Whoa am I posting late, sorry. The point is avoiding prosecution for misconduct. Any jury of fools off the street minus the smart people who get excluded understands a carbon copy is harder to fake than simply running off extra special printouts. The same gang of fools will never be made to understand a signed PDF. And who's signing the PDF anyway... you need a digital notary not a sig.
They won't need to. As soon as they suspect any troubles these cars will simply drive themselves to the dealership to have recall maintenance service performed. Better hope you're not on "Lover's Lane" or on your way to <insert important event here> at the time.
Yeah noob programming error as if those two conditions are mutually exclusive. More likely bigger problem with unmanned autonomous vehicles is people sending carefully crafted control packets "Hey car, did you know you have a recall requiring immediate service, oh and BTW your local dealer service center has moved to (insert sketchy street address deep in the 'hood)?"
Other hollywood plot style problems with autonomous driverless vehicles are cars driving off with little kids trapped in the backseat, etc.
"Hey I'm the iphone valet parking app, trust me, I really am, and would all the expensive new cars in this parking lot please line up behind my tow truck which will shortly be enroute to the chop shop, err, I meant to say I'm your owner and I'm done shopping please pick me up at this door."
The problem is an immense economic gulf from where its technologically possible but horribly expensive, until its cheap enough that a college student econobox car has it. At this time, looking at the cost of tech vs how often you'll need it, you're probably WAY better off taking mass transit like a aircraft (chartered if necessary) and/or hiring chauffeur service and a limo. Its kind of like those guys who try to rationalize a giant $75K pickup truck because they buy approximately one sheet of plywood per year so the "need" the truck. In a similar way any alternative is better economically, than turning a commuter car into a 12-hour cruising machine.
Hmm for the cost of the in dash GPS on my wife's car, well into the 4 digits, I could afford a chartered helicopter flight from my nearby little airport to the big airport, then a chartered jet (only about $700/hr) to my mom's airport, followed by another helicopter flight at the destination. Yet its supposedly cheap and prudent to spend more on the in-dash GPS. F it I'll just use my wife's phone GPS to navigate us, which doesn't even lock out when the car is in motion unlike a POS in-dash GPS.
I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology
Old people... and there's lots of them. With a side order of rich parent buying new car for teenager that might be less likely to kill them.
However, invent an idiot proof car and evolution will invent a better idiot.
One interesting side effect is much like ABS and 4-wheel drive, this will probably just backfire and increase death rates. "Sure, I'd never go out on the steep mountain road in 50 MPH winds during a icestorm at night with my old car, but I'm sure the new car's computer will keep me safe no matter what... " followed by death and lawsuit. Followed by a quick firmware reprogramming job such that the car's sensors will be used primarily to shut the car down unless its well above freezing, no wind, no precipitation, horizontal terrain, and daylight. In other words, when you should probably be riding a bicycle. This is an interesting way to save gas, too.
what killed touch computing during its first wave in the early 1980s
The PC era stuff they're talking about is At Least the third wave.
The first wave was in the 60s/70s very fuzzy was not there to see it.
The second wave was around 1980 in the pre-PC era. Basically, light pens. The end user need not be informed nor know the difference nor need the UI be modified to "touch" vs light pen.
Having lived thru it, there were three classes of light pens around 1980. One was exotic mhz class light sensors that "watched" the phosphor and the video waveforms, and correlated them together to give a simple X Y coordinate. I have no experience with them. I believe Apple had hardware for this?
The next class is "digital" with weird interfaces. My father had a light pen for a TRS80 model3 which used the cassette port and I believe it operated like a modem, where a 0 on the cassette port was 1100 hz and a 1 was 2200 hz or whatever, so a simple light controlled oscillator fed into the cassette input was fast, simple, and worked pretty well. It was not my hardware so I may be off in some details, although I am 100% certain it interfaced via the cassette interface. UI was much cruder than the hardware system above, and amounted to illumate/flash a square on the screen, do you see light? If so the pen is touching, if not, try flashing the next square. Worked pretty well, and fast, for 1 of n selections where n is less than 5 or so, not so good for full screen.
