Join me: i will try to lead the way... Ok, and when we're done fixing English to be less arrogant, we can hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and complain about how rich people are evil.
The Germans capitalize *all* their nouns, the arrogant bastards! What makes a noun so much more important than a verb? Nouns don't even *do* anything!
What predictions does the "theory" of ID make, and how do we test them? As someone who has had this very tiring argument with several IDers, I will say that they always come back with "what predictions does evolution make, and how do you test them?"
I am always at a loss for an answer, because I am not an evolutionary biologist, I'm an engineer. I don't know anything about the science of evolution, only the broad concepts. So would someone more fully versed in the day-to-day work of experimental evolution be able to give me a counter example to throw right back at the IDers?
An analogy involving cars would be nice, but is not required.
now think ahead, if you spent years writing some novel little package that did something nifty, then a bunch of people looked at it, figured out what it did then made a copy of it and gave it away, destroying your efforts, you'd be singing a different tune. Maybe some whiners who don't understand how competition works would be, but I wouldn't. If my package really is that novel, then it's not easily copied*. If it's easily copied, it's not that novel.
Additionally, most people seem to forget (when talking about return on investment for software products) that profits are in no way correlated to the amount of work someone spent developing the product or how elegant/novel/nifty/useful the product is. Profits are correlated exactly to how much it cost to create the product and how much people are willing to pay for it. That's the cold hard truth of competition: even novel, useful, popular products don't make a profit.
If you can't compete with free, you haven't added any value. Welcome to capitalism.
-- *By "copied" here, I mean a similar implementation, not unauthorized duplication.
Maybe, just maybe, the CIA shouldn't be placing big honking satellites they want to keep secret in very predictable, visible orbits.
Do human spies walk in the middle of a great big plaza in full sunshine on a predictable rotation if they want to stay hidden? Of course not-- they stick to the shadows, and they vary their route.
Spy satellites are going to be a relic of the past pretty soon anyway, as radar-invisible high-altitudedroneplanes are becoming the norm. A drone does not have a set flight path like an orbit, so the enemy can't predict where it's going to go even if it is spotted. It flies in the atmosphere, so the IR contrast with the rest of space is not there, and it's made of radar-absorbing materials that make it all but invisible. Add in some visual camouflage (like painting the underside the same color as the sky) and reduce the engine noise with cleverly shaped nozzles, and the enemy will never even know it's there. As the technology to fly these things gets better and the drones themselves get longer range, we might not even need spy satellites anymore.
Satellites with cameras will always be useful for Earth Science and other pursuits. But they might not be the best vector for obtaining covert high-altitude images of enemy territory anymore.
However, keep in mind that our sun was named Sol in Latin, and that name was assigned long before anyone knew that the sun was just a special case of a star (namely, it's the closest star). Back when people started using Sol to refer to the Sun, it was considered a separate entity from the stars, just as the Moon (Luna) was separate from the sun.
However, now that we have hundreds of years of astronomical data proving that our sun is really not different than many other suns, I don't see a problem with calling an external star system a "solar system" just like I would have no trouble calling Phobos and Deimos a "lunar system". Sun and Moon, the English equivalents of Sol and Luna, have become genericized as we found out that our sun and moon were not special; they are just examples of common objects in the universe.
You will also note that the British seem to have no trouble confusing the word "continent" with the specific place "The Continent". This is exactly the same issue as "solar system" vs. "The Solar System", and exactly as pointless to argue about, since it doesn't hinder communication at all.
It used to be that people, and that includes companies run by them, would keep their word and promises. Big business deals were at one time sealed with a word and a handshake. Today, even a contract with more print than the phone book for a big city may not be honored. Yes, let us all pine for a bygone era where everyone was honorable, the sky was bluer, and those pesky things like "laws" didn't need to be enforced because no one broke them.
Take off your rose-colored glasses and read some history. People are no more or less honorable now than they have ever been.
Don't forget that every work not 95 years old is out of copyright in the US and can be freely shared, copied, traded, etc. Also, there is the possibility that people may have been given the right to share, copy, trade, etc a piece of music that has a current copyright. You say that like the recording industry cares about fair/noninfringing use. Their work with Macrovision, CSS, BD+, FairPlay and PlaysForSure is a testament to their willingness to just ignore the edge cases and assume everyone needs permission.
