That's an easy question. If you're ugly enough for it to be a problem, your benevolent eugenics minded government will have had shotguns embedded in the ATMs for instant chlorine in the gene pool. It'll be sold to the public as deterring ATM fraud and outright theft of the machines themselves. And the "think of the children" crowd will support it because we'd be solving the problem of ugly people breeding children who are doomed to growing up ugly as well. You don't want your kids to get bullied at school do you? A shotgun to the face goes a long way to ensuring you don't have kids as ugly as you. And don't worry about surviving the shotgun to the face, since living after that would only leave you even uglier. The ATMs will just keep shooting you every time you go to one until one of them finishes the job.
For the Poe's Law impaired, this is satire...christ I hope it *stays* as satire.......
The problem is, using facial recognition makes it highly likely a person who is picked up on that basis will greatly resemble the actual criminal. There was a funny picture going around the Internet at one point of a black news anchorman having an uncanny resemblance to the police artist sketch of the suspect that was displayed in a picture in picture over the news persons shoulder.
And while the police should know the limitations of the technology and just treat identified people as "persons of interest" rather than "suspects", human nature and the mindset that police work encourages means that in many many cases, the police are going to assume an accurate match. Leaving the hapless innocent party the burden of having to prove they are not the person in the crime scene image(s). A quick Google search for either fingerprint false positives and DNA false positives are possible and those are widely regarded as definitive proofs of identity. A good criminal trial, with proper legal representation, would be very careful to make sure the court took that possibility into consideration before making a finding of guilt. But nonetheless, people are wrongly convicted of crimes based on those sorts of evidence all the time.
Thankfully; those wrongful convictions are fairly rare when expressed as a percentage of total convictions. Another quick Google search says that less than 5% of death penalty cases in the US involve a wrongful conviction. Without actually reading all the scholarly articles about wrongful convictions, I have no way of knowing how many wrongful, but later identified as wrongful convictions get corrected in time to save the persons life. Nor can I tell how many wrongful convictions never get identified as such and corrected. Even so, a 95% success rate seems quite good to me and proper value to the public at large.
And the only reason it seems so likely to public perception is because a) The system doesn't end once the person is behind bars (at least, not in most major countries) There are always appeals and new trials based on new evidence. So a wrongfully convicted person can still get the matter corrected b) Release after a conviction has been over turned always gets into the news, unlike the vast majority of routine and correct convictions.
Because of all that, my biggest concern wouldn't be individual false positives for cases of rape, robbery etc. My concern is for the potential for, as others here have said, making it far easier for authorities to do mass round ups of dissenters and protesters. It would only have to take a few high profile cases where protesters who also committed crimes got arrested this way before people will start to assume that all public protest will be logged and used against them. That would have a chilling effect on any future dissent. And I'm sure that any of us on Slashdot could list half a dozen countries off the top of our heads that have long standing policies of repressing its peoples and using violence to silence dissent. If one of those countries is wealthy enough to have cameras everywhere, or even just at major events of interest, they will install and use them. The only question an authoritarian government will really ponder is whether to scoop up its dissenters quietly so as to make only the other dissenters nervous or to make the capability and every arrest as a result as public as possible so as to deter and control everybody.
I certainly agree that the ISPs will have the ability to fuck with customers traffic. They already possess the technical ability to do so and have since day one. However, some of what you mention I think is a bit alarmist. Replacing downloads in flight with molested versions is obviously do-able, but I think is also fairly readily detected and blame properly attributed. The Antimalware companies would figure it out very quickly, as would the open source community. MD5 hashes wouldn't match up and while I am sure there are relatively few open source folks who bother comparing checksums, enough do that everyone else would be quickly alerted. My concern would be the more insidious opportunities for identifying and tracking the customers and then using and selling the resulting marketing data. (or sharing it with three letter agencies)
Going off on a tangent for a moment. Does anyone know of a legal method for making class action lawsuits actually expensive enough for an offending ISP to really feel hurt by? Over the years I've gotten the impression that class action lawsuits usually get settled for pretty much pennies on the dollar and even then, often paid out in the form of discounts, coupons, vouchers or some other method that costs the loser a lot less than the face value. Hell, even anti-competitive or anti-consumer lawsuits by governments and other big players usually seem to result in judgements being handed down that have relatively little impact on the offenders bottom line.
Having Amazon paying a big ISP (it seems it's only the big players who are in favour of killing Net Neutrality, local DSL re-sellers are against it) is quite likely. As others have said, Comcast has always proven itself more than willing to engage in "traffic shaping" in order to extort still more money from its subscribers. In most areas, I get the impression that the big ISPs are already getting about as much money out of their customer base as can be had. Going after the deep pockets of Aamazon, Netflix and Google seems like a logical next step. (and don't forget Comcast was one of the big ISPs who got millions of dollars in federal funding to expand and upgrade their network and then did sweet fuck all)
That said; I think having Google or whoever also pay to have competitors throttled on top of getting full speed access is far too legally risky for it to work. Note that I am not saying it won't be tried by somebody (again, Comcast is high on that list) just that it would leave both the ISP and the Internet based company pretty exposed to lawsuits over anti-competitive practices. The potential situation I think bears a lot of similarity to the browser wars and the court verdicts against Microsoft.
What I think will happen is the larger the studio or production company, the more bland and middle of the road the resulting production will be. It's my opinion that the more money you spend on market research, polls and focus groups, the more your end data will highlight the average. On the plus side, once the ability to create a convincing cast out of whole cloth is cheap enough, we're going to see an explosion of indie and very small production company releases. That's where all the pushing of the cinematic envelope is going to be.
I wasn't thinking in terms of porn, despite porn being the application the article is about. I was thinking in terms of how limited the hours per day a child actor is allowed to be on set, the need for tutors to continue schooling between takes and the difficulty in finding stunt workers with body proportions at least passably close to the child they are doubling for.
In light of the recent Hollywood sex scandals and the vindication of Corey Feldman's long standing accusations, the fact that replacing child actors with digital emulations also means fewer kids being put in a position where they can be exploited so easily. And I think that is a huge deal. The situations you describe, where there is no real child involved, in either pornography or sex toys, doesn't bother me. To my way of thinking, the focus shouldn't be on making child sex so taboo that it shuts down rational thought. (admittedly, we're all less than fully rational when it comes to protecting our kids) Our focus should always be on preventing the appalling tragedies in the first place. It's my understanding that many paedophiles claim that pornography, real or simulated, helps them avoid offending against children in the first place. It's also my impression that, because the subject is so damn toxic, there has been very little good research on how valid that claim is. If the pedos are right and access to child porn does reduce the rate at which real children are being abused, then I think that is a good argument for de-criminalizing simulated materials. Problem is, the subject is so toxic, so taboo, I can't see any legislator even suggesting funding research or de-criminalization.