The next class, which I actually built and used for my radio shack color computer, was a simple light detector feeding into an analog input. Probably a joystick axis. This amounts to a CdS cell and a resistor in a model rocket cardboard adapter tube and some cabling. Identical software to above. Back in the olden days, home computer analog inputs were very crude and slow, so this was quite a bit slower than the cassette input 1100 hz or whatever device above. But it did work.
There were other gadgets mostly I/O prohibitive that amounted to a frame around a screen and flashing IR LEDs and looking at phototransistor outputs. Serious reflection problems, resolution problems, uses tons of I/O. Pretty fast, if done right, however. I suppose in the modern era, its too expensive to make a "touch" screen material when you could use two webcams and what amounts to something like a crude version of kinect software.
The main problem with touch-ish interfaces in 1980, oddly enough, was the same gorilla arm problem so recently discovered in 2013. Who ever would have guessed human anatomy would evolve so little in a mere two generations. As the endless wheel of IT revolves, as this technology is "reinvented" every decade or so, we'll make the same discovery that it sucks in 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050, repeat into infinity. Also the "human-computer" bandwidth of the UI was ridiculously slow, you could do more with a keyboard in 10 seconds than a touch/light screen in a minute, and back then people believed learning should provide rewards, rather than the modern "all are and will forever be noobs" and "trophies for all, equally" and all that garbage.
Now the definition of temperature is amount of heat energy per amount of entropy (T=dQ/dS).
My version of the "laymans explanation" would revolve around that. There are several ways to define temperature, or at least several equations from distant corners of physics with a "T" in them where a bit of algebra can isolate that "T" to the left side all alone. At "normal human temperatures" those different ways to calculate a "T" all match up. Hopefully you're not surprised that at extremes of size (like astronomically large or atomic small) or extremes of... (dramatic pause) temperature... the equations and "common sense" no longer match up. So all this means is one peculiar way to measure "T" goes negative if you do really weird things to really cold things. It doesn't mean all the equations, especially the most common "normal temps" implementations, ALL flip.
So you can't give them "copy number three" which has completely different terms than "copy number one".
If your sole purpose in life was to save trees you'd just get ONE copy notarized by a notary all/both sides trust, then rely on photocopies of the notarized doc, but even with that protocol you can't prove stuff wasn't added or crossed out, unless you had a clause that the contract is invalid if anything is added or crossed out, and you need to notarize each page, which I'm sure the notary is willing to do for a substantial fee along with a summary page for the notary of each doc they notarized to tie it all together...
Oh just put on your computer cryptologist hat and figure an unbreakable protocol that can be done by hand.
The other part is archaic laws that say "carbon copies or word perfect 4.1 ONLY" and so forth.
One particular problem I see is viewing multiple documents in a workspace simultaneously (e.g. a mosiac of paperwork on one's desk)
I have found the amount of stuff I print has dropped by an order of magnitude every time I add another computer and/or monitor to my desk. I've got 4 now at home and never print anything anymore.
At work I've only got 3, and once in a while I'll have to print out something complicated to compare to the three screens.
I used to automatically start my projects by printing out electronic component datasheet PDFs so I could examine a couple of them while at the same time screwing around with the CAD and simulation software on my one PC and one monitor. Those days are long gone.
Yeah, thats kind of the point. Been there seen this on dailyWTF or sociological images or whatever, clowns forcing black people living in europe/africa to identify themselves as "afro-americans" despite having nothing to do with the USA. A great LOL. Almost as funny as my pale pasty white high school friend who immigrated from south africa demanding to be called an afro-american and get in on all the racial quota deals and scholarships and stuff at colleges. Always wondered what happened to that guy.