You make an excellent point, but I would argue that the use of casual swearing is not analogous. Wikipedia is not censoring profanity at all; in fact there are lots of articles specifically about profanity that don't censor a thing. Articles which are not about profanity typically do not include any because the writing style doesn't require it. This is not censorship anymore than refusing to capitalize the first letter of every noun in a sentence is censorship (as used to be the convention in English several hundred years ago).
By it's nature, most profanity, in any culture, is a product of passion. When people are angry or excited or otherwise passionate about something, they tend to swear. Wikipedia's purportedly neutral tone would negate the need for that, since the style of writing should be, by definition, without passion. It should simply be a calm discussion of the topic. Standard (passionate) profanity therefore does not belong in a Wikipedia article.
The "casual profanity" you referenced is a deliberate speech pattern people use when either 1) they wish to make people uncomfortable, 2) they wish to fit in with a crowd, or 3) they do not have a large enough vocabulary to come up with anything else (either by choice or by education). None of these three reasons is justifiable for use of "casual profanity" in a scholarly article, as Wikipedia's writing style aspires to be. Scholarly writing does not include profanity for profanity's sake not because it's offensive, but because there are many more specific and appropriate words to use instead. Swear words are usually very loosely used, and more precision is needed in an informational article. (One example that comes to mind is the use of the word "feces" in a medical context, or "scat" in a zoological context, or "manure" in an agricultural context, because these words are the appropriate jargon in those industries, and more precise than "shit.")
Additionally, Wikipedia has no problem printing profanity when it is appropriate. For example, quotes from people including profanity are not censored or blocked out, acronyms including swears are fully explained, and Wikipedia even has articles on the swearwordsthemselves which use them liberally. In the context of discussing that topic, swearing is appropriate, where it would not be elsewhere. Wikipedia doesn't sprinkle random images of the prophet Muhammad into unrelated articles, either. They are only in the articles where the images are appropriate to the topic.
The people you mention who get "uppity" when others tell them to stop swearing have every right to feel that way, since the people asking them to stop are trying to infringe on what I consider to be basic free speech rights. The same standard should apply to Wikipedia's collection of images depicting Muhammad.
Nicholas Cage found it after breaking into Los Alamos and finding a codebook hidden in Richard Feynman's desk which contained a simple substitution cypher pointing to the particle accelerator at Cern, where he discovered a vast underground cavern containing piles of gold doubloons stolen from all the Spanish Galleons that supposedly "sunk" in the 1500s. Hidden inside one of the chests of gold was a stone tablet containing ancient cuneiforms which had been painstakingly DES encrypted by hand, and when decrypted, showed the final resting place of the last remaining Higgs boson, which was in the Smithsonian, hanging from the ceiling and protected by the Ancient Order of Obfuscating Physicists.
Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that. Agreed. Disagreed. Disagreed. Agreed.
This is all about keeping Microsoft Windows itself afloat. The decision to make a browser (and a non-standard one at that) a vital O/S component was not a good engineering decision, but it made sense to management at a time when Netscape Must Die. I posted a longer analysis earlier. Actually, that should be "Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed." When I said "keep every developer coding specifically for IE", I meant exactly what you said: the end goal is to keep people using Windows, since IE and Windows are inseparable. Sorry if that was unclear.
If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it. You're right. With those two constraints (backwards compatibility and standards compliance) this is the best way to go.
However, I don't agree with the first constraint. Backwards compatibility should not be an issue here. Period. They should have set the non-standard flag to invoke non-standards mode. Then all the pages that want to keep rendering in IE 6/7 can simply set that flag (since it's an HTTP header, you can just set it on the whole domain and be done with it) and move on with their lives. But on the plus side, any new webpage will have incentive to code to standards, because now all the browsers would support a single codebase (something that has not happened since back in the Mosaic days). No more coding for specific browsers, ever.
And don't give me that crap about old websites that are no longer maintained. Sites coded specifically for IE 4 and Netscape 4 break in IE 6 and Firefox... should we be crying over that? Give me a break. If it's no longer maintained, then why are you still using it? Maintained websites will update their code for the new version of IE every time, just like they did for IE4, IE5, IE6, IE7...
Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that.
IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. Sounds great to me. Welcome to the Standardized Web (tm), we hope you enjoy your stay. On the plus side, all the development needed to change over to standards will be fast and easy, because the standards themselves are well defined and fully published. No more of this ridiculous trial-and-error, click'n'pray style of development. Consistency is a good thing.
Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to. And destroy any incentive for anyone to write compliant pages, now or ever. "Why would we go through all the trouble to validate our code, when it works correctly in all the new versions of IE by default?"
Microsoft's aim is not to standardize. That's only their PR talking point. They still have every intention of locking the majority of the web into playing nice with IE, to keep Windows on most machines. That's not anti-MS rhetoric, it's their standard operating procedure.
Have the company that designs and manufactures the machine to print the ballot be a different company from the one that designs and manufactures the counting and checksum machine. (This would require an open checksum algorithm-- another plus.)
In fact, get two companies to build the counting and checksum machines, and verify them against each other.
The plans for a fully working nuclear weapon can be found quite easily on Google. Gaining nuclear technology has much less to do with knowledge now than with the economics of setting up a proper refining facility for the creation of the uranium and plutonium isotopes used in making a weapon, both of which are very expensive and time-consuming to produce. The challenge is hiding that facility, not learning how to make nukes.
From the altitude the ISS is orbiting, there's no such thing as approaching the atmosphere "slowly". The ISS is traveling at about 17000 mph around the circumference of its circular orbit. In order to enter the atmosphere, a body in that orbit would have to slow down in order to enter an elliptical orbit which intersects the atmosphere. This requires a velocity change (delta v) of about 200-250 mph. Even with that change, you're still traveling at 16,750 mph, so that when you finally do hit atmosphere, the friction from the air will be very high, even if the air is thin. As the friction slows you down, you drop farther into the atmosphere, where the air is thicker and there is more friction. These two changes (air pressure and velocity change) work together to reach a point of maximum heating, and then taper off again as you reach subsonic speeds. The steeper the dive, the faster you reach thicker air, and the higher the max heating point will be.
Let's say for argument's sake that you wanted to drop straight down from where the ISS is orbiting, with no horizontal velocity. (That would require an instantaneous delta v of the whole 17000 mph, which is nigh impossible, but we'll assume we can for our thought experiment.) Since the ISS is orbiting at an altitude of about 225 miles, and the atmosphere is generally considered to start at the 62 mile mark, that's still 163 miles of vacuum free fall to contend with. Leaving out the square-of-the-distance effects of gravity fall off (which are close to negligible at these distances), we get a fall time of sqrt((163 miles)/(32 feet per second squared)) = 164 seconds. That gives us a velocity of (32 feet per second squared)*(164 seconds) = 5248 feet per second, or 3578 mph at the moment we hit the upper fringes of the atmosphere. The heating will certainly be less than the standard deorbit, but it is still a decent force to be reckoned with. Any angle larger than the vertical will require a smaller delta v but will result in a higher entry velocity and higher heating.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, "but AeroIllini! You totally contradicted yourself there!" I did. Except that as you vary the angle of entry from shallow to vertical, the graph of max heating reaches a peak and then falls off again. So for a very shallow entry, your heating will be lower than a steeper entry, but going even steeper the heating will taper off again until you reach vertical entry, which will have the lowest heating of all. Vertical entry also has the highest delta v requirement of all, and a shallow entry has the least delta v required.
Even if I just get a smaller version that fit over my shoes, I could walk a lot faster, lessen strain on my joints, jog farther and more efficiently, and slam dunk like nobody's business. Also, I would be taller.
It seems like this would be good technology to work into a soldier's exoskeleton, too.
Urine and credit score can be argued to be relevant to employment. It's hard to see how a level of monitoring this invasive could slip by in a non-secure industry, or one that doesn't depend on operator health for safety. Actually, I would argue that it's the other way around.
What I do in my spare time outside the office has absolutely no bearing on my job until it effects the productivity of work. Drug tests are an indirect measure of productivity, using the assumption that "drugs == bad worker". I disagree with that logic, and think that drug tests should only be administered if the worker's performance is clearly impacted. If there's no performance impact, then what the hell does the company care what I do outside work? (I know that's not the attitude many companies have, but it's the attitude I have.)
A credit score is a little more of a stretch, but using the logic "bad credit == deadbeat", it could be a stand-in for proper hiring practices.
However, this software will eliminate both of those indirect methods of measuring productivity because it will be able to directly measure it. And productivity, after all, is what the company ultimately cares about.
