Normal headlights are fairly focused. The infrared lamps used for Active Illumination nightvision are very widebeam. So, I don't think their lamps will result in localized bright spots, but rather, just everything being brighter. I'd hope that they thought of other people having the system, and as such, designed it to adjust the total brightness of the display to match the overall brightness of the image.
Nothing is being amplified. This isn't like nightvision goggles, it's Active Illumination Infrared: You can only non-hot things because there are powerful infrared lamps bathing the scene in (invisible to everything but the camera) light.
As others have mentioned, the second image isn't of the new tech, which isn't scaled up enough for a prototype yet. The top image is from the 7-series, as you've already noted. The reason it's so crisp is that it uses Active Illumination Infrared. This works by having headlights that are so bright, they would be illegal if they were emitting any visible light. As it happens, they are absurdly bright, but only in the near-infrared band (NIR). Then, an infrared CCD device records the NIR levels, and converts it to a monochrome image. I'd thought they all worked by a CRT projector that projects the image onto the window, which has a special and expensive film that is only reflective to a specific wavelength of green light, allowing it to display the green image overlay without any (noticeable) change to what you see during the day. I didn't think the same trick would work with a white projection, since you'd need to be reflecting at least red, green, and blue light, so you'd need at least 3 layers of film, making it 3 times as expensive, at least! And, I would think that while looking "better" it would be counter-productive. There's a reason green is the most commonly used nightvision color. It's not because that's what works, but because green light doesn't cause your eyes to adjust. So, however bright the green light is, when its turned off, your eyes are still adjusted to the dark. Same thing happens with red light, but red night vision was found to be more unsettling. (This is, by the way, why blue LED clock radios are obnoxious.) So, I find it odd that they'd use white light for nightvision, since it would wreck your night vision. On the other hand, maybe that's good: If your eyes are adjusted for fairly bright light already, then oncoming headlights won't be as blinding as they are without any kind of night vision, so it might be superior all around. Except, when you look in your side mirrors or windows, you won't be able to see shit all, I wouldn't think.
Anyways, Active Illumination is nice and crisp because everything is very well illuminated, so the signal:noise ratio is quite high. The second shot there is conventional night vision, which doesn't use infrared at all, but rather, uses light amplification. In starlight situations, the signal:noise ratio is tiny, and so you are amplifying a lot of noise along with the signal, so you get a very grainy image. It's not film/CCD grain, just background noise. It has nothing to do with the color of the rendering, as you seem to be implying. It has to do with the technique you're using to see in the dark. Active illumination is much superior to light amplification because of its crispness alone. But, it has the added benefit of not being so sensitive to bright lights overloading it. If you have light amplification going, and a headlight shines in the camera, that will be amplified to super bright. Not good! On the other hand, headlights do emit lots of infrared...but not THAT much. With passive infrared, your image would be washed out by headlights, since they'll be by far one of the brightest NIR sources. But with active infrared, everything is being bathed in NIR, so headlights won't brighter than the car they're in (not by a lot, anyway), which will reflect a lot of your lamps back. If the oncoming car also has NIR lamps, they'll be brighter than any reflections, but again, not by a whole lot still. Optimally, your display would "clip" any really bright sources, rather than just darkening the rest of the image. Ugly, but you're driving, not taking pictures. You care about seeing the darker bits, not about maintaining relative light levels. The white light would still shine through your glass like normal...but that's because that's how glass works, and it has nothing at all to do with the nightvision. And, as I said, best case scenario is that it's not as bad because your eyes would be adjusted to the night vision display, which is brighter than what a normal drivers are looking at when oncoming traffic rounds the bend and s
It's not light amplification, headlights won't overload it and blind it/you. As TFS says, high end cars already have expensive night vision systems, where a film on the windshield has a projector overlay the screen with a shot from the IR camera. To show inanimate objects better, there is also a set of IR lights to illuminate, in addition to normal headlights. And yeah, engines and pedestrians glow pretty bright on these displays. That's the damn point. It's not blinding, because the total amount of infrared just isn't that big.
Not at all. At his concerts he sings all the songs he was refused permission for, like "Chicken Pot Pie" and the like. So if he thinks it's polite, he's not a polite fellow. The reason is his label makes him so they don't get sued and/or kicked out of industry groups.
Yeah, he has a pretty good parody defense. But his label doesn't allow him to run something without permission. Because they'd get sued, and it might go to all out label warfare, where parodied labels try to get them kicked from the RIAA, try to pressure retailers into not carrying Al's label's stuff at all, or else they'll all stop selling to them, instead. And so on. It might sound absurd and petty, but record labels are run by absurd and petty people. At any rate, he got permission from Coolio's label to make "Amish Paradise" but didn't directly ask Coolio himself, who got very angry over it, but never sued...Al joked that he had to wear bulletproof vests to the mall for a few years, but they did eventually bury the hatchet. From then on, he made it a point to talk to their directly, never to "their people."
Well, you, and the general public at large, might see them as different, legally they are not. If you take a Mickey Mouse comic from way back when, and just copy it with a new word bubble, obviously copyright violation, right? If you draw your own character that looks sort of like Mickey Mouse? That's just as much copyright violation, even if you drew every last pen stroke yourself. Fair use, which includes review and parody, is a defense against copyright violation via derivative work. Penny Arcade got in trouble because drawing Strawberry Shortcake is a copyright violation, and fair use is their only possible defense. However, fair use does not allow for making copies of one person's copyright to parody a third-party. Their own lawyers told them that, and they took it down. That's the law.
Mind you, the law is subject to change. Twenty years ago judges verbally berated Sega and Nintendo lawyers on separate occasions for abuse of copyright law. Nintendo tried to sue Game Genie for allowing owners to modify their game code. The judges said that people are free to enjoy their purchase any way they want, and artists have no right to dictate how their works are enjoyed. This opinion is now scoffed at, and artists very much do somehow have the right to dictate how purchasers of their works are allowed to enjoy them. Sega, on the other hand, like Nintendo, used early early DRM to lock out third party game carts on their consoles. They sued Accolade for copyright violation for cracking the DRM. A judge got very angry with them, calling them monopolists and dismissing with prejudice, saying no law permits them to lock people out of their hardware. Now of course, there is such a law, and nobody bats an eye at locked down systems. Crazy that only 20 years ago the very idea was disgusting, and now you're a madman for objecting.
