example, MIT's policy is fairly straightforward and designed to build relationships between the head of the department (i.e. your boss) and giving students the feeling that they are not being downtrodden (if they don't agree with you, they can talk to your boss.) Before you attempt to ask Slashdot, I would use this as an opportunity to have a meaningful discussion with your department head. One, to let him/her know that you exist and care about larger issues than simply "doing your job" and two, to make sure you don't end up with the short end of the stick when some student reads your school's Academic Dishonesty policy before you do, and you find out that a very wrong time that you and your department head do not agree on this subject.
One is a magnifying glass, the other is rapper.
The second photo of the screen was edited, but it appears it was modified only to reduce the brightness/contrast of the image on the screen, which exceeded the contrast ratio of the medium. Note how the hair on the individuals is darker than the rest of their bodies.
If the editing wasn't done, the screen would have been an unreadable white, which would have made for a really crappy photo.
The only "crime" here is the poor lassoing.
The "real" problem with the centrifuges that Costner invested in is that they can't possibly flow enough water to put a dent in the Gulf Oil Spill. The IEEE article's calculation of the centrifuge's capacity assumes they're basically sticking a hose right on top of the oil spill, which is hardly realistic. Even assuming that the majority of the oil spilled is in the first 3 inches of water, a 1 mile by 1 mile area would need to have 50 million gallons filtered. 3 of the centrifuges could process 600,000 gallons per day, and so would take 83 days to complete a 1 mile x 1 mile x 3 inch deep volume of water. With an oil spill covering roughly 8,000 square miles, 700,000 days would be required. So under ideal conditions (all the oil was concentrated in one spot and easy to collect), it would take over 6000 centrifuges to process the "ideal spill" in one year. I think the centrifuges could be quite useful for filtering small, localized areas (protected wetlands, beaches, coves, etc), but the open ocean is just so massive that no device could effectively take care of it. In my opinion, a solution leveraging nature itself would be ideal.
In actuality, the correct term is "exaflop." This is widely accepted vocabulary in academia - especially in Computer Science. I've never read a single paper with the kind of terminology you are ascribing to "haste". "Quintillion FLOPs" doesn't even make sense, as FLOPs are an abstract unit, not physical objects. The only flops that number in the Quintillions are those directed by Uwe Boll. Perhaps next you'd like to inform me that only the "really smart people" use the term Billihertz instead of Gigahertz? If that's the case, then us "dumb" people will let you continue on your genius-like way.
Let's think about this for a second. For the most part, it's trivial to find someone responsible for content on the internet - in any country.
The anon.penet.fi remailer was an early attempt at true email privacy, but even that experiment was terribly flawed because, among other things, it was beholden to the legal system of the Finnish government (and most famously attacked by the Church of Scientology. Weird, but true.) But why was anon.penet.fi required? It certainly wasn't because the internet was anonymous. In short - the very fact that anonymizers exist at all is basic - users are easy to identify on the internet without some fairly complex systems to allow anonymity.
Given that the internet isn't anonymous in the first place, it makes very little sense to force a lack of anonymity on the internet. It's inherently wasteful and doesn't solve any of the real problems (lack of internet access to the world's poor/rural people, running out of namespace, lack of bandwidth, last mile)
Here's an idea for you Kaspersky, go sell your worthless crap in China. They'd love it.
Call me a skeptic, but I find it hard to believe that surface etching can cause the photon absorption characteristics of the material to change, a property which has more to do with the atomic structure of the material than its gross features. This leads me to believe that the color properties of the material are probably due to anisotropic reflection - meaning that the difference between "light" and "dark" between frequencies is the difference between "reflective" and "matte". Therefore, the intensity of the color produced by this method is limited by some mean function of available light, viewing angle, and the minimum feature size - which is limited by the material and not by the laser being used. Therefore, I would expect a material like gold, which exceptional stability to have the most intense colors providable by this method, which is a bit ironic, considering the subject of the article. I don't see General Lee Orange "painted by laser" onto a 1969 Dodge Charger any time soon.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will smell my fear. I will permit it to pass through my nostrils over my nose-hairs. And when the smell of fear is gone I will turn and face the source of fear-scent, and only I will remain.