I don't agree with using this technology, but that's the rationale companies will use.
I am always amazed at the high quality of some of the fan films on the net. They are made by amateurs on shoestring budgets, but outstrip a lot of the professional garbage with much higher budgets. Bravo to these filmmakers.
But I have to ask the question:
Is anyone out there making amateur films that don't take place in the Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Matrix, or other insanely-overdone-fan-universe? Does it always have to be SciFi?! Fer cryin' out loud, is there anyone out there with any originality?!
Make up your own characters, plots, universes, and situations, and I will have far more respect for your craft. Rip off an existing universe, and you're just another fan, no matter how high quality your film is.
Slashdot Mirror
The Germans capitalize *all* their nouns, the arrogant bastards! What makes a noun so much more important than a verb? Nouns don't even *do* anything!
I am always at a loss for an answer, because I am not an evolutionary biologist, I'm an engineer. I don't know anything about the science of evolution, only the broad concepts. So would someone more fully versed in the day-to-day work of experimental evolution be able to give me a counter example to throw right back at the IDers?
An analogy involving cars would be nice, but is not required.
Additionally, most people seem to forget (when talking about return on investment for software products) that profits are in no way correlated to the amount of work someone spent developing the product or how elegant/novel/nifty/useful the product is. Profits are correlated exactly to how much it cost to create the product and how much people are willing to pay for it. That's the cold hard truth of competition: even novel, useful, popular products don't make a profit.
If you can't compete with free, you haven't added any value. Welcome to capitalism.
--
*By "copied" here, I mean a similar implementation, not unauthorized duplication.
OpenOffice is a better program than Microsoft Office because it uses open, documented, ISO standards for creating documents.
This issue is orthogonal to price, features, and forced upgrades.
Maybe, just maybe, the CIA shouldn't be placing big honking satellites they want to keep secret in very predictable, visible orbits.
Do human spies walk in the middle of a great big plaza in full sunshine on a predictable rotation if they want to stay hidden? Of course not-- they stick to the shadows, and they vary their route.
Spy satellites are going to be a relic of the past pretty soon anyway, as radar-invisible high-altitude drone planes are becoming the norm. A drone does not have a set flight path like an orbit, so the enemy can't predict where it's going to go even if it is spotted. It flies in the atmosphere, so the IR contrast with the rest of space is not there, and it's made of radar-absorbing materials that make it all but invisible. Add in some visual camouflage (like painting the underside the same color as the sky) and reduce the engine noise with cleverly shaped nozzles, and the enemy will never even know it's there. As the technology to fly these things gets better and the drones themselves get longer range, we might not even need spy satellites anymore.
Satellites with cameras will always be useful for Earth Science and other pursuits. But they might not be the best vector for obtaining covert high-altitude images of enemy territory anymore.
Yes, lots of people trot that explanation out.
However, keep in mind that our sun was named Sol in Latin, and that name was assigned long before anyone knew that the sun was just a special case of a star (namely, it's the closest star). Back when people started using Sol to refer to the Sun, it was considered a separate entity from the stars, just as the Moon (Luna) was separate from the sun.
However, now that we have hundreds of years of astronomical data proving that our sun is really not different than many other suns, I don't see a problem with calling an external star system a "solar system" just like I would have no trouble calling Phobos and Deimos a "lunar system". Sun and Moon, the English equivalents of Sol and Luna, have become genericized as we found out that our sun and moon were not special; they are just examples of common objects in the universe.
You will also note that the British seem to have no trouble confusing the word "continent" with the specific place "The Continent". This is exactly the same issue as "solar system" vs. "The Solar System", and exactly as pointless to argue about, since it doesn't hinder communication at all.
PDF (working toward becoming ISO 32000)
HTML (ISO 8879)
I don't see the problem.
Take off your rose-colored glasses and read some history. People are no more or less honorable now than they have ever been.
You make an excellent point, but I would argue that the use of casual swearing is not analogous. Wikipedia is not censoring profanity at all; in fact there are lots of articles specifically about profanity that don't censor a thing. Articles which are not about profanity typically do not include any because the writing style doesn't require it. This is not censorship anymore than refusing to capitalize the first letter of every noun in a sentence is censorship (as used to be the convention in English several hundred years ago).