Yes that'll work. My insane link farm idea (from more than a decade ago) was sort of a psuedo MUD / text adventure on the net, with the idea that you decide if your instance is private, group, or public based on how you publicize "your" url or not. With the added metagame that instead of using sensible 128 bit hashes or whatever, I intentionally made the urls small and human enough that a devoted lunatic could randomly skip around and hit something once in a while, see whats going on. Needless to say, never deployed, although it was hilarious to design and implement.
It was originally inspired by stories in the news (at that time) of big companies doing things like embedding account numbers in URLs and then issuing easily guessable sequential account numbers to all users... hmm what could possibly go wrong...
In practice given the hardware of the era I basically made a machine that could DOS itself with practically no users. Maybe now it would work.
Its definable, not necessarily linkable, beyond the domain name.
Its pretty trivial to make a dynamic website, for the sake of example, moronirishnewspaper.com and all the links on that are random numbers which are mapped to the the real story. Then every minute or whatever add new links and destroy the links that are more than 30 minutes old. So MIN.com/123456.html points to the most recent blarney competition, but in an hour, that URL will be deleted and/or repointed to goatse or whatever instead of the original story.
One amusing thing you can do, if you rotate every minute and keep the last 60 links around for an hour, is trivially analyze how long someone's been on the site and/or how long between clicks. You can also get all "top sekrit" security by obscurity and give different random number links to each subscriber, so if you see a link out in the wild, you know exactly who released it and when and what it was linked to. Other than that, it is a pretty moronic stunt or experiment. Why yes, I have done some pretty bizarre things solely for the F of it in the past 20 years.
Under what circumstances do people use a data store that doesn't need data relationships?
A crude 1980s filesystem, on a system where they don't officially allow direct file storage but do provide a database capable of holding arbitrary binary data.
Don't need to. My point was that a suitably intelligent assembly language programmer could make some assumptions about any new instructions or functional units to make a pretty good guess about what new features required that new functional unit... Reimplement it however you want on android... coproc, dedicated peripheral proc, just buy and bolt on a smart peripheral, say screw it do it in software emu, doesn't matter. The point is looking at CPU hardware you might get months, maybe a year's head start on some weird new feature.
members are increasingly tech-savvy and Internet connected — and the combination of ambitious, educated people, a ceiling on advancement due to corruption and lack of infrastructure, and lax law enforcement
They talking about us or them? Doesn't seem fair to pick on the africans when its not really any different in the USA or any number of other places.
I think the somewhat realistic fear is Samsung releasing a A7-CPU-like android device. There seems to be little point in giving your strongest retail competitor your best IP ahead of time for them to study.
There is a market positioning effect in that apple is kind of saying the A7 will be more than just faster, maybe the design will signify a major change in features. Like if it had holographic 3d display hardware acceleration that would imply the new iphone would have a holographic 3d display so the android guys best get started copying now. Perhaps hardware acceleration of (insert specific new or rarely currently used codec here) decoding and/or encoding indicates a major software change like doing facetime over 3G without much bandwidth or whatever. Or a huge improvement in CPU power consumption signifying the new advertising campaign for the new iphone will be longer battery life, so the android guys can start playing catchup months earlier than waiting until device release.
Or its all a head fake and A7 will just be A6 but faster, and they're trying to trick the competition into wasting time/money spinning their wheels.
Looks like boring FPS remakes from big advertisers. In the "real world" untainted by advertising dollars, the PC game outlook in 2013 looks like this:
Spiderweb software is working on two Avadon 2 games. There goes about 50 hours of my life for each.
Goblinworks will probably release something WRT pathfinder online. Coming from "real RPG people" there better not be any "bring me 5 bear skins" grindgarbage quests.
Will xplane release version 11 or will the patent troll who started attacking this year, successfully destroy the company?
Minecraft will probably do something, although I donno what.
(ok ok heres some fps news) I'm hoping the install process for dayz will be streamlined as it was a huge PITA about six months ago. Just put it on steam... linux steam please.