That may seem off-topic, but both those cases were about derivative works. Game Genie was about the right of the consumer to create their own derivative works, which we're now told we do not have. Though we're told by RIAA/MPAA/TV execs, and might possibly still have that right, if you find a judge who will follow the law. And the Sega case was about the right to reverse engineer for compatibility, which we certainly no longer have. Well, except the DMCA, which outlawed it in the first place, has exceptions for compatibility, but those exemptions to not stop Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, from suing anyway. So, while parody defenses are pretty set, so were those rights, and they changed, though perhaps not legally... Precedent is just a suggestion. In the unlikely event that a judge allows wholesale copying of third-party copyright material in unrelated parodies, that's a hidden boon for The Pirate Bay, which would quickly be renamed to The Parody Bay, and totally legal! Just put a quick mockery of your political figure of choice into your torrent description, and the download along side it is protected as a fair use parody!;)
Where are you from, and where the fuck are the mods from that think that's insightful. That's exactly what you do when you find lost property, you attempt to find the owner, and failing that, you turn it over to the police, who have a "Lost property" box. It's not fucking yours, dipshit. They don't send the CSI team to dust for prints, they just take your statement and try to find the owner, if they can...but don't take my word for it...if you find a laptop on an empty table, you go ahead and keep it, I'm sure that if it has a theft recovery service installed, the police will laugh at your sarcasm and let you go.
Add to that that he shopped around with other tech sites trying to get the highest bidder. Good luck convincing a jury that he just wanted it to go to the highest bidder to be sure they were serious about doing their best to find it's rightful owner...
Anyways, I hope all of the idiot posters get their cars stolen and stripped for parts, then dumped in an ally. Since they got them back, it was never even stolen, right? And being sold doesn't count, and being cut apart doesn't count, right?
The difference here, if you aren't just being disingenuous, is that they KNOW who did it. Seriously...you think if the police DO catch a car thief they let them go? SERIOUSLY? No, they arrest them. And, millions of dollars? They spent millions of dollars tracking a journalist to his office? Are you utterly insane? Or are you referring to legal costs, as if the city (not even the state's jurisdiction so it won't cost the state anything) would go and hire a crack legal team instead of, I dunno, the prosecutor? Oh, I'm sure Gizmodo will send their high paid lawyers to defend this guy, and that will cost money. Not the governments money though. And it's not like it will do much good. They'll come in "Your honor, it is my clients right as a journalist to steal high-tech prototypes in order to scoop other reviewers" and the judge will laugh and then allow the trial to proceed.
There's not supposed to be something appealing about Earth, or our solar system. A fleet of ships travels from one star to the next. FTL and Causality are mutually exclusive concepts, so unless "reality" is meaningless, they will be traveling at sublight speeds. It would take years or decades (or more) to jump between even close stars. So, they strip a solar system bare, and live off those resources as they travel to the next system. The fact that they could get water and uranium and iron and whatever else from Alpha Centauri doesn't help if they already did. And will they leave Earth alone because it has "quaint little natives"? Why. Like us, they probably don't recognize inferior animals as equals. Even if they do think it's wrong to kill us all and strip the Earth bare, that means giving up resources. That makes it harder to travel to the next system. Even if they think it's wrong, won't they just say "Better them than us!" and take it anyway? Then their James Cameron analog can make a movie in 4D about the noble earthling savages they wiped out in their greed.
A corporation is considered a total and utter disaster if it's only making a shitload of money, but is not growing exponentially. The only way to stave off total economic collapses happening more and more frequently, is exponential pillage. We're starting to feel a bit bad about it here, so, Spaceward Ho! Divide and conquer. Migrant Fleet heads to system, destroys it, builds new fleet. Two fleets head in different directions, destroy two more systems, and continue. There's no other way to survive in an economic system based on derivatives, where exponential growth is the only way to even maintain the status quo. Invest in a fleet, and make a shit load of money. Only, they won't be returning with spoils for centuries or more. But that's OK, current stock investments don't pay off, either. But the share in the fleet will appreciate as news flows in, so you can sell it based on speculation. Or go to derivatives and buy and sell shares in futures of the fleet. Hell, go second order and invest in the futures of the futures. And if one of humanities mining fleets runs into aliens? Well, they COULD leave them alone. But then their stocks would be worthless, those futures would be worthless, those future-futures would be worthless. Economic collapse. Billions starving to death, unable to afford the megatonnes of food rotting in silos. It's the more ethical choice to wipe those aliens the fuck out. (It's the even MORE ethical choice to not have such an incredibly stupid economic system, but suggesting that makes you a socialist).
Sure, I'm projecting our society on theirs...odds are, to not nuke their planet into desolation, they have to be better people than us. But, it's not like they have to be evil monsters from hell to go around wiping out civilizations they deem inferior. They just have to be big dicks like us. Alone, humans are swell people. But, none of us is as bad as all of us.
Many many issues have retractions. It's rare a judge orders it to be first page, so they normally hide them, but they're there all the time. Still, it has happened where a judge felt the damage was so severe that it warranted a front page apology.
Good rant. Maybe in all your in-depth research to prove why the quote is so wrong, you should have started by making sure Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that. I'll get you started: Although the Slashdot summary presents it as a quote, the Register article does not present it as a quote, but as a claim that he said it "recently." And the Der Speigel article THEY cite, makes no mention of this at all. What he actually said, paraphrasing, was that if you are hiding that you did something, you maybe shouldn't be doing it, but beyond that, you definitely shouldn't be putting it online, because even with privacy policies, the FBI can always use the Patriot Act to force any website or service to turn that information over.