By it's nature, most profanity, in any culture, is a product of passion. When people are angry or excited or otherwise passionate about something, they tend to swear. Wikipedia's purportedly neutral tone would negate the need for that, since the style of writing should be, by definition, without passion. It should simply be a calm discussion of the topic. Standard (passionate) profanity therefore does not belong in a Wikipedia article.
The "casual profanity" you referenced is a deliberate speech pattern people use when either 1) they wish to make people uncomfortable, 2) they wish to fit in with a crowd, or 3) they do not have a large enough vocabulary to come up with anything else (either by choice or by education). None of these three reasons is justifiable for use of "casual profanity" in a scholarly article, as Wikipedia's writing style aspires to be. Scholarly writing does not include profanity for profanity's sake not because it's offensive, but because there are many more specific and appropriate words to use instead. Swear words are usually very loosely used, and more precision is needed in an informational article. (One example that comes to mind is the use of the word "feces" in a medical context, or "scat" in a zoological context, or "manure" in an agricultural context, because these words are the appropriate jargon in those industries, and more precise than "shit.")
Additionally, Wikipedia has no problem printing profanity when it is appropriate. For example, quotes from people including profanity are not censored or blocked out, acronyms including swears are fully explained, and Wikipedia even has articles on the swear words themselves which use them liberally. In the context of discussing that topic, swearing is appropriate, where it would not be elsewhere. Wikipedia doesn't sprinkle random images of the prophet Muhammad into unrelated articles, either. They are only in the articles where the images are appropriate to the topic.
The people you mention who get "uppity" when others tell them to stop swearing have every right to feel that way, since the people asking them to stop are trying to infringe on what I consider to be basic free speech rights. The same standard should apply to Wikipedia's collection of images depicting Muhammad.
Nicholas Cage found it after breaking into Los Alamos and finding a codebook hidden in Richard Feynman's desk which contained a simple substitution cypher pointing to the particle accelerator at Cern, where he discovered a vast underground cavern containing piles of gold doubloons stolen from all the Spanish Galleons that supposedly "sunk" in the 1500s. Hidden inside one of the chests of gold was a stone tablet containing ancient cuneiforms which had been painstakingly DES encrypted by hand, and when decrypted, showed the final resting place of the last remaining Higgs boson, which was in the Smithsonian, hanging from the ceiling and protected by the Ancient Order of Obfuscating Physicists.
This is all about keeping Microsoft Windows itself afloat. The decision to make a browser (and a non-standard one at that) a vital O/S component was not a good engineering decision, but it made sense to management at a time when Netscape Must Die. I posted a longer analysis earlier. Actually, that should be "Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed." When I said "keep every developer coding specifically for IE", I meant exactly what you said: the end goal is to keep people using Windows, since IE and Windows are inseparable. Sorry if that was unclear.
However, I don't agree with the first constraint. Backwards compatibility should not be an issue here. Period. They should have set the non-standard flag to invoke non-standards mode. Then all the pages that want to keep rendering in IE 6/7 can simply set that flag (since it's an HTTP header, you can just set it on the whole domain and be done with it) and move on with their lives. But on the plus side, any new webpage will have incentive to code to standards, because now all the browsers would support a single codebase (something that has not happened since back in the Mosaic days). No more coding for specific browsers, ever.
And don't give me that crap about old websites that are no longer maintained. Sites coded specifically for IE 4 and Netscape 4 break in IE 6 and Firefox... should we be crying over that? Give me a break. If it's no longer maintained, then why are you still using it? Maintained websites will update their code for the new version of IE every time, just like they did for IE4, IE5, IE6, IE7...
Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that.
Microsoft's aim is not to standardize. That's only their PR talking point. They still have every intention of locking the majority of the web into playing nice with IE, to keep Windows on most machines. That's not anti-MS rhetoric, it's their standard operating procedure.
Also, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Apple is not. That means the rules are different for Microsoft than they are for Apple.
Although, that doesn't seem to matter much to the current Department of Justice...
One step better:
Have the company that designs and manufactures the machine to print the ballot be a different company from the one that designs and manufactures the counting and checksum machine. (This would require an open checksum algorithm-- another plus.)
In fact, get two companies to build the counting and checksum machines, and verify them against each other.
And seriously... "nuclear secrets"?
The plans for a fully working nuclear weapon can be found quite easily on Google. Gaining nuclear technology has much less to do with knowledge now than with the economics of setting up a proper refining facility for the creation of the uranium and plutonium isotopes used in making a weapon, both of which are very expensive and time-consuming to produce. The challenge is hiding that facility, not learning how to make nukes.