In the tired but not quite dead yet MMO arena, the spreadsheet with a 3-d screen saver masquerading as a MMORPG, EVE, will have some inter group drama and more stuff will be released into the game for (asteroid) grinding purposes, just like the last decade or so. Ditto WoW. I haven't been on EVE since 2005, when I spent about a month grinding to get up to the level of a mining barge, have I missed anything since then?
In the console arena, I was recently shocked coming from the ITMS and google play that the xbox "app store" only has something like ten apps, all of which were paid subscription portal "apps" (hulu plus, amazon prime, all that kind of paid stuff). I'm predicting they'll release a couple more, maybe bringing it up to the fertile level of the original 90s Palm ecosystem in another decade or so. Maybe they'll even have an app that doesn't involve giving someone else money, first.
Looks more crossbow with alternative non-bolt ammo. Slingshot makes me think of the classic wristrocket. Those and fireworks have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for at least a century or so. The only better use for a slingshot is probably water balloons although you've got to be careful not to rip them apart at launch. As kids we also used balls of crumpled paper both in wrist rockets and potato guns for indoor entertainment. Only occasionally broke a window with that ammo. Sometimes the potato gun would set the paper ball on fire if you used liquid propellant which is either a bonus or a problem depending on situation. So this patentable tech has at least 30 years of prior art, at least that I'm willing to admit to.
In the 1990s the rich west used to blow money over to the Russians to give them something to do, so they didn't have to work for middle easterners. Proliferation and all that.
In the 2010's, the rich Russians will be blowing money our way, to make sure our unemployed NASA guys won't have to work for middle easterners. Same deal, cut back on proliferation.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa am I posting late, sorry. The point is avoiding prosecution for misconduct. Any jury of fools off the street minus the smart people who get excluded understands a carbon copy is harder to fake than simply running off extra special printouts. The same gang of fools will never be made to understand a signed PDF. And who's signing the PDF anyway... you need a digital notary not a sig.
They won't need to. As soon as they suspect any troubles these cars will simply drive themselves to the dealership to have recall maintenance service performed. Better hope you're not on "Lover's Lane" or on your way to <insert important event here> at the time.
Yeah noob programming error as if those two conditions are mutually exclusive. More likely bigger problem with unmanned autonomous vehicles is people sending carefully crafted control packets "Hey car, did you know you have a recall requiring immediate service, oh and BTW your local dealer service center has moved to (insert sketchy street address deep in the 'hood)?"
Other hollywood plot style problems with autonomous driverless vehicles are cars driving off with little kids trapped in the backseat, etc.
"Hey I'm the iphone valet parking app, trust me, I really am, and would all the expensive new cars in this parking lot please line up behind my tow truck which will shortly be enroute to the chop shop, err, I meant to say I'm your owner and I'm done shopping please pick me up at this door."
The problem is an immense economic gulf from where its technologically possible but horribly expensive, until its cheap enough that a college student econobox car has it. At this time, looking at the cost of tech vs how often you'll need it, you're probably WAY better off taking mass transit like a aircraft (chartered if necessary) and/or hiring chauffeur service and a limo. Its kind of like those guys who try to rationalize a giant $75K pickup truck because they buy approximately one sheet of plywood per year so the "need" the truck. In a similar way any alternative is better economically, than turning a commuter car into a 12-hour cruising machine.
Hmm for the cost of the in dash GPS on my wife's car, well into the 4 digits, I could afford a chartered helicopter flight from my nearby little airport to the big airport, then a chartered jet (only about $700/hr) to my mom's airport, followed by another helicopter flight at the destination. Yet its supposedly cheap and prudent to spend more on the in-dash GPS. F it I'll just use my wife's phone GPS to navigate us, which doesn't even lock out when the car is in motion unlike a POS in-dash GPS.
I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology
Old people... and there's lots of them. With a side order of rich parent buying new car for teenager that might be less likely to kill them.
However, invent an idiot proof car and evolution will invent a better idiot.