Personally, I would want to see a clearly articulated standard for just how life like the simulations are allowed to be, along with a requirement to supply the original wireframes or equivalent underlying foundations alongside the finished product. The goal being something lifelike enough to satisfy the pedos, while still being unreal enough that a layman looking at a screenshot can still tell it isn't real.
Additionally, I'd want to see a requirement that a real child never be involved in anyway. What I mean is no use of rotoscope or similar techniques, no use of child actors for the voices and no making characters that are intended to resemble a well known person. (well known that is, to either the creator OR to the public at large. So no doing a bit based on your neighbours kid or a child celebrity)
quote: The vibration from those large SSD drives might shake the computer apart. I think you don't understand what is inside a solid state drive. The only thing moving inside them is electrons and charge states. And the voltages are low enough that electro-magnetic effects are pretty trivial.
I've posted this before on related stories, but I think it bears repeating: Once the uncanny valley is definitively conquered and rendering becomes cost-competitive with a live actor, I predict we're going to see a return to the old "studio system" of the silver screen era. Only, instead of a bunch of utility actors and a few big stars whose lives are micro-managed by the studio, we're going to see studios and production companies coming up with their own virtual cast and headline stars. No union worries, so scandals, no practical limits on how much "on set" time a given character can give. (no child labour laws!!!) Absolutely everything about a character being micro-managed and massaged according to the latest polls and trends. Popular characters never have to age, they can't hold a production hostage demanding a bigger cut of the proceeds and can be "fired" incredibly easily and comparatively cheaply.
What is going to be interesting are the lawsuits over the use of the likeness of some dead celebrities. Is there any studios that still have movie rights to Elvis? Would his estate disagree? Could an actors estate sue on the grounds that a given production was one that the actor would never have been caught dead in? (see what I did there?)
I suggest you look up the Holodomor some time. Sure, it started with a failed agricultural policy, collectivization and mandated change from subsistence staples to crops that had international trade value caused yields to plummet. (It didn't help that the peasants often didn't know how to grow the new crops, or were forced to grow new crops in unsuitable conditions. The famine may have been deliberately started, experts still debate that and likely always will. But there is no doubt in my mind that Stalin saw this as an opportunity. The Ukraine had been the scene of a lot of resistance to the Soviet regime, with several failed revolts, all put down with great force. By refusing all foreign aid and even refusing to ship surplus foods from elsewhere, the Communists forced the mass starvation of millions.
Personally, I don't think the application of force and the brutal abuses of power to gain and maintain power are the sole province of any part of the political spectrum. History has shown that, no matter what ethnicity, culture or political inclinations, people with too much power can find ways to justify their prejudices and excuses to commit atrocities. The best way we have managed to come up with for avoiding those abuses is two-fold : First, freedom of speech (includes freedom of the press) and second, inclusive democracy. A well functioning democracy seeks to implement polices that are for the benefit of all and freedom of speech helps insure that when polices are abusive or unjust, that those in power can be called on it. As distasteful as the rhetoric of the far right is, as flatly unacceptable as their proposed solutions are, they still serve democracy by speaking up. Think of them as societies warrant canary. As long as even the extremists from either end of the spectrum can find a place to speak, we know that free speech still exists.
Thanks for your post. You made some good points there. As for as the surprised Youtubers, I have little sympathy. You go into business with someone, providing content which they then pay you for is just that, a business. If you don't understand how that business works and why it works that way, then you really don't have the moral high ground when that business has to change. No matter what field of human endeavour, ignorance is expensive.
As for thin-skinned advertisers, I can understand why they are that way, especially these days with the much faster process of outrage, disseminated knowledge and organized protests. One politically tone deaf ad can cost big companies huge sums of money after all. It used to be that, if an ad on TV, radio or print put the corporate foot in its mouth, the company and/or ad agency could get the spot pulled and it would fairly quickly fade from public awareness. They could also run a risky ad in a isolated market as a test. But now, an ad is instantly seen by millions of people all over the world and mistakes get quickly recorded and uploaded to numerous forums, video hosting sites and so on. The corporate gaffe may still fade from the public awareness, but only if it doesn't go viral. A negative viral ad is pretty much a marketers nightmare.
Problem is, safe tame ads might avoid that risk, but they're also less effective at getting the public attention. Take a risk and maybe lose enormous amounts of reputation (and more importantly, money) or play it safe and risk running a totally useless campaign that has no effect on sales at all. The "shock jocks" you mention had and still have a similar problem. They need to get eyeballs on their content, they need to get those likes and subscriber numbers pumped up. Shock and sleaze sells. But if they go to far, then advertisers pull out.
For what it's worth, I don't think trying to create popular content so as to get a slice of the advertising revenue is "free money". After all, that's what most websites try to do, does it matter if the platform is Youtube or Wordpress?
It's almost certainly true that Alphabet/Youtube owes those content creators nothing in a contractual sense, since the terms of service and payment plans are all written by them on a "take it or leave it" basis. Like it seems every other technology company (and no few non tech outfits), they will have included a clause that basically says "we can change this agreement at any time, without notice and your only recourse is mediation in a place we picked as being most friendly to us"
My questions would be : What kind of content is being demonitized and why? Taking away ad income from say hate speech, trippy kid-targeted adult content, ISIS execution videos and so on is basically a form of moderation. That sort of thing is already covered by the existing TOS, so I don't have a problem with it. However; if they change the algorithm so as to demonitize content in order to give a competitive advantage to partners who pay more, then that might be regarding as anti-competitive behaviour and be legally actionable regardless of what the TOS says. Or, if they pull a Paypal and just rewrite the contract regularly to give themselves an ever increasing share of the profits by paying content creators less and less, then I think that is an ethical failure. It is those content makers who are bringing in the clicks and ad impressions that make Youtube such a valuable site in the first place. Some of the channels on Youtube I am aware of are by people who are spending at least several days a week and money out of their own pockets to create the content they upload. It's only fair that they get paid proportionally.
I've had Firefox 57 for two days now and can share my experiences thus far:
I use Firefox and Chrome regularly, leaning heavily towards Firefox because I was quite satisfied with the add-ons I had for it. Pretty much 100% of my recreational browsing is on Firefox.
