If you don't have access to a gang of lawyers and the money to fund them - sometimes for decades - the patent system doesn't work if someone else really wants to steal your idea.
>The popularity of ROM sites shows how much money there is to be made by companies selling these titles again (along with of course the popularity of the new NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, etc... consoles and the money Nintendo has made on virtual console). They just need to decide how they want to do it
Hardware costs continually drop. If I were running one of these places, every 20 years I'd sell a controller that had all the games 20 years and older built right into it and had the latest multimedia outputs. There are already a few such devices for sale, but it'd be nice to see that become standard practice.
Every new console cycle, you'd also put out an updated 'classic' console that's contained within a controller and is 20 years behind the times but contains *all* titles the company's ever released prior to 20 years ago. Wouldn't you buy those, for each gaming system, even if you rarely played them?
I watched a lecture by one of the guys who did the math showing where to look for Planet 9. It's very convincing.
Essentially, if there ISN'T a Neptune-sized object in the orbit they're predicting, there is something extremely odd happening in the outer Solar system that will still require explaining. There are KBOs with orbits that are most easily explained by a small gas giant in a long, elliptical orbit - if you assume more than one body (excluding the possibility of a dual-planet arrangement like Pluto/Charon) you have to come up with a much more complicated solution to explain the observed gravitational effects.
I don't want to live forever (and that's impossible anyways, entropy always wins)... but I wouldn't mind a solid chance of living until *I* decide I don't want to live any longer rather than being slowly crippled by age until my body gives up on me.
> Finally, NASA had a chance to image the fatal hole on Columbia in space, and didn't....
To what end? They didn't have a patch kit, there was no rescue rocket on standby. There was no return plan other than 'de-orbit', and the shuttle could only come in tiles-first. And given the maximum altitude of a shuttle flight... they were coming back regardless (though they'd have run out their life support systems by about day 17, so they'd come back already dead when their orbit finally decayed).
A smarter scam would be to create a 'group investment pool' and allow users to opt in up to a set limit for 'automated trading based on the proprietary Coinbase AI's market analysis', and give participants a small cut of the action.
>Wasn't that essentially the plot of Johnny Mnemonic?
I wouldn't say that - it was a dystopian high/low tech future, but Johnny was a data courier with a kink bomb in his head, not a co-processor. And there wasn't any significant exploration of what that kind of tech would do to people, it was more a simple action movie in a weird setting.
You know... mix that with the original Matrix concept of using human brains as processors and you'd have a decent premise for a sci-fi movie.
Especially that last part about the poor, but I'd also add in the uber-rich being augmented with 'cloud' processing they can skim from their poor workforce.
Then you need the poor guy/gal who gets disconnected - losing their only income - and ends up figuring out how to use their natural brain capacity to take down the system and save everyone.
There's a script in there. Maybe even a good one, if a bit derivative.
Well, IIRC there used to be some '@Home' calculation projects where they'd let the clients determine whether they'd been successful or not initially, but nothing mattered until it was confirmed by the central authority.
So... if you have a crypto that was able to do something similar to the already present distributed transaction confirmation requirements, it should be possible.
Then again, that's a guess based on superficial similarities between the tasks, not an answer based on a comprehensive understanding of the underlying protocols.
>Firefly was an amazing series that was cut short.
In its short run, it had a couple of fairly weak episodes that didn't bode well for a long run. As awesome as the good bits were, I think we're suffering from the effects of advice they were forced to follow: "Always leave them wanting more".
>Nothing short of a reboot of the series will satisfy.
Too soon. I know I remember the original well enough that I would be disappointed no matter what they did. I'd rather somebody just come up with a vaguely similar premise and slap a different name on it, with 'inspired by Firefly' in the closing credits or something.
I'll see you that '(ostensibly) limited to the people with whom you are *friends*' and raise you a 'friends, but mostly people you want to measure yourself against to boost your weak self esteem in a petty popularity contest'.
Does Facebook allow you to see the likes and dislikes themselves on everything? Because if there isn't an account name tagged to each, it'll quickly turn to a shitshow.
In fact, I think it will even then, because it'll get personal a lot faster.
Unfortunately, negative social interaction is more engaging than positive. The users will be less happy - hell, some will be downright miserable - but they'll be more engaged, more addicted to getting likes and getting a rush from watching 'enemies' get a dislike.