One interesting side effect is much like ABS and 4-wheel drive, this will probably just backfire and increase death rates. "Sure, I'd never go out on the steep mountain road in 50 MPH winds during a icestorm at night with my old car, but I'm sure the new car's computer will keep me safe no matter what... " followed by death and lawsuit. Followed by a quick firmware reprogramming job such that the car's sensors will be used primarily to shut the car down unless its well above freezing, no wind, no precipitation, horizontal terrain, and daylight. In other words, when you should probably be riding a bicycle. This is an interesting way to save gas, too.
what killed touch computing during its first wave in the early 1980s
The PC era stuff they're talking about is At Least the third wave.
The first wave was in the 60s/70s very fuzzy was not there to see it.
The second wave was around 1980 in the pre-PC era. Basically, light pens. The end user need not be informed nor know the difference nor need the UI be modified to "touch" vs light pen.
Having lived thru it, there were three classes of light pens around 1980. One was exotic mhz class light sensors that "watched" the phosphor and the video waveforms, and correlated them together to give a simple X Y coordinate. I have no experience with them. I believe Apple had hardware for this?
The next class is "digital" with weird interfaces. My father had a light pen for a TRS80 model3 which used the cassette port and I believe it operated like a modem, where a 0 on the cassette port was 1100 hz and a 1 was 2200 hz or whatever, so a simple light controlled oscillator fed into the cassette input was fast, simple, and worked pretty well. It was not my hardware so I may be off in some details, although I am 100% certain it interfaced via the cassette interface. UI was much cruder than the hardware system above, and amounted to illumate/flash a square on the screen, do you see light? If so the pen is touching, if not, try flashing the next square. Worked pretty well, and fast, for 1 of n selections where n is less than 5 or so, not so good for full screen.
The next class, which I actually built and used for my radio shack color computer, was a simple light detector feeding into an analog input. Probably a joystick axis. This amounts to a CdS cell and a resistor in a model rocket cardboard adapter tube and some cabling. Identical software to above. Back in the olden days, home computer analog inputs were very crude and slow, so this was quite a bit slower than the cassette input 1100 hz or whatever device above. But it did work.
There were other gadgets mostly I/O prohibitive that amounted to a frame around a screen and flashing IR LEDs and looking at phototransistor outputs. Serious reflection problems, resolution problems, uses tons of I/O. Pretty fast, if done right, however. I suppose in the modern era, its too expensive to make a "touch" screen material when you could use two webcams and what amounts to something like a crude version of kinect software.
The main problem with touch-ish interfaces in 1980, oddly enough, was the same gorilla arm problem so recently discovered in 2013. Who ever would have guessed human anatomy would evolve so little in a mere two generations. As the endless wheel of IT revolves, as this technology is "reinvented" every decade or so, we'll make the same discovery that it sucks in 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050, repeat into infinity. Also the "human-computer" bandwidth of the UI was ridiculously slow, you could do more with a keyboard in 10 seconds than a touch/light screen in a minute, and back then people believed learning should provide rewards, rather than the modern "all are and will forever be noobs" and "trophies for all, equally" and all that garbage.
Now the definition of temperature is amount of heat energy per amount of entropy (T=dQ/dS).
My version of the "laymans explanation" would revolve around that. There are several ways to define temperature, or at least several equations from distant corners of physics with a "T" in them where a bit of algebra can isolate that "T" to the left side all alone. At "normal human temperatures" those different ways to calculate a "T" all match up. Hopefully you're not surprised that at extremes of size (like astronomically large or atomic small) or extremes of ... (dramatic pause) temperature ... the equations and "common sense" no longer match up. So all this means is one peculiar way to measure "T" goes negative if you do really weird things to really cold things. It doesn't mean all the equations, especially the most common "normal temps" implementations, ALL flip.
So you can't give them "copy number three" which has completely different terms than "copy number one".