1) Yes, Firefox IS much faster to load and navigate to my usual websites. However, sites heavy with the usual endless third party scripts, ads and so on remain occasionally frustratingly slow. However; I have always attributed that to poor design choices and lack of network optimization on the part of those third party content delivery networks. (I'm using Ghostery, but no other ad-blocking software on purpose.)
2) Page rendering is MUCH faster. I think this is the biggest factor in perceived browser speed. Easily matching Chrome and actually surpassing it on image heavy sites like imgur.
3) The add on ecosystem has a long way to go to catch up to what previous versions of Firefox had available. To preserve speed, function and reliability, Firefox 57 has a much more modular arrangement. That means ALL previous add-ons will not work in Firefox 57. In addition; what add-ons that do exist do not seem to be nearly as powerful as the add-ons I used previously. That may be due to the modular design not allowing as much control of Firefox by add-ons, it may be because there simply hasn't been time for third party developers to come up with equally powerful replacements.
4) Firefox has a pretty slick system for handling the deprecation of old add-ons. After updating, when you go to the about:addons page, you'll notice that none of your old addons are visible, but there is a link at the top you can click to view them. Clicking one of your greyed out addons takes you to the get more addons page and usually shows you a pretty good replacement. (9 of the 12 addons I love most had acceptable replacements, learning curve aside) The diversity of addons, as I said, just isn't there yet. So if you have one of the lessor known, less popular addons, you probably won't be able to replace it.
5) There are many very popular addons where the original developer is unavailable or as announced that their addon will not be, or cannot be, rewritten for the new Firefox.
6) The themes situation frankly sucks. Simple themes, ones that basically change the colour of the address and menu bar space are still there and old ones you have will still work. But "complex themes" (what I call REAL themes, ones that change the icons used for buttons, bookmark folders, shape and dimensionality of tabs and so on flat out do not exist. From checking out Mozillas pages on 57, it seems that, as it stands now, Firefox 57 is simply not capable of supporting them. Mozilla does say that complex themes are something they are working on and plan on making available later. Personally, I don't want to make the address/menu bar space simply some colour, or use some wide, narrow image as a simple background. I want themes that help visually distinguish tabs, themes that accentuate the skeuomorph effect. I find this makes it easier to see and mentally manipulate. For me a browser is a tool and a tool doesn't need to look pretty and should never never never try to look pretty at the cost of ergonomics. For now, this is a total loss in my book.
Overall, I do like Firefox 57 and have no plans on reverting to an older one. I am however, going to keep spending a lot of time working on it until I can regain the look and above all function I prefer.
Oh I do understand that the skin of most aircraft is relatively thin. ( I have a few chunks of aircraft skin hiding in my crawl space, a gift from a airframe tech who used to work on Hercs and is now working on Canada's new C-3 Galaxies. Those pieces are substantially thicker than a truck hood sheet metal, but they came off Model J hercs...)
But the mechanisms that operate the control surfaces are surprisingly beefy. A fighter aircraft aileron has to deal with air pressure measured in tons. Moving a roughly a CF-16 "flaperon" is something like a square meter in size and needs to be moved into and out of air moving past at speeds in excess of Mach 1. meanwhile, the wing is something like less than 2" thick where the "flaperon" meets it. Thus, the "flaperon" is built a lot beefier than you think and the linkage is obviously going to be built of something heavier than 12 Ga aircraft aluminium. Burning through the skin of the aileron, as I said,won't accomplish much unless you manage to do significant damage to the internal ribbing or control linkages. (instead of just a through and through hole, you could move the beam as you burn and slice through ribs, but that only exacerbates the time on target problem.)
Combat aircraft are designed with being shot at in mind. True, most aren't as rugged as the A-10, but they have self-sealing fuel tanks and often redundant hydraulic control linkages because they expect to get shot at and are expected to be able to take a few rounds of anti-aircraft fire or shrapnel from missiles and keep flying. Something that can handle a handful of.50 machine gun hits or even the odd 20mm cannon round aren't going to have much problem with a ~5mm laser burned hole.
I take your point about using lasers against fast movers like missiles. As I said though; as far I as knew, the best the military was capable of right now was hitting a stationary truck at relatively close range. A missile coming at you is a tiny target and usually moving faster than a bullet. I didn't think the ability to get and keep light on a target was up to that challenge yet. Lasers can be good for dazzling the optical portion of a missile sensors though, combine that with existing counter-measures and you have something useful.
I looked up the Lockheed ATHENA system mentioned in the article and it's exactly what I said would be a good use for lasers: a vehicle based anti-drone system.
I can easily see the potential utility of airborne laser systems powerful enough and small enough to be viable on fighter and drone platforms. But I didn't think we were quite there yet. It was only a year or two ago when I saw video footage of an experimental airborne laser disabling light truck targets by burning through the hood and damaging the engine underneath. That footage revealed two major constraints of the state of the art at that time:
1) The target had to be stationary. The laser just couldn't dump enough energy into the target fast enough for a sub 1 second shot to disable the truck. IIRC, it took almost 5 seconds of continuous laser on a single point for it to work. (Note that this was burning through thin gauge mild steel and not fairly beefy aircraft control surfaces made of aerospace alloys. I think a puncture on an aileron would have minimal effect, you have to damage the linkages inside in order to disable the craft)
2) The demonstration had to be a low altitude strike, similar to what the A-10 Warthog already does so well. The reason being laser bloom. It is very very hard to maintain laser focus over long distances through atmosphere. I can only assume the airflows around target aircraft would be an extra tricky environment to maintain tight focus through. (especially if the attack is coming from behind and has to cope with engine exhaust or thrust induced turbulence.) Aircraft to aircraft combat distances are pretty big, it would be very challenging to maintain focus over distances exceeding 5K while maintaining enough power to do significant damage to control surfaces in less than a second.
Overall, I think a better use for compact lasers is killing sensors. You don't have to destroy a drone to destroy it's utility to the enemy, just burn out the optics. Combine that with conventional EW and the drone becomes an unguided missile. Another use would be on the ground. Vehicle mounted systems could be used to negate the increasing use of backpack portable drones by opposing forces.
Only if said chemicals affected fertility. Some better metrics to look at would be incidence of birth defects. For high levels of oestrogens and related hormone chemicals, the rate of intersex births would be of particular value. Also look at average IQ for people born in that state compared to people of similar socio-economic brackets in states with cleaner waters. (among other things, stupid people tend to breed at earlier ages and in greater numbers, This depends on a number of factors, but then there are a number of factors which derive from this as well.) What are the cancer rates like? Especially GI, kidney and liver cancers.