See: Reddit. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than a social networking site with this kind of unlimited feedback system.
It's always a gamble, yes... but there's a difference between manufactured risk and assumed risk.
Throwing money at companies more or less randomly (say, because they've just used the word 'blockchain' in a press release) is manufactured risk. You're creating an unnecessary risk by being blind to the investment details. You can't know how big the risk is or how big the potential payoff, because you've willfully blinded yourself.
You really should have a reason to invest in a particular company - and you should know enough about the company to make a rational assessment of the company's chances of performing to your expectations. That's an assumed risk - there's a pre-existing risk, and you're buying into it based on a (hopefully) rational and reasonably comprehensive analysis of the level of risk vs. the anticipated rewards if it pays off.
What ever happened to 'due diligence'? I see so much 'investment' that is just blind gambling because the right keyword is included in the company's mission statement. It's insane.
If you have so much free capital that you're willing to throw it at companies blindly... just give it away to some useful cause.
This exact use would be so awesome for me. I'm OK with faces, but linking them to names is really, really difficult for me unless I know the person very well... which can make business meetings awkward for me.
If it could be made more subtle, I'd love a set of camera/HUD glasses that would remind me of people's names and where I know them from.
1) Bandwidth is an issue. Live video streaming from every cop wearing these simply is not practical.
2) Power is an issue. Sure, it takes some cycles to do the processing, but in a portable unit you don't need to constantly transmit a high bandwidth stream.
3) Encrypted devices that don't allow direct reading of the database and will lock every 12 hours are possible. And they have a very limited hardware interface, so you'd need someone to steal the device and crack it to get more than a cop's shift out of it.
4) The stored information would be (more or less) public record. People wanted by the police or people with convictions and release conditions being watched by the police - stuff you'll see published by your local news media or in FOI-accessible court records.
In short, so long as they can't scan and track every face and keep logs over long periods of time for data mining, this device isn't really a big problem. However, it ought to be looked at closely (at least in those nations where we care about privacy) so that it doesn't become a monster as the technology improves.
I imagine the future is a media player with the capability built in, so you can sub in whatever faces you want. (Presumably your own plus some celebrity in most cases).
Hell, forget porn (for face swapping)... I think it'd be hilarious to watch movies and put myself, my family, and friends into the lead roles. Especially if we could also do something like Lyrebird and swap the voices, too.
In my area, the only people who go under the limit are in that age range where a doctor should be checking to see if they're still able to safely operate a vehicle. (And man, do I wish the Grim Reaper upon them frequently since one of my common driving routes passes by a retirement community...) In my experience, the only way for men to drive faster than women is for the men to be speeding.
Statistically, men tend to be riskier drivers (which I'm willing to attribute to testosterone, the cause of and solution to all men's problems!). We have the big accidents that kill people. Women have a lot more of the fender-bender type, likely because they're still over represented in the 'running errands all day' category. Take those 'facts' with a grain of salt, as it's been a while since I've read up on the subject and things may have changed or I may be recalling incorrectly.
Well... if they're aware their service is encouraging breaking of public road safety regulations... yeah, they should put a soft speed cap on, perhaps by fining drivers who exceed the limits.
I say that as someone who routinely speeds and generally doesn't respect speed enforcement (speed limits are artificially low in my opinion, 'everybody' speeds and the roads aren't red with blood so it isn't for safety)... but having a company encourage such behaviour is a different matter.
It seems to be more common that evolution creates an ecosystem that stabilizes - niches filled with specialists that are too highly adapted for their niche for some other local species to out compete them even after a few beneficial mutations.
Thus the theory of punctuated equilibrium - evolution is NOT generally a steady march, but has long periods of stasis until something disrupts the system and creates new opportunities. That Chicxulub asteroid did wonders for mammals, as particularly large-scale example.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have access to a gang of lawyers and the money to fund them - sometimes for decades - the patent system doesn't work if someone else really wants to steal your idea.
>The popularity of ROM sites shows how much money there is to be made by companies selling these titles again (along with of course the popularity of the new NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, etc ... consoles and the money Nintendo has made on virtual console). They just need to decide how they want to do it
Hardware costs continually drop. If I were running one of these places, every 20 years I'd sell a controller that had all the games 20 years and older built right into it and had the latest multimedia outputs. There are already a few such devices for sale, but it'd be nice to see that become standard practice.