And anyway, you're saying if you found a bomb, you'd just walk away and not tell anybody? Nice fellow.
Your neighborhood sounds horrifying if 24/7 you have people with binocs recording the plates of everybody who visits. There was an equally crazy "gated" community near where I lived. I walked down it, to see what it was like, see if it was worth the city park they bought and bulldozed to build it. Some guy with a notepad ran up to me "This is private property and just standing here will put you in jail, I know you're not visiting, there are no children allowed" and I said "Oh I'm just casing the place, what's your house number and when do you work?" he bolted, probably called 911 80 times. Scary scary 12 year old, was I. I know better now, of course. He doesn't work, that's why he can sit on his porch on constant guard against schoolchildren taking a shortcut down his private through street that leads to the duck ponds...if your strata doesn't want visitors, build a damn barbwire fence and put an armed guard on your gate like the rest do. Meanwhile, a still shot from Google doesn't help you case, because you can't tell when anybody works, it doesn't let you plan shit. And odds are, it doesn't show you much or anything of what they have inside. If it does, a casual walk down the street would show you that, no need for any "suspicious peering" as you call it. And far from being the most risky part of a burglary, taking a quick look around just isn't that hard. In a gated community, ya, anybody who doesn't belong must have hopped a fence to get in, and that's suspicious...but if not...well...I've lived on a cul-de-sac...have you, really? There are always cars turning in, realizing its the wrong turn, looping around, and leaving. Do you really write them all down just in case? And do you make quick sketches or photograph people who walk in on foot? I dunno, is the UK really that far gone into big brother? Do you really corner and grill people out walking their dogs? How dare they take a loop around your street, it's not theirs! GET OUT FOREIGNER!
You can't eat healthy at Subway unless you get something without sauce, cheese, or bread;). In terms of "good for you" you can go to the grocers and just buy those prewashed bags of salad, and a plastic fork. Enjoy! Faster and cheaper, and you'll have leftovers! And the Mandarin Chicken Salad is really bad for you, because even if you don't use the dressing or noodles it comes with, those orange slices (OK technically mandarin oranges aren't a kind of orange...) are marinated in pure corn syrup. Still, it's an almost not bad for you meal if you don't put the noodles or the dressing on. Because not only is the dressing also packed with sugar for no good reason, it's also got extremely high sodium levels. We're talking 1.25 g of sodium. A full half of your daily RDA in the USA, and pretty much your entire RDA in the UK. But, it IS their healthiest salad. Their Caesar will kill you faster than a baconator, and the BLT Salad? 1.8 g of sodium!!! Anywho, at least it spinach and swiss chard in it, dark greens. An infinitesimal amount, but still, they're in there.
The interesting thing about fast food, is how the amount of fast food people eat is not correlated with the obesity epidemic at all. Correlation is not causation, but no correlation is quite often no causation. If not, it's at least causation that's weak enough to be dominated by other factors;) What obesity IS correlated with is the food pyramid. If you graph obesity for the last 100 years, you'll see it more or less flat, with a very slight increase over time as portion sizes grow. Fast food takes off, obesity doesn't even twitch. Then in the 80s you get the food pyramid, and the slope of obesity over time goes up by a factor of 30! Obesity is going from linear to exponential now. Because the higher it gets, the more we push high sugar, low fat diets, like in the food pyramid, and it doesn't work, it doesn't work at all. If you went to France 300 years ago and ask a master chef what makes rich people so fat, he'll tell you "cake!". Then suddenly in the 80s, it stopped being breads and cakes and other starches that made you fat, suddenly it was fat! Nutritionists laughed and laughed at how stupid they'd been for hundreds of years! They were too busy looking for correlations and doing studies! It was so simple, fat is as fat does, the end, fuck studies, it's true because it's simple! Occam's Razor! You'd think that, with hundreds of years of anecdotal and also rigerous correlation between starch and sugar intakes, and obesity, it would take a serious study to blow that out of the water. But, nutritionists don't do studies showing that high fat diets make you fat, because those studies fail, leaving them two choices: Be a scientist and publish results that don't agree with orthodoxy, and destroy your career, or just bury it and pretend it never happened. They chose B usually. Those who chose A, as I said, run out of the profession on a rail. So it's pretty well known now that you don't do that study, because the orthodoxy is wrong, and if you try to rub their faces in it, they will end you.
At any rate, I've never understood how fast food is considered as fast...in the time you spend in line, then waiting for them to make it, you could have made something cheaper and better for you at home. It's not fast food, it's procrastinated food. I'll spend 10 minutes at lunch waiting (maybe less if you didn't have any travel time?), instead of 5 minutes in the morning making. That seems like a loss, but that's future me's problem, not mine!
Decades ago, my dad had a Nordic Track ski machine. The flywheel has a magnet in it that connects to a sensor for the speed display. My dad had the idea to connect it to a serial port for logging purposes, so you could get a graph of your speed over time. I further suggested connecting your speed to a game, for visual motivation. MONEY PLEASE.
No, it's not like that at all. He's saying any form of sex education is illegal, which isn't supported by the law whatsoever. There is no contradiction except in his twisted head, where he thinks everybody who knows what sex is will automatically rape. He has an adopted child, maybe Child Services should pay them a visit, if he really thinks that.
Oops, they aren't. They are design patents, not hardware patents. I mean, obviously you couldn't patent having a light on a control to show its mode. Turbofire controllers for the NES had lights on them. What you can patent via design patent, though, is having a light in a particular spot. And handgrips in a particular shape. Analog sticks in a particular spot. And so on. Basically, you can't make a controller that has anything at all in common with the xbox controller, because it's protected by a dozen or so design patents. You'd think that if a design patent is on a design, you could only have one on a design. But that would be bad, because then you could just have your own design! No, it's important to have each button, each stick, protected by its own patent. That way, it's basically impossible to make a third party xbox controller without infringing at least a few of the design patents.