Surprisingly, another metric is murder and other violent crime rates. There is evidence to suggest that the elimination of lead in paint and gasoline caused or contributed to a huge drop in violent crimes in the late 70's and 80's.
So far the posts to this story have been uniformly disparaging, derisive and even mocking. I happen to agree with the consensus that IBM generally, and the creative team described in TFA specifically, are waaaay over thinking things.
That said, let's note that, for a corporation as large as IBM, the costs of having such a design team develop is pretty minor. Even so, there has to be some form of performance metric the managers and higher ups use to measure the value to the company the design team and their output provide. Which leads me to my questions:
If you're a high level design exec, how do you determine that a change is needed? Once you've come up with a new logo, typeface, letterheads and so on, how do you measure its effectiveness at expressing the companies philosophy/business strategy? I've often felt that there is too much effort being put into such things. You get a creative type to create a logo, choose a typeface that suits your needs and move on. Yet these creative folk (most of whom are pretty smart within their field) see effects on the viewer, see meaning in little details that frankly eludes me. It's like in the art world, where artists and intellectuals see nuances and levels of meaning in a work that the vast majority of people just don't notice or understand. At it's most extreme, that leads to things like modern art, performance art and so on. If a big corporation chooses a new look, given that subtleties are going to be lost on the majority of viewers, how can they be sure it's not only working, but working well enough to justify the man hours that went into crafting it?
I'd love to hear from the artists, industrial designers and so on about this.
Virtual actors might not be all that attractive to the consumers, at least, not as long as they can tell the difference. BUT; I'm sure they'll be hugely appealing to the folks who produce the media content. They'll be a hell of a lot cheaper, easier to work with, scandal free and readily disposable if the director or the fickle public decide a given character is yesterdays news. With that kind of motivation, I'm sure enough money will be thrown at the problem until the studios get characters the audience can't possibly distinguish from the real thing.
William Gibson touched on this stuff in his novel Idoru. A sophisticated enough synthetic person who is so convincing that a major music star wanted to marry her. I think that it is only a matter of time before we see the re-birth of the old studio system, only with wholly fictional characters. There was a time when almost everything visible about a Hollywood star was the product of cigar smoking men in back rooms, plotting out the lives of the actors to maximise their box office draw.
I have to disagree with that statement. I live in social housing and merely moving the current population to a more desirable location is going to do little or nothing for the social problems found in social housing. I'd say the vast majority of my friends and neighbours are decent, hard working and law abiding folk. (I certainly am one of them) But, the relative proportion of drug users and career criminals to average folk is higher than in say my brothers upper middle class bedroom community. If you move everybody to the new location, you're just moving the problem around. And; if you can somehow separate the sheep from the goats (good luck!) and move only the law abiding folk, all you'll achieve is creating an even nastier social problem in the original neighbourhood because you will have distilled the demographic down to the worst content.
Properly tackling the problem of poverty and the social ills it breeds is a huge and complex issue. I freely admit I don't know of any cure for poverty, no matter how we structure society, there is always going to be people at the bottom of any scale you pick. What we can do is at least structure our society so that upward mobility is as easy to achieve as possible. And we can collectively choose to spend money on alleviating the worst of the social ills. Universal single pay medical coverage, school breakfast programs, drug and alcohol dependence therapy and so on. Where I live, the government is experimenting with making higher education virtually free for all citizens resident in the province. The idea being that spending public funds on educating folks is a long term investment in the prosperity of the nation and helping poor kids see a way out of poverty and into the middle class.
As a poverty related aside; I've never understood the lower economic classes in the US who support the (mostly) Republican antipathy towards universal medical care. I mean it's right there in the preamble to the US constitution "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare , and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (emphasis mine) If the People, as determined by polls or elections, decide that universal health care is an integral part of "the general welfare", which seems an easy conclusion to argue in favour of, then one can easily argue that health care is then a constitutional right. Then there is Lincoln's most famous speech where he said "and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Which I take to mean quite clearly that the government OF the people is expressly intended to serve those people.
Any sane person should be fucking terrified about this. During the Cold War, both sides subscribed to the "No first strike" policy, which was in turn the foundation for Mutually Assured Destruction. In other words, both sides were promising not to shoot first, but to also unleash nuclear Armageddon if attacked with nukes. (and possibly other weapons of mass destruction. The Russian Dead Hand apparently didn't just rely on sensors detecting nukes after all. It was rumoured that it relied on certain radio stations continuing to broadcast and would launch the missiles autonomously is a set number of stations went off the air such as when a virulent plague wiped out a town)
North Korea doesn't have the ability to launch a massive counter-strike, so their continued existence after rattling the nuclear sabre the way they've been doing depends on utterly on the US sticking to the "no first strike" policy. Yet TFA claims that General Goldfein is asking his staff to come up with ways to use nukes in combat. To me that sounds very much like the US Joint Chiefs are preparing contingency plans for pre-emptive strikes and "small" tactical nukes after that. To be fair, it is the clear duty of the Joint Chiefs to come up for contingency plans for pretty much every possible scenario, even the incredibly unlikely ones. But, one doesn't juggle squadrons around and re-assign personnel for unlikely contingencies.
Meanwhile, there have been a slew of articles which suggest the US Navy is in dire straits. It's my understanding that successive administrations have forced them to cut back on new ship purchases and skimp on maintenance so long for the sake of short term availability, that now some ships are sitting in dry dock for years, waiting for repair. Likewise, there has been a clear trend to lower head counts in the ground forces as well. The focus has been on smaller, more nimble forces, aimed at dealing with insurgents and the like. That smaller force has become very sensitive to combat losses, has been forced to keep guys posted in combat far longer than expected (stop-loss) and is deployed in a number of hot spots all over the world. The ground forces are just not prepared to get into a land war in Asia right now. As an aside, I'm not sure I buy the fears of fanatically loyal human wave attacks. There was some concern about that in Iraq as I recall, because both Iraq and Iran had an established history of using such tactics. There were human wave attacks in the Korean conflict sure, but as in Iran, Iraq and WWII Russia, human waves always rely on political officers at the back, sending the hapless troops into battle at gun point, threatening family members back home if necessary. But, as we saw in Iraq, once the troops got totally cut off from high command, most couldn't surrender fast enough. (there is an apocryphal tale of an Iraqi regiment that tried to surrender to a BBC camera crew)
The only arm of the US forces that seems to be ready to open a can of whoop ass in Korea is the Air Force. Problem is, there is a long standing dictum "You can bomb it, shell it until the rubble bounces, but you don't control it until you stick a kid with a rifle on it." The Air Force is guaranteed to wipe out anything on the surface taller than a dandelion with conventional weapons alone. But the Koreans have had decades to dig in and there is a lot of evidence of their tunnelling prowess in the tunnels the south Koreans have intercepted at the DMZ. The upshot is that the Air Force can not win the war on it's own.