Every new console cycle, you'd also put out an updated 'classic' console that's contained within a controller and is 20 years behind the times but contains *all* titles the company's ever released prior to 20 years ago. Wouldn't you buy those, for each gaming system, even if you rarely played them?
> If you're touting this as a failure of President Trump's
How can it be anything else when the entire world knew NK was playing him and Trump started trying to claim a Nobel?
I watched a lecture by one of the guys who did the math showing where to look for Planet 9. It's very convincing.
Essentially, if there ISN'T a Neptune-sized object in the orbit they're predicting, there is something extremely odd happening in the outer Solar system that will still require explaining. There are KBOs with orbits that are most easily explained by a small gas giant in a long, elliptical orbit - if you assume more than one body (excluding the possibility of a dual-planet arrangement like Pluto/Charon) you have to come up with a much more complicated solution to explain the observed gravitational effects.
I don't want to live forever (and that's impossible anyways, entropy always wins)... but I wouldn't mind a solid chance of living until *I* decide I don't want to live any longer rather than being slowly crippled by age until my body gives up on me.
> Finally, NASA had a chance to image the fatal hole on Columbia in space, and didn't....
To what end? They didn't have a patch kit, there was no rescue rocket on standby. There was no return plan other than 'de-orbit', and the shuttle could only come in tiles-first. And given the maximum altitude of a shuttle flight... they were coming back regardless (though they'd have run out their life support systems by about day 17, so they'd come back already dead when their orbit finally decayed).
Turn in yours. That was the change they made when the studio insisted that it was too complicated for moviegoers to understand.
A smarter scam would be to create a 'group investment pool' and allow users to opt in up to a set limit for 'automated trading based on the proprietary Coinbase AI's market analysis', and give participants a small cut of the action.
Same scam, but no complaints.
>Wasn't that essentially the plot of Johnny Mnemonic?
I wouldn't say that - it was a dystopian high/low tech future, but Johnny was a data courier with a kink bomb in his head, not a co-processor. And there wasn't any significant exploration of what that kind of tech would do to people, it was more a simple action movie in a weird setting.
You know... mix that with the original Matrix concept of using human brains as processors and you'd have a decent premise for a sci-fi movie.
Especially that last part about the poor, but I'd also add in the uber-rich being augmented with 'cloud' processing they can skim from their poor workforce.
Then you need the poor guy/gal who gets disconnected - losing their only income - and ends up figuring out how to use their natural brain capacity to take down the system and save everyone.
There's a script in there. Maybe even a good one, if a bit derivative.
> Probably no way to make it work
Well, IIRC there used to be some '@Home' calculation projects where they'd let the clients determine whether they'd been successful or not initially, but nothing mattered until it was confirmed by the central authority.
So... if you have a crypto that was able to do something similar to the already present distributed transaction confirmation requirements, it should be possible.
Then again, that's a guess based on superficial similarities between the tasks, not an answer based on a comprehensive understanding of the underlying protocols.
>Firefly was an amazing series that was cut short.
In its short run, it had a couple of fairly weak episodes that didn't bode well for a long run. As awesome as the good bits were, I think we're suffering from the effects of advice they were forced to follow: "Always leave them wanting more".
>Nothing short of a reboot of the series will satisfy.
Too soon. I know I remember the original well enough that I would be disappointed no matter what they did. I'd rather somebody just come up with a vaguely similar premise and slap a different name on it, with 'inspired by Firefly' in the closing credits or something.
I'll see you that '(ostensibly) limited to the people with whom you are *friends*' and raise you a 'friends, but mostly people you want to measure yourself against to boost your weak self esteem in a petty popularity contest'.
Does Facebook allow you to see the likes and dislikes themselves on everything? Because if there isn't an account name tagged to each, it'll quickly turn to a shitshow.
In fact, I think it will even then, because it'll get personal a lot faster.
Unfortunately, negative social interaction is more engaging than positive. The users will be less happy - hell, some will be downright miserable - but they'll be more engaged, more addicted to getting likes and getting a rush from watching 'enemies' get a dislike.