The controller does look identical to an XBOX controller. The black/white buttons are above instead of below. But those guys are all over the place on the different official xbox controllers anyways. All the other buttons are the same, and the shape is identical. Now, design patents can only cover the ornamental portion of the design, not the function. (If the function of your device is novel, it needs a regular patent). So, you could argue it needs all of those buttons. Certainly microsoft has no claim on a diamond of four buttons, X,Y,A,B, considering the SNES has the exact same diamond arrangement of buttons, even with the same damn names! The PS1 had the same setup with 4 shoulder buttons, but they aren't the same shape, and the Datel controller copies the exact shape of the shoulder buttons. Datel could also try to argue that users of an XBOX would be used to the positions of the sticks and buttons, so that's a necessary part of the device, as opposed to simple aesthetics. However, the fact remains that the shape overall is identical, and since there are all kinds of controllers out there, you couldn't argue that the EXACT shape is a necessary part of the device.
So, all in all, no, this isn't hardware patents. It's design patents, which are more like copyright than actual patents. It doesn't have to be a novel invention. It just has to be a distinct ornamental design. Though like other patents, they are frequently abused to cover any and all designs, regardless of aesthetics. Which makes it messy. They are difficult to defend against if your design is close to an existing design, because it can be hard to demonstrate which parts of a design are needed for functionality, and which are purely aesthetic. Especially for a controller, where the games might be designed around the assumption of a particular layout.
No, that's not necessary. The judge didn't rule that all hyperlinks are always OK no matter what. He ruled only that in this particular instance, the link was not libelous. In particular, he made clear that if you post a link to a defamatory web-page, with any sort of comment indicating agreement, or that the website in question is accurate, then it would be libelous. Much in the same way as if, in a book, you cited a defamatory article, not just with "This is interesting" but "Read this book for the truth on so-and-so", then your citation wouldn't just be a footnote, it would in itself be libelous.
That's how my wife works. She really really wants a song. She hops on iTunes to buy it. Oh look, it's not $0.99, it's $1.09. Deal breaker, forget it, no sale. It makes the artist seem super greedy, grabbing for an extra 10 damn cents because that particular song was just on an episode of something that week... Well, that's how I feel about all these damn greedy publishing houses. They want easily 10% or more markup over the physical fucking book. eBooks are supposed to be cheaper than physical books, not more expensive by a large margin! There's no printing costs, and Amazon is the one hosting it, not the publisher.
Naw, even bleeding hearts realize he's a suehappy jerk after RTFA and noticing that he knew she used a cellphone and WiFi, and told her that the house behind his was for rent. He told her she could live there just SO he could sue her. The only help he needs is into jail for his protection racket. Step 1: Find somebody with a cellphone. Step 2: Tell them they can move in to your neighborhood. Step 3: Demand they give up all electronic devices, even electric lighting. Step 4: Sue for half a million dollars when they won't give up their lighting, and are stuck in their lease and cannot leave. Step 5: Profit!
Or, look at it from the first side again, and allow for the fact that you are also crazy. There's a famous story about psychosomatic EM sensitivity. They built a large microwave relay station for cable television. Big huge microwave dishes and nasty pointy antennae. Nearby, a huge uproar, it was causing crippling migraines and vertigo and nose bleeds and nausea and blurred vision. They sign petitions and form a mob to go complain to the guys and tell them to shut it off. Well, the engineers at this station just laugh at them. "It's not funny!" they scream, just as you do, "Our pain is real! It's agony just being this close to your building, turn it off!" It turns out the engineers can't turn it off because they still haven't turned it on yet.
All of the mentally afflicted who claim this impossible allergy to an infinitesimally narrow band of radiation (with complete immunity to all other bands of EM radiation) who have actually been tested, have been shown to be making it up. The test is easy: Put them in a sterile room with nothing but lights in the way of electronic devices, and assure them its shielded from signals. See how calm they are, despite the powerful WiFi routers in the false ceiling? Now wheel in a big scary machine covered in antennae. Still fine, see, it's off! Now flick that big "ON" switch for them, see how that green light comes on? Instant agony! They grab at their heads and they scream, make it stop, you are raping our minds! OK, switch it off, they have proven their point, radio waves cause them pain. Except there is no transmitter, there are just pieces of metals attached to an empty box. The "ON" switch turns on the light, and only the light.
Afterwards, the quacks who make big bucks selling these folks expensive electricity cleaning devices and crystalline rods to protect them, say that of course the test failed, when you are allergic to pollen you don't sneeze as soon as you are near the plant, it can take hours. Or, they say the scientists negative thoughts, because they aren't true believers in chi points and auras, have corrupted the results. In any event, you are making the utterly absurd claim that you can feel the effects instantly as you climb higher towards the towers. So you have no excuse now. Go get tested. You can win $1,000,000 if you prove that your "disability" is real, and you have no room to complain since you've already asserted that there is no delayed reaction, you feel physical pain instantly. We'll be waiting.
Further, this guy didn't just sit there, minding his own business. He knew her before she moved in. He knew she had a cellphone, knew she used WiFi on her laptop so she could chat with family using Skype. And knowing this, he told her that the house next to his was for rent. Then, as soon as she moved in, him and a big friend of his knock on her door and tell her she has to shut off all of her wifi stuff or she'll be sorry. She did, she turned off her router and used a wired connection. That wasn't enough, no cellphone. So she stopped using her cellphone while home. Not enough, now she has to replace her dimmer switches with regular switches. So she said no, I've made too many comprises, no more, I'm keeping my dimmer switches. So he sued for half a million dollars and a permanent injunction barring her from using any and all electronic devices. He told her about the place because he KNEW she used a cellphone, and wanted an easy target to sue.
That's what they do. That's why they're being sued. GameStop is selling a box that says the game has multiplayer. It does not, you have to buy it if the game isn't new.