If your sole purpose in life was to save trees you'd just get ONE copy notarized by a notary all/both sides trust, then rely on photocopies of the notarized doc, but even with that protocol you can't prove stuff wasn't added or crossed out, unless you had a clause that the contract is invalid if anything is added or crossed out, and you need to notarize each page, which I'm sure the notary is willing to do for a substantial fee along with a summary page for the notary of each doc they notarized to tie it all together...
Oh just put on your computer cryptologist hat and figure an unbreakable protocol that can be done by hand.
The other part is archaic laws that say "carbon copies or word perfect 4.1 ONLY" and so forth.
One particular problem I see is viewing multiple documents in a workspace simultaneously (e.g. a mosiac of paperwork on one's desk)
I have found the amount of stuff I print has dropped by an order of magnitude every time I add another computer and/or monitor to my desk. I've got 4 now at home and never print anything anymore.
At work I've only got 3, and once in a while I'll have to print out something complicated to compare to the three screens.
I used to automatically start my projects by printing out electronic component datasheet PDFs so I could examine a couple of them while at the same time screwing around with the CAD and simulation software on my one PC and one monitor. Those days are long gone.
Yeah, thats kind of the point. Been there seen this on dailyWTF or sociological images or whatever, clowns forcing black people living in europe/africa to identify themselves as "afro-americans" despite having nothing to do with the USA. A great LOL. Almost as funny as my pale pasty white high school friend who immigrated from south africa demanding to be called an afro-american and get in on all the racial quota deals and scholarships and stuff at colleges. Always wondered what happened to that guy.
There's a haggis joke in here somewhere
Yes that'll work. My insane link farm idea (from more than a decade ago) was sort of a psuedo MUD / text adventure on the net, with the idea that you decide if your instance is private, group, or public based on how you publicize "your" url or not. With the added metagame that instead of using sensible 128 bit hashes or whatever, I intentionally made the urls small and human enough that a devoted lunatic could randomly skip around and hit something once in a while, see whats going on. Needless to say, never deployed, although it was hilarious to design and implement.
It was originally inspired by stories in the news (at that time) of big companies doing things like embedding account numbers in URLs and then issuing easily guessable sequential account numbers to all users... hmm what could possibly go wrong...
In practice given the hardware of the era I basically made a machine that could DOS itself with practically no users. Maybe now it would work.
Its definable, not necessarily linkable, beyond the domain name.
Its pretty trivial to make a dynamic website, for the sake of example, moronirishnewspaper.com and all the links on that are random numbers which are mapped to the the real story. Then every minute or whatever add new links and destroy the links that are more than 30 minutes old. So MIN.com/123456.html points to the most recent blarney competition, but in an hour, that URL will be deleted and/or repointed to goatse or whatever instead of the original story.
One amusing thing you can do, if you rotate every minute and keep the last 60 links around for an hour, is trivially analyze how long someone's been on the site and/or how long between clicks. You can also get all "top sekrit" security by obscurity and give different random number links to each subscriber, so if you see a link out in the wild, you know exactly who released it and when and what it was linked to. Other than that, it is a pretty moronic stunt or experiment. Why yes, I have done some pretty bizarre things solely for the F of it in the past 20 years.
Company policy isn't law.
Maybe in Ireland. Wait till the Americans get the same idea.
sounds like a transaction
Under what circumstances do people use a data store that doesn't need data relationships?
A crude 1980s filesystem, on a system where they don't officially allow direct file storage but do provide a database capable of holding arbitrary binary data.
thanks for giving them that idea. now I have to put my food in the front seat instead of the trunk.
aren't copying anything in chip design from Apple
Don't need to. My point was that a suitably intelligent assembly language programmer could make some assumptions about any new instructions or functional units to make a pretty good guess about what new features required that new functional unit... Reimplement it however you want on android... coproc, dedicated peripheral proc, just buy and bolt on a smart peripheral, say screw it do it in software emu, doesn't matter. The point is looking at CPU hardware you might get months, maybe a year's head start on some weird new feature.