See: Reddit. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than a social networking site with this kind of unlimited feedback system.
It's always a gamble, yes... but there's a difference between manufactured risk and assumed risk.
Throwing money at companies more or less randomly (say, because they've just used the word 'blockchain' in a press release) is manufactured risk. You're creating an unnecessary risk by being blind to the investment details. You can't know how big the risk is or how big the potential payoff, because you've willfully blinded yourself.
You really should have a reason to invest in a particular company - and you should know enough about the company to make a rational assessment of the company's chances of performing to your expectations. That's an assumed risk - there's a pre-existing risk, and you're buying into it based on a (hopefully) rational and reasonably comprehensive analysis of the level of risk vs. the anticipated rewards if it pays off.
>Tech speculators are superstitious and foolish.
What ever happened to 'due diligence'? I see so much 'investment' that is just blind gambling because the right keyword is included in the company's mission statement. It's insane.
If you have so much free capital that you're willing to throw it at companies blindly... just give it away to some useful cause.
This exact use would be so awesome for me. I'm OK with faces, but linking them to names is really, really difficult for me unless I know the person very well... which can make business meetings awkward for me.
If it could be made more subtle, I'd love a set of camera/HUD glasses that would remind me of people's names and where I know them from.
I started with the WSJ article but submitted the Engadget link because the WSJ is paywalled.
Some notes for you:
1) Bandwidth is an issue. Live video streaming from every cop wearing these simply is not practical.
2) Power is an issue. Sure, it takes some cycles to do the processing, but in a portable unit you don't need to constantly transmit a high bandwidth stream.
3) Encrypted devices that don't allow direct reading of the database and will lock every 12 hours are possible. And they have a very limited hardware interface, so you'd need someone to steal the device and crack it to get more than a cop's shift out of it.
4) The stored information would be (more or less) public record. People wanted by the police or people with convictions and release conditions being watched by the police - stuff you'll see published by your local news media or in FOI-accessible court records.
In short, so long as they can't scan and track every face and keep logs over long periods of time for data mining, this device isn't really a big problem. However, it ought to be looked at closely (at least in those nations where we care about privacy) so that it doesn't become a monster as the technology improves.
>This really gets to a basic question of who owns the rights to your likeness, your face, your identity and so on.
I'm sure some will start using 'parody/fair use' as a shield... and eventually someone will actually do so in a way that legally qualifies.
I imagine the future is a media player with the capability built in, so you can sub in whatever faces you want. (Presumably your own plus some celebrity in most cases).
Hell, forget porn (for face swapping)... I think it'd be hilarious to watch movies and put myself, my family, and friends into the lead roles. Especially if we could also do something like Lyrebird and swap the voices, too.
If you're not going to read my post and respond in a meaningful way, why bother responding at all?
In my area, the only people who go under the limit are in that age range where a doctor should be checking to see if they're still able to safely operate a vehicle. (And man, do I wish the Grim Reaper upon them frequently since one of my common driving routes passes by a retirement community...) In my experience, the only way for men to drive faster than women is for the men to be speeding.
Statistically, men tend to be riskier drivers (which I'm willing to attribute to testosterone, the cause of and solution to all men's problems!). We have the big accidents that kill people. Women have a lot more of the fender-bender type, likely because they're still over represented in the 'running errands all day' category. Take those 'facts' with a grain of salt, as it's been a while since I've read up on the subject and things may have changed or I may be recalling incorrectly.
Well... if they're aware their service is encouraging breaking of public road safety regulations... yeah, they should put a soft speed cap on, perhaps by fining drivers who exceed the limits.
I say that as someone who routinely speeds and generally doesn't respect speed enforcement (speed limits are artificially low in my opinion, 'everybody' speeds and the roads aren't red with blood so it isn't for safety)... but having a company encourage such behaviour is a different matter.
It seems to be more common that evolution creates an ecosystem that stabilizes - niches filled with specialists that are too highly adapted for their niche for some other local species to out compete them even after a few beneficial mutations.
Thus the theory of punctuated equilibrium - evolution is NOT generally a steady march, but has long periods of stasis until something disrupts the system and creates new opportunities. That Chicxulub asteroid did wonders for mammals, as particularly large-scale example.