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Normal headlights are fairly focused. The infrared lamps used for Active Illumination nightvision are very widebeam. So, I don't think their lamps will result in localized bright spots, but rather, just everything being brighter. I'd hope that they thought of other people having the system, and as such, designed it to adjust the total brightness of the display to match the overall brightness of the image.
Nothing is being amplified. This isn't like nightvision goggles, it's Active Illumination Infrared: You can only non-hot things because there are powerful infrared lamps bathing the scene in (invisible to everything but the camera) light.
As others have mentioned, the second image isn't of the new tech, which isn't scaled up enough for a prototype yet. The top image is from the 7-series, as you've already noted. The reason it's so crisp is that it uses Active Illumination Infrared. This works by having headlights that are so bright, they would be illegal if they were emitting any visible light. As it happens, they are absurdly bright, but only in the near-infrared band (NIR). Then, an infrared CCD device records the NIR levels, and converts it to a monochrome image. I'd thought they all worked by a CRT projector that projects the image onto the window, which has a special and expensive film that is only reflective to a specific wavelength of green light, allowing it to display the green image overlay without any (noticeable) change to what you see during the day. I didn't think the same trick would work with a white projection, since you'd need to be reflecting at least red, green, and blue light, so you'd need at least 3 layers of film, making it 3 times as expensive, at least! And, I would think that while looking "better" it would be counter-productive. There's a reason green is the most commonly used nightvision color. It's not because that's what works, but because green light doesn't cause your eyes to adjust. So, however bright the green light is, when its turned off, your eyes are still adjusted to the dark. Same thing happens with red light, but red night vision was found to be more unsettling. (This is, by the way, why blue LED clock radios are obnoxious.) So, I find it odd that they'd use white light for nightvision, since it would wreck your night vision. On the other hand, maybe that's good: If your eyes are adjusted for fairly bright light already, then oncoming headlights won't be as blinding as they are without any kind of night vision, so it might be superior all around. Except, when you look in your side mirrors or windows, you won't be able to see shit all, I wouldn't think.
Anyways, Active Illumination is nice and crisp because everything is very well illuminated, so the signal:noise ratio is quite high. The second shot there is conventional night vision, which doesn't use infrared at all, but rather, uses light amplification. In starlight situations, the signal:noise ratio is tiny, and so you are amplifying a lot of noise along with the signal, so you get a very grainy image. It's not film/CCD grain, just background noise. It has nothing to do with the color of the rendering, as you seem to be implying. It has to do with the technique you're using to see in the dark. Active illumination is much superior to light amplification because of its crispness alone. But, it has the added benefit of not being so sensitive to bright lights overloading it. If you have light amplification going, and a headlight shines in the camera, that will be amplified to super bright. Not good! On the other hand, headlights do emit lots of infrared...but not THAT much. With passive infrared, your image would be washed out by headlights, since they'll be by far one of the brightest NIR sources. But with active infrared, everything is being bathed in NIR, so headlights won't brighter than the car they're in (not by a lot, anyway), which will reflect a lot of your lamps back. If the oncoming car also has NIR lamps, they'll be brighter than any reflections, but again, not by a whole lot still. Optimally, your display would "clip" any really bright sources, rather than just darkening the rest of the image. Ugly, but you're driving, not taking pictures. You care about seeing the darker bits, not about maintaining relative light levels. The white light would still shine through your glass like normal...but that's because that's how glass works, and it has nothing at all to do with the nightvision. And, as I said, best case scenario is that it's not as bad because your eyes would be adjusted to the night vision display, which is brighter than what a normal drivers are looking at when oncoming traffic rounds the bend and s
It's not light amplification, headlights won't overload it and blind it/you. As TFS says, high end cars already have expensive night vision systems, where a film on the windshield has a projector overlay the screen with a shot from the IR camera. To show inanimate objects better, there is also a set of IR lights to illuminate, in addition to normal headlights. And yeah, engines and pedestrians glow pretty bright on these displays. That's the damn point. It's not blinding, because the total amount of infrared just isn't that big.
Every ATM I've seen has a headphone jack. If you plug your headphones into it, you'll find that it has, in fact, been talking this whole time!
Not at all. At his concerts he sings all the songs he was refused permission for, like "Chicken Pot Pie" and the like. So if he thinks it's polite, he's not a polite fellow. The reason is his label makes him so they don't get sued and/or kicked out of industry groups.
Yeah, he has a pretty good parody defense. But his label doesn't allow him to run something without permission. Because they'd get sued, and it might go to all out label warfare, where parodied labels try to get them kicked from the RIAA, try to pressure retailers into not carrying Al's label's stuff at all, or else they'll all stop selling to them, instead. And so on. It might sound absurd and petty, but record labels are run by absurd and petty people. At any rate, he got permission from Coolio's label to make "Amish Paradise" but didn't directly ask Coolio himself, who got very angry over it, but never sued...Al joked that he had to wear bulletproof vests to the mall for a few years, but they did eventually bury the hatchet. From then on, he made it a point to talk to their directly, never to "their people."
Well, you, and the general public at large, might see them as different, legally they are not. If you take a Mickey Mouse comic from way back when, and just copy it with a new word bubble, obviously copyright violation, right? If you draw your own character that looks sort of like Mickey Mouse? That's just as much copyright violation, even if you drew every last pen stroke yourself. Fair use, which includes review and parody, is a defense against copyright violation via derivative work. Penny Arcade got in trouble because drawing Strawberry Shortcake is a copyright violation, and fair use is their only possible defense. However, fair use does not allow for making copies of one person's copyright to parody a third-party. Their own lawyers told them that, and they took it down. That's the law.
Mind you, the law is subject to change. Twenty years ago judges verbally berated Sega and Nintendo lawyers on separate occasions for abuse of copyright law. Nintendo tried to sue Game Genie for allowing owners to modify their game code. The judges said that people are free to enjoy their purchase any way they want, and artists have no right to dictate how their works are enjoyed. This opinion is now scoffed at, and artists very much do somehow have the right to dictate how purchasers of their works are allowed to enjoy them. Sega, on the other hand, like Nintendo, used early early DRM to lock out third party game carts on their consoles. They sued Accolade for copyright violation for cracking the DRM. A judge got very angry with them, calling them monopolists and dismissing with prejudice, saying no law permits them to lock people out of their hardware. Now of course, there is such a law, and nobody bats an eye at locked down systems. Crazy that only 20 years ago the very idea was disgusting, and now you're a madman for objecting.