With that situation, it is going to be very tempting to just nuke the place.
And we have Donald Trump with his finger on the button.
Donald Trump...let that sink in for a moment.
Tactically, this is shaping up to be a bigger version of Vietnam and the US had to worry back then about the Soviet Union and The Peoples Republic of China who were not only pretty close allies at the time, but backing the north Vietnamese. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all far more savvy poli
Back when Google first announced the book scanning project, there was a lot of argument back and forth here on slashdot about how copyright laws would affect the scope and scale of the project. We collectively agreed that snippets of content were fair use long before it was brought to the courts. A big part of the reason for that opinion was the previous experience we had in watching Google make content from Usenet and news organization websites accessible within the search function. There was a lot of debate about whether Google was right in effectively breaching the paywall of news sites, but very little debate about making Usenet more accessible.
I repeat something I said back then: In my opinion, Google would be providing a much greater service to mankind if they scanned the enormous amount of books that are now completely public domain, and not just books that were published for the general market within the last 200 years. There must be hundreds of thousands, maybe even a few million, books, scrolls and tablets sitting tucked away in private libraries, monasteries, temples. the Vatican archives, museums, the British Admiralty archives and so on. As an example, I suggested sending one or two technicians to some remote monastery with a solar powered, multi-spectral scanner (multi-spectral in hopes of finding previously unidentified palimpsests) and paying the resident monks some small fee per page that they scan in. (having the monks do the scan would ensure that the effective content owners get final say in what gets brought into the public eye).
From there, Google could put the raw visible spectrum images out there for free access, and charge fees for additional spectra, OCR processed and searchable text and auto-translated data. Done right, even the field technicians could be essentially free for Google, since there are numerous graduate students and researchers who would love to get their hands on this stuff.
And; as a bonus, that external drive (it would pretty much have to be an external wouldn't it?) would be amazingly theft resistant! Of course, power consumption would be a bit of an issue, but I'm sure the manufacturers will promise to fix that with the next firmware update.
For me, what would be "ideal" would be this sort of massive improvement combined with an equally impressive gain in photovoltaic efficiency. IIRC, the current average efficiency for PV panels is something like 15% and there was something like an upper theoretical limit of 40%. (but I admit I do not understand the physics of why that limit is what it is)
If we could achieve say a 65% efficiency and build a car body out of PV cells, there would be a rather significant number of owner/users who would never need to charge, along with another significant number who only need to charge for longer than usual trips or during the cooler seasons. I googled some rough numbers and came up with the following:
There is roughly 1000W/m^2 of sunlight energy that reaches the earth surface. An average car has about 5m^2 of surface. At current 15% efficiencies, that means only about 750W can be generated, which is enough for a week long trickle charge I suppose, but not enough to fully recharge the batteries after a commute to work. Bump efficiency to 65% though and you get over 3200W of output. Parked at work or the car pool lot at the train station, such a car would be able to gain more than enough charge to get back home, where the battery pack can recharge all night if needed.
It is very simple and well established. You are allowed to lie for your own reasons however and whenever you wish. (and accept the social consequences of such behaviour) Except in a few well defined circumstances. The most common one being any time money is changing hands. If you come up with some hokum product that you claim increases penis size (a perennial favourite of the scammers), you can tell people you have done so. But if you tell me it works in order to sell it to me, that's fraud. If you are a doctor, free speech doesn't give you the right to gossip about my medical information. Another is libel and slander. If you knowingly spread false information about someone else and a reasonable third party might expect that person to be harmed by such lies, you are guilty of libel or slander. (depending on how you spread the info)
Slashdot Mirror
For the Poe's Law impaired, this is satire...christ I hope it *stays* as satire.......
And while the police should know the limitations of the technology and just treat identified people as "persons of interest" rather than "suspects", human nature and the mindset that police work encourages means that in many many cases, the police are going to assume an accurate match. Leaving the hapless innocent party the burden of having to prove they are not the person in the crime scene image(s). A quick Google search for either fingerprint false positives and DNA false positives are possible and those are widely regarded as definitive proofs of identity. A good criminal trial, with proper legal representation, would be very careful to make sure the court took that possibility into consideration before making a finding of guilt. But nonetheless, people are wrongly convicted of crimes based on those sorts of evidence all the time.
Thankfully; those wrongful convictions are fairly rare when expressed as a percentage of total convictions. Another quick Google search says that less than 5% of death penalty cases in the US involve a wrongful conviction. Without actually reading all the scholarly articles about wrongful convictions, I have no way of knowing how many wrongful, but later identified as wrongful convictions get corrected in time to save the persons life. Nor can I tell how many wrongful convictions never get identified as such and corrected. Even so, a 95% success rate seems quite good to me and proper value to the public at large.
And the only reason it seems so likely to public perception is because a) The system doesn't end once the person is behind bars (at least, not in most major countries) There are always appeals and new trials based on new evidence. So a wrongfully convicted person can still get the matter corrected b) Release after a conviction has been over turned always gets into the news, unlike the vast majority of routine and correct convictions.
Because of all that, my biggest concern wouldn't be individual false positives for cases of rape, robbery etc. My concern is for the potential for, as others here have said, making it far easier for authorities to do mass round ups of dissenters and protesters. It would only have to take a few high profile cases where protesters who also committed crimes got arrested this way before people will start to assume that all public protest will be logged and used against them. That would have a chilling effect on any future dissent. And I'm sure that any of us on Slashdot could list half a dozen countries off the top of our heads that have long standing policies of repressing its peoples and using violence to silence dissent. If one of those countries is wealthy enough to have cameras everywhere, or even just at major events of interest, they will install and use them. The only question an authoritarian government will really ponder is whether to scoop up its dissenters quietly so as to make only the other dissenters nervous or to make the capability and every arrest as a result as public as possible so as to deter and control everybody.
Going off on a tangent for a moment. Does anyone know of a legal method for making class action lawsuits actually expensive enough for an offending ISP to really feel hurt by? Over the years I've gotten the impression that class action lawsuits usually get settled for pretty much pennies on the dollar and even then, often paid out in the form of discounts, coupons, vouchers or some other method that costs the loser a lot less than the face value. Hell, even anti-competitive or anti-consumer lawsuits by governments and other big players usually seem to result in judgements being handed down that have relatively little impact on the offenders bottom line.