A Metal Enclosure is not a catch-all electromagnetic shield. In fact, a Faraday cage is only perfect for an electrostatic field - but due to the resistance of the cage material, the faraday cage can be penetrated by high frequency electromagnetic radiation.
Second, electromagnetic radiation can be steered electronically with multiple antennas acting as a phased array. In short, the disabling beam can "focused" and "directed" to an arbitrary accuracy dependent only on the radiation frequency and the processing circuitry. In short, the beam does not "only go straight." It could quite easily have a beamwidth of 1 meter at 100 meters and "follow" targets.
Third, all reflections of the device would be diffuse (d^2 attentuation in air) - even if the surface is "mirrored". You do understand that "mirrored" surfaces are only mirrors for visible frequencies?
In short, tight-fitting body panels, firewalls, hoods, ECU enclosures, can be penetrated. The radiation can be steered. The radiation can be focused. And no, it isn't going to reflect in a dangerous way.
One of the conclusions drawn from this article is that the "Uncanny Valley" is a culturally dependant phenomenon. Then is the "Uncanny Valley" similar to the characteristics of beauty, which are known to differ by culture? If so, then can it be considered a matter of aesthetics? Is it purely individual? Are there certain robot characteristics that are "universally" uncanny or...canny?
One of these days, someone is going to start a web site called, "RobotOrNot", allowing people to rate robots from 1 to 10, with 1 being obviously machine (like a toaster) and 10 being a picture of Kristanna Loken.
It's just not a Maoist communist country anymore. Deng Xiaoping changed everything.
That's why disturbing the peace is a notion we all understand. But the law works FOR this clown, too. This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, this is only true in certain circumstances. The right to assembly is actually writ in law as the "Right to Assemble peaceably". If the assembly becomes, or poses what is deemed to be a physical threat, then it's tasertime, or worse.
While the term "police state" may be hyperbole, there is still a valid point being made - who determines when the assembly is no longer "peaceable"? Well, actually, that is the executive branch's decision, AKA the Law Enforcement. Hopefully you understand that.
It seems to me that the idea here is that vocal, unruly, rebellious or obstinate students are the ones that pose the most threat to the student body, teachers, staff, and property. From an administrative perspective, I'm guessing that the Campus Police are being told to enforce and project an image of authority, mostly to prevent strange things from happening or people from disturbing the peace. I'm not sure if I'm willing to debate that issue, since oftentimes it's an incident-by-incident judgement call and ultimately the UFL will reap what it sows.
What I find really sad about this incident, however, is that it shows how ineffective the established campus protection system is at preventing real violence from happening. In the latest string of school shootings - Columbine, Heritage, Santana, Rocori, Red Lake, Platte Canyon, Weston, Henry Foss, and most recently VT - the simple fact of the matter is that violent crime was perpetrated suddenly and without warning. There was no "angry rant" before pulling out a weapon and killing someone. The violent confrontations are premeditated - these aren't "crimes of passion", so to speak.
It reminds of David Owen's New Yorker Article which talks about how large floodlights installed in unmonitored locations, designed originally to prevent crime, actually do nothing at night but making it easier for real criminals to see what they are doing. One arguably positive effect is that you prevent a lot of dorked-up but probably harmless people from loitering in an open parking lot. One big problem is that you also provide plenty of light for a gang of hardened criminals to bash a door lock, open a loading door, and steal as much as they can in as short an amount of time as possible.
The idea is that creating generic enforcement policies doesn't really prevent people who are truly intent on committing a crime from doing nefarious things. Tasering a protestor might be textbook law enforcement, but it still doesn't make me feel safer when I walk onto a college campus. In some ways, it makes me feel more unsettled.