That may seem off-topic, but both those cases were about derivative works. Game Genie was about the right of the consumer to create their own derivative works, which we're now told we do not have. Though we're told by RIAA/MPAA/TV execs, and might possibly still have that right, if you find a judge who will follow the law. And the Sega case was about the right to reverse engineer for compatibility, which we certainly no longer have. Well, except the DMCA, which outlawed it in the first place, has exceptions for compatibility, but those exemptions to not stop Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, from suing anyway. So, while parody defenses are pretty set, so were those rights, and they changed, though perhaps not legally... Precedent is just a suggestion. In the unlikely event that a judge allows wholesale copying of third-party copyright material in unrelated parodies, that's a hidden boon for The Pirate Bay, which would quickly be renamed to The Parody Bay, and totally legal! Just put a quick mockery of your political figure of choice into your torrent description, and the download along side it is protected as a fair use parody! ;)
Where are you from, and where the fuck are the mods from that think that's insightful. That's exactly what you do when you find lost property, you attempt to find the owner, and failing that, you turn it over to the police, who have a "Lost property" box. It's not fucking yours, dipshit. They don't send the CSI team to dust for prints, they just take your statement and try to find the owner, if they can...but don't take my word for it...if you find a laptop on an empty table, you go ahead and keep it, I'm sure that if it has a theft recovery service installed, the police will laugh at your sarcasm and let you go.
Add to that that he shopped around with other tech sites trying to get the highest bidder. Good luck convincing a jury that he just wanted it to go to the highest bidder to be sure they were serious about doing their best to find it's rightful owner...
Anyways, I hope all of the idiot posters get their cars stolen and stripped for parts, then dumped in an ally. Since they got them back, it was never even stolen, right? And being sold doesn't count, and being cut apart doesn't count, right?
The difference here, if you aren't just being disingenuous, is that they KNOW who did it. Seriously...you think if the police DO catch a car thief they let them go? SERIOUSLY? No, they arrest them. And, millions of dollars? They spent millions of dollars tracking a journalist to his office? Are you utterly insane? Or are you referring to legal costs, as if the city (not even the state's jurisdiction so it won't cost the state anything) would go and hire a crack legal team instead of, I dunno, the prosecutor? Oh, I'm sure Gizmodo will send their high paid lawyers to defend this guy, and that will cost money. Not the governments money though. And it's not like it will do much good. They'll come in "Your honor, it is my clients right as a journalist to steal high-tech prototypes in order to scoop other reviewers" and the judge will laugh and then allow the trial to proceed.
There's not supposed to be something appealing about Earth, or our solar system. A fleet of ships travels from one star to the next. FTL and Causality are mutually exclusive concepts, so unless "reality" is meaningless, they will be traveling at sublight speeds. It would take years or decades (or more) to jump between even close stars. So, they strip a solar system bare, and live off those resources as they travel to the next system. The fact that they could get water and uranium and iron and whatever else from Alpha Centauri doesn't help if they already did. And will they leave Earth alone because it has "quaint little natives"? Why. Like us, they probably don't recognize inferior animals as equals. Even if they do think it's wrong to kill us all and strip the Earth bare, that means giving up resources. That makes it harder to travel to the next system. Even if they think it's wrong, won't they just say "Better them than us!" and take it anyway? Then their James Cameron analog can make a movie in 4D about the noble earthling savages they wiped out in their greed.
A corporation is considered a total and utter disaster if it's only making a shitload of money, but is not growing exponentially. The only way to stave off total economic collapses happening more and more frequently, is exponential pillage. We're starting to feel a bit bad about it here, so, Spaceward Ho! Divide and conquer. Migrant Fleet heads to system, destroys it, builds new fleet. Two fleets head in different directions, destroy two more systems, and continue. There's no other way to survive in an economic system based on derivatives, where exponential growth is the only way to even maintain the status quo. Invest in a fleet, and make a shit load of money. Only, they won't be returning with spoils for centuries or more. But that's OK, current stock investments don't pay off, either. But the share in the fleet will appreciate as news flows in, so you can sell it based on speculation. Or go to derivatives and buy and sell shares in futures of the fleet. Hell, go second order and invest in the futures of the futures. And if one of humanities mining fleets runs into aliens? Well, they COULD leave them alone. But then their stocks would be worthless, those futures would be worthless, those future-futures would be worthless. Economic collapse. Billions starving to death, unable to afford the megatonnes of food rotting in silos. It's the more ethical choice to wipe those aliens the fuck out. (It's the even MORE ethical choice to not have such an incredibly stupid economic system, but suggesting that makes you a socialist).
Sure, I'm projecting our society on theirs...odds are, to not nuke their planet into desolation, they have to be better people than us. But, it's not like they have to be evil monsters from hell to go around wiping out civilizations they deem inferior. They just have to be big dicks like us. Alone, humans are swell people. But, none of us is as bad as all of us.
Many many issues have retractions. It's rare a judge orders it to be first page, so they normally hide them, but they're there all the time. Still, it has happened where a judge felt the damage was so severe that it warranted a front page apology.
They collect your SSID and router's wifi MAC, they don't connect to your router, the don't have your machine's MAC, they don't have IP addresses.
Good rant. Maybe in all your in-depth research to prove why the quote is so wrong, you should have started by making sure Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that. I'll get you started: Although the Slashdot summary presents it as a quote, the Register article does not present it as a quote, but as a claim that he said it "recently." And the Der Speigel article THEY cite, makes no mention of this at all. What he actually said, paraphrasing, was that if you are hiding that you did something, you maybe shouldn't be doing it, but beyond that, you definitely shouldn't be putting it online, because even with privacy policies, the FBI can always use the Patriot Act to force any website or service to turn that information over.