That said; I think having Google or whoever also pay to have competitors throttled on top of getting full speed access is far too legally risky for it to work. Note that I am not saying it won't be tried by somebody (again, Comcast is high on that list) just that it would leave both the ISP and the Internet based company pretty exposed to lawsuits over anti-competitive practices. The potential situation I think bears a lot of similarity to the browser wars and the court verdicts against Microsoft.
What I think will happen is the larger the studio or production company, the more bland and middle of the road the resulting production will be. It's my opinion that the more money you spend on market research, polls and focus groups, the more your end data will highlight the average. On the plus side, once the ability to create a convincing cast out of whole cloth is cheap enough, we're going to see an explosion of indie and very small production company releases. That's where all the pushing of the cinematic envelope is going to be.
On that subject, just wait until fandom gets hold of this ability. Making slash video is an obvious step, but imagine the mary sue potential!
In light of the recent Hollywood sex scandals and the vindication of Corey Feldman's long standing accusations, the fact that replacing child actors with digital emulations also means fewer kids being put in a position where they can be exploited so easily. And I think that is a huge deal. The situations you describe, where there is no real child involved, in either pornography or sex toys, doesn't bother me. To my way of thinking, the focus shouldn't be on making child sex so taboo that it shuts down rational thought. (admittedly, we're all less than fully rational when it comes to protecting our kids) Our focus should always be on preventing the appalling tragedies in the first place. It's my understanding that many paedophiles claim that pornography, real or simulated, helps them avoid offending against children in the first place. It's also my impression that, because the subject is so damn toxic, there has been very little good research on how valid that claim is. If the pedos are right and access to child porn does reduce the rate at which real children are being abused, then I think that is a good argument for de-criminalizing simulated materials. Problem is, the subject is so toxic, so taboo, I can't see any legislator even suggesting funding research or de-criminalization.
Personally, I would want to see a clearly articulated standard for just how life like the simulations are allowed to be, along with a requirement to supply the original wireframes or equivalent underlying foundations alongside the finished product. The goal being something lifelike enough to satisfy the pedos, while still being unreal enough that a layman looking at a screenshot can still tell it isn't real.
Additionally, I'd want to see a requirement that a real child never be involved in anyway. What I mean is no use of rotoscope or similar techniques, no use of child actors for the voices and no making characters that are intended to resemble a well known person. (well known that is, to either the creator OR to the public at large. So no doing a bit based on your neighbours kid or a child celebrity)
quote: The vibration from those large SSD drives might shake the computer apart. I think you don't understand what is inside a solid state drive. The only thing moving inside them is electrons and charge states. And the voltages are low enough that electro-magnetic effects are pretty trivial.
What is going to be interesting are the lawsuits over the use of the likeness of some dead celebrities. Is there any studios that still have movie rights to Elvis? Would his estate disagree? Could an actors estate sue on the grounds that a given production was one that the actor would never have been caught dead in? (see what I did there?)
Personally, I don't think the application of force and the brutal abuses of power to gain and maintain power are the sole province of any part of the political spectrum. History has shown that, no matter what ethnicity, culture or political inclinations, people with too much power can find ways to justify their prejudices and excuses to commit atrocities. The best way we have managed to come up with for avoiding those abuses is two-fold : First, freedom of speech (includes freedom of the press) and second, inclusive democracy. A well functioning democracy seeks to implement polices that are for the benefit of all and freedom of speech helps insure that when polices are abusive or unjust, that those in power can be called on it. As distasteful as the rhetoric of the far right is, as flatly unacceptable as their proposed solutions are, they still serve democracy by speaking up. Think of them as societies warrant canary. As long as even the extremists from either end of the spectrum can find a place to speak, we know that free speech still exists.
As for thin-skinned advertisers, I can understand why they are that way, especially these days with the much faster process of outrage, disseminated knowledge and organized protests. One politically tone deaf ad can cost big companies huge sums of money after all. It used to be that, if an ad on TV, radio or print put the corporate foot in its mouth, the company and/or ad agency could get the spot pulled and it would fairly quickly fade from public awareness. They could also run a risky ad in a isolated market as a test. But now, an ad is instantly seen by millions of people all over the world and mistakes get quickly recorded and uploaded to numerous forums, video hosting sites and so on. The corporate gaffe may still fade from the public awareness, but only if it doesn't go viral. A negative viral ad is pretty much a marketers nightmare.
Problem is, safe tame ads might avoid that risk, but they're also less effective at getting the public attention. Take a risk and maybe lose enormous amounts of reputation (and more importantly, money) or play it safe and risk running a totally useless campaign that has no effect on sales at all. The "shock jocks" you mention had and still have a similar problem. They need to get eyeballs on their content, they need to get those likes and subscriber numbers pumped up. Shock and sleaze sells. But if they go to far, then advertisers pull out.
It's almost certainly true that Alphabet/Youtube owes those content creators nothing in a contractual sense, since the terms of service and payment plans are all written by them on a "take it or leave it" basis. Like it seems every other technology company (and no few non tech outfits), they will have included a clause that basically says "we can change this agreement at any time, without notice and your only recourse is mediation in a place we picked as being most friendly to us"
My questions would be : What kind of content is being demonitized and why? Taking away ad income from say hate speech, trippy kid-targeted adult content, ISIS execution videos and so on is basically a form of moderation. That sort of thing is already covered by the existing TOS, so I don't have a problem with it. However; if they change the algorithm so as to demonitize content in order to give a competitive advantage to partners who pay more, then that might be regarding as anti-competitive behaviour and be legally actionable regardless of what the TOS says. Or, if they pull a Paypal and just rewrite the contract regularly to give themselves an ever increasing share of the profits by paying content creators less and less, then I think that is an ethical failure. It is those content makers who are bringing in the clicks and ad impressions that make Youtube such a valuable site in the first place. Some of the channels on Youtube I am aware of are by people who are spending at least several days a week and money out of their own pockets to create the content they upload. It's only fair that they get paid proportionally.
I use Firefox and Chrome regularly, leaning heavily towards Firefox because I was quite satisfied with the add-ons I had for it. Pretty much 100% of my recreational browsing is on Firefox.
1) Yes, Firefox IS much faster to load and navigate to my usual websites. However, sites heavy with the usual endless third party scripts, ads and so on remain occasionally frustratingly slow. However; I have always attributed that to poor design choices and lack of network optimization on the part of those third party content delivery networks. (I'm using Ghostery, but no other ad-blocking software on purpose.)
2) Page rendering is MUCH faster. I think this is the biggest factor in perceived browser speed. Easily matching Chrome and actually surpassing it on image heavy sites like imgur.