When you make everything illegal, no one obeys you.
When you make everything secret, no one trusts you.
As a rocket scientist, I'll take the reins here.
From the altitude the ISS is orbiting, there's no such thing as approaching the atmosphere "slowly". The ISS is traveling at about 17000 mph around the circumference of its circular orbit. In order to enter the atmosphere, a body in that orbit would have to slow down in order to enter an elliptical orbit which intersects the atmosphere. This requires a velocity change (delta v) of about 200-250 mph. Even with that change, you're still traveling at 16,750 mph, so that when you finally do hit atmosphere, the friction from the air will be very high, even if the air is thin. As the friction slows you down, you drop farther into the atmosphere, where the air is thicker and there is more friction. These two changes (air pressure and velocity change) work together to reach a point of maximum heating, and then taper off again as you reach subsonic speeds. The steeper the dive, the faster you reach thicker air, and the higher the max heating point will be.
Let's say for argument's sake that you wanted to drop straight down from where the ISS is orbiting, with no horizontal velocity. (That would require an instantaneous delta v of the whole 17000 mph, which is nigh impossible, but we'll assume we can for our thought experiment.) Since the ISS is orbiting at an altitude of about 225 miles, and the atmosphere is generally considered to start at the 62 mile mark, that's still 163 miles of vacuum free fall to contend with. Leaving out the square-of-the-distance effects of gravity fall off (which are close to negligible at these distances), we get a fall time of sqrt((163 miles)/(32 feet per second squared)) = 164 seconds. That gives us a velocity of (32 feet per second squared)*(164 seconds) = 5248 feet per second, or 3578 mph at the moment we hit the upper fringes of the atmosphere. The heating will certainly be less than the standard deorbit, but it is still a decent force to be reckoned with. Any angle larger than the vertical will require a smaller delta v but will result in a higher entry velocity and higher heating.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, "but AeroIllini! You totally contradicted yourself there!" I did. Except that as you vary the angle of entry from shallow to vertical, the graph of max heating reaches a peak and then falls off again. So for a very shallow entry, your heating will be lower than a steeper entry, but going even steeper the heating will taper off again until you reach vertical entry, which will have the lowest heating of all. Vertical entry also has the highest delta v requirement of all, and a shallow entry has the least delta v required.
I hope this answers your question.
If you're from Texas, then you should know that "y'all" is singular.
The plural is "all y'all".
I think the far more important question is...
Where can I get some of those carbon fiber feet?!
Even if I just get a smaller version that fit over my shoes, I could walk a lot faster, lessen strain on my joints, jog farther and more efficiently, and slam dunk like nobody's business. Also, I would be taller.
It seems like this would be good technology to work into a soldier's exoskeleton, too.
What I do in my spare time outside the office has absolutely no bearing on my job until it effects the productivity of work. Drug tests are an indirect measure of productivity, using the assumption that "drugs == bad worker". I disagree with that logic, and think that drug tests should only be administered if the worker's performance is clearly impacted. If there's no performance impact, then what the hell does the company care what I do outside work? (I know that's not the attitude many companies have, but it's the attitude I have.)
A credit score is a little more of a stretch, but using the logic "bad credit == deadbeat", it could be a stand-in for proper hiring practices.
However, this software will eliminate both of those indirect methods of measuring productivity because it will be able to directly measure it. And productivity, after all, is what the company ultimately cares about.
I don't agree with using this technology, but that's the rationale companies will use.
I am always amazed at the high quality of some of the fan films on the net. They are made by amateurs on shoestring budgets, but outstrip a lot of the professional garbage with much higher budgets. Bravo to these filmmakers.
But I have to ask the question:
Is anyone out there making amateur films that don't take place in the Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Matrix, or other insanely-overdone-fan-universe? Does it always have to be SciFi?! Fer cryin' out loud, is there anyone out there with any originality?!
Make up your own characters, plots, universes, and situations, and I will have far more respect for your craft. Rip off an existing universe, and you're just another fan, no matter how high quality your film is.
And they have the Photoshopping skills of a Nigerian scammer.
My favorite is the picture on the very bottom of the page you linked, showing the "small display on the physical hardware itself".
*gets a recursive atlas*