And anyway, you're saying if you found a bomb, you'd just walk away and not tell anybody? Nice fellow.
Your neighborhood sounds horrifying if 24/7 you have people with binocs recording the plates of everybody who visits. There was an equally crazy "gated" community near where I lived. I walked down it, to see what it was like, see if it was worth the city park they bought and bulldozed to build it. Some guy with a notepad ran up to me "This is private property and just standing here will put you in jail, I know you're not visiting, there are no children allowed" and I said "Oh I'm just casing the place, what's your house number and when do you work?" he bolted, probably called 911 80 times. Scary scary 12 year old, was I. I know better now, of course. He doesn't work, that's why he can sit on his porch on constant guard against schoolchildren taking a shortcut down his private through street that leads to the duck ponds...if your strata doesn't want visitors, build a damn barbwire fence and put an armed guard on your gate like the rest do. Meanwhile, a still shot from Google doesn't help you case, because you can't tell when anybody works, it doesn't let you plan shit. And odds are, it doesn't show you much or anything of what they have inside. If it does, a casual walk down the street would show you that, no need for any "suspicious peering" as you call it. And far from being the most risky part of a burglary, taking a quick look around just isn't that hard. In a gated community, ya, anybody who doesn't belong must have hopped a fence to get in, and that's suspicious...but if not...well...I've lived on a cul-de-sac...have you, really? There are always cars turning in, realizing its the wrong turn, looping around, and leaving. Do you really write them all down just in case? And do you make quick sketches or photograph people who walk in on foot? I dunno, is the UK really that far gone into big brother? Do you really corner and grill people out walking their dogs? How dare they take a loop around your street, it's not theirs! GET OUT FOREIGNER!
You can't eat healthy at Subway unless you get something without sauce, cheese, or bread ;). In terms of "good for you" you can go to the grocers and just buy those prewashed bags of salad, and a plastic fork. Enjoy! Faster and cheaper, and you'll have leftovers! And the Mandarin Chicken Salad is really bad for you, because even if you don't use the dressing or noodles it comes with, those orange slices (OK technically mandarin oranges aren't a kind of orange...) are marinated in pure corn syrup. Still, it's an almost not bad for you meal if you don't put the noodles or the dressing on. Because not only is the dressing also packed with sugar for no good reason, it's also got extremely high sodium levels. We're talking 1.25 g of sodium. A full half of your daily RDA in the USA, and pretty much your entire RDA in the UK. But, it IS their healthiest salad. Their Caesar will kill you faster than a baconator, and the BLT Salad? 1.8 g of sodium!!! Anywho, at least it spinach and swiss chard in it, dark greens. An infinitesimal amount, but still, they're in there.
The interesting thing about fast food, is how the amount of fast food people eat is not correlated with the obesity epidemic at all. Correlation is not causation, but no correlation is quite often no causation. If not, it's at least causation that's weak enough to be dominated by other factors ;) What obesity IS correlated with is the food pyramid. If you graph obesity for the last 100 years, you'll see it more or less flat, with a very slight increase over time as portion sizes grow. Fast food takes off, obesity doesn't even twitch. Then in the 80s you get the food pyramid, and the slope of obesity over time goes up by a factor of 30! Obesity is going from linear to exponential now. Because the higher it gets, the more we push high sugar, low fat diets, like in the food pyramid, and it doesn't work, it doesn't work at all. If you went to France 300 years ago and ask a master chef what makes rich people so fat, he'll tell you "cake!". Then suddenly in the 80s, it stopped being breads and cakes and other starches that made you fat, suddenly it was fat! Nutritionists laughed and laughed at how stupid they'd been for hundreds of years! They were too busy looking for correlations and doing studies! It was so simple, fat is as fat does, the end, fuck studies, it's true because it's simple! Occam's Razor! You'd think that, with hundreds of years of anecdotal and also rigerous correlation between starch and sugar intakes, and obesity, it would take a serious study to blow that out of the water. But, nutritionists don't do studies showing that high fat diets make you fat, because those studies fail, leaving them two choices: Be a scientist and publish results that don't agree with orthodoxy, and destroy your career, or just bury it and pretend it never happened. They chose B usually. Those who chose A, as I said, run out of the profession on a rail. So it's pretty well known now that you don't do that study, because the orthodoxy is wrong, and if you try to rub their faces in it, they will end you.
At any rate, I've never understood how fast food is considered as fast...in the time you spend in line, then waiting for them to make it, you could have made something cheaper and better for you at home. It's not fast food, it's procrastinated food. I'll spend 10 minutes at lunch waiting (maybe less if you didn't have any travel time?), instead of 5 minutes in the morning making. That seems like a loss, but that's future me's problem, not mine!
Decades ago, my dad had a Nordic Track ski machine. The flywheel has a magnet in it that connects to a sensor for the speed display. My dad had the idea to connect it to a serial port for logging purposes, so you could get a graph of your speed over time. I further suggested connecting your speed to a game, for visual motivation. MONEY PLEASE.
No, it's not like that at all. He's saying any form of sex education is illegal, which isn't supported by the law whatsoever. There is no contradiction except in his twisted head, where he thinks everybody who knows what sex is will automatically rape. He has an adopted child, maybe Child Services should pay them a visit, if he really thinks that.
Oops, they aren't. They are design patents, not hardware patents. I mean, obviously you couldn't patent having a light on a control to show its mode. Turbofire controllers for the NES had lights on them. What you can patent via design patent, though, is having a light in a particular spot. And handgrips in a particular shape. Analog sticks in a particular spot. And so on. Basically, you can't make a controller that has anything at all in common with the xbox controller, because it's protected by a dozen or so design patents. You'd think that if a design patent is on a design, you could only have one on a design. But that would be bad, because then you could just have your own design! No, it's important to have each button, each stick, protected by its own patent. That way, it's basically impossible to make a third party xbox controller without infringing at least a few of the design patents.