3) The add on ecosystem has a long way to go to catch up to what previous versions of Firefox had available. To preserve speed, function and reliability, Firefox 57 has a much more modular arrangement. That means ALL previous add-ons will not work in Firefox 57. In addition; what add-ons that do exist do not seem to be nearly as powerful as the add-ons I used previously. That may be due to the modular design not allowing as much control of Firefox by add-ons, it may be because there simply hasn't been time for third party developers to come up with equally powerful replacements.
4) Firefox has a pretty slick system for handling the deprecation of old add-ons. After updating, when you go to the about:addons page, you'll notice that none of your old addons are visible, but there is a link at the top you can click to view them. Clicking one of your greyed out addons takes you to the get more addons page and usually shows you a pretty good replacement. (9 of the 12 addons I love most had acceptable replacements, learning curve aside) The diversity of addons, as I said, just isn't there yet. So if you have one of the lessor known, less popular addons, you probably won't be able to replace it.
5) There are many very popular addons where the original developer is unavailable or as announced that their addon will not be, or cannot be, rewritten for the new Firefox.
6) The themes situation frankly sucks. Simple themes, ones that basically change the colour of the address and menu bar space are still there and old ones you have will still work. But "complex themes" (what I call REAL themes, ones that change the icons used for buttons, bookmark folders, shape and dimensionality of tabs and so on flat out do not exist. From checking out Mozillas pages on 57, it seems that, as it stands now, Firefox 57 is simply not capable of supporting them. Mozilla does say that complex themes are something they are working on and plan on making available later. Personally, I don't want to make the address/menu bar space simply some colour, or use some wide, narrow image as a simple background. I want themes that help visually distinguish tabs, themes that accentuate the skeuomorph effect. I find this makes it easier to see and mentally manipulate. For me a browser is a tool and a tool doesn't need to look pretty and should never never never try to look pretty at the cost of ergonomics. For now, this is a total loss in my book.
Overall, I do like Firefox 57 and have no plans on reverting to an older one. I am however, going to keep spending a lot of time working on it until I can regain the look and above all function I prefer.
If this works, as it gets applied to more genetic diseases it's going to save a lot of lives, including my DMD son.
But the mechanisms that operate the control surfaces are surprisingly beefy. A fighter aircraft aileron has to deal with air pressure measured in tons. Moving a roughly a CF-16 "flaperon" is something like a square meter in size and needs to be moved into and out of air moving past at speeds in excess of Mach 1. meanwhile, the wing is something like less than 2" thick where the "flaperon" meets it. Thus, the "flaperon" is built a lot beefier than you think and the linkage is obviously going to be built of something heavier than 12 Ga aircraft aluminium. Burning through the skin of the aileron, as I said,won't accomplish much unless you manage to do significant damage to the internal ribbing or control linkages. (instead of just a through and through hole, you could move the beam as you burn and slice through ribs, but that only exacerbates the time on target problem.)
Combat aircraft are designed with being shot at in mind. True, most aren't as rugged as the A-10, but they have self-sealing fuel tanks and often redundant hydraulic control linkages because they expect to get shot at and are expected to be able to take a few rounds of anti-aircraft fire or shrapnel from missiles and keep flying. Something that can handle a handful of .50 machine gun hits or even the odd 20mm cannon round aren't going to have much problem with a ~5mm laser burned hole.
I take your point about using lasers against fast movers like missiles. As I said though; as far I as knew, the best the military was capable of right now was hitting a stationary truck at relatively close range. A missile coming at you is a tiny target and usually moving faster than a bullet. I didn't think the ability to get and keep light on a target was up to that challenge yet. Lasers can be good for dazzling the optical portion of a missile sensors though, combine that with existing counter-measures and you have something useful.
I looked up the Lockheed ATHENA system mentioned in the article and it's exactly what I said would be a good use for lasers: a vehicle based anti-drone system.
1) The target had to be stationary. The laser just couldn't dump enough energy into the target fast enough for a sub 1 second shot to disable the truck. IIRC, it took almost 5 seconds of continuous laser on a single point for it to work. (Note that this was burning through thin gauge mild steel and not fairly beefy aircraft control surfaces made of aerospace alloys. I think a puncture on an aileron would have minimal effect, you have to damage the linkages inside in order to disable the craft)
2) The demonstration had to be a low altitude strike, similar to what the A-10 Warthog already does so well. The reason being laser bloom. It is very very hard to maintain laser focus over long distances through atmosphere. I can only assume the airflows around target aircraft would be an extra tricky environment to maintain tight focus through. (especially if the attack is coming from behind and has to cope with engine exhaust or thrust induced turbulence.) Aircraft to aircraft combat distances are pretty big, it would be very challenging to maintain focus over distances exceeding 5K while maintaining enough power to do significant damage to control surfaces in less than a second.
Overall, I think a better use for compact lasers is killing sensors. You don't have to destroy a drone to destroy it's utility to the enemy, just burn out the optics. Combine that with conventional EW and the drone becomes an unguided missile. Another use would be on the ground. Vehicle mounted systems could be used to negate the increasing use of backpack portable drones by opposing forces.
Surprisingly, another metric is murder and other violent crime rates. There is evidence to suggest that the elimination of lead in paint and gasoline caused or contributed to a huge drop in violent crimes in the late 70's and 80's.
That said, let's note that, for a corporation as large as IBM, the costs of having such a design team develop is pretty minor. Even so, there has to be some form of performance metric the managers and higher ups use to measure the value to the company the design team and their output provide. Which leads me to my questions:
If you're a high level design exec, how do you determine that a change is needed? Once you've come up with a new logo, typeface, letterheads and so on, how do you measure its effectiveness at expressing the companies philosophy/business strategy? I've often felt that there is too much effort being put into such things. You get a creative type to create a logo, choose a typeface that suits your needs and move on. Yet these creative folk (most of whom are pretty smart within their field) see effects on the viewer, see meaning in little details that frankly eludes me. It's like in the art world, where artists and intellectuals see nuances and levels of meaning in a work that the vast majority of people just don't notice or understand. At it's most extreme, that leads to things like modern art, performance art and so on. If a big corporation chooses a new look, given that subtleties are going to be lost on the majority of viewers, how can they be sure it's not only working, but working well enough to justify the man hours that went into crafting it?
I'd love to hear from the artists, industrial designers and so on about this.