African cyber-crime wave.
Thats racist(tm)(c) and completely non-politically correct. Not quite as bad as using the N word but still inappropriate. Should have been written:
African-American cyber-crime wave.
There now thats the politically correct term.
members are increasingly tech-savvy and Internet connected — and the combination of ambitious, educated people, a ceiling on advancement due to corruption and lack of infrastructure, and lax law enforcement
They talking about us or them? Doesn't seem fair to pick on the africans when its not really any different in the USA or any number of other places.
I think the somewhat realistic fear is Samsung releasing a A7-CPU-like android device.
There seems to be little point in giving your strongest retail competitor your best IP ahead of time for them to study.
There is a market positioning effect in that apple is kind of saying the A7 will be more than just faster, maybe the design will signify a major change in features. Like if it had holographic 3d display hardware acceleration that would imply the new iphone would have a holographic 3d display so the android guys best get started copying now. Perhaps hardware acceleration of (insert specific new or rarely currently used codec here) decoding and/or encoding indicates a major software change like doing facetime over 3G without much bandwidth or whatever. Or a huge improvement in CPU power consumption signifying the new advertising campaign for the new iphone will be longer battery life, so the android guys can start playing catchup months earlier than waiting until device release.
Or its all a head fake and A7 will just be A6 but faster, and they're trying to trick the competition into wasting time/money spinning their wheels.
Given that Phobos is most likely a captured body, this does not seem like a good return on the investment.
Why, do they expect to be charged with receipt of stolen property?
I was thinking more in terms of loan sharking gone bad than protection racket gone bad for the first example, but that works too.
Looks like boring FPS remakes from big advertisers. In the "real world" untainted by advertising dollars, the PC game outlook in 2013 looks like this:
Spiderweb software is working on two Avadon 2 games. There goes about 50 hours of my life for each.
Goblinworks will probably release something WRT pathfinder online. Coming from "real RPG people" there better not be any "bring me 5 bear skins" grindgarbage quests.
Will xplane release version 11 or will the patent troll who started attacking this year, successfully destroy the company?
Minecraft will probably do something, although I donno what.
(ok ok heres some fps news) I'm hoping the install process for dayz will be streamlined as it was a huge PITA about six months ago. Just put it on steam... linux steam please.
In the tired but not quite dead yet MMO arena, the spreadsheet with a 3-d screen saver masquerading as a MMORPG, EVE, will have some inter group drama and more stuff will be released into the game for (asteroid) grinding purposes, just like the last decade or so. Ditto WoW. I haven't been on EVE since 2005, when I spent about a month grinding to get up to the level of a mining barge, have I missed anything since then?
In the console arena, I was recently shocked coming from the ITMS and google play that the xbox "app store" only has something like ten apps, all of which were paid subscription portal "apps" (hulu plus, amazon prime, all that kind of paid stuff). I'm predicting they'll release a couple more, maybe bringing it up to the fertile level of the original 90s Palm ecosystem in another decade or so. Maybe they'll even have an app that doesn't involve giving someone else money, first.
Looks more crossbow with alternative non-bolt ammo. Slingshot makes me think of the classic wristrocket. Those and fireworks have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for at least a century or so. The only better use for a slingshot is probably water balloons although you've got to be careful not to rip them apart at launch. As kids we also used balls of crumpled paper both in wrist rockets and potato guns for indoor entertainment. Only occasionally broke a window with that ammo. Sometimes the potato gun would set the paper ball on fire if you used liquid propellant which is either a bonus or a problem depending on situation. So this patentable tech has at least 30 years of prior art, at least that I'm willing to admit to.
In the 1990s the rich west used to blow money over to the Russians to give them something to do, so they didn't have to work for middle easterners. Proliferation and all that.
In the 2010's, the rich Russians will be blowing money our way, to make sure our unemployed NASA guys won't have to work for middle easterners. Same deal, cut back on proliferation.