The controller does look identical to an XBOX controller. The black/white buttons are above instead of below. But those guys are all over the place on the different official xbox controllers anyways. All the other buttons are the same, and the shape is identical. Now, design patents can only cover the ornamental portion of the design, not the function. (If the function of your device is novel, it needs a regular patent). So, you could argue it needs all of those buttons. Certainly microsoft has no claim on a diamond of four buttons, X,Y,A,B, considering the SNES has the exact same diamond arrangement of buttons, even with the same damn names! The PS1 had the same setup with 4 shoulder buttons, but they aren't the same shape, and the Datel controller copies the exact shape of the shoulder buttons. Datel could also try to argue that users of an XBOX would be used to the positions of the sticks and buttons, so that's a necessary part of the device, as opposed to simple aesthetics. However, the fact remains that the shape overall is identical, and since there are all kinds of controllers out there, you couldn't argue that the EXACT shape is a necessary part of the device.
So, all in all, no, this isn't hardware patents. It's design patents, which are more like copyright than actual patents. It doesn't have to be a novel invention. It just has to be a distinct ornamental design. Though like other patents, they are frequently abused to cover any and all designs, regardless of aesthetics. Which makes it messy. They are difficult to defend against if your design is close to an existing design, because it can be hard to demonstrate which parts of a design are needed for functionality, and which are purely aesthetic. Especially for a controller, where the games might be designed around the assumption of a particular layout.
No, that's not necessary. The judge didn't rule that all hyperlinks are always OK no matter what. He ruled only that in this particular instance, the link was not libelous. In particular, he made clear that if you post a link to a defamatory web-page, with any sort of comment indicating agreement, or that the website in question is accurate, then it would be libelous. Much in the same way as if, in a book, you cited a defamatory article, not just with "This is interesting" but "Read this book for the truth on so-and-so", then your citation wouldn't just be a footnote, it would in itself be libelous.
That's how my wife works. She really really wants a song. She hops on iTunes to buy it. Oh look, it's not $0.99, it's $1.09. Deal breaker, forget it, no sale. It makes the artist seem super greedy, grabbing for an extra 10 damn cents because that particular song was just on an episode of something that week... Well, that's how I feel about all these damn greedy publishing houses. They want easily 10% or more markup over the physical fucking book. eBooks are supposed to be cheaper than physical books, not more expensive by a large margin! There's no printing costs, and Amazon is the one hosting it, not the publisher.
Naw, even bleeding hearts realize he's a suehappy jerk after RTFA and noticing that he knew she used a cellphone and WiFi, and told her that the house behind his was for rent. He told her she could live there just SO he could sue her. The only help he needs is into jail for his protection racket. Step 1: Find somebody with a cellphone. Step 2: Tell them they can move in to your neighborhood. Step 3: Demand they give up all electronic devices, even electric lighting. Step 4: Sue for half a million dollars when they won't give up their lighting, and are stuck in their lease and cannot leave. Step 5: Profit!
Or, look at it from the first side again, and allow for the fact that you are also crazy. There's a famous story about psychosomatic EM sensitivity. They built a large microwave relay station for cable television. Big huge microwave dishes and nasty pointy antennae. Nearby, a huge uproar, it was causing crippling migraines and vertigo and nose bleeds and nausea and blurred vision. They sign petitions and form a mob to go complain to the guys and tell them to shut it off. Well, the engineers at this station just laugh at them. "It's not funny!" they scream, just as you do, "Our pain is real! It's agony just being this close to your building, turn it off!" It turns out the engineers can't turn it off because they still haven't turned it on yet.
All of the mentally afflicted who claim this impossible allergy to an infinitesimally narrow band of radiation (with complete immunity to all other bands of EM radiation) who have actually been tested, have been shown to be making it up. The test is easy: Put them in a sterile room with nothing but lights in the way of electronic devices, and assure them its shielded from signals. See how calm they are, despite the powerful WiFi routers in the false ceiling? Now wheel in a big scary machine covered in antennae. Still fine, see, it's off! Now flick that big "ON" switch for them, see how that green light comes on? Instant agony! They grab at their heads and they scream, make it stop, you are raping our minds! OK, switch it off, they have proven their point, radio waves cause them pain. Except there is no transmitter, there are just pieces of metals attached to an empty box. The "ON" switch turns on the light, and only the light.
Afterwards, the quacks who make big bucks selling these folks expensive electricity cleaning devices and crystalline rods to protect them, say that of course the test failed, when you are allergic to pollen you don't sneeze as soon as you are near the plant, it can take hours. Or, they say the scientists negative thoughts, because they aren't true believers in chi points and auras, have corrupted the results. In any event, you are making the utterly absurd claim that you can feel the effects instantly as you climb higher towards the towers. So you have no excuse now. Go get tested. You can win $1,000,000 if you prove that your "disability" is real, and you have no room to complain since you've already asserted that there is no delayed reaction, you feel physical pain instantly. We'll be waiting.
Further, this guy didn't just sit there, minding his own business. He knew her before she moved in. He knew she had a cellphone, knew she used WiFi on her laptop so she could chat with family using Skype. And knowing this, he told her that the house next to his was for rent. Then, as soon as she moved in, him and a big friend of his knock on her door and tell her she has to shut off all of her wifi stuff or she'll be sorry. She did, she turned off her router and used a wired connection. That wasn't enough, no cellphone. So she stopped using her cellphone while home. Not enough, now she has to replace her dimmer switches with regular switches. So she said no, I've made too many comprises, no more, I'm keeping my dimmer switches. So he sued for half a million dollars and a permanent injunction barring her from using any and all electronic devices. He told her about the place because he KNEW she used a cellphone, and wanted an easy target to sue.
That's what they do. That's why they're being sued. GameStop is selling a box that says the game has multiplayer. It does not, you have to buy it if the game isn't new.