William Gibson touched on this stuff in his novel Idoru. A sophisticated enough synthetic person who is so convincing that a major music star wanted to marry her. I think that it is only a matter of time before we see the re-birth of the old studio system, only with wholly fictional characters. There was a time when almost everything visible about a Hollywood star was the product of cigar smoking men in back rooms, plotting out the lives of the actors to maximise their box office draw.
Properly tackling the problem of poverty and the social ills it breeds is a huge and complex issue. I freely admit I don't know of any cure for poverty, no matter how we structure society, there is always going to be people at the bottom of any scale you pick. What we can do is at least structure our society so that upward mobility is as easy to achieve as possible. And we can collectively choose to spend money on alleviating the worst of the social ills. Universal single pay medical coverage, school breakfast programs, drug and alcohol dependence therapy and so on. Where I live, the government is experimenting with making higher education virtually free for all citizens resident in the province. The idea being that spending public funds on educating folks is a long term investment in the prosperity of the nation and helping poor kids see a way out of poverty and into the middle class.
As a poverty related aside; I've never understood the lower economic classes in the US who support the (mostly) Republican antipathy towards universal medical care. I mean it's right there in the preamble to the US constitution "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare , and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (emphasis mine) If the People, as determined by polls or elections, decide that universal health care is an integral part of "the general welfare", which seems an easy conclusion to argue in favour of, then one can easily argue that health care is then a constitutional right. Then there is Lincoln's most famous speech where he said "and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Which I take to mean quite clearly that the government OF the people is expressly intended to serve those people.
North Korea doesn't have the ability to launch a massive counter-strike, so their continued existence after rattling the nuclear sabre the way they've been doing depends on utterly on the US sticking to the "no first strike" policy. Yet TFA claims that General Goldfein is asking his staff to come up with ways to use nukes in combat. To me that sounds very much like the US Joint Chiefs are preparing contingency plans for pre-emptive strikes and "small" tactical nukes after that. To be fair, it is the clear duty of the Joint Chiefs to come up for contingency plans for pretty much every possible scenario, even the incredibly unlikely ones. But, one doesn't juggle squadrons around and re-assign personnel for unlikely contingencies.
Meanwhile, there have been a slew of articles which suggest the US Navy is in dire straits. It's my understanding that successive administrations have forced them to cut back on new ship purchases and skimp on maintenance so long for the sake of short term availability, that now some ships are sitting in dry dock for years, waiting for repair. Likewise, there has been a clear trend to lower head counts in the ground forces as well. The focus has been on smaller, more nimble forces, aimed at dealing with insurgents and the like. That smaller force has become very sensitive to combat losses, has been forced to keep guys posted in combat far longer than expected (stop-loss) and is deployed in a number of hot spots all over the world. The ground forces are just not prepared to get into a land war in Asia right now. As an aside, I'm not sure I buy the fears of fanatically loyal human wave attacks. There was some concern about that in Iraq as I recall, because both Iraq and Iran had an established history of using such tactics. There were human wave attacks in the Korean conflict sure, but as in Iran, Iraq and WWII Russia, human waves always rely on political officers at the back, sending the hapless troops into battle at gun point, threatening family members back home if necessary. But, as we saw in Iraq, once the troops got totally cut off from high command, most couldn't surrender fast enough. (there is an apocryphal tale of an Iraqi regiment that tried to surrender to a BBC camera crew)
The only arm of the US forces that seems to be ready to open a can of whoop ass in Korea is the Air Force. Problem is, there is a long standing dictum "You can bomb it, shell it until the rubble bounces, but you don't control it until you stick a kid with a rifle on it." The Air Force is guaranteed to wipe out anything on the surface taller than a dandelion with conventional weapons alone. But the Koreans have had decades to dig in and there is a lot of evidence of their tunnelling prowess in the tunnels the south Koreans have intercepted at the DMZ. The upshot is that the Air Force can not win the war on it's own.
With that situation, it is going to be very tempting to just nuke the place.
And we have Donald Trump with his finger on the button.
Donald Trump...let that sink in for a moment.
Tactically, this is shaping up to be a bigger version of Vietnam and the US had to worry back then about the Soviet Union and The Peoples Republic of China who were not only pretty close allies at the time, but backing the north Vietnamese. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all far more savvy poli
I repeat something I said back then: In my opinion, Google would be providing a much greater service to mankind if they scanned the enormous amount of books that are now completely public domain, and not just books that were published for the general market within the last 200 years. There must be hundreds of thousands, maybe even a few million, books, scrolls and tablets sitting tucked away in private libraries, monasteries, temples. the Vatican archives, museums, the British Admiralty archives and so on. As an example, I suggested sending one or two technicians to some remote monastery with a solar powered, multi-spectral scanner (multi-spectral in hopes of finding previously unidentified palimpsests) and paying the resident monks some small fee per page that they scan in. (having the monks do the scan would ensure that the effective content owners get final say in what gets brought into the public eye).
From there, Google could put the raw visible spectrum images out there for free access, and charge fees for additional spectra, OCR processed and searchable text and auto-translated data. Done right, even the field technicians could be essentially free for Google, since there are numerous graduate students and researchers who would love to get their hands on this stuff.
And; as a bonus, that external drive (it would pretty much have to be an external wouldn't it?) would be amazingly theft resistant! Of course, power consumption would be a bit of an issue, but I'm sure the manufacturers will promise to fix that with the next firmware update.
If we could achieve say a 65% efficiency and build a car body out of PV cells, there would be a rather significant number of owner/users who would never need to charge, along with another significant number who only need to charge for longer than usual trips or during the cooler seasons. I googled some rough numbers and came up with the following:
There is roughly 1000W/m^2 of sunlight energy that reaches the earth surface. An average car has about 5m^2 of surface. At current 15% efficiencies, that means only about 750W can be generated, which is enough for a week long trickle charge I suppose, but not enough to fully recharge the batteries after a commute to work. Bump efficiency to 65% though and you get over 3200W of output. Parked at work or the car pool lot at the train station, such a car would be able to gain more than enough charge to get back home, where the battery pack can recharge all night if needed.
It is very simple and well established. You are allowed to lie for your own reasons however and whenever you wish. (and accept the social consequences of such behaviour) Except in a few well defined circumstances. The most common one being any time money is changing hands. If you come up with some hokum product that you claim increases penis size (a perennial favourite of the scammers), you can tell people you have done so. But if you tell me it works in order to sell it to me, that's fraud. If you are a doctor, free speech doesn't give you the right to gossip about my medical information. Another is libel and slander. If you knowingly spread false information about someone else and a reasonable third party might expect that person to be harmed by such lies, you are guilty of libel or slander. (depending on how you spread the info)